“And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:6)

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:36-37)

The relationship between the Father and the Son is an eternal to-and-fro. It is this primary “chiasm,” a “there-and-back-again,” a forming and a filling, which gave shape to the Creation Week and every facet of the Word of God and of human life.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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Author Marilynne Robinson writes about the Bible in the New York Times:

The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.

Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical — indeed, even when they are unintentional — they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction.

Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.

A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man?

Continue reading at New York Times…

The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible

Art is man’s interpretation of the world, but the world itself is the original art. Everything is physical, literal, historical, but everything is also symbol. This is not an interpretation imposed upon what we observe. The Creation was actually made as symbol. Without the Word of God, we are rendered unable to interpret it. [1]

The meaning of the sun, moon and stars in Genesis 1 is not simply a poetic idea. The purpose of the heavenly lights is actual and practical. Moreover, it will be measured out in human flesh over and again throughout history.

God follows a seven-squared pattern in the Creation week, and then the narrative zooms in to describe a similar routine in the making of Man. Only the eye of the poet sees this mirroring, but the account is historical nonetheless. The pattern of Word in Creation becomes a pattern measured out in flesh.

I’ve almost finished Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and she weaves this idea effortlessly throughout the book. Not perfect theology (being the world understood through the eyes of the abandoned child in the story), but a striking rendition of the relationship between the physical Domain and its microcosm, the Man, is her account of the tearing of earth and heaven, between divided waters and torn flesh. It is not animism. It is an understanding of God’s sovereignty over the physical world and over its history, everything carrying the imprint, the type, of the same finger:

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground—a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realised the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator in the image of his Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one’s hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up. Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem harmless. Well, all that is purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savour in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.

(Housekeeping, pp. 192-193)

[ Art: Adrift by Catherine Stringer ]

[1] Science Without Controls Is Not Science.

“A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations.”

Marilynne Robinson writes:

“The Calvinist doctrine of total depravity—’depravity’ means ‘warping or distortion’—was directed against casuistical enumerations of sins, against the attempt to assign them different degrees of seriousness. For Calvinism, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace. This is a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than others, since Christian tradition has always assumed that rather few would be saved, and has differed only in describing the form election would take. It might be said in defense of Christianity that it is unusual in a religion to agonise much over these issue of ultimate justice, though in one form or another every religion seems to have an elect.

The Calvinist model at least allows for the mysteriousness of life. For in fact life makes goodness much easier for some people than for others, and it is rich with varieties of cautious or bland or malign goodness, in the Bible referred to generally as self-righteousness, and inveighed against as grievous offenses in their own right. The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain.

A Puritan confronted by failure and ambivalence could find his faith justified by the experience, could feel that the world had answered his expectations. We have replaced this and other religious visions with an unsystematic, uncritical and in fact unconscious perfectionism, which may have taken root among us while Stalinism still seemed full of promise, and to have been refreshed by the palmy days of National Socialism in Germany, by Castro and Mao—the idea that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilise the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones be put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas. Societies have done exactly the same thing from motives they considered religious, of course. But people of advanced views believe they are beyond that kind of error, because they have not paused to worry about the provenance or history of these advanced views. Gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes. No Calvinist could be surprised. No reader of history could be surprised…

Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experiences, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills.”

(“Puritans and Prigs” in The Death of Adam, pp. 155-159)

Christians who are “postmillennial” (the gospel of Christ will continue to take cultural ground and finally be vindicated in history) are not wearing rose-coloured glasses. Postmill not only understands the strength of the gospel through the Spirit of Christ as the true mortar that builds Christian culture, it is not disheartened by the failures of a Christian culture that attempts further progress without Christ. Because this is also, in fact, vindication of the gospel. In the big picture, just as it is in any Christian’s life, this realistic—messy—process of trial and error is part of humanity’s growth to maturity. The gospel-leaven will eventually fill the whole lump as Christ promised.

A postmillennial Calvinism is a realistic optimism.

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord. (Zechariah 4:6)

(See also A Priesthood of All Believers Can Be Messy – 1.)

“I gave the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael today… I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham’s extreme old age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honour the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.”

 

Reverend John Ames, in Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, p. 128-129.