Monthly Archives: February 2021

In Praise of a Mysterious God

I had planned to write something else next, but I was struck by a thought this morning and wanted to take this opportunity to meditate on it. And since decisions of sequence are currently arbitrary, I don’t feel bad in the least.

The spark happened on social media as one friend commented on another friend’s post. (If you’re ever wondering what social media is good for, this surely belongs on your list.) This commenter spoke in praise of mystery over and against claims of knowledge, and spoke as one trying to swing the pendulum back from the extreme in which we often find ourselves. I don’t wish to recap his comments or put words in his mouth. Today’s post is not a reply as such, but a reflection on mystery itself.

Let me also say that I have no desire to correct someone of such a mindset. We do need reminders of the goodness of mystery in our devotion. And if his or her relationship with God thrives on this, I say “praise God.”

It seems to me that mystery can be thought of in at least two different ways: one as an acknowledgement of our limitations, and the other as the only mode of approaching God. The former is necessary for orthodoxy. Anyone who has faith in Christ will sooner or later have to admit his limitations—that he is not God, that he cannot know everything, and what is unknown is no less true. I don’t wish to make this a strict test of faith or acceptance, but I can’t imagine someone lacking these views could have a healthy relationship with God and men. To be a disciple requires submission, not just of the will but of the mind.

The latter is traditionally known as the “via negativa” or the way of negation. It embraces denial as the path to true wisdom. On this view, I cannot say what it means that “God is light” except to know for sure that He is not darkness. The true knowledge of the statement is beyond me; I can only hope to know the truths of its negation.

There is a long tradition of this view in Christianity, and I don’t wish to condemn it, but I would not commend it to anyone. It seems to readily falter when one asks what, precisely, one is negating. How can I affirm “not darkness” unless I know what darkness is? What am I negating?

There is no doubt an answer to my questions out there somewhere, but I have not found it worth seeking out. I am untroubled by claims to knowledge, and this for two simple reasons: one, they appear to be unavoidable, and two, they are endorsed in Scripture. Knowledge is not a Western invention; it is an aspect of humanity that crosses cultures. We may define it in slightly different ways or give it greater or lesser honor, but it cannot be denied. Experience (and the testimony of others) indicate that knowledge is something we have to live with. But when God Himself commands us to know, to understand, to obey—well, it would seem this is not only normal for humanity, but normal for discipleship. If I want to submit to God, part of my devotion is to know that which He wants me to know.

But here I am talking at length about knowledge. Isn’t the post about mystery? Yes. And if my first point is that mystery as an acknowledgement of our limitations in the face of God is necessary for discipleship, my second is this: mystery and knowledge need each other. To embrace only mystery is to go too far; to embrace only knowledge is fraught with many of its own dangers. But mystery has value precisely because knowledge has value. Only in knowing what I know and the limits of what I know can I truly appreciate the mystery of what I don’t know. Only in embracing mystery can I affirm my frailty, God’s transcendence, and the sheer beauty of a God that would disclose knowledge of Himself to us. Mystery is to be valued because knowledge is valued.

Now, third: even as we affirm and embrace both, we must take care not to adore either for their own sake. This is a danger I think both “camps” fall into—that is, the people who wish to adore the mystery, and those who adore knowledge by wishing to seek out, share, and refine it. All praise belongs to God. All adoration is His. The mystery we adore is not mystery itself but God in His “beyondness.” We adore the mysterious God. We adore God where knowledge fails, where reason breaks down, and where our souls are met with silence.

Just the same, those who pursue knowledge must take care not to pursue “knowingness.” We must not in adoring wisdom find ourselves merely adoring our cleverness. If anything in knowledge is to be adored, it is God we adore—God as He has revealed Himself. We adore a God who draws near. A God who speaks our language. A God who knows us. We adore God’s words because we adore Him. We adore wisdom because it is His wisdom. Whether in speech or stillness, absence or presence, clarity or confusion, God is to be adored.

I have wrung my hands for a season, fretting over whether I could know anything and what that meant for following God. I am done with this. Knowledge is good. Mystery is good. Where God has spoken, we adore by listening, by reflecting, and by passing it on. Where God has not spoken, we carefully consider what, if anything, can be said. Where nothing can be said, we adore God in our silence and by our silence. And whether in speech or in silence, we marvel. Because God is always partly disclosed and partly hidden, and so our praise is always partly in understanding and partly in accepting the mysteries. Mystery does not undermine knowledge, nor knowledge mystery. But God is all in all, worthy of the highest praise. We submit to Him on His terms, and they turn out to involve both knowledge and mystery. To embrace Him is to accept both.

From Bible to Theology

In my last post, I described how I ended up prioritizing a doctrinal statement and why I’m beginning with church history rather than Scripture to build one. I want to flesh out these thoughts a bit more.

If the Bible is my authority (which it is), then everything I do should be in submission to that book. I believe it is completely true. Why? For the same reason I believe it’s authoritative: I believe God wrote it. No, I don’t mean God’s disembodied hand appeared and took up a pen. I believe He worked through people to produce His words, faithfully. The ancients had a metaphor that I like: it was like music played by a divine performer on a human instrument. It carries the unique qualities of the human author, but it is controlled by (and its truth is secured by) the divine author.

So if God authored the Bible, what it describes must be true. What it commands must be His command, therefore it must be right. His imperatives are the most important imperatives. What it leaves out, God chose to leave out. What it emphasizes, God chose to emphasize.

In the modern era, we read books in order to take from them or critique them. We sit in judgment on them. We listen for things we like or appreciate or find useful, and we reject whatever seems bad, poor, or untrue. That’s good critical thinking. You must determine for yourself what is true, good, and beautiful and leave the rest.

But if the Bible is God’s book, my relationship with it changes. It’s still very much like any other book in that it has stories, words, characters, themes, etc. But it’s different in that I must not come to judge but to be judged. I come not to take but to be taken. I come not to sift, approve, and condemn, but to be sifted, be approved, be condemned.

So my job when I read the Bible is to read open-handedly. Let the Bible tell me what is true, what is important. Let the Bible tell me what I ought to do. It’s too easy to formulate your plans on your own and then look for vindication or validation from Scripture. That’s not a terrible idea; if you’re testing something to know whether it is worthy, that’s fantastic. It’s when you are looking to justify yourself, to add a little divine endorsement—that’s when you’re using the Bible. I don’t think you ought to “use” God’s Word. It is useful, but it’s not your widget.

Now, if I want to take the Bible seriously (and I do) that means I have to make decisions about what I’m hearing. I have to make decisions like “was that command for them or for everyone?” and “if this verse says x and that verse says y, how do I hold these truths together?” They are not questions that give me power over the text. But they are questions that mobilize my response to the text. That I am in control over. That I must do.

So this means I’m engaged in theology. I take theology to be the next step beyond repetition and affirmation. I’ve been told that theology is any response to revelation, and I’m ok with that definition for the most part, but for my purposes here I want to say that it’s an engaged response. It’s not merely accepting, although that is, indeed, the foundation of a right response. God wants you to accept this map of reality, to obey these commands, to love what He loves, and that requires more than mere affirmation.

So now I’m a Baptist doing theology. Everyone does theology, but paying attention and striving to do it well is more like what we normally think of as theology.

There’s an old saying: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” On the face of it, I agree. But too often I have heard this phrase used to undermine theology. As though “God said it” were merely a matter of saying “amen” and everything else works out on its own. God said it, I believe it, therefore I meditate on it. God said it, I believe it, therefore I wrestle with it. God said it, I believe it, therefore I’m trying to change. God said it, I believe it, therefore we have to work this out.

Ok, so hopefully you see that being a good Baptist means doing theology for yourself, that taking the Bible seriously means doing more than simply affirming. So why did I start with historical creeds?

That’s the question I want to pick up next time.

Back to Basics

I’m good at overcomplicating things, and part of the reason is I like to leverage actions for multiple outcomes. A sort of economy of intellectual motion. This tends to multiply the variables that affect my decisions, and that in turn requires more recalculating along the way.

Admitting it is supposed to be the first step. I’ll get back to you about the others.

I’ve decided to leave the question about audience for a little while and focus on what’s next for me. I’ll work on myself in public and hope that produces something worth sharing.

My first real moment of clarity on this was during the sermon on Sunday morning, when it dawned on me that the authority of Scripture was a watershed issue for me. I want to talk about it, but before I talk about it, I want to anticipate attacks. I want to defend it. No, I want to convince you it’s true.

That’s a tall order for a blog post or two.

That’s important work, and I look forward to doing it. But I’m putting it on hold as well. What I long to do most is enjoy and explore the theological world that unfolds from a life in submission to the Word.

So with that settled, I found myself today trying yet again to figure out what’s next. How do I prioritize all my ambitious plans?

This gets back to that intellectual economy of motion ideal/problem. I want something I can leverage professionally, in my personal walk, and as a parent. I always have questions I’m wrestling with. How do I prioritize them? What’s more, how do I prioritize them with so few creative restrictions?

I’m a firm believer that what you believe is the most important thing about you, to paraphrase Tom Morris. In my life, at least, I find that what I believe has a powerful impact on my perceptions, actions, and attitudes. Perhaps for some people, doctrines are just trivia, but for me, they are nothing less than the programming language of the mind. Flip this belief switch here and my patterns change there.

So since I’ve been slacking a bit on theology for the past couple of years, I thought the best first project was to revisit my doctrinal statement, identify holes or questions, and create a list of theological projects that I could then schedule out for study and use.

But the method problem always comes up early. You can start doing the work for a while, of course, but before long it will be obvious that you could be doing it a bit better. So at some point you have to stop and think about what you’re trying to do and what the best way is to do it.

In other words, if you want to be thoughtful about your process, you can’t avoid method.

So if I want to evaluate my doctrinal statement, I can open it up and just see how it strikes me. But that seems to me to rely heavily on reason and intuition. I like those. I’m very comfortable with those. At least, I am when they’re mine; yours make me uneasy.

My ideal would be to just read Scripture and let the patterns emerge. Let the Bible tell me what’s most important, then codify that in a way that is most faithful to the text and least contrived and molded by human tendencies. That’s my theological Holy Grail, as it were. It would probably take me a lifetime, but in the end I would be the only one convinced by it. And frankly, it shouldn’t say anything all that different from what’s already out there. So what’s the point? I just want to know whatever I believe is not just true but properly weighted according to Scripture.

So I’m working toward that in my devotions. Note patterns. Note questions. Launch a word study here or there. And I’ll share from that as things really strike me.

But today (and I will end with this) I chose to harvest where others have sewn. I was once at a talk where NT Wright said something to the effect that theology was a matter of picking your favorite verses and building from there. I don’t want to do that. On a more practical note, I once had a friend (who was obviously not raised Baptist) ask why one would want to write a doctrinal statement at all. Why not adopt one of the statements that already exist?

In the spirit of those insights, I started by studying the three “ecumenical” creeds: Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian. I wanted to see how they compared and what theological categories arose from there. What questions were they asking? This will help me compare what I’m seeing and hearing with what others have valued.

It’s a very modest beginning, I know, but you have to start somewhere.

Two Questions

I’ve been in the church for my whole life, and I’ve been involved in ministry for most of that time. There are many, many questions that interest me, but a few that I keep coming back to time and again. Chief among them are these:

  1. What does it mean to live in submission to the Bible, to respect the authority of an ancient text?
  2. Why is good Christian leadership so hard to come by, especially in a world saturated with leadership resources?

The first question can lead to an endless set of objections about reason, interpretation, realism, tradition, culture, etc., etc. I have looked into all of these, and while I’m not expert in any one of them, I am confident that the Bible is true, that it bears God’s authority, and that He expects normal people to be able to understand and respond to it.

The second question has occupied more of my time in the years since seminary. It’s easy for me to become overly critical of someone’s doctrine or practice, elevating matters of personal conviction to the level that I’m willing to fight for them, but that’s my problem. God works through all kinds of imperfect people and systems. (There’s hope He may yet even work through me!)

But most of the problems I’ve seen aren’t technical. They are interpersonal. Leaders treat brothers as enemies, hide their plans and maneuver behind the scenes, say one thing and do another, or settle matters by force rather than by principle and persuasion.

I sometimes wonder if fundamentalists (and their children) are worse about this because they tend to value willpower over reason, and strong leaders over godly examples. Maybe everyone feels this pull, I don’t know. And there are a million different ways to fall; no denomination is free of those. But do we create and perpetuate a culture where we distrust others too easily and work around them when we should be addressing conflict directly?

Power is always tempting. Commands are easier than persuasion. Ejection is cleaner than reconciliation. And sometimes a strong hand is necessary. But I see these broken scenarios over and over again.

As a Baptist, I take seriously the need to study the text for myself and respond to it. But teachers are not mere advisors; God has given the church teachers to guide and equip. We must take them seriously. All the same, teachers are themselves accountable to the Word and false teachers are accountable to the congregation. So there is a kind of mutual submission in play. When the desire for control by any party outweighs the desire to submit to Scripture, trouble ensues. When circumstance or status protects someone from being questioned, trouble ensues.

Maybe it’s idealistic, but I believe that people who live in submission to the Bible and are committed to one another should be able to work things out far more often than they do.

Perhaps by properly addressing the first question can we begin to heal the second.

Adjusting

I’m not above adjusting my plans to fit new data. In fact, it can be a bad thing. I sometimes have a hard time sticking to plans because I am too eager to adapt them. It’s very different when someone else is involved; I feel an enormous sense of responsibility to other people. But when it’s just me keeping a commitment to myself, well, that’s another story.

So I’m adjusting a few things behind the scenes. It’s been a few days since I posted, and that’s partly because home and family life needed more attention. Easy choice. I was also trying to make a daily practice of music, partly to keep up old skills, partly to practice producing homemade multimedia, and partly in the hopes of sharing some original music from a lifetime ago. I’m downgrading the music idea, at least for now. It takes a lot of time to improve. I don’t need to improve that quickly.

The biggest change, though, has been prioritizing Bible reading. I’m someone who desperately needs to have Scripture in my life, but I find myself always putting it on the back-burner to do other good things. Those things are usually for God, they are often doctrine-related, and so it doesn’t feel like the most sacrilegious trade-off.

However, I don’t think I can sustain a blog that’s just about my thoughts. The thoughts most worth sharing are based on the Bible. Every path I would like to see my life go down requires being saturated with Scripture. But even more importantly, my relationship with God depends on it. I need to hear His voice, not just to get somewhere but to BE with Him. It’s not part of a strategic plan. It’s part of a relationship.

I also find that the more time I spend on social media, the more fragmented my attention becomes. I once took a long break from television because I could feel it messing with my head. I distinctly remember watching an episode of Family Guy in college and just feeling scattered afterward. It’s well-done. I’m not complaining about the show in particular or TV in general. I just don’t like what it does to me, and so I changed our relationship. I’m feeling that pull in social media, too. I don’t like what it does to me, and so I want to change our relationship.

I want to focus on what matters most to God, and that’s found in His Word. There are good things online, but they are scattered among bad things, funny things, useless things, you name it. There are no rules for Facebook. We all use it for different things, and so we bounce from one purpose to the next, as though we’re channel-surfing our friends’ lives.

I’m not complaining about Facebook in particular or social media in general. I just don’t like what it does to me.

So I’m trying to turn that down (not off) and spend more time in the Bible and other books. It’s harder than I would have thought, and I plan to share some observations about that in the future. But it is so worthwhile. Not just because of what it does to me, but, again, because I want a daily, living relationship with the God who made me and saved me.