Thoughts Negligible

"He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense." --C.S. Lewis

Some would contest the fact that this God is one of love; Lewis would reply that their "conception of love needs correction." Thankfully, and most divinely, "As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished [Heb 12:8]." Thank God I'm a bastard!

I'm not even sure what to write tonight, though I feel pressed to write something. Even at my lowest I am convinced, so very convinced, that I am loved beyond what I even know, and certainly beyond what I deserve. I have been paid that "intolerable compliment." The love of God is so crazy it must be true: for who would dream to love the unlovable, the pathetic, the stupid, the bumbling, the ugly, the failure? No one could make up such a ludicrous idea! How much more the Incarnation? I absolutely love this Kierkegaard quote:

"That one should push through the crowd in order to get to the spot where money is dealt out, and honor, and glory--that one can understand. But to push oneself forward in order to be flogged--how sublime, how Christian, how stupid!"

God's "inexorable sense" of love is truly something miraculous, and if he feels it, it is only because he has made himself to do so. We have not created the need in him, but he made it for us: "If he requires us, the requirement is of His own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding."

For pain to be an irreconcilable problem with the idea of a loving God, two things must be happening: (1) We posses a trivial understanding or attach a misguided ideal to the word 'love'. (2) We look on the world as if man were the center.

What Lewis says is true:

"It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness."

Tonight I use the words of others, because theirs are the only ones that make sense.

God is surely good.

"The little clause 'God is' signifies a revolution." --Barth

I suppose it should be no other way, that the same day I post about pain, I be confronted with my utter lack of personal experience. Of course I had no delusions that I did know anything of serious suffering going into the thing. That’s why I put my words in the mouth of someone suffering, hopefully to lend meaning to the words that I could not empower. I had thought about adding a disclaimer, but I assumed the fact that I used a dying man to speak my thoughts would be self-evident: it’s hard to accept it coming from someone who knows so little on the subject.

So it had been arranged. I was to watch the humbling and moving Shape of the Moon the night after I posted. It’s a documentary of a Christian Indonesian family living in a Muslim world, being poor and sad and contentious. To be reminded of the suffering of more than two-thirds of the world is a powerful thing. But the more I think about it, the more it confirms the good of pain. Could it be that pain is a problem because we don’t have the right grid to deal with it?

I saw in the film a family toiling under the weight of poverty, greed, loss of life, abandoning faith, perilous living conditions, underemployment or unemployment, a corrupt system—but I also saw them laughing, acting silly, singing songs, working together, being loved and giving love, forgiving, repenting, praying. Are they so different from me? And must I degrade my own perceivably pithy pain? I should think not. Perhaps I should be the one being pitied, for I often lack in those good things I saw in abundance that lay just under the surface in that family. Are they truly worse off because they have to worry about fixing a leaky thatched roof? Or am I worse off for worrying about the highest GB storage I can get for my ipod, or which book I will buy next, or how many I can buy this time, or whether Brad and Jen will ever reconcile, or how I’ll pay my satellite bill next month? Is there not poverty in riches? And can there not be found riches in poverty? I think Jesus was pretty clear on that.

Of course poverty is only one kind of pain, and there are plenty of others that come along with it. The thing I took away from the film is that we all suffer the same. While our sufferings may come in different degrees and styles we all must deal with it by our faith or shrivel up. C.S. Lewis said that pain should be a problem only for the Christian because they have to reconcile suffering with a loving God. Surely pain can’t be a problem for those who have no faith, it’s just the way of the world. For them it’s just natural—a hindrance, yes, but nonetheless pointless. With this mindset, suffering is wholly arbitrary and inconsequential. But with Christ, suffering has not only an end, but a good.

“All creation anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time…. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us…But if we look forward to something we don’t have yet, we must wait patiently and confidently.” --Romans 8:18-25

“The sufferings of the present time cannot, therefore, be compared with this glory. In Christ Jesus they have indeed been compared, and have been shown not merely to be simply characteristic of our life in this world, but actually to mark the frontier where this life is dissolved by life eternal. The time in which we live and suffer is the present time, the time when glory is made manifest in suffering. So clearly does God manifest His glory in the secret of suffering, that, so far from shrinking for His sake from the contemplation of suffering, it is for His sake that we are bound to gaze upon it, to see in it the step, the movement, the turning-point from death to life, and to apprehend it as the place where Christ is to be seen. To overlook suffering is to overlook Christ.” –Karl Barth, from The Epistle to the Romans

“If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just the unexpectedness, that wilful [sic], dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch—the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.” --C.S. Lewis

Up stood an old man, frail and pale, looking as if he were suffering from a deadly consumption, he began to whisper something barely audible to his audience. He closed his eyes to the light, seeming too hard to remember the lines of a long-passed third-grade play. Speaking with dire weakness, his words held a pointed authority built up by years of life, a strength that juxtaposed his physical state. And everyone listened, quieted, listening for a humming bird’s wings.

“I stand as one dead,” he whispered, his breath already short, “yet I stand somehow. I stand humbly, and I stand in awe.

“Today I awoke unable to breathe, fatigued, with a crushing headache, pain in my chest, unable to open my eyes to the beautiful morning’s God-light. And I thanked our Creator for that light, even though I could not bear it in my present state. My eyes watered as I struggled for breath, until finally my lungs were opened; I smiled as I breathed—as if for the first time. Today I was reborn, from ashes I came. Brought back from the dead as it were. Just call me Lazarus of Bethany. Today I feel confident that I was created from dust and to dust this flesh will return. But I am moved today by that fact.

“You see, I’ve done nothing to bring about this disease, nothing but exist—and what better thing to do? It’s a painful existence, yes, but what alternative is there? There are things I know now. I’m not guaranteed health and happiness, and, certainly not life. I don’t deserve any of these things, though I deserve fully a decrepit body, death of body and even soul. Though I deserve death, I taste only life—even at the end of this terrestrial stage, or, perhaps, especially at the end of this mortal breath. Would that we never forget the fact that we deserve absolutely nothing.”

Some would later swear they saw tears in his eyes as his posture strengthened and he said with passionate conviction, “Yet my God loves me! He gave me a free will, to express his love to others, back to him, and now, to share with you my turmoil—my blessing.

“There stands before me nothing to obstruct the choices that are capable within me besides my physical limitations and moral inclinations. This morning I opened a door for a young lady and that simple gesture got me to thinking. This door was an obstruction to that girl’s intentions, whatever her destination and purpose. The door had closed behind me, but I returned to open it. I intervened in the natural world, working against the laws which closed it and which would work against that young lady’s efforts as she went on her way. My courtesy was a simple blessing to her, and a miraculous testament to my free will. I’ve learned, that if I’m traveling smoothly downhill, there must be someone toiling upward on that very hill. Nature demands this be so and if you tried to fashion another system, you’d take away the very life we have.
“It has been said that nature maintains autonomy so man can maintain free choice. If nature were perfectly fitted to suit everyone’s each need and desire, where would free will stand? If nature were precisely tuned to your good alone, where would I stand when your will or good ran contrary to my own? I would then have no free choice, as nature bent its knee to you alone. So nature has its own fixed trajectory, not preferring one person over another. Yet that nature can be manipulated—just as it was when I opened that door, or even, when someone made that door—but if compassion and good can be worked by using the fixed state of matter and employing my free choice, so can malevolence and evil. C.S. Lewis said, ‘The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbor on the head.’ So the laws of nature provide for good and the free will of individuals can make nature conform, even in the smallest ways, to fit their desires. Lewis also said that ‘if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem [natural problems] by competition instead of courtesy.’

“I suppose you’ve noticed, but this is practiced every day, both good and evil. But this is the goodness of God: that even our Fall, our conscious choice against his loving intentions for our race, will not deter him from making something good from it. He will not let us muddle things up. No! He’ll take the very consequence of our sin—our failing bodies, our sweat and toil, hate and pain, even our death—and turn it into a blessing. But in Christ, he shared our suffering, took our pain and lived this ragamuffin human life—yet in triumph. And our Redeemer will remain in that super-fleshly body forever as an affirmation that the work he started in us is indeed good, as he said. So now we suffer not in vain, but agree with Christ in his sufferings, partaking in his salvific grace, becoming more like him; therefore, in all suffering we are made to know more deeply the love of God, that he, of all, should suffer for us.

“The truth is that you would not be without your pain. Think for a moment on the suffering of the lepers and that their predicament is nothing less than a deadening of the nerve receptors that warn the brain of physical harm. And think on the sweetness of the sweet, how it would be diminished or impossible without the bitter, even the bitterest. Can you imagine this world without it? What then could we appreciate? What then could we resist? Reject? Abhor? . . . Love? Where would be our sin? And where our forgiveness and grace? Would we be better as angels, those who give ceaseless love to God, yet are not adored by their Master in return as we are—we who least deserve it?

“For the Love of our God, let us understand our problem of pain and sin, for it is what we have! It is our necessary path to salvation through Christ. Without this we’d know neither love nor life! I will die soon, and so shall you, but let us, in these free moments, glorify the Son of God with our suffering and our health alike, for both make our condition salvageable and wonderfully worthwhile. We must have them until we reach the other side where the troubles of this life will not compare to the Glory that shall be revealed. We must have them so Christ may be glorified and his—our—Father will find those trespasses wiped from his memory as our salvation is complete. Let us suffer and celebrate, together, so that our merciful God may be glorified! We diminish pain where we can, but when we cannot, we embrace him. Fear not, for he is with you always!”

At this crescendo the old man fell silent and walked off stage.

"The wrath of God is the judgment under which we stand in so far
as we do not love the Judge . . . . For the wrath of God cannot be His last
word, the true revelation of Him! . . . . The whole world is the footprint
of God: yes, but, in so far as we choose scandal rather than faith, the
footprint in the vast riddle of the world is the footprint of His
wrath.” --Karl Barth

WE are made to believe that God became unnecessary through the advent of science, that the world became too harsh of a place, the universe too vast and empty and cold, as we hallowed the depths of both ocean and heaven. Such is not the case however. We find in the very first civilization, Sumer, the pessimistic Wheel of Life perception of how the universe functions, simply, that everything was born only to toil and die: “The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die” (Lewis). The seasons spoke of monotony, not diversity, endless patterns that brought distinct but equal troubles at each passing. Throughout the literature and lives of Sumerians, and every other ancient culture, life is most important when spent in conquest and riches. Even passionate love is something of a secondary notion, supplementing the most important substances—fame and glory—because in this mindset what one leaves behind is the only thing that really defines them, the only proof they ever existed at all. (If that doesn’t sound forbiddingly modern, I don’t know what does.) We find in the Epic of Gilgamesh—possibly the oldest written word dating from around 2600 BCE—the pursuit fully of these things material.

Though they had a rich pantheon of extremely anthropomorphized gods (as all pantheism goes), Cahill says we should take the Sumerians' piety with the same weight we do when a politician makes allusions to the Creator. They were an incredibly practical and secular people, for civilization wouldn’t have irrupted without such spirits, but their gods did little for them, being mostly bickering or wicked or half-hearted and, like humans, always looking out for their own interests. A pantheon like theirs was only a natural articulation of the ancients’ fear and misery of the monotony of this life, the turmoil and struggle, only to die in the end. This pain was not abated by their beliefs, only made more acute. Lewis describes a term that may fit this sad state as Numinous (that which inspired unspeakable awe or dread).

My point here was not to give a history of civilization or pantheism, but to show that the pointlessness that infuses the beliefs of most naturalists is not, as they claim, just realism that came along with science: this feeling was always there, this pessimistic outlook as real and painful for the ancients as the moderns.

The above is what makes what happens next absolutely and marvelously miraculous. A wealthy (and practical) Semitic Sumerian hears a voice, a deity who separates himself from the confusing god-buffet of his day, calling Abram by name, and telling him to leave Ur for the desert. Something’s going to happen. For the first and last time, a god begins to define his own attributes and thus establishes a personal and beneficent relationship with a human through his own initiative. This god will later identify himself to Moses as YHWH (Ex 3:14) which means “I AM WHO I AM” or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE” or simply “I AM” (there are no vowels in original Hebrew. Since Jews have not uttered the Name from early on in their monotheistic history, the actual pronunciation is unknown; Cahill says the only way he knows to say it sounds like a breath, which is beautifully descriptive of the God who is Spirit or Breath or found in the “still small voice,” who will not be represented by idols).

We can’t underestimate the significance of this event: the “hostile immensity” of the universe rapped up in the ominous Wheel of Life began to unravel as linear history, based upon God’s self-disclosure, and became real and useful for the first time. Without this dictum, history and even life has no significance since it’s bound to return to the same place of nonexistence. Now progress can be made. Science and our entire Western world rest on this very moment—when a god became God. And today it's fashionable to disparage man in his earliest stages. We speak of ancients as ignorant, using a silly idea of spirituality and God to give them strength. Well, C.S. Lewis says to those who suffer from such hubris: “To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry, and agriculture.” Not so stupid, were they? Lewis’s point is this: that it is truly a miracle that God became God to us in the milieu of such hopelessness; it was a truly novel occurrence, something that went profoundly against the literally “timeless culture of Sumer” (Cahill). This would be the start of something new, something explosive.

Read a deeper and more eloquent treatment of this subject in The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill.

I suppose it would be helpful to survey the foundation of any of my thoughts that will find themselves in this blog. Anyone who knows me knows I subscribe to few systems faithfully. I find it difficult to settle into some of the more contested views; yesterday I was a Piperian Calvinist, today a Molinist, tomorrow I won’t care at all. In such nonessentials my position is only as strong as the weakest breeze and possibly rests on my mood for the day. I would have a problem with this intellectual inconsistency if any other part of my life held any consistency (Maybe that’s why I need a system?). I see few pressing reasons to plant myself fully in such nonessential matters yet (aside from academic reasons), but only to take what’s helpful and what encourages me to love God and people more.

Though I waiver on some issues, others are confirmed for me. The Apostles Creed or the Nicene confession of 325 are good summations of my essential beliefs, but I should speak further on important issues to me.

Theologians differentiate between special and general revelation (Milne). All of creation, “moral experience”, the universal religious tendency, and subjective emotions, are general revelation. They speak directly of God’s character, plan, and law, but can’t give specific knowledge of salvation. This is why we need special revelation, to tell us specifically, more completely of God’s plan and love. This specificity comes first and most powerfully in the God-man Jesus Christ. In him we know as much as our finite minds can comprehend of God’s love and plan and how much he has chosen to condescend, how to achieve salvation and a relationship with the God of the universe. Scripture is also a direct testament to God’s heart and intentions. The first way to know about Jesus is through Scripture (apart from miraculous Christ- or angel-visitations—which, I’m told do happen), however, so we must put faith in God’s Word to understand him; but Christ is God’s final and full Word (Logos), his fleshly and incarnate revelation of himself (Jn. 1:1, 14; 14:10; Phil. 2:7, 8; Heb 1:3). I believe fully that the Bible is revelation of God, which is self-authenticated by the Spirit for those who will see. While seeking to develop a more structured biblical theology, my greatest desire is to know God more fully and abide in his beneficial law—to apply Scripture to life.

While natural theology has its limits in apologetics, I see it as extremely beneficial to the nature-inclined or romantic Christian. I’ve felt God as powerfully watching the sun set, or just staring out across the fields in Springer, or playing the piano, or listening to a Liszt concerto, as I ever have in the walls of the church. This is a strange thing to say, and I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t felt something similar to understand, but God makes himself real to each of us in a number of ways; however, I don’t base a soteriological (salvation) doctrine with my natural theology. Natural theology works as God-authenticating or love-inspiring in my life, as general revelation, but for the Christian, natural proclivities can inform his faith to an astounding degree. It’s good to keep in mind I use “natural theology” in two different ways: the first is the most common sense of apologetics, e.g., cosmological, ontological, teleological and moral arguments; the second way I can only describe as finding God’s love displayed through nature, through the beautiful, the mighty, the mundane, and even terrible. This is a more mystical, subjective idea, but it works for me. Not to be confused as pantheistic, I only speak of confirmation of God’s love and continuing insights, not that he himself is in nature, but testified to and worshipped by nature. Well, that makes me sound vitalist, but I’m not that either. Nor am I one to split hairs over semantics.

Well, I’m boring myself now, so we’ll rap up. This blog began as a journal of the reading I plan to start with a friend but I feel it will be more than that. I look forward to sharing what little I can and being able to share my thoughts on my current non-school reading. If you’re interested in joining the discussion and study, please do! I would encourage you to start your own blog (just tell me what it is and if you don’t mind your blog being put on my sidebar) and we can all link together to catch up on each others’ thoughts.

The first book is Lewis’s The Problem of Pain which will immediately be followed up by A Grief Observed, also by C.S. Lewis. The first book is his theoretical exploration of God and the purpose—or problem?—of pain, the other, his practical experience after the tragic death of his wife. There’s no official reading schedule as yet, but I will be done (with luck) with both of these books by mid-February. I’m starting this week. They are easy reads and short. All subsequent books or subject studies will be done each following month. We felt a month would give us enough time to dig a little deeper, reach a little further, but will not bog us down in our studies. It will also stretch the time out enough so it shouldn’t interfere with other responsibilities—we’ll see. Some months will be studies of literature itself; other months will be specific topic or character studies. I’m sure the subject matter won’t always interest everyone who might want to be involved, but it sure won’t hurt you if you go ahead and plug away to further your knowledge, and you may find things unexpected. Feel free to pop in and out as you choose. I will also be posting just general thoughts on numerous topics and will try to make the entries based on reading accessible and applicable for those who aren’t joining us as well.

This blog, I suppose, is what I’m learning about God and the Christian life, my thoughts made digital, and—for better or worse—public. As Barth says, “What is the attempt to speak of him but helpless sighing and stammering[?]” I don’t intend on helping or enlightening anyone, only to speak of the Only thing which matters in this world, albeit in “helpless sighing and stammering.”