“The truth,” writes the apostle, “abides in us and will be with us for ever: grace, mercy and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love” (II John 2-3). I’ve given a fair amount of thought, sometimes a little frenzied and panicked, to the paradigm of truth in Scripture. For the Orthodox, the truth is “internal and pneumatic” versus (what they call) the “external and dogmatic” model in the West, whether seen in the Reformation formula
sola Scriptura or the Catholic hierarchy of authority. As a good Evangelical (sic) I begin with Scripture. Do we find
sola Scriptura there? Most importantly, what does the New Testament claim for itself?
While the Scriptures are “God-breathed” and “useful”, (II Tim. 3:16) they are never the fullest embodiment of truth. For that is always found in the person of Christ. Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), and “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (2:8). Of the three persons of the Trinity, the Son is revelation, communication, and that in human form (“bodily”); as such he is Truth for mankind. Of Scripture no such claim is made. At best the term “Word of God” has been muddied in popular evangelical culture, and applied far more freely than is warranted by the Scriptures themselves. For the Word of God is always Christ first and foremost, per John’s Prologue, and if it is also applied to the Scriptures, it is only as an expression of the fact that God’s self-revelation in Christ is present there in inspired form. (That is, “God-breathed”, a term which deserves a certain amount of attention.) The Word of God is a broader (but no less clearly defined) thing than I have been conditioned to believe. In Acts, the Word of God can “grow” and “multiply” (12:24, 19:20). It can “dwell richly” in the believer (Col. 3:16). And it is also present in the “tradition” which Paul exhorted the Corinthians to maintain (I Cor. 11:2, 23, 15:3), and later encouraged Timothy to guard (I Tim. 6:20, II Tim. 1:14). But how is this tradition maintained? Was it based solely in the apostles, so that it is no longer extant except in their writings? Or has it really been handed down to us through the Church, that is, the succession of true believers in whom dwell the Holy Spirit of God?
The truth cannot be made abstract; it cannot be limited to something written down, quantified, interpreted. It must be enacted. Against the “philosophies and human traditions” Paul places, not the Scriptures, but the redemptive work of Christ on the believers’ behalf (Col. 2:8-15). “You have come to fullness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (10). In Christ, Paul goes on, redemption was accomplished. In Christ we were circumcised “without hands”; in Christ we were buried and raised again through faith in the working of God (11-12). And in Christ were the principalities and powers “disarmed” (15) – those same principalities which comprise the human traditions, the philosophies, the elemental spirits of the universe (8). In other words, against all the human effort and teaching which mislead and construe, we have, not the Scriptures as such, but Christ, the ultimate Word. And not Christ as a mystic concept, either, but as a person, as the Person, in whose accomplished work we participate daily. We do not know an abstraction of truth, or a corpus of writings which must be interpreted. We know a Person (Philippians 3:9-10). “Authentic
gnosis,” says Vladimir Lossky, “is inseparable from a charisma, an illumination by grace which transforms our intelligence. And since the object of contemplation is a personal existence and presence, true
gnosis implies encounter, reciprocity, faith as a personal adherence to the personal presence of God Who reveals Himself.” The divine Word is not to be studied, so much as practiced, and in practice, substantiated and defended. In his second epistle, John warns us: “Look to yourselves, that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward (8)”. Paul adjures the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12), and the writer of Hebrews tells us to “strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the same sort of disobedience” (4:11).
The divine Word, then, is not so much “understood” (intellectually) as submitted to, in obedience. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). Apprehension of the divine begins with the right posture, the posture of faith. In Christ’s own teaching we often hear the formula, “he who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9, 43, elsewhere). The self-same revelation of Christ can both condemn and vivify, depending on the heart of its hearers (Matthew 13:11-17). In other words, the knowledge of the Word of Christ, whether its means be the Scripture or some other lesser venue, is dependent not on the right interpretation so much as on the condition of its hearers. Can one submit to a text? Is not the goal of reading or interpreting texts a mere intellectual understanding? But we submit to a Person.
This is a half-baked paradigm at best of the New Testament teaching on divine truth. Still, it’s what I am going on for the present. Which tradition best expresses it is a question I’ve troubled over for some time, but I am beginning to think that that is less important than my own persistence in it. To “convert” may or may not happen. Any decision now would be premature and rash. To enter (an evangelical) seminary, for better or for worse, will at least continue the process: not of the development of my mind, or of my own imminent “decision”, but of “looking to myself”. Come what may.
There was a narrow window of time when I was writing things that I can look back on now and be pleased with. For some reason that window has closed lately, and the odd thing is that what's closed it has been the progress of my mind, into new realms, new patterns of thought, new books I'm reading and ideas I'm having. I try to write about them, but I can never do them justice, so I end up frustrated. Strange. What happened? I used to be so much better at this.
I'm married, and living in Toccoa, probably the last year I'll spend here. And that's bittersweet. It's odd knowing that you're going to miss a place horribly very soon, but not being able to do anything about it, and in the meantime not being able to really appreciate it as it is. I work at a woodshop, for forty hours a week, making wood turnings on a CNC lathe. I enjoy it. Nothing I'd like to do for the rest of my life, but I won't be, so I don't have to worry. It is a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to occupy my thoughts. I try to be mentally productive. I've memorized some poems, some Hopkins and Macleish, as well as some Scripture. I've thought a lot about the Lord of the Rings, and just about every other novel I've loved. I tell the stories again in my head, and sometimes get mixed up. I sing Belle and Sebastian songs to myself. Belle and Sebastian because, for one, I probably know more of their songs all the way through than any other band, and two, they are so persistently uplifting. I sing some other stuff too, and feel a little foolish when my co-workers walk past. I think about theology, about Ladd and Bonhoeffer, Lossky and Schmemann. I nick up my knuckles and sand the tips off my fingers. I do battle with the computer.
My parents live in town so we've enjoyed their proximity. Gives us another house to go to, the one I grew up in but no longer live in. I'm there now, in the stuffy heat from the wood stove after a long Sunday afternoon nap on the library couch. In about half an hour I'm going to drive across town and pick up Jenni from work. She gets in the car, gives me a kiss, and I ask her how her day was as her co-workers walk past us to their own cars. It's a tidy domestic scene. Tonight I think we're going to decorate our tree. Funny how little I have to do these days, and yet how little time I have for reading. There's always something.
Here's a comprehensive list of what I've read in the last month or two, and what I'm still reading now:
Poetry and Experience, Archibald Macleish
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, with Jenni. We've been reading it aloud and we're just past halfway in the second book.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Daniel B. Clendenin
Orthodox Theology, Vladimir Lossky
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Plague, Albert Camus
The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Adam of the Road, Elizabeth Janet Gray
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
And to go with it a list of music I've particularly enjoyed since we've moved into the new place.
A mix of British Sea Power B-sides and EPs from Muffy, really great
Heaven or Las Vegas, The Cocteau Twins
Feathers, Dead Meadow
Trust, Low
The Curtain Hits the Cast, Low
Things We Lost in the Fire, Low
If You're Feeling Sinister, Belle and Sebastian
Tigermilk, Belle and Sebastian
The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian
Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno
Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
The Best of Simon and Garfunkel
Diary, Sunny Day Real Estate
Old Mogwai stuff, also from Muffy
A couple of boring old lists to bore the two people who probably read this.
There is a lot on my mind and a lot I'd like to try and write it out. I'll see if I can't do some of that in the near future. In the meantime Jenni is getting off work.
"By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.
"A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish-dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves this dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
"God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians which his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.
"When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first the accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Life Together"
