hughbiquitous

Your life is an unending series of risks. You resolve to do something; you take a chance, and try. You reach for the box of chocolates, and it’s true: you never know what you’re going to get. You know the other team is better than your team, but you still play the game, because, hey, you never know.

This is the language of finitude. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God cannot speak this way.

And yet — God acts. He still “plays the game,” but not because he says, “hey, you never know.” He always knows, but that’s too feeble if you leave it there: his sovereignty transcends knowing. In his sovereignty, God irresistibly brings about the outcome.

So if God cannot risk, what is he doing?

Daring.

Daring differs from risk in that risk involves uncertainty. The idea of risk is nonsensical within a context of absolute certainty. Daring, on the other hand, is not compromised when the outcome is known… it just means you’re willing to endure the doing and face the outcome — even if you know exactly what that is.

I’m reading a great book right now: The Lost Virtue of Happiness by J.P. Moreland and Klaus Issler. For the most part, it’s addressing the neglected art of the spiritual disciplines. (Accountability note: I intend to write a series of entries reviewing each chapter as one of the first exercises of those disciplines.) However, the chapter I read this morning, “Forming a Trusting Will That Risks with God,” was the first stinker in the book. Not because it was heretical, not because it offended my Reformed sensibilities… because, like John Eldredge, Klaus Issler (the author of this chapter), was sloppy.

The whole treatment will have to wait until I’ve read the whole book; one of the things I’ve learned from another book I’m reading (How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler) is that you can’t critique a book until you’ve read the whole thing. However, here are a few observations I made while trying to be charitable:

God sure seems like a risk-taker. Our finite biases make it really hard to understand the transcendent sovereignty of God.

It’s easy to misuse words like “risk” and “chance” when talking about God, even though you still affirm his sovereignty. This is just verbal sloppiness. “Risk” and “chance” are banished from the lexicon of the fixed and certain. When you use anthropomorphisms to make a statement about God, it ought to be at least implicitly clear where the boundaries of your metaphor are drawn. For example, it’s relatively safe to talk about things like “the hand of God,” because clearly, God is not a finite, physical being with finite, physical hands. Such language could only be metaphorical. On the other hand, when you talk about God’s relationship to the certainty of his own actions, you would do well to take some pains to qualify any appeal to the language of finitude.

That whole hypostatic union thing. Jesus is God. God is transcendent and sovereign. No uncertainty there. But, at the same time, Jesus is man. Man is finite. Finitude suggests uncertainty. Uncertainty makes risk possible. Accept this because it is true; explaining the mechanics of it all is left as an exercise for the reader.

Unfortunately much of contemporary preaching seems out of balance, having become too much like what someone described as “a mild-mannered man standing before mild-mannered people urging them to become more mild-mannered.”

Steven J. Lawson, Famine in the Land, p. 64

(HT: Tim Challies)

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Is that a fact, Fred-o?

The crucifixion was real. The Cross would give you splinters if you could touch it. It was weighty. Not merely a sterile, metaphorical symbol, it was a real thing.

John Updike’s poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, makes the point that the Resurrection was a real thing, too…

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter
from Telephone Poles and Other Poems, © 1961 Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc.

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