Full Contact Christianity

Suppose a man is sitting in a closed tool shed.  It is pitch-dark, except that there is a tiny crack in the roof, and a single ray of light shines through it.  This tool shed, like all tool sheds, is dirty and dusty, and in the dust that floats on the air, that single ray of light is clearly visible.

The man could look at that ray of light from the side, seeing the dust motes dance in it, and admire its beauty.  And it is beautiful, is it not?

But if the man wants to see the sun, looking at the ray won’t do the job.  He has to sight along it, and if he does that, the ray of light becomes more than a thing in itself; it becomes a pointer, a guide that leads him back to its source.

That is what a proposition about God must do.  False propositions point us somewhere else.  True propositions can be beautiful, elegant, and so on — and they often are — but to admire them as things-in-themselves is to miss the point.  The goal is to sight along the proposition so as to see the God who gave it, and about whom it is speaking.

This is exactly what Romans 10:14 tells us.  Your English translation will say something like “How will they believe in Him of whom they have not heard,” but that’s incorrect.  (For you Greek guys out there, yes it’s a genitive, but akouw takes genitive direct objects.)  The correct translation is “How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?”  In the preaching of the gospel, the unbeliever hears propositions, of course.  But Paul says there’s more to it than that: in the preaching of the gospel, the unbeliever hears Christ — not just “about Christ,” but hears Christ — and hearing Him, he believes.  Faith in Christ comes by hearing Christ, and hearing Christ comes by the Word of God.

But what are we to do when we discover — as Gordon Clark did, to his considerable embarrassment — that in Scripture different propositions are held up on different occasions as the preaching in which one can encounter Christ and believe in Him?  (For example, Rom. 10:10 on one hand, and Jn. 20:30-31 for a different proposition.)

Let’s go back to the toolshed, and extend the analogy a little.  Rather than just one crack in the roof, let us say there are three, each one about a foot away from the others.  Through each of these three cracks, a ray of light shoots down.  Let us further suppose that there are four men in the shed, not just one. Sitting together in the corner of the shed, they look across the small room at the three rays of light.

“That one, over on the left?” the first man says.  “That one’s sunlight.  I can tell.”

“No, Larry,” says the second man.  “The one in the middle is sunlight.”

The argue for a while, and then the third man says, “You’re both wrong.  The one on the right is sunlight.”

“Curly, you idiot!” the first man says.  “It has to be one of the first two.  Right?”  He looks at the second man for confirmation.  The second man nods enthusiastically, and the bickering continues.

Meanwhile, unnoticed by the three, a fourth, quiet man gets up from the corner and walks across the shed.  He goes to the first ray of light, and looks up along it, through the crack in the roof.  Then he goes to the second ray and does the same, and then the third.  He frowns and shakes his head, and repeats the process.  And then, slowly, a smile spreads across his face.

“Excuse me, guys,” he says.

The three men look up from their bickering.  “What is it, Elihu?”

I mentioned in an earlier post that mysticism, even true mysticism, poses major problems of epistemology to most conservatives.  This problem comes in two parts: conservatives have believed lies about the nature of knowledge, and simply fail to understand the nature of language and how it relates to relationships.

The first part of our problem is that we bought the Enlightenment lie about the nature of knowledge.  Real knowledge — so they told us — is about what can be weighed, counted, numbered.  Real knowledge can be calculated; it happens in a laboratory, or in an equation, and only there.

We brought this over into theology, too.  Real theological knowledge happens when all the proof texts line up, the syllogisms are clear and sharp and valid, and so on.  “If p, then q” and like that.  Propositional calculus reigns.

Well.  The results of a laboratory experiment, or a syllogism, can be real knowledge, true enough.  But we wouldn’t have arrived at the primacy of the laboratory from Scripture.

You can’t get four chapters into Genesis without noticing this.  “And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain…”

He what?

So tell me, Mr. Gradgrind, to which facts did Adam’s intellect assent, that she might conceive Cain?  Did he seduce her with syllogisms, or maybe sing her that great Olivia Newton-John hit, “Let’s Get Cognitive”?

Of course not.  The marriage bed is a paradigm case of real knowledge, and though it can be described propositionally to an extent — parents everywhere struggle to try, when the kids start asking questions — the knowledge itself is far more than propositions.  (Otherwise, why would “virgins discussing sex” be a universally understood metaphor for not knowing what you’re talking about?)

For those of you sputtering “But ‘Adam knew Eve’ is just a euphemism!” — so what?  Do you really think Moses just picked a verb at random?  That “knew” is a lie, a mere place-holder because Moses was too genteel to say “f—ed”?  Of course not.  The word choice is appropriate, and made not just by Moses, but by the Holy Spirit who inspired him. God uses it because it’s an appropriate, a true, way of describing what happens.  If we don’t find it appropriate and true, then we need to repent.

Fast-forward to Deuteronomy and Proverbs, where we learn that real knowledge happens at the pilgrim feasts.  Come and feast before Me, God says, so that you may learn to fear Me.  The fear of the Lord, Proverbs tells us, is the beginning of knowledge.  One of the foundations of real knowledge in ancient Israel was drinking strong drink and eating roast sheep in the presence of Yahweh.  Not just the concept — the actual doing of it.  Put that in your propositional calculus and smoke it.

Back when I was part of a church singles ministry, we once invited the pastor, a couple of elders, and their wives to join us to play a version of the newlywed game.  All these couples had been married for decades, but that only made it more fun.  We separated the men and women, and asked them questions about each other, then got them together to hear the answers to the questions.

The pastor — married four decades at this point — didn’t know the color of his wife’s toothbrush.  But when we asked his wife what animal her husband reminded her of, she tried in vain to suppress a grin, blushed fiercely, and said “Stallion.”

Did he know his wife?  She seemed to think so.

**

The second part of our problem is that conservatives don’t grasp the Trinitarian nature of language.

The Trinity contains metaphor within its very nature.  If you’ve seen the Son, you’ve seen the Father.  The fundamental is/is not of metaphor is present there — If you’ve seen the Son, you’ve seen the Father; the Son is not the Father.  The Son is a metaphor for the Father.

Language is God’s gift, and it is metaphor.  “Lion” is not a lion; it’s a word.  But then, of course it’s a lion; it’s not “apple” or “skyscraper” or “purse;” it’s lion.  Is/is not.  Metaphor.

“The lion ate the zebra” is storytelling.  The language represents, but does not contain, the reality.  In the right relational context, though, propositions do more than communicate; they become a conveyance through which a relationship can be created, altered or destroyed.

“With this ring I thee wed,” uttered in the context of a stage play, does not actually unite the man and the woman on the stage in marriage.  A single person can stand in an empty room and say “With this ring I thee wed” all day long, and still not be married.

But in the proper context, said by the groom to his bride and vice versa, “With this ring I thee wed” both signifies, and accomplishes, the union.

What makes the difference?

The relationship.

Could the whole thing have been accomplished without words?  No, not really.  Were the couple deaf/mute, they’d have accomplished it without speaking, but not without language.  The proposition is important.  But it’s not a sufficient condition to accomplish the marriage.  The right people have to be present in the right relationship, or it doesn’t work.

What if they mess up the words?  What if they stumble over it?
“With this thee I ring…uh…with thee this ring I…oh, forget it, we’re married!” says the red-faced groom, sliding the ring on her finger.  The bride, thrown off by this, just blurts out “I thee wed” and puts the ring on his finger.

“But wait,” says the pinch-headed fundamentalist, as the guests are eating at the reception a little later.  “She didn’t mention the ring.  Are we sure they’re really married?”

Wedding guests should be clothed with rejoicing; this bean-counter has come to the feast without his wedding garment.  If he insists on making his point loudly and repeatedly, the friends of the bridegroom will quite properly cast him out.

**

What does this have to do with mystical union with Christ?  Propositions matter, but not in the way that rationalist bean-counters would like to think.  This is a reality we deal with every day; it is by no means too complicated for normal people.  However, it does not reduce well to test-tube categories, and if you have a certain turn of mind, that makes you angry.  “If it can’t be boiled down to essentials and tracked,” you say to yourself, “then how can I be sure?”

That’s exactly the right question, and to find the answer to it, answer this question first: If we can’t reduce Adam’s knowledge of Eve to propositions, how could she have conceived?  How could we be sure she had?

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Mystical Union with Christ.  For those of you who read the second and third posts, but missed the caveats in the introductory post of the series, you can find it here.

Well, opposition to my “Mystical Union” stance has certainly intensified.  To be honest, the manner of it has stung a bit.  On the other hand, it’s been helpful to me, because resistance highlights the specific “pressure points” that give me an idea of what needs more elaboration and clarification.

One of the big ones is just the fact that I, a scion of conservative, evangelical, free grace, and other theological adjectives, am daring to use the word “mystical” in a good light.  I touched on this in my first post, and in a well-received paper I presented at GES a year ago (audio here around the 27:00 mark), but further discussion seems to be in order.

So let’s have that discussion.

Galatians 2:20 means something.  Paul experienced another Person that was not himself living within him.  John 15 means something.  We too can experience living connection to Christ, our Vine from which we draw sustenance and by whose nature we bear fruit.  And when we walk with Him, we do have that experience.  In spite of our sins and follies and finitude and whatever errata may have crept into our doctrine — and be honest, we’ve all got some — if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.  That’s the promise, and God’s promises are true.

We are, in that way, united to God and one another — not off somewhere in the aether where it doesn’t matter, but right here, right now, practically.  Which is to say, mystically.

This idea sometimes makes conservatives freak out.  (There’s a major epistemological issue here that’s a subject for another post.)  They want something measurable, something they can photograph or copy in triplicate, something objective.  But there is a subjective element to the Christian faith, a reality that takes place within us.

Jesus promised this, and if it’s not real, then to hell with the whole of Christianity.

Of course, the reason they’re freaking out about me saying anything good about mysticism is that there’s a lot of false mysticism out there — but the existence of the counterfeit doesn’t invalidate the genuine article. I once had a counterfeit $20 in my hand, but I don’t, on that account, refuse all $20 bills.  The word actually does have a decent pedigree, stretching into far antiquity at one end and reaching up into historic Protestantism on the other.  For example, John Calvin once used it thus:

Therefore, to that union of the head and members, the residence of Christ in our hearts, in fine, the mystical union, we assign the highest rank, Christ when he becomes ours making us partners with him in the gifts with which he was endued. Hence we do not view him as at a distance and without us, but as we have put him on, and been ingrafted into his body, he deigns to make us one with himself, and, therefore, we glory in having a fellowship of righteousness with him.  (Institutes III.xi.10)

Historically, certain strands of the Christian church have used the term “mystical” to describe the realities that Galatians 2:20, John 15, and other passages are talking about.  Although our fathers have certainly gone some strange places with the word, at the core of it is an attempt to talk about the reality of a believer’s experience with God.

Given the various abuses that have cropped up around the term, I avoided it for a long time.  In the end, though, I’ve returned to it, and not entirely by choice.  As I began to see these truths clearly in Scripture, I tried a number of different words, seeking to convey what I was seeing.  Here’s what I found.

When I used the word “spiritual,” nobody understood that I was talking about a real thing happening right here and right now.  When I talked about Christ being present spiritually, people heard “as opposed to back in, say, AD 30, when He was really here.”  The connotation was some abstract transaction taking place in the heavens, far removed from us here and now.  Or worse, they heard “Christ is really in heaven at the Father’s right hand, but He’s here spiritually.” — which is to say, not really. Because I was shooting to convey a here-and-now reality, the word “spiritually” didn’t do the job for a lot of the people I was talking to.

I tried talking about relationship with Christ, and I really thought that would solve the problem.  How naive I was — “relationship with Christ” has been bandied about so much that it has lost all meaning altogether.  For most evangelicals, “relationship with Christ,” like “Christian life,” means “whatever I do that’s God-related.”  To use C. S. Lewis’ phrase, that term has been “sold, raped, flung to the dogs.” A few people — people who were already consciously living the truths I was trying to convey — understood what I was saying. But they were as baffled as I was when it came to finding the right vocabulary to convey it to people who didn’t already understand what we were talking about.

I tried talking about “experiential” knowledge of God.  That worked for some people, but there were problems there as well.  A lot of the very intellectual folks in my immediate circle nodded sagely and said they understood, but on investigation, it wasn’t true.  They were interpreting “experiential knowledge of God” as “gaining experience applying principles.”  Every Pharisee had that kind of experience — that wasn’t what I was talking about.

And so I found myself, at last, turning to “mystical” as a descriptor for the sort of thing I was talking about.  It conveyed the personal, immediate nature of the biblical truths I was trying to convey.  It was very clearly not just talking about applying principles, or about nebulous abstractions out in the aether somewhere.  In short, its use cut across the miscommunications I was struggling against.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect.  There are two problems with “mystical.”  The first is that it’s not a biblical word.  But we once settled on “Trinity” despite the fact that it’s not in the Bible, because we needed a word for that meaning.  I’m feeling similarly settled on “mystical” at this point, although I concede that could change.  As I said above, the term does actually have a decent pedigree.

Second, “mystical” has bad connotations in conservative circles. But I’m running out of terms to use, and this one lacks a number of significant flaws that the alternatives have.  Are there other possibilities?  I’m open to suggestions, as I’ve said before.  So far, I’m not getting any suggestions at all (let alone good ones) from the people who are upset that I’m espousing some form of mysticism.  How about it, guys?