Miscellanies

We will concede perhaps that man is as wicked as Edwards said. What we do not know–or do not yet know–is that God is as holy as Edwards knew him to be. We have in our wisdom substituted for the holy God a kind Heavenly Father. A holy God will not suffer his plans for a vast, stupendously intricate, marvelous creation and the men designed to be his sons to be flouted and destroyed by self-willed and proud little delinquents, aged 60 as often as 16, called nations or civilizations as often as persons. Or we have substituted for the holy God, the sovereign source and determiner of being, Being simply considered, the Constitution of the universe, a wildly running chance. Our feet are standing in slippery places, to be sure, but we are not being held this side of destruction by holy power and determined will; it is chance that keeps us from slipping. There is no wrath in heaven directed against us, because there is no holiness, no will for wholeness, for integrity, and for glory. And since there is no holiness there is no hope for us except the hope that we’ll get by a little longer with our compromises and our superior animal cunning.

Edwards used to say that the trouble with men was not that they had no ideas of God, but that they had little ideas of God. We might add that they are ideas about little Gods. The anachronism of Edwards celebration is not so much that we try to honor him in a time of atheism, when men do not believe in God; but that we seek to know and respect a servant of the Almighty, of the Lord, the Source of Being itself, of Power beyond all powers, in a time when our God is someone we try to keep alive by religious devotions, to use for solving our personal problems, for assuring us that we are beloved. He is without wrath, because we have made this image wrathless; his love is not holy love because we have painted the icon without holiness.

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards

The church’s mission requires both the individuals and groups who, authorized by God to communicate his message, go out from the community to others, near and far, and also the community that manifests God’s presence in it’s midst by its life together and its relationships to others.

-Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World

You see, doubt doesn’t mean that God is dying for us. Doubt signals that we are beginning to die to ourselves and our ideas about God. Jesus talks about that: taking up your cross daily, losing your life so you can find it (Matt 10:38-39); Paul talks about being crucified with Christ—I no longer live, Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20); or you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3). I wish I knew what all that meant, but I don’t. I’m learning. But I do know that this is about a lot more than “getting saved.” God wants us to know him, but that means a death has to occur. All that talk of dying and being crucified and hidden is not getting saved language, and now you’re done with all of that. It is “being an every-day Christian” language, the path of the Christian life, dying daily.

-Peter Enns

The Benefit of Doubt: Coming to Terms with Faith in a Postmodern Era

The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel; the Lord hath put on his apparel and girded himself with strength:

Like every newborn, he has come from very far.

His eyes are closed against the brilliance of the star.

So glorious is he, he goes to this immoderate length

To show his love for us, discarding power and strength.

Girded for war, humility his mighty dress,

He moves into battle wholly weaponless.

Madeleine L’Engle, “Like Every Newborn” in The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L’Engle

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation.

In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him…He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.

C. S. Lewis, Miracles