hughbiquitous

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

…I have learnt that a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith which he ought to make to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture.

— Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis

Précis

Joy in God is a duty enjoined upon Christians. Easily neglected because of sin’s opposition to and corruption of holy joy, it elevates our standard of delight beyond reach: we depend on God for its initiation and satisfaction. This creates existential dissonance; joy in God is insatiable and elusive. Yet, it is an essential property of new life in Christ: desires, not just decisions, really matter. Thus, joy in God must be fought for.

This joy, once realized and mature, sustains the hard, unnatural work of the Christian life: sacrificial love.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 1:

• There is a false dichotomy that is often set up between head and heart, between doctrine and affections. God is sovereign over the whole of a man; there is nothing mutually exclusive about “head-joy” and “heart-joy.” “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Mt. 22:37)
• It is often observed that “love is a decision,” and it is. But if it is only a decision and is wholly removed from the affections, then something is wrong.
• Lewis said, “the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one” (see below); cf. Ps. 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Properly aligned desires glorify God and satisfy the desirer.
• This joy is not merely to promote our good spirits. It’s to get us through the hard things God calls us to do. It must become the most basic motivation we have.
• The greatest commandment was to love God with the whole person; the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. The first fuels the second; joy in God makes sacrificial love possible no matter what the circumstances are, no matter who the neighbor is.

Quotes

• Christian Hedonism is a liberating and devastating doctrine. (p. 11)
• Indwelling sin stands in the way of my full satisfaction in God. It opposes and perverts my pursuit of God. It opposes by making other things look more desirable than God. And it perverts by making me think I am pursuing joy in God when, in fact, I am in love with his gifts. (p. 14)
• [Upon discovering Christian Hedonism] Manageable, duty-defined, decision-oriented, willpower Christianity now seemed easy, and real Christianity had become impossible. (p. 14)
• God [has] to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God. (p. 14)
• The truth and beauty and worth of God shine best from the lives of saints who are so satisfied in God they can suffer in the cause of love without murmuring. (p. 15)
• Salvation is the awakening of a new taste for God, or it is nothing… Conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks. (pp. 15-16)
• If human happiness, whose perfection it is to be united with God, were hidden from man, he would in fact be bereft of the principal use of his understanding. Thus, also the chief activity of the soul is to aspire thither. Hence the more anyone endeavors to approach to God, the more he proves himself endowed with reason. (p. 16, quoting John Calvin)
• Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites… [Rather, they ought] to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures… Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value… [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement… There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting. (p. 17, quoting Jonathan Edwards)
• For there exists a delight that is not given to the wicked, but to those honoring Thee, O God, without desiring recompense, the joy of whom Thou art Thyself! And this is the blessed life, to rejoice towards Thee, for Thy sake. (p. 18, quoting Augustine)
• Provided the thing is in itself right, the more one likes it and the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it’s idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own! (p. 18, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• Spiritual desires and delights are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are not objects to be handled. They are events in the soul. They are experiences of the heart. (p. 19)
• Love is not a mere choice to move the body or the brain. Love is also an experience of the heart. So the stakes are very high. Christ is to be cherished, not just chosen. The alternative is to be cursed. Therefore life is serious. (p. 19)
• When I address the question, “What should I do if I don’t desire God?” I am addressing the question: “How can I obtain or recover a joy in Christ that is so deep and so strong that it will free me from bondage to Western comforts and security, and will impel me into sacrifices of mercy and missions, and will sustain me in the face of martyrdom?” (p. 20)
• The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death. (p. 21)

I’ve wondered recently about beauty. Why are some things beautiful and other things aren’t? Why is it that a thing can be beautiful to one person, but hideous to another? Why is it that beauty often defies definition, yet we know exactly what it means? How come immaterial things can be beautiful?

One oft-cited immaterial bearer of beauty is mathematics. Physicists and mathematicians reportedly wept over the beauty of Einstein’s proofs. Paul Erdős, the late mathematician, has said, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

The sublime beauty of mathematics is lost on those of us who have not paid the high price of admission to join the elite fraternity that includes men like Isaac Newton, John Nash, and countless others you’ve never heard of. This makes me sad, because it doesn’t take long before mathematicians turn into theologians when they behold the elegance of the way numbers relate to one another.

Exhibit A: Euler’s Identity. It is simply this: e^iπ+1=0. Impressed? Are you slack-jawed at the astonishing beauty of this equation? Few people are, but blessed are those who “get it,” I say. A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, has said of Euler’s Identity, “There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence.” I wish I could appreciate that. I feel like I’m missing out.

Erdős, also an atheist, said, “God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.” Here’s what he means: look at this picture of the prime numbers, plotted graphically. The white dots are primes; the black dots are non-primes. Notice a pattern? Click the image to see all the primes from 1 to 1,299,827 plotted like this.

Why should prime numbers line up like this? When numbers—which are uncreated and necessary (in the sense of “it could not be otherwise”)—exhibit an aesthetic like this, I can understand why mathematicians turn into theologians. Galileo reportedly claimed that “mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe.”

I have a faint idea of why he might say such a thing. But I daresay a musician could say the same thing about his art; C. S. Lewis had Aslan sing Narnia into existence. Similar claims could be advanced by a programmer or a painter or any manner of craftsman, I suppose. Whatever form beauty takes for a person, it stirs within the soul a desire for the One who possesses beauty without limit.

(Before we leave Galileo, let me digress from mathematics into astronomy to present Spiral Galaxy IC342. As one astronomy blogger put it, “If that doesn’t impress you, close this window, shut down your computer, go find a nice hole in the ground and lie down. You have no pulse.” And Yuri Gagarin went up there and claimed he didn’t see God. Like Ellie Arroway said in Contact, “They should have sent a poet.”)

In the end, I think beauty is an apologetic for God’s existence, a signal of transcendence that leads us home. As Lewis reasoned, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We desire beauty and we never tire of it; we never have our fill. Our appetite for beauty is never satisfied in this world, so the most probable explanation is that the beauty we desire resides elsewhere.

Augustine knew where to find it: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

See also: God by the Numbers (Christianity Today)