God with Us (Part 1)

Of all the earthly delights and joys that I have savored throughout my years the one for which I am most grateful to God is that he ordained that I should be born of a Christian mother and father. Only such a setting could immerse my mind and heart in the preparatory cleansing power of the good news as it is in Jesus so that from my initial moments of conscious awareness I entrusted myself to the Lord Jesus Christ for redemption from my inherited sinful nature with its destructive proclivities and death-dealing power and have done so for now almost 71 years.

Of course, knowing God, who exceeds our capacity to comprehend, was mine as an infant only in seed form. Born into a family where my senses were daily saturated with the gospel, prior to developed memory, the Holy Spirit caused that seed to swell and to burst forth with newness of life. Consequently, as I began to acquire a view of the world and for the world, my understanding and comprehension were irrevocably bent toward acknowledging and affirming what God’s Holy Word proclaims concerning all things is authoritative. Through no power of my own, that newness of life, which instilled within me an inherent trust in God who has spoken through prophets and through his Son, persists to this day so that my very young eyes and ears were open to read and to perceive the heavenly rhythmic truths God embedded within his created order concerning his invisible attributes of eternal power and divine character which worldlings suppress by their unrighteousness. How grateful I am for such a heritage that delivered me from the pervasive deleterious shaping effects of unchecked moral depravity to see through and beyond what is visible that this created realm is but the shadowlands of the dwelling place of God.

Thus, early in life daily routines incrementally developed a belief in and acknowledgment of the integrated nature of God’s created order. Thus, as I observed in a brief note last summer, removing weeds from our garden was an occasion for understanding the correlation God established between two realms, the earthly and the heavenly. My single aunt, Myrna, would instruct with probing questions such as, “Why are there weeds that we need to uproot and discard?” She would proceed to explain that the Creator’s curse for Adam’s disobedience both infests the ground with weeds that sap the nutrients from fruitful plants and afflicts us with depravity’s infestation of sin’s weeds. Both require diligent uprooting of invasive weeds as we strive to reclaim something of the orderliness of Eden. My aunt and my parents were too wise to suggest that Eden was within our reach or grasp. Rather, until the Lord Jesus comes—as he taught us to pray “let your kingdom come; let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—we will constantly be striving against the inertia of the curse with regard to the proclivities of both ourselves and the soil to default to the infestation of weeds.

Little did I realize as a child that Christian adults were shaping me to think rightly concerning myself and my environment. Now, as I reflect upon my early childrearing, they instructed me beyond what their respective formal education levels would seem to have provided them because they rooted my thinking in the Holy Scriptures. They comprehended that human reason left to itself invariably defaults to not only wrong thinking but sinful reasoning. Thus, though they never expressed it this way, they were teaching my siblings and me to reclaim our intellects, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, intellects that have been corrupted by the effects of Adam’s disobedience. Again, though they did not express it this way, their objective was that our faith and reason might be so commingled that we would “reason rightly” concerning the whole of life in this accursed realm while setting our hope upon the Lord Christ who alone will fully reclaim and restore both our capacity to reason concerning the Creator and his creation itself which in hope awaits its freedom from the bondage of decay tied inextricably to the liberation of God’s children when we shall receive the adoption for which we wait, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:20-25). Though I knew the Apostle Paul’s words, “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” little did I realize as a child and as a youth that I was engaging a massively important topic of deep theological discussion among theologians including my wonderful friend and longtime professorial colleague, Paul K. Helseth who has devoted much of his academic work to “right reason” as a major theme among the great theologians of Princeton Theological Seminary from its founding until the early twentieth century. (For paradigm-shifting research on this see Right Reason and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal).

Given my heritage, from which by God’s wonderful grace I have never strayed, it should come as no surprise that my thinking, though much more mature, persists in rightly reasoning along the same pathways etched deeply in my memory from childhood. And now, at the close of an extensive teaching career in both undergraduate and graduate Christian institutions, I am even more firmly convinced that my parents and my aunt set me on the proper course of reasoning rightly. For me to think rightly is to acknowledge that it is not my work to integrate my faith and my reason but rather God, our Creator, established the thoroughly integrated unity of all his created order, whether of the tangible universe in all its diverse portions or the intangible realm of knowledge with which he endowed us humans. Thus, even though I have regularly thought through and have published my mindful engagements with a diverse range of competing explanations of the biblical text, I have never flirted with abandoning the understanding I received as a child concerning the accounts of God’s creation and of human rebellion in Genesis 1-3. The remainder of this blog entry and the next, therefore, consist of a brief accounting of how, from the beginning, God thoroughly integrated his created order with the heavenly ordered realm and indelibly imprinted his character upon the created order which humans left to themselves deliberately suppress in their unrighteousness. Harsh as it may seem, suppression of this truth is the source of so-called “integrative theories” that have surreptitiously slinked into churches and into church institutions under the spiritually sounding pretext of “doing integration of faith and learning.”

How can a violin‘s origin be sleuthed out as coming from Antonio Stradivarius? How can a musical score be identified as deriving from the mind of Ludwig van Beethoven? How can an antique chair be traced back as originating from William Searle’s 17th-century New England workshop and not as a forgery? How could I eventually discern that I truly am my father’s son and not an adopted child? True, a craftsman’s work and a father’s son bear recognizable distinguishing marks of provenance. Yet, our response to these questions must be much richer and fuller. Why? It is because we did not evolve from some primeval lower life form. No! From the dust of the earth God made us, his creatures, to be his earthly analogs. He made us in his image and after his likeness (Genesis 1:26-28). Thus, right reasoning and biblical thinking recognize and affirm that in some profound way we humans reveal something of our Creator’s glory. Again, reasoning rightly, we must affirm that whatever God’s speaking, asking questions, relenting, planning, loving, choosing, grieving, etc. conveys concerning the Creator, these qualities do so not because he borrows them from us because he does not. Instead, God bestows his own qualities upon us and infuses those qualities with signifying imagery so that our talking, our asking questions, our relenting, our planning, our loving, our choosing, our grieving all reflect earthly likeness to our Creator. We do all these things because our Creator imprinted us with his own qualities as an indelible signature so that we humans recognize the orderly and observable arrangement. As God’s earthly analogs what we achieve with our hands bears our signature as God’s works bears his. So, as all creation points unmistakably to its Creator, exquisitely and finely crafted musical instruments, musical scores, or furniture bear their artisan’s signature within their integrated design.

Calvin affirms, “Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he . . . revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception” (Institutes 1.5.1). Because God’s creation is “the appearance of things invisible” (Hebrews 11:3, it is “a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible” (Institutes, 1.5.1).

Because God imbued all of creation to reflect his glory (Romans 1:20), he infused the full array of creation’s aspects with signifiers that point away from themselves to their Creator. Again, John Calvin observes:

But upon his individual works, he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance. Therefore the prophet very aptly exclaims that he is “clad with light as with a garment’ [Ps. 104:2]. It is as if he said: Thereafter the Lord began to show himself in the visible splendor of his apparel, ever since in the creation of the universe he brought forth those insignia whereby he shows his glory to us, whenever and wherever we cast our gaze” (Institutes, 1.5.2).

David, the psalmist, does not impose upon the heavens their capacity to speak. Rather, the Creator imbued the heavens with the capacity to convey speech that translates itself into every human language.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour out speech;
night after night they communicate knowledge.
There is no speech; there are no words;
their voice is not heard (Psalm 19:1-3).

It is easy for theologians to get lost in our lofty-sounding terminology when we speak of God with expressions such as “communicable attributes” and “anthropomorphism,” things of which I have been speaking thus far but without the exalted terms. Thus, many Christian theologians fall prey to the notion that they are, by the powers of their own reasoning, to determine “that which is fitting of God” or “that which is dignified of God” (dignum Deo) in their quest for the “Perfect Being.” Thus, such theologians tend to project onto God what he must be like resulting in one of two errors: (1) they severely exaggerate God’s immanence (presence), viewing God as a human; or (2) they significantly exaggerate God’s transcendence (above, beyond), viewing God as utterly remote. Both are critical errors because they operate with defective representations of God’s self-talk, his self-revelation, which is inescapably and inseparably human. Because God is pleased to reveal himself with human form and passions the former view of God projects onto him human limitations. The latter view projects onto God its own analytically derived concept of what God must be like while appealing to God’s revelation with human form and passions in their attempt to portray an otherwise abstract God more concretely.

I am convinced of a more biblically grounded understanding of God’s self-revelation with human form and passions. Because God formed Adam from the “dust of the earth” and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, making him in his own image and after his own likeness, God makes himself known to us in our likeness, as if he wears both our form and passions, when in fact we wear his but with creaturely limitations.

Thus, to read the Bible correctly we enter the world the Bible portrays and we accept its presuppositions and affirmations concerning God, all of creation, and ourselves. The principal character in the biblical drama is the Lord God who also is the scriptwriter, director, producer of this grand drama as well as creator and owner of the cosmic theater in which the drama plays out. The Bible lays out the storyline of this drama stretched throughout the history of God’s redemption of his creation, with the First Man and Second Man, each with his significant and respective role at creation and consummation. Integral to this history of redemption are progressive sequences of God’s revelation that reach completion and fulfillment in the disclosure of God’s Last Adam, Jesus Christ. Throughout this drama in the Old Testament God, the principal protagonist, conceals his glory with human similitude, revealing himself to us with the qualities which he has bestowed upon us—speech, action, emotion, self-reflection. The New Testament features God as the principal character in the drama whose glory more than inhabits human spoken word; now God’s spoken word inhabits human flesh (John 1:1-2, 14).

Watch for God with Us (Part 2) next week.