Adiaphora

Every poet, consciously or unconsciously, holds the following absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art:

(1) A historical world exists, a world of unique events and unique persons, related by analogy, not identity. The number of events and analogical relations is potentially infinite. The existence of such a world is a good, and every addition to the number of events, persons and relations is an additional good.

(2) The historical world is a fallen world, i.e. though it is good that it exists, the way in which it exists is evil, being full of unfreedom and disorder.

(3) The historical world is a redeemable world. The unfreedom and disorder of the past can be reconciled in the future.

It follows from the first presupposition that the poet’s activity in creating a poem is analogous to God’s activity in creating man after his own image. It is not an imitation, for were it so, the poet would be able to create like God ex nihilo; instead, he requires pre-existing occasions of feeling and a pre-existing language out of which to create. It is analogous in that the poet creates not necessarily according to a law of nature but voluntarily according to provocation.

Two particular things I gained from Colin are worthy of mention. First, a sense of joy in the possibilities of the discipline of theology: the intellectual work is hard, and is also important, but there is more than that: Colin attributed it to Barth, and it is certainly there, but he appropriated it more than any other Barth scholar I have met: theology done properly must be cheerful work. How can we speak (read; write) of God’s infinite grace poured out without limit in the gift of Jesus Christ, and not find our hearts warmed, our sorrows comforted, our failures rendered into proper perspective? How can we not be basically joyful, if to do this is our life’s work?

Second, a belief that theology belongs – not just to the church, but to the churches. Colin and I came from traditions that differed on baptism, but were joined by a commitment to congregationalist ecclesiology: it is the local, gathered, congregation that is (in John Smyth’s words) ‘the chief and principal part of the gospel’. The theologian cannot do his/her work without being seriously committed to a particular local fellowship, with all its eccentricities, peculiarities, joys, and frustrations. Too much theology, still, regards the churches as embarrassing, and tries to proceed by cruising 30 000 feet above their messy lives. It was from Colin that I learned that this can never be right.

Instead of a life of experience, Christ calls us to a life of love. And a life of love for the most part means attending to the tedious details of others’ lives, and serving them in sacrificial ways that most days feels, well, not exciting at all. Rather than sweeping the kitchen, cleaning the toilet, listening to the talkative and boring neighbor, slopping eggs onto a plate at the homeless shelter, or crunching numbers for another eight hours at the office—surely life is meant for more than this. We are tempted to wonder, Is that all there is to the “abundant” Christian life? Shouldn’t my life be more adventurous if God is in me and all around me? How am I going to be all I’m supposed to be if I have to empty bedpans in Peoria? I would just die if I had to do that.

Yes, you would. Jesus called it dying to self. Love is precisely denying the self that wants to glory in experience. The cost of discipleship most of us are asked to pay is to live the life God has given us, serving in mundane ways the people he has put in our path. To be free from the self and to discover such love is the essence of abundant life.

As Paul put it, in the final analysis love is not about speaking in tongues, having prophetic powers, understanding all mysteries or knowledge, having experiences of wonder, or being all we can be. Love instead “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Yes, endures. It endures now because it hopes. And it hopes because it has not yet been given in full what is promised, but only glimpses here and there, mere appetizers to the great kingdom feast.

It is not hard to see why the religion of experience—the experience that Rob Bell is now writing about—tempts one to make feeling an idol, or how a religion of feeling leads to the watering down of great gospel themes. Historians of theology have shown such connections time and again. What’s hard to understand is why so many Christians who claim they stand for the faith once delivered to the saints don’t see that the road of experience leads nowhere except to the barren desert of the self.

If you have some fondness for this body, and you are sorry to be unyoked from what you love, do not be in despair about this. [You will receive your own body] woven again from the same elements, not indeed with its present course and heavy texture, but with the thread respun into something subtler and lighter… so that the beloved body may be with you and be restored to you again in better and even more lovable beauty.

The purpose of theology - the purpose of any thinking about God - is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning - by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings - more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.