Ascended into Heaven

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(Isaiah 25:6-10a; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 1 Corinthians 15:42-44a, 51-57)

“Heaven” is one of those words that when you say it, people think they can stop listening because they already know what you’re going to say. When we die, our bodies aren’t us anymore, and our immortal souls go up to heaven where we watch over the people we’ve left behind. Add in the usual clouds and harps and pearly gates, with St. Peter standing outside them behind a lectern with a huge book—and what on earth did poor Peter do to get stuck with that, anyway?—and you have the basic picture that floats around in the back of most people’s minds; that’s what “heaven” means to us.

I’m here to tell you I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, and I don’t believe it’s going up to heaven when I die, and I most especially don’t believe any of us in this room will be playing harps—except for Elly, since she plays it now. (If you want to tell me heaven would be a place where I’ll play bassoon well enough that it will still be heaven for everyone else, we can talk about that, but I’m no harpist.) Obviously, if by “heaven” you mean the place where God lives and is fully visibly present, yes, I believe in that, but I don’t believe in heaven as most people think about it; and the reason I don’t is because the Bible doesn’t either. The Bible, instead, promises us two very different and very much greater things: the resurrection of the dead, and the new heavens and the new earth. Jesus didn’t come to Earth just to save our souls, he came to redeem us as whole human beings, body and spirit; indeed, he came to redeem his whole creation, not just us. God isn’t in this just for souls, as if he’d be happy to let the rest of the world he made go to rot; he’s in this to take it all back.

The ascension makes this clear, and underpins what Paul is saying about the resurrection from the dead in 1 Corinthians 15, because it shows us that Jesus’ resurrection was no temporary thing. He came back to life as a flesh and blood human being—albeit one whose body could do things that ours can’t—and when he left, he didn’t leave that body behind and go back to heaven as a spirit; he returned in the body, as a human being. That shows us what God is about in our own redemption. To raise us as spirits and leave our bodies behind would leave death with some measure of victory in the end; and it would devalue the world God has made, the world which he pronounced good. God isn’t interested in letting either of these things happen. Rather, his intent is to absolutely undo all the damage done by our enemy when he led Adam and Eve into sin, and absolutely destroy all powers opposed to him, leaving them no scrap of accomplishment at all. The absolute destruction of all death, and the absolute victory of all that is life, under the rule of Jesus Christ our Lord is what we have to look forward to—nothing less.

This is why, if you flip over and look at the last couple chapters of Revelation for a minute, you’ll see what it promises: a new heaven and a new earth, an entirely remade physical world; and at its center is the holy city, the city of God, the new Jerusalem. This seems odd to a lot of folks—indeed, by comparison to most human myths, it is odd—and I know a few people who object to the idea of living in a city for eternity. I don’t think that’s what Revelation is getting at, though; rather, I think the point of the new Jerusalem is this, that when God remakes the world, he won’t simply undo everything we’ve done. As the French theologian Jacques Ellul notes, “The city is . . . our primary human creation. It is a uniquely human world. It is the symbol that we have chosen.” This does mean, in part, that it’s “the place that human beings have chosen in opposition to God.” That’s why, in Scripture, cities are never really seen as positive places, and oftentimes are presented very negatively. But in making the center of the new creation a city, God is taking our works into account, and redeeming the works of our hands, turning the center and hub of our fallen civilization into the center of his perfect reign. This tells us that the good that we have made, the good things we have built, the honorable works of our hands, will not be swept away in the final judgment; even as God will redeem and perfect us, so too will our accomplishments be redeemed and perfected. The gifts God has given you, and the good things you do with them to his glory, will also be saved.

Of course, that redemption and perfection are an important part of the picture. The great relief pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, the late Dan Quisenberry, once quipped, “I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer”; but if that tends to be drearily true in human history, it will not be true at all of the new creation. We will be raised in our own bodies, but our bodies will be different in kind. Now, they are perishable; our bodies erode, they wear out, they catch diseases, they break, they fail, and we die. In the new creation, they won’t be subject to any of that; they will be imperishable, what Paul calls “spiritual bodies.” Flesh and blood as we know it now cannot endure the glory of God, it cannot stand up to the brightness of his presence; it’s too frail and flimsy and shadowy a thing to breathe the air of heaven. It must be made new, remade, along with the rest of creation, in order to be solid enough and real enough to stand in the very presence of God. So too the works of our hands, those things we have forged out of our own hard work and the raw materials God has given us; that which is worthy will endure, but not as we have known it, for it too will be remade by the hand of God.

This is the promise of the gospel—the promise we see realized first in the resurrection of Christ, whom Paul calls “the firstfruits,” the first harvest, “of those who have died”; as the first one to be raised from the dead, as the one who went before us to show us the way, he shows us the new life that waits for us. We will be raised from the dead, not merely as we are now, but as he is, and the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and the power of sin in our lives will be no more, forever and ever and ever.

Now, as a side note, people have wondered and argued how this all fits together, and they’ve come up with a lot of different ideas; I should probably tell you how I understand this, and I’ll borrow from Paul and say “I, not the Lord,” and you can make of it what you will—but this is what makes sense to me. I believe, when it comes to the point of Christ’s return to this earth and the resurrection from the dead, that we all get there at the same time, regardless of when we leave. I believe that when Jean Illingworth and Susan Bertschai and Sara’s grandparents and all those whom we love who have died closed their eyes for the last time, it was just a blink, and they opened them again to find Jesus raising them from the dead in their new bodies; and I believe that those of us who die between now and that time, they found us right there beside them, blinking and rub-bing our eyes and staring at last into the face of Jesus our Lord. Some have called that idea “soul sleep,” but I prefer to think of it as time travel—the moment of death is the moment of resurrection, in God’s perspective, even if it doesn’t look that way to us now. As I say, you can make of that what you will, you can believe it that way or not, it doesn’t matter to me; that’s just how I best understand it. All that really matters is that however it makes sense for you, that you don’t let go of any of God’s promise to you.

I say that because, unfortunately, that’s all too easy to do. There’s a real tendency to spiritualize this which goes back before the beginning of the church; it’s a tendency which found its most significant expression in the movement known as Gnosticism. If you read The DaVinci Code, you’ll probably remember that the characters in there talk a lot about Gnosticism, though the author, Dan Brown, actually knows very, very little about it, and so presents a completely screwy picture. Gnosticism, I think it’s fair to say, was rooted in two basic impulses. One is the desire to be superior to other people, in this case by being able to say, “I know something you don’t know”; the other is the desire not to have to take the body seriously. For some, that was because they hated the body and all its limitations, and wanted to get free of it, to become more than human; as our science advances, that same impulse is starting to show itself in the work of scientists who talk about “enhancing” our bodies, and dream of a “post-human age.” Others, however, didn’t want to have to take their bodies seriously because they wanted to be able to do whatever they pleased with them; they wanted to be able to get drunk, get high, eat too much, sleep with whomever they could get into bed, and generally indulge themselves, while still being “spiritual.” Two very different reasons for the same basic claim: that the body is unimportant, that only the spirit matters.

That kind of thinking has been a continuing problem for the church over the years; the church keeps getting rid of it, and it keeps creeping back in. People find it easier to believe, and not always for bad reasons, and so they drift into thinking this way without ever really realizing that it’s less than what God promises us. But it is less, because our bodies aren’t unimportant, and they aren’t incidental to who we are; we exist as body and spirit together, and our bodies, though fallen and subject to sin, are beautiful and precious; certainly, to live forever in bodies that aged and fell ill and broke down would be no good thing, but to leave them behind forever would be no good thing either, for it would make us less than ourselves. That’s why God promises to raise us, whole, from the dead, in imperishable, incorruptible bodies, because our bodies are part of us, and every part of us matters to God, in every aspect of who we are and what we do.

This means that what we do with our bodies matters, because our bodies are sites of God’s redemption; his Spirit is alive and at work in our bodies as well as in our spirits, for they are inseparably woven together, to remake us into the people he created us to be. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and why he tells the Corinthians that they need to watch what they do with their bodies, because there are no merely physical acts. Every act is spiritual, because every act that affects our bodies—food, sex, exercise, sleep, slipping and falling, getting back up—every act affects our spirits, and we won’t be leaving these bodies behind. They’ll be transformed when God makes all things new, but they’ll still be our bodies, and what we do with them matters, to us and to God.

To some, this might not seem like good news, but I think it is; it’s the good news that because Jesus ascended into heaven in the body, as a human being, there is room for us in our full humanity in the presence of God. There is no part of us God will not re-deem—no good thing he will not purify, no bad thing he will not transform. There is room for us in the kingdom of God as whole people, scars and all, because he has re-deemed us as whole people, scars and all; when the kingdom comes, even our scars will no longer bring us pain, or shame, for they, too, will be the marks of the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives.

Score one for SCOTUS

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The Supreme Court of the United States struck a blow for national sovereignty recently—and along with it, a blow for the separation of powers. Medellín v. Texas is a decision that deals with some weighty issues of domestic and international law, but I think the Court made the right decision; I appreciate that they stood up to an attempt by the Bush administration to overreach the authority of the executive branch, and even more that in doing so they didn’t claim more authority for themselves, but rather upheld the proper sovereignty of the legislative branch. Most of all, I think they were right to say that while the US must honor its treaty obligations, it’s the principles of our own Constitution rather than the diktat of international organizations which determine how we do so.

A further point of interest to this decision, noted by the article to which I’ve linked here, is that it deals a body blow to the efforts of pro-abortion activists to use international organizations and treaties to overrule pro-life laws here in the US; this too is a good thing. In general, I’m not a believer in surrendering any part of our sovereignty to international organizations which all too often don’t have our best interests at heart; I particularly oppose allowing the opinions of folks in other countries to determine important issues like abortion policy.

Further thoughts on the Ascension: the value of our humanity

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The most basic significance of Jesus’ ascension is that he returned to heaven as a human being. This was a controversial statement in the early church—that’s why the creeds explicitly affirm that Jesus ascended into heaven, because there was a lot of argument about that point. The reason for the argument is that a lot of people just couldn’t deal with the idea that anything as gross and physical and material as a human body could be in heaven, in the presence of God. They were very “spiritual” people, in the same way as many people nowadays are very “spiritual”—which is to say, they saw “spiritual” reality as very different from, and superior to, mere physical, material reality. They’d be very happy to talk about their immortal souls going to heaven when they died—but the body? Ugh. No thanks. That was just a temporary thing, even a temporary prison, which they believed their souls would eventually escape to live a purely spiritual existence with God, who himself was pure spirit, and therefore superior to us physical beings.

Obviously, on such a view, Jesus couldn’t possibly have returned to the presence of God as a human being—that would defeat the whole purpose, and contaminate heaven. Yet this is precisely what the Scriptures affirm: the first-century Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth ascended bodily into heaven, and at the end of all things he will return to this earth in exactly the same way. His human body, his human identity, wasn’t just something he put on for a while and then set aside—it’s a permanent part of who he is. The Son of God is still, seated in heaven at the right hand of God, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew with nail scars in his wrists and feet and the wound of a spear in his side, and so he shall ever be; he didn’t just wear a human suit for a while, he became fully human, and he remains fully human.

This isn’t something we tend to think about very often, but it’s a profound and critically important truth. Jesus took our humanity with him when he returned to his Father; which means that in Jesus, God has taken our humanity into himself. He has not discarded our flesh, nor has he separated himself again from this world we know and love; rather, the stuff of creation is inextricably woven into the being of God. This is why the author of Hebrews can declare that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and our struggles. It’s not just a matter of Jesus remembering what it was like once upon a time to be human, powerful a thing though that is; his humanity is not merely a memory from the past, it’s a present reality. He still knows what it is to be human, because he still is human.

If Jesus cared so much for us human beings that he was willing to identify that completely with us in order to save us, it suggests that we should probably value our humanity rather more highly than we often do. We tend to value ourselves for what we do, what we have to offer, what we can contribute—and to value others on the same basis; there are even those voices which say that if people have nothing to offer, because they’re too disabled or too old or too sick, then we’re justified in getting rid of them. We don’t tend to value ourselves or others simply for being human beings. But God does. Jesus does. In fact, he values us so much—he loves us so much, just for ourselves, just because he made us to love—that he became one of us. Maybe, rather than measuring ourselves and each other by the world’s standards, we ought to learn to look through Jesus’ eyes instead.

“The oboe as an instrument of torture for oboists”

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Slate has a perfectly wonderful piece up titled “Death by Oboe: How acoustic instruments torment their players.” Speaking as a double-reed player myself (albeit one on a fairly lengthy hiatus just at the moment), I particularly appreciate this bit:

In the modern world, nothing in music is more tragicomic than the subject of double-reed instruments like the oboe and bassoon. If you’re an oboist or bassoonist in a high-school band, you buy ready-made reeds. Otherwise, you make your own from scratch, using expensive aged cane from particular terroirs, preferably in southern France. Cutting and trimming and binding and shaving reeds consumes a good deal of your days, while other musicians are practicing and regular people are having fun or making love. If you play the oboe seriously, much of your free time is spent making reeds, not love. Besides being ridiculously fragile, reeds are also sensitive to humidity, which on a soggy night can turn an orchestral woodwind section into a squawkfest.A professional oboist will tell you more than you need to know about what constitutes a Mozart reed, a Mahler reed, a Stravinsky reed, and so on. If he plays in a pops orchestra, there’s probably a Lennon/McCartney reed. If he wants to show you his reed knife, which is razor sharp, you should keep an eye on the exit. Reed making and the pressure on the brain that comes from blowing into an oboe can do unpredictable things to a person.

The strangest person I ever met was an oboist, the younger brother of one of my fellow bassoon students; when he had a reed he was making turn out badly, he would stand it on end, stand all his other reeds around it in a circle, facing inward, and set the offending reed ablaze with a lighter—pour encourager les autres.(The title of this post is taken from Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers story “The Missing Item.”)HT: Alan Jacobs

The church, the prophet, the whale—and God

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The latest issue of Touchstone has a remarkable article surveying children’s versions of the story of Jonah—and showing just how badly wrong they get the book, on the whole. (About halfway through I got up to check our copy of The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I posted on a while back, to see how it answered the challenge; it did better than most, but was not without flaw, cutting Jonah’s story off before chapter four.) There’s no question that most adults (even in the church!) have a seriously distorted mental picture of the book of Jonah, one which rarely gets beyond the question, “Was it a whale or was it a fish?” (Answer: to the ancient Jews, they were both fish.) From Ronald Marshall’s survey, it’s not hard to understand why.

What I particularly appreciate about the piece is that his analysis of the matter goes beyond anything I’d thought of. I’d always figured that most of the sanitizing of the book was rooted in the fact that Jonah, as an anointed prophet of God, ought to act like a hero and doesn’t—that the primary concern was squeezing him as much as possible into that mold. Wouldn’t do, after all, to admit that one of God’s prophets could be such a whiny, priggish, self-righteous, hateful jerk. The Rev. Marshall goes further, though, suggesting that “Jonah is a horrifying book”—which he’s right, it is, though I’ve never particularly felt that—and that the main concern has been to neuter it, to remove the horror and render it “safe for children.” (C. S. Lewis would have had a pungent comment about that, I think.) The problem is, as the article’s subhead puts it, “In removing the fear from the story of Jonah, children’s versions remove the gospel, too.”

This is because the great truth at the heart of the book of Jonah is the juxtaposition of God’s holy fury at human sin with his holy will to show mercy to human sinners. God’s hatred of the evil practiced by the Assyrian Empire was so great (with good reason) that he wanted to destroy Nineveh; yet he preferred to destroy them as his enemies by bringing them to repentance, so he sent Jonah to preach a message of warning to them. God’s hatred of Jonah’s rebellion was such that he sent a storm to drive him into the ocean, into the terror of drowning and the hell of the stomach of the sea-beast; yet he desired to show mercy to his recalcitrant prophet, and when Jonah prayed for forgiveness, he relented, and Jonah was vomited up onto the shore. And when Jonah sat down to try to shame God into destroying Nineveh despite its people’s repentance, God made the shade tree grow, then killed it, in an effort to bring Jonah around; where Jonah’s motto seems to have been, “Hate the sin, hate the (non-Jewish) sinner more,” God seeks to teach his prophet to love mercy.

In all this, of course, God isn’t nice to Jonah; one could easily argue that he’s far more considerate of the Ninevites who would destroy his people than he is of the prophet whom he called to serve him. But then, Jesus wasn’t nice to those who were leading his people astray, either—nor was God the Father nice to Jesus. God’s purposes are far, far bigger than being nice to us and making us comfortable and happy; his hatred of our sin is no less real and great than his hatred of the sin of others, nor is his desire to show mercy to those others any less than his desire to show mercy to us. If we’re seeking a God who’s “on our side,” we’re looking in the wrong place. The Bible doesn’t give us a God who’s on our side, it shows us God and calls us to be on his side. (This is the greatest error in all typically American forms of theology, including even black liberation theology, which is rooted in the great truth that God lifts up the cause of the oppressed.) To the extent that we resist what God is doing, he isn’t on our side at all. As Rev. Marshall puts it, working from Kierkegaard:

Kierkegaard stunningly ties this story to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies. When God destroys the tree, he is being “so terrible” to Jonah. If this is the way God loves his servants, there are no “syrupy sweets” in it at all. Rather, the “strenuous and sacrificial” marks this love.

Because God is so rough on us, Jesus said we should love our enemies—knowing full well that God is our “most appalling enemy.” Loving our enemies is primarily about loving God. Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, “God wants you to die, to die to the world; he hates specifically that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your zest for life.”

God makes Jonah miserable, but for his own good. He breaks apart his worldly hopes and dreams and pushes him into a new life. He shows him that his own comfort does not matter. He calls Jonah to set his mind “on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”—things like some wilting shade tree (Col. 3:2). And for all this cruel treatment, Jonah is to love God anyway, simply because Matthew 5:44 says we are to love and not hate our enemies.

This is the hard truth of the life of faith, that following God isn’t about “our best life now” and God helping us realize our potential as we see fit, according to our own desires; it’s about denying ourselves, even dying to ourselves, and God killing that part of us that needs to die. Granted, he does so in order “that we might have life, and have it abundantly,” but it isn’t our best life, it’s his; and getting there means confronting our darkness, and the horror of which we’re capable, head on. It means understanding both the full measure of the awesome wrath of God against sin—and the fact that our sin deserves that wrath—and the awesome depth and breadth of the mercy of God for sinners, which took that wrath upon himself on the cross. Just as Jonah sacrificed himself to save the sailors from the wrath of God (though he did so because he preferred death to obedience), so Jesus sacrificed himself to save “the entire boat of humanity” (in St. Jerome’s words). And as Jared’s been arguing over at The Thinklings, and as C. J. Mahaney talked about with Sinclair Ferguson, it’s only if we understand that fact in its full significance that we truly understand the gospel.

Keep praying for Zimbabwe

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Mugabe’s decided to dig in and fight; the opposition is still standing up to him, but I guess he’s figuring if he just terrorizes Zimbabweans enough, he can make them more afraid of voting him out than of letting him stay in power. Pray he’s wrong—pray the people of Zimbabwe stand up to him and to these tactics and vote him out anyway. And pray that when they do, that somehow, he’ll go quietly. Please keep praying.

Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil (full post)

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Continuing the conversation . . .

A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?

R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.

A: I don’t understand this. Let’s back up and try a different line of approach. If God exists, if he is completely good, all-powerful, and in complete control, then why is there evil?

R: That is an important question. Shortest answer: I don’t know. Even at the very beginning, if you look at Genesis 1, creation is portrayed as God’s victory over evil—not moral evil, but what Dr. Waltke, one of my Old Testament professors, calls surd evil: the power of chaos. Where does that come from? And what about the Devil, who tempted humanity into sin? Where did his evil come from? I really don’t have answers to those questions.

A: You referenced the Devil a minute ago, too. Do you really believe in the Devil?

R: Yes, I believe that there is a personal agent of evil who is at war with God; he’s already lost, but he won’t admit it yet.

A: Huh. Well, I suppose that if you believe in God, there’s no reason not to believe in the Devil as well.

R: No. What I’m getting to, though, is that the fact that I can’t explain evil isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You see, evil isn’t a positive reality, but a negation. Are you familiar with Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time?

A: I’m sorry, no.

R: Oh, well; that would have made explaining this a little easier. It was Augustine’s insight, I believe—he was one of the great theologians of the early church—that if God is the one who is and the creator of all that is, if he is the source of all good, and evil is the opposite of good, then evil is ultimately the negation of being, uncreation. As Henri Blocher, a French theologian, put it, “evil is disruption, discontinuity, disorder, alienness, that which defies description in creational terms (except negatively!).” Blocher makes the point that human reason is designed to understand the order God created, to trace out the patterns. A rational explanation of the existence of evil could only be possible if evil had a place in the rational order of creation; this could only be the case if evil were in fact an original part of creation. This in turn would mean that God was the source of all evil as well as of all good, and thus that evil, too is eternal. But this is not the case: evil is outside the rational order of creation, and has no part in God.

Blocher goes on to say that evil is not there to be understood, it is there to be fought, and that God has in fact already defeated it; we are living with the death throes of an enemy that has not yet accepted that it has lost.

A: So what you’re saying is that evil is as incomprehensible as God is.

R: Yes. God is beyond the ability of our reason to comprehend because he is too big, great and good beyond the scope of our reason; evil is beyond our reason because it is fundamentally opposed to the created order, and thus fundamentally arational.

A: Intuitively, that makes sense to me; but I think that answer leaves a hole, because it doesn’t address the continued existence of evil, to say nothing of its continued success. If, as you say, God is perfectly good and all-powerful, once evil came to be—or to not be? on your terms, I’m not sure how to phrase the question—why didn’t he simply defeat it at the beginning? Why leave evil to do all the damage it has done?

R: Again, I don’t know; I can’t answer that. I’ve heard one preacher suggest that once the Devil rebelled, God decided to let his rebellion play itself out in order to ensure that no one would ever try it again; I don’t know that I would offer that as an answer, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Origen, another of the Church Fathers, held that in the end, God would redeem all of creation, that even the Devil would eventually be restored. He was condemned as heretical by later councils of the Church, and I won’t offer that as the right answer either, but again, it makes some sense; and I’d like to believe it, whether or not I do.

In the end, though, the only answer I can offer is this, that God is a creator and a lover, not a destroyer, and that he chose to fight evil accordingly by bringing good out of evil. In the end he will bring the curtain down on evil once and for all, but for this time he has chosen to answer evil with self-sacrificing love; and he has given this world time while he carries out his plan, spreading his word throughout the world to claim all those who belong to him. The number of those to be saved has not yet been completed.

What the question of evil comes down to, then, is the question posed by another of my professors, John Stackhouse: can God be trusted? Can we trust his wisdom, that he does indeed know what he is doing and why, and can we trust his heart, that his love is indeed unflawed? To me, the answer is clearly yes, we can; the fact that the Father was willing to go so far as to send the Son to the cross, and that the Son was willing to go so far as to endure it, and that the Spirit was willing to bear that loss—that is proof enough for me. But it’s a question everyone has to answer themselves.

A: This still leaves the question of human evil; if we grant for the moment that evil is allowed for whatever reason to exist and that we are limited beings, then certainly bad things are going to happen. There will be errors in judgment, which will lead to accidents, things we have made will break, which will produce more, natural disasters will occur. The forces of chaos, as you referenced a few minutes ago, are at work—fine, we’ll accept that for the moment. But what really concerns me is why we humans do so much evil to each other and our world, and I don’t think you’ve answered that. Why is evil allowed so much influence over us?

R: That’s partly a question about God, but it’s also a question about us—after all, human sin comes out of human nature—so I think there are a couple of things that need to be said before trying to answer that. In case you’re interested, the formal terms theologians use here are anthropology, which is the doctrine of human nature, and hamartiology, which is the doctrine of human sin.

A: Every field has its own jargon, I suppose.

R: And the jargon has its uses—at the very least, it helps you keep track of what part of the discussion you’re in. Now, God created Adam and Eve in his own image.

A: So you believe there really was a literal Adam and Eve?

R: I do. I’d rather not get sidetracked into a discussion of possible interpretations of Genesis 1-2, which I read as a poetic and liturgical text, rather than a scientific description of creation, but I will say this: if one believes as I do that God created everything, then there is no reason not to believe that he created human beings in the way that the Genesis text recounts; I’ve already said that I have scientific as well as theological reasons for rejecting the various theories of natural evolution, and again, I’d rather not get off into that discussion. What’s more, from a Christian perspective there is good reason to believe that God created the human race directly, even if one does accept evolutionary theory. Namely, there is the biblical statement that God created human beings, male and female, in his image. This separates us from the animals.

A: Come now. We’re animals, too, after all.

R: Physically, yes, but we’re more than that. We’re spiritual amphibians, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, a fusion of body and spirit like no other animal.

A: Ah, yes; when we die, our souls go to Heaven or Hell, is that it?

R: Umm, no.

A: No?

R: I didn’t say we’re spiritual Oreos—screw off the top, eat the filling, and leave the chocolate cookie behind. We are embodied souls, ensouled bodies, the union of the two, we are in total made in the image of God, and we don’t separate out; we aren’t just our bodies, but we’re not whole without them, either. The face you wear is as much you as the thoughts you hide behind it. That’s why I say we’re spiritual amphibians, because we belong to two worlds at once, that of cats and dogs and that of angels and demons.

A: Angels always seemed so wishy-washy to me. But if you don’t believe that your soul will live on after death and go to Heaven, what do you believe?

R: We’ll get there. As for angels—well, Western culture tends to sentimentalize them something awful these days; I think we have the Victorians to thank for that one, with their simpering fainting-girl angel paintings. Not at all the biblical idea. But as I was saying, we were made in the image of God, which means both that we were made like God and that we represent him in the world—we were made to be his agents. Like I said earlier, part of that is that we reflect his communicable attributes: we are personal beings; we are moral agents; we were created good; we are capable of love; we are creative actors, and we have the ability, to some degree, to carry out what we plan to do. As Tolkien would say—

A: Tolkien? What does he have to do with this conversation?

R: Besides being a devout Christian—

A: He was?

R: I believe he was Catholic, to be precise. In any case, Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” called human beings “sub-creators,” because God has given us the ability and the right to create within his creation. We cannot create out of nothing as he did, but we can create much from the materials he has given us, and we were meant to do so to his glory. Dorothy Sayers—yes, the mystery writer, she knew both Tolkien and Lewis—argues in her book The Mind of the Maker that this is what Genesis means when it says that we’re made in the image of God, because at that point in the biblical story what we know of God is that he creates.

I think, actually, that there is more to see than that from the beginning of Genesis; God is presented as rational, personal, and capable of relationship—after all, God is quoted as saying, “Let us make man in our image.”

A: “Us”? Interesting. I hadn’t thought the doctrine of the Trinity was that old.

R: It isn’t. This passage allows for the Trinity, but whoever wrote it had no such conception. There are arguments about what the author was thinking, but I don’t want to get into them. Anyway, we can also see from the creation story that God is good, since he is creating everything good, and that he rules over everything. So in part, to say that we are in the image of God is to say that we reflect his character, and in part it is to say that we reflect his activity as creative beings; and in part it is to say that we represent him in this world, that we are not only small creators but small rulers, responsible for managing the world which he made and which therefore belongs to him.

A: I can’t help thinking that this would be a very different world if Christians actually believed what you’ve been saying; from what you’re saying, pollution is a sin.

R: I believe polluting the earth is a sin. But seeing that isn’t enough, even if everyone in the church did. After all, even if our understanding of God were perfect in every respect, we would still be sinful people; and given that self-deception is a sin, and one that we as a race are pretty good at, the contradiction between our beliefs and our behavior would corrupt the purity of our understanding in short order anyway. We were created perfect, but we didn’t stay that way.

Skeptical conversations, part II: What is God like? (full post)

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Continuing the conversation . . .

R: Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.

A: Everything? What about sending people to Hell?

R: As regards Hell in particular, I’d like to come back to that later; but to speak more broadly, yes, I think God’s judgment and wrath are very much consistent with his nature, which is love. Stop and think a minute. If someone was trying to undermine your relationship with your wife and daughter—to take the extreme case, think Iago—what would your reaction be?

A: I’d be furious. I love them, I would never let anyone come between us.

R: And if someone tried to hurt them?

A: Just the same. I would defend them to the best of my ability, and whoever had threatened them would deserve whatever happened.

R: Well, that’s how God reacts to sin. He is perfectly good—the Bible says that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”—and he made the world good; he made us good. The Father made us so that he, the Son and the Holy Spirit could expand the circle and share their love with us, and he gave us the world as a gift so that we might enjoy its beauty and care for it.

A: Now you’re getting close to environmentalism.

R: I am, and I think rightly so; I think our theology needs to address environmental questions. (I’m not the only one, either; if you’re interested, look up Steven Bouma-Prediger or Loren Wilkinson, for starters.) We were given the earth to be its stewards, and I think we will be held accountable for what we have done with our charge; but the threat to the earth from which we must defend it is our own sin. Sin, you see, threatens everything that God has made, and most especially all of humanity, whom he loves; sin mars his creation, and hardens our hearts against him. His response is jealousy and wrath against sin—the same jealousy and wrath you would show to anyone who tried to hurt your family or your relationship with them.

A: Jealousy? Come now, I’m not a jealous person.

R: Jealousy is a threat reaction. In people we think of as “jealous,” it’s set off by anything and everything, causing all sorts of unjustified behavior; but when someone really is threatening your relationship with your wife or daughter, jealousy is the appropriate response, as long as it is within bounds.

A: It sounds rather like antihistamines in the body; when they’re set off by false threats such as pollen, they give us allergies.

R: But when germs set them off, they are an important part of the body’s defense system. Exactly. And they will not stop until the germs are dead, and the same is true of God’s reaction—something akin to an allergic reaction, I suppose—to sin: his wrath is ferocious and uncompromising. He does not tolerate sin in any way, shape or form, and he will not settle for anything less than the absolute defeat of sin. Which is where Hell comes in.

A: That I can accept. It’s the absolute defeat of sinners I find hard to take.

R: Well, as I said, we’ll come back to that. In any case, God is love, which makes sense because he is three in one. I suspect you’ve thought of God as egocentric, to demand our love and worship?

A: Yes.

R: It would be a fair charge, were he just a single person; and in fact, I’ve heard a preacher defend God against that charge by admitting it and then saying he’s justified in being egocentric because he’s so wonderful. But in truth, it isn’t that God is all wrapped up in himself, some sort of cosmic Narcissus—rather, the Father, Son and Spirit are all wrapped up in each other. Except that they invite us into their circle, to share their love, which is the reason why he created us.

The fact that God is perfect, self-giving love is the root for everything else that we can say about the character of God. His love is unflawed, and so he is good in everything he does. His wrath against sin arises out of his love, as I’ve said, as does his command that we be holy just as he is holy—he does not want us to settle for less than what he intended for us. At the same time, though he hates sin and is perfectly just, he shows great grace and mercy and patience in dealing with sinners, because even in our broken, sinful state, he still loves us greatly. He is perfectly faithful to those who follow him, for the same reason. And note that all of these statements describe him as a personal, active God; he is no impersonal force (this isn’t Star Wars, no midichlorians here) nor a distant, uncaring, uninvolved God, but three persons who relate to us on a personal level out of love for us.

A: Sounds like you see God as pretty involved in your life.

R: Not just in mine—in everyone’s, in one way or another. He is Lord over everyone, in every moment, whether they acknowledge him or not; he created everything, and he sustains it—the universe only continues to exist because he keeps it so.

A: I might have to come back to that last statement of yours. But this all reminds me of an essay I read recently called “Why Smart People Believe in God”; the author is a smart man who doesn’t, and poses the same question I asked you. Along the way, he sets out two poles: either God is a God “who pokes his finger into the muck of human experience”—I think that’s exact—who tests people, makes strange demands, tells his follower to kill his son and takes vengeance on those who cross him, or he is infinite beyond imagining, “a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” as someone said; and if he is the latter, then why would he pay attention to us? As I recall, the author concludes that most people who believe in God believe in the little one who cares about us, not about the big one who, it would seem, shouldn’t. You were talking earlier about God in cosmic terms, but now you’re using much more local terms, for lack of a better phrase; do you really try to hold those two together?

R: Yes. God is infinite—without end, without limits, and utterly uncontrolled by anyone or anything—and so, as theologians will say, he is transcendent, going far above and beyond our limited being and understanding; as such, he is also incomprehensible to us. We can’t understand God solely through our own reason, but only as far as he reveals himself to us, though our reason has a part to play in that. At the same time, God is immanent—

A: “Imminent”? He’s arriving shortly? By train, perhaps?

R: No, not “imminent,” but “immanent”—it’s a term coined by some past theologian: it means that God is right with us, that he is present with his creation.

A: Well, yes, if God is everywhere, then logically that would include here.

R: I don’t just mean that he is present in that sense; I also mean that he is emotionally present, that he cares about all his creation, and most especially about people. As I said, God is love. It really is a staggering thought, that a God who can hold a universe billions of light-years across in the palm of his hand would care about us; but he does.

A: It’s incomprehensible, in fact. Which you just said is one of God’s attributes, so at least you’re being consistent.

R: Yes. Of course, trying to conceive of God as both infinite and personal at the same time—it’s harder to be consistent on that. But anyway, you used the word “attribute” a moment ago; the attributes of God can be broken up into two kinds, according to my theology professor. The attributes I’ve been talking about, those which relate to the character of God and what he is like, are called communicable attributes because they are attributes he can share with us. He is personal, powerful, good, loving, faithful, etc. So, too, we are personal; we have a certain amount of power to do what we intend to do, though we are limited; and while we are sinful, we were created to be good, loving, and generally like God in character. This is part of what the Bible means when it says we were created in the image of God, but I’ll come back to that.

The rest of God’s attributes are called incommunicable attributes, and they have to do with what he is in himself. A lot of these are statements of negative knowledge—we can’t grab hold of what God is, because he’s too big for us, so we define him in part by what he is not. For instance, he is atemporal, which is to say he is not within our time stream. Does he experience time? I don’t know for sure, but I am quite certain that he is not bound to ours; he is in the past, he is in the present, and he is in the future, he sees all times at once, and all are the same to him. God is immutable—he does not change and cannot be changed; he is who he is, yesterday, today and forever. He is also impassible, which is to say that he does not experience fluctuating emotional states, nor does he feel sinful passions. This doesn’t mean that God is emotionally inert, however—after all, he is love.

More positively, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful. This goes back to his being the author of all creation; even in human terms, the author (or authors) of a book can be omnipresent and omnipotent to their characters, though even such limited omniscience eludes us. As well, he is self-existent, as I said before, and self-sustaining; he is completely independent, needing nothing and no one else to be complete—which makes the decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to create us and love us all the more significant, because they were complete in and of themself and did not need us for anything.

A: “Themself.” Now there’s a word I never thought I’d hear.

R: God isn’t limited by our grammar, either. After all, he are one God.

A: All right, enough already.

R: I find it helps on occasion to say things like that—it jars the ear, and so jars the mind out of its ruts, which is an important thing to do whenever one is thinking about God. Anyway, I’d add one other attribute: simplicity. God is never at war within himself the way we are; he may be three persons, but in anything God does, they are totally integrated and interinvolved; the Father, Son and Spirit are each fully present and completely of the same mind and purpose in anything they do. There is no self-doubt, no disagreement, no indecision, no double-mindedness and no second-guessing.

The last thing to say about God is to go back to a couple of points I touched on earlier, that God is sovereign—he reigns as Lord over all creation—and active. This leads to the statement that everything that happens in the world happens through the providence of God. He created everything that is, and it is his will that keeps all of it in existence; he is at work in everything that happens, and nothing happens apart from his will. As the Belgic Confession, one of the confessions which my denomination affirms, puts it, he “leads and governs [all things] according to the holy divine will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God’s orderly arrangement.” Nothing happens by chance, nothing takes God by surprise, nothing happens apart from his will, and nothing happens despite his work; he is sovereign in everything.

A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?

R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.

Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God? (full post)

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I owe my wife another debt of gratitude, which is no surprise to any of you who know us. I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out how to make expandable post summaries work on this blog, but Blogger’s FAQ didn’t seem to work. Turns out it’s a consequence of the switch to New Blogger, and they haven’t caught up with the change. So, my wife went hunting and found Hackosphere, a blog which (among other things) provides the necessary instructions and code—and we’re in business. I’ve already tested the code on the longest post I’ve written to date, and it worked perfectly.

In celebration, I’m going to repost my credo posts, this time with the credo actually in the post, below the jump. As I noted earlier, this is something I wrote as part of my ordination process; I wound up writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic. This conversation is of course my own creation, but a lot of it comes out of discussions we actually had. (Again, these chunks are quite long—in MS Word, around seven double-spaced pages of 12-point Times New Roman, somewhere shy of 2,000 words.)

A: I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now. As we’ve discussed baseball and life and other minor issues, your Christianity has come up now and again, but we’ve never pursued that issue very far for its own sake; and it has always puzzled me why intelligent, educated people believe in God. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve always wanted to ask why that should be. The problem is, you have to be careful who you ask that sort of question, since it’s a very personal matter; but you seem to me to be someone who wouldn’t mind. So tell me, why do you believe in God?

R: What do you mean?

A: For one thing, your belief seems so unnecessary. Since Darwin, we have no need of that hypothesis, as someone said. More importantly, though, if you don’t need him to prop the system up, how can you believe in him? The Christian God, so far as I can tell, wants to restrict your freedom to think and your freedom to act; he wants to rule certain lines of thought and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment out of court before you ever get the chance to consider them. It seems to me that all believing in God does is narrow your life and your mind. Why on earth would you? Is what you get in return really worth it?

R: Do you really want answers to your questions, or are they just rhetorical?

A: If you have good answers to offer, I’m interested to hear them, if that’s what you mean.

R: Have a couple hours you aren’t using? Because I think the most basic thing underlying your question is that you don’t really know what I believe; if you want an answer with any depth, you need to understand where I’m coming from before you understand why.

A: Well, I have the time, and I’ll admit I have more to learn about Christianity; but I don’t have a great deal of patience with theology, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” and that sort of thing.

R: Theology gets a bad rap, unfortunately, from people who associate it with those kind of abstracted discussions. But really, theology is a pretty practical thing. It’s just whatever you believe about God; a friend of mine calls theology the science of God, and I think that’s a good way to put it. If you don’t believe there is a God, that’s the center of your theology—or atheology, I suppose—and then whatever your belief that there is no God does to your view of the world would be part of your theology as well. If you say that because there is no God, we human beings need to work our hardest to take care of each other and the world because we’re on our own, we’re all there is––

A: I do believe that, you know that.

R: Yes, I do—well, that’s a theological statement. That’s your theology, or part of it.

A: I hadn’t thought of my beliefs in those terms before.

R: And mine begins at a very different place, with the belief that there is a God, and a very particular God at that, and that God stands in relation to us and to the world in a very particular way. Specifically, it begins with the belief that God created all of everything, and that as a result he is God over all of everything.

A: Interesting. You say he’s God because he created everything, not just because he wants to play God.

R: Right. Think of a novel for a minute. The person who wrote the novel created those characters––

A: Even if they only cut them out of cardboard.

R: True. But the author created those characters, wrote every word that comes out of their mouths, set every decision they make, and determined how the book would end. You might say that the author was God to those characters. But does that make that author any more Godlike anywhere else? No. His authority, or hers, comes from the fact of authorship. In the same way, only in a much bigger way, God has authority over everything and is in control of everything that happens because he is the author of everything.

A: I’d never noticed that word linkage before. But are you suggesting that God might be just a member of a race of gods?

R: Umm, no. In fact, that’s an important point. God is not one of a race of anything; he is unique. One of the names for him in the Bible is “I Am”—as it’s rendered in Greek, “The One Who Is.” He is the one who was not created by any other, and he is the source of everything else that exists. He didn’t come from anywhere; he has always been.

A: So the universe started out with God, surrounded by nothing. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense. God must have come from somewhere, and he must have been someplace.

R: But then where did that place come from? Who made it? Who came before God, and where did they come from? No, if you stop and think about where everything came from, you only have two possible answers: either the universe has always existed, in some form or another, in which case it has no beginning or end, or there was a point in time when the universe did not exist and there was nothing—in which case there must have been someone there to create it out of nothing, and that someone must have always existed, without beginning or end; and we can argue back and forth, but we can’t wrap our minds around either possibility. Either way, our minds aren’t that big.

The point I’m trying to make is that our relationship to God begins with the fact that he created us, and the whole world in which we live. Wait, I can see you wanting to argue that point, but if we head off on the whole Darwin-evolutionism-creationism argument, we’ll never come back to your question. That’s an argument for another hour. I believe, for reasons both biblical and, yes, scientific, that God created all that is and as such has both complete authority and complete power over all that is. Having said that, you hit the question: who is this God?

First and foremost, he is triune—three in one.

A: Ahh, the Trinity. I never have understood that.

R: Well, that’s partly because it isn’t all that understandable by our limited minds. We do the best we can to explain the Trinity and understand how God can be both three and one, but in the end it’s a mystery.

A: Isn’t that just like a Christian. You get hit with a question you can’t answer, you just say, “It’s a mystery.”

R: It makes sense, though. We are limited creatures, after all; if God is big enough to be God over the whole universe, wouldn’t you expect him to be too big for us to completely understand? And if he were small enough for us to wrap our minds around, would he still be big enough to be God?

A: I’ll have to think about that.

R: Anyway, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to our understanding of God, for a lot of reasons, so it’s essential to come to some understanding of it. I like the way Stan Grenz, one of my professors, explains this doctrine in one of his books. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in four statements: “God is one,” “God is three,” “God is a diversity,” and “God is a unity.”

First and most basic, God is one. We worship only one God, not many, and we assert that there are no others. But second, God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn’t just how we perceive him, it’s how he is; the one being of God exists in three distinct persons.

A: That doesn’t make any sense.

R: Like I said, our minds aren’t big enough to understand it. But then, you’re an educated man, you have a solid understanding of science for a non-scientist, right?

A: Yes, but I don’t see your point.

R: You know what physicists have determined about the nature of light, that light is both a wave and a particle? Can you explain how that can be, since the two seem to be mutually exclusive?

A: No, I can’t, but that’s what the evidence says. And yes, I see where you’re going; I’ll grant that the nature of light presents similar problems to the doctrine of the Trinity.

R: Reality is bigger than we are; someday we may be able collectively to understand how everything in the world fits together, but even then no one person will be able to grasp more than a small part of that understanding. And it’s entirely possible that we will never fully understand the nature of light, or quantum mechanics, or other such ques­tions. But whether we do or not, God will still remain orders of magnitude greater than his creation in which we live, too great for us to control.

A: Control?

R: Knowledge is power, right? I think the reason we aren’t content with a God we can’t fully understand, analyze, and describe in comprehensible terms is that any such God is beyond our ability to predict and control. That’s much of the drive behind the hard sciences, after all—the desire to reduce all the mysteries of the universe to things we can identify, label, explain, and control. I’d say it’s most of the drive behind psychology, the desire to extend our control over ourselves and others so that we can fix whatever we decide is broken. But if God remains beyond our understanding, he’s a threat, because we can’t control him—we can’t predict what he’ll do next.

A: Fine; point taken. Back to the subject, please?

R: Sorry for the digression. God is one; God is three. He is one being; he is three persons. It’s important to keep those in balance. Sometimes those of us in the Western church—Catholics and Protestants—tend to talk as if “God” is a single person, the “real” person above the three members of the Trinity. I knew a man in my denomination, a candidate for ordination like me, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity for just this reason: he asked, “If there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then who is ‘God’?” The answer is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, but he couldn’t find that balance; he concluded that “God” must be a fourth person and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a result.

Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.