seven stanzas at easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

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-mache,
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.

A friend sent me this a few Easter seasons ago, and I have been saving it until I could make sense of it. When I received it, my mother was dying. It was awful to think she would die just when the world was about to erupt with new life. The humid Louisiana air was brisk every morning, but warm and sauna-like most afternoons, though it could change very quickly and threaten cold, harsh rains. When the weather whiplashes us this way, I am reminded of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (Burial of the Dead):


APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Very close to that time, I attended a Sunday service with my husband of two months, at a small local church that had been recommended to me by a friendly stranger in the DMV. I was suspicious, since I knew the denomination did not allow musical instruments or women's speaking during their services, but my husband reminded me that each denomination has regionally different expressions, and that the a capella singing might be phenomenal. I agreed, and we went. We entered a small church building where only four of the twenty-some pews were occupied. I knew better than to judge a church on the size of its congregation, and proceeded with open mind. A black family filled nearly the whole pew in front of us, by far the best-dressed in the room. The service began, and the singing left much to be desired. Apparently, the song leader was tone deaf, which, added to the lack of instrumentation, did not lead us well through the chosen hymns. It was music that felt like a death, not a coming to life. A boy in the family in front of us looked questioningly at the man I assumed was his father, stifling a grin, while his father did his best to get the twinkle out of his eye and look grave and severe. They seemed to say to each other, shrugging, "These white people just can't sing...oh well." I began to misgive.

During communion (on EASTER SUNDAY, when normal churches hope for and expect an influx of visitors), the crackers and grape juice ran out at the second row. Flustered, the man distributing them disappeared somewhere in the front of the church, leaving us in painful silence. We could hear him clattering around to produce more of the elements. When he emerged, he had forgotten where he'd left off, resuming at our row, leaving the black family in front of us to turn and gesticulate wildly, trying to get his attention. As we started to point him in their direction, the mother cleared her throat, "ExCUSE me!" and the man, realizing what he had done (and how it appeared), turned three shades of red and fluttered back to serve her family communion. I turned to my husband, appalled, and whispered, "I need to leave. I don't know what this is. But it's NOT Easter." He gestured that we should wait until a more opportune time, so we took communion. With no musical interlude to buffer our escape attempt, we found ourselves bracing for the first few logical fallacies of some drivel the preacher apparently intended as an Easter sermon. We left quietly, if conspicuously. The day outside was incongruously bright and beautiful, compared with the silence and cardboard behind us. We didn't know what to do, so we headed to Blockbuster and rented "The Passion of the Christ." That was the most redemptive thing we did that day.

Happily, Easter is usually a much more joyous occasion, and this year the week coincides with my due date, so we may celebrate a new life as well as the Resurrection. I am grateful for John Updike's piercing thoughts on Easter, which remind us that there are so many ways to miss the miracle. I want to be shocked by it, to revel in it, to be left without words and perhaps let go some tears of profound relief. I want to be scared senseless into realizing just how severe, how physically jolting--and how unsafe it is for the status quo of our failed world order--that Christ has risen from the dead.

* In the year nineteen hundred, in the course of purely theoretical (mathematical) investigation, Max Planck made a very remarkable discovery: the law of radiation of bodies as a function of temperature could not be derived solely from the Laws of Maxwellian electrodynamics. To arrive at results consistent with the relevant experiments, radiation of a given frequency f had to be treated as though it consisted of energy atoms (photons) of the individual energy hf, where h is Planck's universal constant. During the years following, it was shown that light was everywhere produced and absorbed in such energy quanta. In particular, Niels Bohr was able to largely understand the structure of the atom, on the assumption that the atoms can only have discrete energy values, and that the discontinuous transitions between them are connected with the emission or absorption of energy quantum. This threw some light on the fact that in their gaseous state elements and their compounds radiate and absorb only light of certain sharply defined frequencies. (Albert Einstein, on Quantum Theory, 1940)

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-theory-max-planck-quotes.htm

what's in a name?

Reading through Genesis on a quasi-weekly basis with my husband (we fall off the wagon easily, these days, but hope any effort will be taken in earnest by God, who will ultimately draw us more often into the Word that is so familiar from our earlier lives), I am struck by the references to language, specifically the act of naming things and people. It begins with God, of course, naming day and night, but extends quickly to naming Adam, who is given the task of naming Eve and the other creatures of the Garden. It goes beyond this, into each generation of his descendants, and the names they will give their children.

It's a mysterious and weighty thing, the business of naming someone. I can't help noticing that since God gave Adam the task of naming the animals, we have all had some role in the shaping of the world through our use of language. For Adam in the garden it was work, but it was also joyful co-creation. Since the fall, we have the added tasks of co-redemption and co-restoration with God when we name.

As the birth of our first child approaches, we are still wrestling with this responsibility of naming. There are the usual pressures to pick names that are coherent, attractive, not too common but not too strange. All these other considerations notwithstanding, I hope that if we can settle on a name that makes the invitation, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we will have begun the task of raising this child well.

experto crede

Experience.

This leads me to the final leg in my four-legged stool: experience. My life so far can be measured in two segments, before and after I went through Henry Blackaby’s study, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. Drawing from the examples of Noah, Moses, Mary, and countless others throughout the Bible, the study emphasized not only the uniqueness of each person’s encounter with God, but also the underlying truths that could be trusted whenever God is present. The guiding principles that arrested my attention were that as disciples of Christ, we ought to be taking the time to discern where God was already at work, and joining God there. This seemed a valuable antidote to all our eagerness to do God’s work in our own strength and wisdom. It also reassured me that it was normal to expect interaction with God. It was also the first time I had been asked to reexamine whether I had ever been guilty of presuming to do God’s work without God’s help. It simultaneously whet my appetite, and caused me to relax. In subsequent years, even as I have yearned for God to let me participate in something great in his grand scheme, I have also been able to more calmly recognize the quiet, routine workings of the world God made. Through this less obvious, sustained, prevenient grace, God daily, incrementally draws people into restored relationship with each other and himself, and it is easy to see when you have eyes to see it. The point, Blackaby seemed to suggest, was that it doesn’t matter the scope of the project or one’s involvement in it: the point is to recognize the work of God and participate in it, wherever one is called. In this, he affirmed that any good result of this divine and human co-restoration of the broken world is rightly to God’s credit, not ours.

This did, however, leave me with one empirical problem. If everything good was God’s doing, either by virtue of creating, sustaining, redeeming, or restoring, whose doing was the bad? Similarly, if my Spirit-enlightened reason was responsible for my grasping the good and the true, how could others who did not know God also grasp truth and goodness, sometimes even better than I did? This is where an encounter with the poetry and art of British Romantic William Blake, and his “synthesis of opposing dialectics,” seemed to offer some help. Blake envisioned the world as a kind of yin and yang, where good and evil were inextricably involved with one another for their identity, existence, roles, and actions. In a dynamic, cosmic interplay, good and evil participated in each other, leading Blake to marvel,

Tyger, tyger burning bright
in the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?

...Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

In the usual slipperiness between thought and speech, it must be said that one could easily interchange destruction for evil, nurturing for good in the images of the tiger and the lamb, and that destruction is not always evil, or nurturing always good. These things depend on definitions, context, and much more. But the principle remained indelible for me: the world is a mixed bag. Because I live in the world, where good and evil are so intertwined, it follows that sometimes I percieve God in the same way. This is my limitation, that I must always compare the Creator to the created. Precisely where one comparison breaks down, though, it seems another begins, and C.S. Lewis’ beaver puts it nicely in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe when he says of Aslan, the lion, “Safe? Of course he isn’t safe! But he’s good.” This, for me, can only describe the God of the Old Testament, of Revelation...and the God who allowed Hurricane Katrina to happen.

If our experience of God leaves us often with these strange and disconcerting paradoxes, it also assures us that God will defy our every category, that he will burst out in spring when when we expect indefinite winter, that our prodigalism will find its shocking, opposite reaction each time we come home repentant, and that there is a remedy for each yet unfulfilled longing or expectation, if we will recieve it in God’s time. One of the most delightful shatterings of my own preconceptions about God occurred in college, when I was reintroduced to the feminine imagery of God, who defies gender in a way our language cannot. When I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in close succession, it was helpful that I could already see God mothering me, and that this did not contradict the more familiar role as heavenly Father that I had been raised with.

“Let us make man in our image,” God said in the act of creation, and “Male and female he created them.” I have experienced the powerfully formative roles of gender in family, in friendship, in the academy and in the Army, but never more powerfully than in marriage. It is no coincidence that the very conversation in which I at first objected to dating my best male friend and future husband in college is the very conversation that continues as we explore and adjust our roles in relationship to each other and the rest of the world. If we have a daughter, she will reap the benefits of our very fruitful debate on the subject of what it means to be a “woman who fears the Lord”--in the form of such empowering freedom that I shudder to think how she might eventually break our hearts with it. However, the same would be true of our son, who, in the process of becoming “a man after God’s own heart,” may veer off and become someone who we don’t even recognize. In this, we undertake the same risks as God does--the risks that come with bringing someone into the world who bears the weight of their own choices, and for whom justice, truth, love, and mercy will mean what he/she makes them mean through observation and experience.

My experience of gender is one of the most defining lenses through which I interpret my faith. Resisting the urge to dwell on the repressive, marginalizing experiences of girl and womanhood (on the larger human stage, not necessarily in my own life), I do identify with Madeleine L’Engle’s understanding of “mankind” as referring to all of us. I can be as expansive and generous about this as the other actors in a conversation are willing to admit their need for. If, however, a they cannot acknowledge the historical subjugation of female experience that blatantly prefers “man-kind” where “human-kind” could have been used, or attaches positive connotations to “bachelor” but negative ones to “spinster,” etc., I feel the need to point out this injustice--as a co-restorer with God--of fallen culture and language. It is my rational conviction, looking at the whole trajectory of Scripture and Church tradition, that we were never meant to fall into the confines of these gender-based, linguistic and cultural roles in the first place, and my experience validates this. (This entire post could have read “s/he” every time I refer to God, and I would have done it in good conscience. I made a decision to presume the most generous understanding of God’s self-revelation of our givenness as male and female, both image-bearers of God. Plus, I feel it’s uneccessarily awkward in English, for our lack of a personal, gender-neutral pronoun.) My reasonable response to the reality of gender is that we do not know nearly as much about it as we claim to. We are discovering every day that both men and women can surprise us by (in a Godlike way) defying the categories in which we place them. We also wrestle with the nature and nurture of our seemingly unavoidable differences, celebrating them where we can.

Approaching women in Scripture, I must take each passage in its cultural context, if I am to avoid a crippling interpretation of womanhood that misappropriates particular messages specific to times and places as transcendent or applicable to us all. As a response to church tradition regarding women, I won’t make the ordination of women a stumbling block for other Christians, but I will always prefer to attend churches where women are allowed the full expression of spiritual service and leadership to which they are called. As for experience, I will hold my own with an open hand, recognizing that any understanding of gender this side of heaven is incomplete and therefore still morphing. I will avoid anything that leads me to be dishonest with myself or others about the woman I am becoming before God, even for the sake of community.

Neatly, this discussion of personal experience in faith leads back to the role of reason, since it is only reasonable to critically examine how one’s experiences might color the interpretation of Scripture, buy-in to Church tradition, and future experience.  In this, we are all captive to our bodily lives--we have only our five senses and one brain to integrate them, which, while impressive its its faculties, still limits us to our unique perspective. Perhaps it is part of the divine comedy that we experience this and work it out in the context of our relationships to the world around us. The constant struggle to discern between substance and shadow, truth and error, beauty and gaudiness, is ongoing, and it requires our utmost, individual awareness, attention to the Spirit and reliance on each other. I am reminded of the logic Bassanio unveils to Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as he answers the riddle designed by her dead father to choose her husband. Three caskets of lead, silver, and gold each present a riddle to would-be suitors, but only a man who chooses correctly will find her portrait inside the casket and be allowed to marry her:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness of fair ornament?

All the arts and sciences we can devise still echo that groaning of creation described by Paul in his letter to the Romans which, like the pains of childbirth, expresses the hard labor of becoming. We struggle to say what we mean, to create and preserve beauty, to participate in justice and peace--but never perfectly. That Christ shared in this embodied, spiritual existence, providing us with his example of redemption in a broken world, and leaving us the help of his Spirit is the most lovely and hopeful news I can think of.

traditio legis

Tradition.

This is a useful reminder for a lifelong Protestant who only recently has appreciated the roles of Scripture and tradition in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. A Catholic friend in high school who was debating with me about the experience of prayer and Bible study in the Christian experience. Exasperated with my line of questioning (“How do you know what you believe if you don’t read the Bible every day? How do you know that God is calling you to do something if you don’t seek his answer every day in prayer?” etc.), he retorted, “How do I know? How do you know you’ve reached the right interpretation, or that you’ve actually heard from God? You guys are the damn split-offs, anyway--we [the Catholic Church] never went anywhere!” His implication was that, of course, I had accused him of being “cut off from the vine” because of his traditions, but had no real basis for knowing this. If in my mind the entire Catholic Church was a severed, dead branch, cut off for the “sins of the fathers” committed in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and clergy pedofilia, how did I defend the solvency of the church in America after the Salem Witch Trials, the slave trade, and Jim Bakker? Too, wasn’t my branch of the Church responsible for enabling the widespread, radically subjective, individualized interpretation of Scripture, whose endless permutations and bickerings led, inevitably, to more disunity? His point, of course, was that I would have to start looking for God in the Catholic Church, too, if I wanted to be sure he was still in the Protestant one. Thankfully, via my grandmother’s Anglicanism and mass attendance at the cathedral while studying in Seville, I had the chance to do this, permanently altering my view of the universal Church.

Now, where church tradition offends me, I look first to the roots of that tradition. If the root is in Scripture, I keep digging until I can at least understand, if not agree with, the particular lens through which a brother or sister read God’s Word and saw a place for that tradition. If the root is not in Scripture, I explore the cultural roots, to see if anything there transcends time and place and can help me in my journey with Christ. If either is true, I can then say that the tradition has some merit, and I will not make an issue of it with other believers even if the tradition does not appeal to me. If the tradition is neither based in Scripture nor in any redemptive cultural purpose, I feel justified in fully discarding it, and the degree to which I do this publicly or passionately is governed by a cost-benefit analysis a la Paul to the Ephesians: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” This is why I consider several of the most urgent disagreements between the churches regarding tradition (ordination of married/unmarried/female clergy, music in church, translation of the Bible used in church, liturgy, dress codes, etc.) fair game in a debate, but only in the spirit of good conversation. By this, I mean that neither of us is trying to convince the other that the way to God is only by our own music, dress, preaching style, Scriptural translation, etc., but that we are sharing only what we feel may benefit the other’s pursuit of God. This is not even enough: the argument must be delivered in a way that also benefits and does not harm our filial relationship as daughters and sons of God. It requires that we search our own motives and interpretations, since our experiences in the communion of saints are never comprehensive or free of baggage. If we make our practical conviction, for the sake of argument, a stumbling block to another believer, we have lost our way, and the purpose of our tradition is likewise misplaced.

When tradition is misplaced and imposed on other believers without reasonable benefit, people begin to begrudge their fellow believers, and eventually God, their participation. For example, I will not abide being verbally patted on the head by my elders--or by my peers who openly fancy themselves my elders by virtue of their “wisdom”--when they seem to prefer that I affirm their view of Christian femininity, their politics, their musical preference or their dress codes over the working out of my own salvation before God and other believers. I know that they often do this out of a desire for unity, for simplicity, to “share everything in common,” including appearance, convictions, and resources. (Little do they know, that if given the choice between their narrow view of what it means to be a woman, for example, and my own pursuit of further encounters with God in the Church, I would choose my womanhood, for I am a far more authoritative expert on that than on what the Church should be or who God is.) Thankfully, I do not allow these issues to become a stumbling block for me, and so far no one has succeeded in reversing this trend. This keeps the conversation going, so that I can still hear differing insights about God, which can inform my understanding of self in relationship to God and others. I know many other people for whom the stumbling block proved too difficult to hurdle, however. It’s a great tragedy that we’ve asked such people to be so dishonest about their own questions, traditions, and experiences as to either participate in our particular brand of Christianity or discard the Church altogether. Many times, we do this by mere insinuation, but I have heard it far too many times from an overconfident pulpit. Forgetting the spirit of Martin Luther’s legendary words: “Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God,” we write them off others’ convictions and questions as rebellious or misguided, instead of inviting them to the table for dialogue and potential friendship with Jesus.

cogito, ergo sum

Reason.

Reason, it should be clear, is assisted by the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Some have renamed this side of the quadrilateral “Holy Spirit” altogether for this reason. The best metaphorical illustration I have heard of this spiritual usurpation of human reason is in John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God,” (also called “Holy Sonnet XIV”) where he laments the weakness of human reason, and invites a divine invasion that will cause it to remain loyal to his best interests and those of God:

...I, like an usurped town, to another due,
labor to admit you, but oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

...Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you entrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The foremost argument I have to make about the role of reason in faith, much like any form of dedicated inquiry or exploration, reason must have time and the right circumstances to work things through. “Chewing” on a scriptural passage, as a metaphor for cogitation and meditation, helps me. Just as it is unlikely that my body can ever pull every ounce of nutrition from my food, it is unlikely that I will ever pull every last insight from a passage of Scripture, but will like a cow have to re-digest it over and over through several iterations. This is delightful to some, but others are frustrated by the process, and want the surety of a first-time, prefab interpretation that is recognized as “correct” by the majority of Christians. Worse, some who have had the benefit of their own, lengthy cogitations over Scripture insist that newcomers reach their own conclusions virtually overnight (as if their own digestive processes can provide the same enjoyment and nutrition to others) and even become offended if they are not immediately agreed with as experts on the subject. Usually, chewed-up food is only given to immature creatures by their parents, so it is not easy to see why this is offensive to someone just arriving at a passage in Scripture.

I sympathize, however, with the impulse for quick resolution; C.S. Lewis once wrote in his Mere Christianity that “questions were made for answers,” and I emphatically agree. I only know that the answers I learned to mark in my math classes were meaningless if I did not understand every step in the process, which sometimes took a long time to attain. I want to take the same approach with Scripture: if my solving an algebra equation required an understanding of various laws and theorems, and other conceptual tools developed by others to codify the process (even when there is often more than one way of arriving at the correct answer, and more than one way of annotating it), then the same is true in Scripture. I will give myself all the time in the world to wrestle with the particularly difficult passages, where God’s justice or mercy seem in question, where the views of the writers seem to cloud the message, where what’s being said seems inconsistent with my own encounters with the world. It is vital that I understand not only the context for each passage read, the finer points of the lenses through which we all read, and especially the shifting linguistic realities in which we all operate.

God deal with me as God will, but I cannot see the point in insisting that people read a certain translation of Scripture only, that people read so much every day, that people read in a specific order to become highly qualified interpreters of God’s word. This is partly due to my belief that, while literacy and language are vital and enriching to the human experience, they are not required for access to God. If they were, infants, autistics, coma patients, and animals alike would all be cut off from the experience of God. “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love,” says Paul, “I am a banging gong, a clashing cymbal.” I have certainly met these kind of cacophonous individuals. Some of them just started reading the Bible recently. Others have been reading it faithfully for years. So the discipline of reading Scripture, as I understand it from the Church, is a vital and worthwhile one, but it can be conducted in diverse ways to suit different individuals, communities, times, and places. The condition of the reader’s heart is the determining factor in how effectively Scripture leads to right thinking and right relationship to God and others.

The disposition of one’s heart toward the word of God, in my understanding, has to do with both the presence of the Holy Spirit and a kind of epistemic humility. The two may ultimately be synonymous, for who can truly remain in the presence of God, fully aware of one’s own mortality and sin, without the intercession of Christ and the Holy Spirit? “Who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap...” Malachi’s question is always set for me in the music of Handel’s Messiah. The implicit concern is that this experience is too much for any one of us to bear, that the crushing weight of God’s holiness will leave everyone on our knees: as Isaiah says, “Our righteousness is like filthy rags,” insufficient to make us stand before God. Perhaps it is for this reason that God chose to manifest the gift of the Holy Spirit in “tongues of fire”--the Holy Spirit is a precursor who prepares us for the day of judgment, introducing God’s purifying fire in doses we can withstand, sanctifying us bit by bit in life to prepare us to face God’s fiery judgment.

Here, too, is a connection between the Holy Spirit and language: those who received the Holy Spirit spoke to onlookers in languages they previously didn’t know, “and each one heard them speaking in his own language.” Such experiences have largely evaded me, although I have attended communities where others received these gifts. Despite witnessing some disorderly and outright abusive attributions of this Acts passage, I remain open to the notion and the experience that the Holy Spirit “intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” For me, this has never been clearer than in times of grief and loss. Without words, without being able to name the overwhelming sadness or frustration, I know that the Spirit expresses what I cannot. Too, the Spirit recalls Scripture to mind, sometimes giving me illustrations or paraphrases that meet me in my disorienting postmodernity, to remind me to search out and reexamine a passage, to pass it on to someone else, or to meditate on it for my current situation. Often, while reading an enigmatic passage, the Spirit will clarify, in the moment or happening into my thoughts later, what seemed hidden in the text.

There have been times where the Holy Spirit prompted me to speak to someone I had never met, communicate with someone specific who I did know, or even seek out solitude. In many of these cases, I received the gratification of feeling these promptings confirmed by the person, or by my own spirit, based on information or connections learned as a result of obedience. Now, the Holy Spirit is harder to distinguish from my own suspect “conscience”: I have learned that people often claim to hear antithetical and even heretical messages from the “Holy Spirit,” and can even use it as a blanket excuse for the most egregious instances of group-think imaginable. When I think I have heard something from the Spirit, then, I test it against the other three sides of the quadrilateral--which can take some time--in order to discern whether my thoughts are really being reshaped in the image of God’s, or whether I am reshaping God’s thoughts in the image of mine. Underlying everything, I have the sense that “now we see through a glass dimly, but then face to face; I know in part, then I will know fully, even as I am fully known,” and this is both disconcerting and comforting. I must acknowledge what I do not yet know or understand--this is intellectual honesty as well as being totally vulnerable before God.

I expect that a similar disposition made it possible for scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Curie to pursue new understandings of the created world, even in the face of cultural and religious dogma that contradicted their findings. Using science as an example, then (we could easily explore the same reality in the arts or in politics), reason is what allows me to believe that the world operates according to God’s intentions--it may appear both random and orderly depending on our understanding of it, but his role as creator and sustainer underlie every predictable cycle, every surprising novelty. This conviction allows me to dismiss the classic animosity between science and religion as a false dichotomy, managing the tension by a willingness to either reconcile new information to the current theory, or to move with a paradigm shift when enough data does not fit. For this reason, Darwin and Genesis are currently not at odds for me. Since others have voiced this position far better, I will defer to the book, Biology Through the Eyes of Faith for further explanation. Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that regarding as metaphor the length of time God took to create Adam from the earth and breathe life into him negates the reality of God as creator, or humankind as bearers of the divine image. To say that perhaps the process took millions of years (as our instruments currently measure, though they can always err), takes nothing away from the Incarnation or the Resurrection, and these must be defended at all costs or the message of Christ is pointless, as Paul asserts in his first letter to the Corinthians.

Of course, there are others who feel that finding our ancestry among apes diminishes their understanding of the imago dei, the Incarnation and Resurrection. I submit that these differences are due to our understandings of what the divine image is (does it consist in four limbs, two eyes, a hairless body, intelligence, language, or something else--the ability and accountability to discern good and evil?) and also of Christ’s humanity (did he just appear to be human, or did he really suffer as we do, relish a good wine, or feel the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush when people came to arrest him in the garden?). These debates go all the way back to the early church, and while I am sometimes eager to debate them, I am also content to say that often believers will have to agree to disagree: we are seeing different sides of what is essentially a mystery. Now I know in part, then shall I know fully, even as I am fully known.

sola scriptura

Scripture.

Having spent most Sundays in the pew of one Protestant church or another, the role of daily Bible reading was impressed upon me at an early age: “Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee.” In this early presentation of Bible study, I learned that our wrongdoing and imperfections separate us from God, and so studying God’s words in Scripture could help strengthen and repair my broken connection with God, and guard me from future trespasses. When I was older, I also learned the more positive motivations for learning Scripture: “How sweet are thy words to my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” I learned in this that what God had to say could be life-giving, enriching, and pleasurable. I always found this easier to sense when reading the beautiful, poetic passages of Old Testament wisdom and prophets, or the spine-tingling simplicity of John’s, “In the beginning was the Word.”

At first, the translation did not matter to me, did not interfere with the goodness I read, or the sustenance it gave me. Later, however, the language itself could become a bad taste in my mouth, depending on the connotations I had forged with it. King James could either evoke the parlance of Shakespeare and lead me to weep, or it could cause me to avoid, at all costs, letting the words pass through my lips. I suspect much of this had to do with how I heard those words read by others, too: if read with the wagging finger of a heavy Southern accent, I might read condemnation with no hope of salvation, and become sick at hearing them. Mostly, the churches I attended pursued topical study of Scripture that darted around in search of unifying themes on a particular subject. Occasionally, I experienced a more deliberate, inductive approach that took a passage in the context of the surrounding verses and historical scenario.

At some point, a gnawing suspicion began in me that I was not very good at routine, dedicated study of Scripture on my own. I also began to suspect that some people who claimed to practice this discipline faithfully were not my favorite people to be around. Still, for short spurts of time, I could be swept away in private by opening my Bible and engaging what I found there. There are other times where, hoping for the refreshment of a Messianic prophecy or early church exhortation, I find instead the stench of death: God ordering what looks like genocide, or Paul telling me that women should be silent in church. I take comfort in knowing I am not the first to wrestle with these passages, and that I will not be the last. As my experience of God evolves, my faith must undergo the arduous process of being continually renewed--in a kind of reptilian molting, I think through these things in the presence of the Holy Spirit and other Christians, my old understandings stretch until they break and slough off, leaving a shiny new one to begin the cycle again. I can never be sure this side of heaven that I have grasped everything, that there will be no more room for growth. Many people would agree with this in theory, but their lives and their conversations prove so inflexible it’s hard for me to believe that they really do prefer the lively “anxiety of becoming” to a stasis that starts in adulthood and carries them through, far too certain of everything, until death.

Because of this, Scripture may comment directly on something, and I still am not sure of it. Many of the voices in Scripture questioned God after direct encounters with him, and I am no exception. It is their example--Abraham, Moses, Job, David, Zachariah, Mary Christ’s mother, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, Thomas, Peter-- that convinces me that God and his words can withstand my doubtful discourse. It would accomplish little for me to pretend that “I know that I know that I know,” as some claim to. Absolute certainty of God and God’s purposes in Scripture inspires awe in some, but ridicule in many others, and is does not communicate the winsomeness of friendship with Jesus to those who don’t know him. It doesn’t deceive God, either. Perhaps some really are given the that gift of surety. I rarely receive it, and then only in hindsight, after embarking on a journey that is really a hypothesis--an act of faith, undertaken with “fear and trembling.” I will, then, pray: “Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief.”

At present, I recognize the value of daily Scripture study as an act of devotion, and I struggle to regain momentum in its practice. I also, however, squarely reject the notion that reading Scripture every day is always necessary or even possible, without allowing spiritual pride to creep in. Sometimes falling back on those verses that are hidden in the heart is preferable (and more portable) on a daily basis, depending on one’s activities and disposition. For centuries, faithful Christians have not always had regular access to Scripture. While that reality has spurred some useful technical innovations, political reforms, and spiritual revival movements, it surely doesn’t justify a swing toward the opposite extreme, where we are all bound to a particular practice of how/when/where/why we read the Bible. The classic guilt trips ring empty after awhile: “People in China don’t even have Bibles! Can you imagine living before Gutenberg and not having your own copy? We should consider ourselves fortunate to read it every day!” These ring with truth, to be sure, but are useless when neither devotion nor enjoyment can compel us to read and study, and do little to restore our hope or joy in the process. Reading the Bible should not be always an act of desperation, or a guilty obligation, but should be given the chance to become a real delight; it cannot do this under the duress of being compared to everyone else’s reading habits. The people who were chosen as God’s linguistic instruments to record Scripture would certainly approve of our reading and re-reading it in public and in private. Still, I think they might be shocked by how quickly our most useful and necessary debates about translation and study techniques turn into petty sibling rivalries that violate the spirit of the the very words we are trying to lay hold of.

wesley's quadrilateral

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. ...And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

 

These words from the first chapter of John have always intrigued me, especially when they are read during the seasons of Advent through Epiphany. I think they fascinate me by the suggestion that Jesus and language--or communication--are inextricably bound up in one another. For someone who loves language the way I do, this association is powerful; this words bespeak something vital about the role of language in expressing who God is, what God says, and how God says it. Perhaps in Jesus--and, by extension, in language--we encounter something otherwise elusive about God, and something staggering about the Incarnation. Just a few verses later, John says that “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”

“In the beginning was the Logos,” Greek for “word”: synonymous with discourse, reason, speech, thought, principle, or apparent truth. John casts Jesus as all of these things, and he cannot be ignorant of the philosophical connotations of the word, which the Greeks used first to refer to human rationality. We are led to understand that Jesus makes all that is, make sense: that he communicates reality, that he is the very mind of God explained to us. “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegesato Him,” John asserts, recognizing Jesus’ unique explanatory power. Jesus exegetes God in a way nothing else can--not creation, not any other human being, not even God himself. This may cast other instances of theophany in a new light, suggesting that when God wrestles with Jacob, or shows Moses or Elijah his back, that there is something still in the way of God fully communicating with people. Perhaps it is God’s holiness--he instructs Elijah to hide himself and Elijah hides his face with his cloak--or God’s blinding purity. Other times, he seems to hide in a cloak of anonymity, where the visited person only wonders aloud, after a time, if he has been in the presence of God. In either case, there is an overwhelming sense of God’s “otherness” that seems to prevent direct communication, even when God is speaking with a person he has chosen to speak with. Jesus, then, speaks God’s mind to us in a way that transcends or overcomes that “otherness.” Even when we don’t comprehend him, Jesus is the most direct link to the thoughts of the God the Father.

The implications of this abound, but I want to focus specifically on what Jesus can explain to us about our experience of God, about how we read and understand Scripture, how we live its truth in the context of community, and about how our rational minds come to understand the basis of our faith. Let organize this discussion by saying that for me, God is mediated through four authoritative sources that coincide with what is dubbed John Wesley’s “Quadrilateral”: Scripture, Reason, Tradition, Experience. Writing words on a page, or even speaking them, do not make them a reality. Similarly, crafting a logical argument, doing something out of habit or to gain approval, or relying exclusively on one’s own experiences without referencing experts hardly guarantees accuracy or benefit. Similarly, each of these legs has inherent liabilities, but together, they check and balance one another to produce a sturdy platform for faith.