Below is an excerpt from a book project I will probably never finish, in which case it is more properly called a fragment from an unfinished essay. So below is a fragment from an unfinished essay. Let’s call it Unfinished Essay 2. In a fragment from, say, Unfinished Essay 1, I discussed the familial nature of the image of God as the design against which all other forms of human relationality must be judged. The fragment below assumes familiarity with that argument from that fragment in Unfinished Essay 1. But you’ll manage.

---

The family project continues in the East. Eve’s title as mother of all the living is brought to fruition in the spread of Adam’s seed. Eve was formed out of Adam’s rib, but the rest of the world is formed out of Adam’s loin. Eden has been barred. The first guardian angels are sent to block the way back (Gen. 3:24). The men of the East would take their pens of dominion and plowshares of the Garden and beat them into swords. Gardening in God’s world would give way to nation building. Men would begin to scribble history with blood, becoming increasingly brute and uncreative with each generation, whose concept of good writing amounts to little more pressing harder with the pen. In the man’s world, the family would be thrust deep into the shadows to bring into the spotlight the warlords—it is hunting season in the East—battling one another for mastery over history altogether fighting in a world war against time. It was not good for Man to be alone, estranged from his feminine side. Human history, as we know it, thus begins with two brothers, the firstfruits of Adam’s seed.

---

The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is has clear intentions. It is a ground account of the bird’s flight to follow. In principle, it is the same story as Genesis 3 (as well as all of the stories of Genesis 5-11)—the story about the way sin divides the human family from one another and from God. But it does have a few significant differences. While Genesis 3 focuses on the first causes of sin in the parents of the human race, Genesis 4 focuses on the first effects of sin in the children. It is therefore naturally more empathetic to the world that begins outside the Garden, the world in which its readers find themselves, the world of Israel, the world of us. Genesis 3 also reveals the true faces of the family and its enemy, of the divinely ordered unity and the soulless search for divinity, the ignorance of which produces much strife in subsequent history. It is not trivial that it begins with two brothers and ends with an only child (Gen. 5:1b-3). Adam’s world was and has ever since been a world of brothers killing brothers and calling them others. If there are any illusions about the way of a man after Adam, any lingering hope of returning to Eden, this story sobers and severs. It exists to orient us to the long road ahead, a one-way easterly road that ever polarizes its travelers from the Garden way. The Garden gate and its guardian angels will grow smaller and smaller in our rearview memory.

Cain and Abel were born after the cherubim took their posts at the east gate. Adam’s seeds immediately begin to sprout out of the cursed ground of the East. Cain is a gardener, like his father. He spends his days with his hands in the dirt of a curse with sweat from the toil and blood from the thorns. Abel is a shepherd, and a butcher, like the Levites. No women are in the story. The Lord does not intervene. He gives space for the love of freedom, which men love to fill with control. It turns violent—quickly.

The brothers bring offerings to the Lord. The Lord does not regard Cain’s ground-grown offering. He accepts Abel’s first-born offering. It is too early to make sense of the Lord’s discretion. Speculations can be made about the parallels of the Garden garments or the kind of sacrifice needed in a condemned world, but they are only speculations. The Lord speaks graciously to Cain. He has not yet rebelled against him. He had only acted in ignorance. Cain was just like the child who offers his parents a ketchup and ice cream sundae. It was not that Cain had done anything particularly wrong with his offering. God did not condemn him for that. God just reserves the right to aesthetic judgments. It is good to separate the waters from the land and the ketchup from the ice cream, even if Cain prefers otherwise, even if Cain prefers red to cover white, for blood to flood the field.

At any rate, the story has nothing substantial to tell us about the offerings. It tells us, instead, about Cain, and therefore about ourselves. It does not draw our attention to a symbolic meaning of either offering, but to the way Cain reacts to his sense of the Lord’s rejection. Human history is unwittingly all about the creative and uncreative ways men handle that sense of the Lord’s rejection. Since men cannot find peace with the Father, they are wont to make enemies with others, even, and especially, with brothers.

---

Cain gets angry. A new emotion enters the Genesis narrative. Anger is a new way of dealing with shame. Shame, again, is the horizontal feeling of vertical guilt, the impulse to hide from we know not what, only that we must hide ourselves. Shame in the Garden sought a scapegoat, but in this world the scapegoat is ripe for the slaughter. It is much the same as what we have already seen. An obvious pattern emerges. Discord in the divine-human community finds first expression on the ground—on earth as it is in hell. God did not accept Cain’s offering, but he does suggest to Cain that Cain can still be accepted, “if you (Cain) do well. If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7). Sin crouches at our door. It now exists ‘out there’ like a cold front in the open-air or a snake hole in a gated neighborhood.

Or does it? Where is sin, or temptation, or the tempter, actually located in this story? Within or without? That is perhaps one of the questions this story is designed to answer. Regardless, its desire is for Cain. All it has to do now—all sin ever has to do—is exploit Cain’s shame. Sin has found its dance partner.

Shame has many reflexes. It adapts to its environment. But its goal is always the same as it was in the almost-beginning: to self-preserve. In the Garden, shame sought merely to find a worse offender to deflect the guilt. Adam points to Eve, Eve to the serpent, and the scale terminates at bottom with the devil. But this is a different environment. The serpent is missing. God has made a judgment about the brothers’ offerings. Cain is unpleased with God’s judgment. God does not condemn Cain but he does offend him. Cain does not need to repent. He needs only to stay humble. He needs only to accept that God’s judgments are good, even if that means God does not regard his offering good. Perhaps God is just real, and real Persons have preferences. And perhaps God is good and just to impose his preferences upon us. Perhaps it is good that God prefers we love our enemies and not cut off their heads, even when that means loving those who have cut off people’s heads. Perhaps the liberation any man from an Absolute good is inherently slavery of all men. Perhaps the power of the will to choose good aimlessly in its own eyes is always already only the will to power.

Regardless, Cain should surely not hold God’s preferential nature against God, and certainly he should not take it personally if God preferred Abel’s lamb to Cain’s durian. If I’m honest, I have no regard for my grandma’s offering of (yet another) three-pack of bright white Fruit of the Loom underwear every Christmas (she worked in a Fruit of the Loom factory, making loin coverings for men for over three decades). But that does not mean I have no regard for my grandma. That is why I lie to her. But God is not a liar, like me. God’s prefers truth-telling to ego-stroking. The whole world was lost in a single lie safeguarded in every ego, so it does no good for God to protect our egos and thereby preserve the lie that i am that I AM, that my preferences determine the absolute good.  

For Cain’s part, he only need accept that not all offerings are created equal, and that only means accepting God is God and he is not. But who is really willing to accept that? Who will not first have to accept that “no one is good but God alone”? Who will not first have to acquit all their enemies of their evils and throw their stones down in the dirt? Who will not first have to pardon others by crucifying the voice of the accuser in their own head every single day of their life? So, alas, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after emerging from Soviet captivity in the Gulag, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every man. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” It is far less painful to destroy your brother’s. 

---

Cain has not sinned at this point in the story, yet he behaves as like an escaped convict, as though living in the shadow of some past offense (like Harold), as though guilty before proven innocent. He is impulsive, rash, desperate. It is evident that there is more to the scene than meets the eye, like a subterranean fault line under immense pressure. The sequence in the Garden story was command, confusion, deception, disobedience. In this story, the two middle components are indistinct because they seem to be all that is there. The motivations for Cain’s actions are not part of the script. They seem, instead, to be encoded in the heart of the script, perhaps encoded in the heart of Cain.

The Lord announces that Cain can still be accepted, that he can rule over sin. But there is no response, no indication that an attempt is made to heed these words. There is, rather, an eerie sense that Cain is in constant consultation with an unseen third party, an invisible echo whispering into, or within, Cain’s ear: “Did God really say…” or “Who is God to say…” or “Are you not like God, of knowing good and evil?” or “You are God.”

But the serpent is nowhere to be found. He had returned to his hole. He apparently no longer needed to be present for his echoes to be heard. It behooved him to remain hidden. If blame terminated at him each time, as it did in the Garden scene, he would never accomplish his goal of instigating retaliation. The absence of a tempter makes guilt a far more slippery thing to hammer down—and guilt must be hammered down. A visible talking snake means there is an enemy of God, and it may not be me. But an invisible talking snake means there’s an enemy of God in my head. That is a terrifying prospect, rendering the experience of life to an ongoing whack-a-mole scenerio. If the serpent’s whisperings were now in some sense buried in Adam’s seed, his greatest strategy would undoubtedly be to never rear his head again—indeed, he never does again, at least not to ordinary eyes. In that case, the thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘I AM’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘he’ and ‘it’, all slide off the divide into a slurry of inner distances off the tip of that two-pronged tongue. The only thing more dangerous than a talking snake in a Garden is a talking snake in your head. That is the kind of thing that will drive a man mad. It drove Cain mad. 

---

In the Garden the serpent could encourage segregation, domestic violence and even divorce between the two-made-to-become-one. He did so from without, hurling grenades of deception to cause divisions and convincing them, as is his custom, to stop holding each other’s hearts and to start pointing their fingers and clinching their fists. But he could not yet convince them to embrace a segregation and begin to throw stones. He could not convince them to declare a civil war. But the conditions are different in the East. The serpent now begins by splitting a man at his nucleus. The family is divided because the man’s heart is divided. Cain’s pointing finger was not pulled away by some open-air attraction, looking merely for someone to blame and send away like a scapegoat. The projection was much more deeply seated. It grew out of the branches of his heart. As such, it was much harder, sharper and more prodigious than his parents’, their fingers merely meeting their targets through an invisible trajectory. With Cain, the trajectory materialized. His finger pointed all the way through Abel’s body. The brotherly community is now destroyed—nuclear fission in the nuclear family.

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen. 4:8)

The Lord had been gracious with Cain and given him another chance to offer an acceptable sacrifice—to another God. He led his brother Abel into his field, the place of his produce, like a sheep led to the slaughter. Cain waters the cursed ground with Abel’s blood, but his blood cried out to the God of the Garden (Gen. 4:1). The world that once sprouted with life expedites its process of decay. Everything is dying, plants and people withering into the brittle brown of dead leaves and dried blood. This was the work of two gardeners. Everything in the East is going the way of the dust. A man dies. A family dies. Cursed is every man who hides in the shadow of that God-damned tree (cf. Gen. 3; Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

Every man from Adam is born on the other side of yet another divide. With each generation the oneness of creation is more easily disregarded as a creative fiction, thus providing the distance necessary to embrace increasing degrees of separation that commensurately sever empathy with others who live at a distance. Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, that place that guards the heart. Man in the image of God was made to share heartaches. But men became islands unto themselves and took to the image of the beasts. As such, as long as a professional distance is maintained, stabbing another man, or a brother, in a field, or nailing another Man, or a Brother, to a cross, feels only like cutting into a limb with severed nerves. It doesn’t even hurt, even if he does bleed a common blood, unless indeed I AM my brother’s Keeper (Gen. 4:9). 

The Lord confronts Cain. “Where is Abel your brother?” he asks. As with Adam, he gave Cain a chance to confess. “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain has become a smart ass. He has his father’s sense of humor. In addition, he is a liar. He did know where Abel was. Lying is another pathetic form of sewing. It is the grammar of making garments in an attempt to hide our guilt from the one before whom “all are naked and laid bare…to whom we must give an account of our lives” (Heb. 4:12-13). 

---

Cain is sent to wander on the wide and aimless easterly road, a fugitive. Anger in community gives way to fear in isolation. His own internal sense of justice condemns him. Cain discovers his conscience, but we discover in Cain that our condemning conscience does not lead us to repentance but only deeper into a more permanent form of our modus operandi: self-preservation. Cain, like his father and like the first criminal in the crucifixion account, and like most every man, seeks sympathy from God, not forgiveness. He asks for salvation from his guilty conscience, not forgiveness for his guilt. He demands pardon from his punishment but is unwilling to confess that he deserves it. So he rejects God as a Person and constructs an eastern worldview indeed of an inescapable and impersonal karma: 

“Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me” (Gen. 4:13-14).

He killed and knew what he deserved. But the Lord, even here, shows a deeper arrangement. It is grace for Cain while preserving justice in the world (Gen. 4:15-16). It is not an exacting arrangement, at least not yet, and it requires personal and preferential bias, intervention, indeed, Incarnation.

God marks Cain to protect him. He then sends him away from his presence. Eden continues to shrink. The Lord returns to his Garden. Cain builds a city. In God’s world, families are the center, in Cain’s world, cities. The partitions grow. The world apart from the presence of the Lord, from the Garden of the Lord, has nothing but the future in potentia. There is no model or microcosm for home, only natural resources for the limitless imagination. The world has lost its essence and all is reduced to utility. Men continue moving forward, telling themselves that the pot filled with gold is bigger than the emptiness they seek to fill. Those futile attempts to fill that inner infinite void, however, has only ever served to keep us “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). The soul made for rest has no recourse for restlessness from within because rest indeed only comes from without. 

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” ~ St. Augustine

This world knows nothing of true rest, though something called rest exists within the grid of utility. Utilitarian rest serves the function of efficiency. Rest is calculated to maximize production. Relationships, too, are calculated accordingly, subsumed within the crowd and therefore entangled in untruth (Kierkegaard). There is no time for eye contact, much less for reflection, contact with one’s self and its host of inner demons. Such is what keeps us so distracted. Men band together to run from themselves, to build cities, to hide. The world looks progressively less like a Garden. It is too painful to remember the trees, so they built, so we build, concrete gardens. 

 

 

O Jealous Moon
Don’t turn your back
That tap on your shoulder
Is a shadow of black

O Jealous Moon
Love the Light as yourself
If you seek out your own
You’ll become something else

~ Dated 2001

Below is an excerpt from a book project I will probably never finish, in which case it is more properly called a fragment from an unfinished essay. So below is a fragment from an unfinished essay. Let’s call it Unfinished Essay 2. In a fragment from, say, Unfinished Essay 1, I discussed the familial nature of the image of God as the design against which all other forms of human relationality must be judged. The fragment below assumes familiarity with that argument from that fragment in Unfinished Essay 1. But you’ll manage.

---

The family project continues in the east. Eve’s title as mother of all the living is brought to fruition in the spread of Adam’s seed. Eve was formed out of Adam’s rib, but the rest of the world is formed out of Adam’s loin. Eden has been barred. The first guardian angels are sent to block the way back (Gen. 3:24). The men of the east would take their pens of dominion and plowshares of the Garden and beat them into swords. Gardening in God’s world would give way to nation building. Men would begin to scribble history with blood, becoming increasingly brute and uncreative with each generation, whose concept of good writing amounts to little more pressing harder with the pen. In the man’s world, the family would be thrust deep into the shadows to bring into the spotlight the warlords—it is hunting season in the East—battling one another for mastery over history altogether fighting in a world war against time. It was not good for Man to be alone, estranged from his feminine side.

This, human history, as we know it, begins with two brothers, the firstfruits of Adam’s seed.

---

The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is has clear intentions. It is a ground account of the bird’s flight to follow. In principle, it is the same story as Genesis 3 (as well as all of the stories of Genesis 5-11)—the story about the way sin divides the human family from one another and from God. But it does have a few significant differences. While Genesis 3 focuses on the first causes of sin in the parents of the human race, Genesis 4 focuses on the first effects of sin in the children. It is therefore naturally more empathetic to the world that begins outside the Garden, the world in which its readers find themselves, the world of Israel, the world of us. Genesis 3 also reveals the true faces of the family and its enemy, of the divinely ordered unity and the soulless search for divinity, the ignorance of which produces much strife in subsequent history. It is not trivial that it begins with two brothers and ends with an only child (Gen. 5:1b-3). Adam’s world was and has ever since been a world of brothers killing brothers and calling them others. If there are any illusions about the way of a man after Adam, any lingering hope of returning to Eden, this story sobers and severs. It exists to orient us to the long road ahead, a one-way easterly road that ever polarizes its travelers from the Garden way. The Garden gate and its guardian angels will grow smaller and smaller in our rearview memory.

Cain and Abel were born after the cherubim took their posts at the east gate. Adam’s seeds immediately begin to sprout out of the cursed ground of the east. Cain is a gardener, like his father. He spends his days with his hands in the dirt of a curse with sweat from the toil and blood from the thorns. Abel is a shepherd, and a butcher, like the Levites. No women are in the story. The Lord does not intervene. He gives space for the love of freedom, which men love to fill with control. It turns violent—quickly.

The brothers bring offerings to the Lord. The Lord does not regard Cain’s ground-grown offering. He accepts Abel’s first-born offering. It is too early to make sense of the Lord’s discretion. Speculations can be made about the parallels of the Garden garments or the kind of sacrifice needed in a condemned world, but they are only speculations. The Lord speaks graciously to Cain. He has not yet rebelled against him. He had only acted in ignorance. Cain was just like the child who offers his parents a ketchup and ice cream sundae. It was not that Cain had done anything particularly wrong with his offering. God did not condemn him for that. God just reserves the right to aesthetic judgments. It is good to separate the waters from the land and the ketchup from the ice cream, even if Cain prefers otherwise, even if Cain prefers red to cover white, for waters to flood the field. At any rate, the story has nothing substantial to tell us about the offerings. It tells us, instead, about Cain, and therefore about ourselves. It does not draw our attention to a symbolic meaning of either offering, but to the way Cain reacts to his sense of the Lord’s rejection. Human history is unwittingly all about the creative and uncreative ways men handle that sense of the Lord’s rejection. Since men cannot find peace with the Father, they are wont to make enemies with others, even, and especially, with brothers.

Cain gets angry. A new emotion enters the Genesis narrative. Anger is a new way of dealing with shame. Shame, again, is the horizontal feeling of vertical guilt, the impulse to hide from we know not what, only that we must hide ourselves. Shame in the Garden sought a scapegoat, but in this world the scapegoat is ripe for the slaughter. It is much the same as what we have already seen. An obvious pattern emerges. Discord in the divine-human community finds first expression on the ground—on earth as it is in hell. God did not accept Cain’s offering, but he does suggest to Cain that Cain can still be accepted, “if you (Cain) do well. If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7). Sin crouches at our door. It now exists ‘out there’ like a cold front in the open-air or a snake hole in a gated neighborhood.

---

Or does it? Where is sin, or temptation, or the tempter, actually located in this story? Within or without? That is perhaps one of the questions this story is designed to answer. Regardless, its desire is for Cain. All it has to do now—all sin ever has to do—is exploit Cain’s shame. Sin has found its dance partner.

Shame has many reflexes. It adapts to its environment. But its goal is always the same as it was in the almost-beginning: to self-preserve. In the Garden, shame sought merely to find a worse offender to deflect the guilt. Adam points to Eve, Eve to the serpent, and the scale terminates at bottom with the devil. But this is a different environment. The serpent is missing. God has made a judgment about the brothers’ offerings. Cain is unpleased with God’s judgment. God does not condemn Cain but he does offend him. Cain does not need to repent. He needs only to stay humble. He needs only to accept that God’s judgments are good, even if that means God does not regard his offering good. Perhaps God is just real, and real Persons have preferences. And perhaps God is good and just to impose his preferences upon us. Perhaps it is good that God prefers we love our enemies and not cut off their heads, even when that means loving those who have cut off people’s heads. Perhaps the liberation any man from an Absolute good is inherently slavery of all men. Perhaps the power of the will to choose good aimlessly in its own eyes is always already only the will to power.

At any rate, Cain sure should not hold God’s preferential nature against God, and certainly he should not take it personally if God preferred Abel’s lamb to Cain’s durian. If I’m honest, I have no regard for my grandma’s offering of (yet another) three-pack of bright white Fruit of the Loom underwear every Christmas (she worked in a Fruit of the Loom factory, making loin coverings for men for over three decades). But that does not mean I have no regard for my grandma. That is why I lie to her. But God is not a liar, like me. God’s prefers truth-telling to ego-stroking. The whole world was lost in a single lie safeguarded in every ego, so it does no good for God to protect our egos and thereby preserve the lie that i am that I AM, that my preferences determine the absolute good.  

For Cain’s part, he only need accept that not all offerings are created equal, and that only means accepting God is God and he is not. But who is really willing to accept that? Who will not first have to accept that “no one is good but God alone”? Who will not first have to acquit all their enemies of their evils and throw their stones down in the dirt? Who will not first have to pardon others by crucifying the voice of the accuser in their own head every single day of their life? So, alas, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after emerging from Soviet captivity in the Gulag, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every man. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” It is far less painful to destroy your brother’s. 

---

Cain has not sinned at this point in the story, yet he behaves as like an escaped convict, as though living in the shadow of some past offense, as though guilty before proven innocent. He is impulsive, rash, desperate. It is evident that there is more to the scene than meets the eye, like a subterranean fault line under immense pressure. The sequence in the Garden story was command, confusion, deception, disobedience. In this story, the two middle components are indistinct because they seem to be all that is there. The motivations for Cain’s actions are not part of the script. They seem, instead, to be encoded in the heart of the script, perhaps encoded in the heart of Cain.

The Lord announces that Cain can still be accepted, that he can rule over sin. But there is no response, no indication that an attempt is made to heed these words. There is, rather, an eerie sense that Cain is in constant consultation with an unseen third party, an invisible echo whispering into, or within, Cain’s ear: “Did God really say…” or “Who is God to say…” or “Are you not like God, of knowing good and evil?” or “You are God.”

But the serpent is nowhere to be found. He had returned to his hole. He apparently no longer needed to be present for his echoes to be heard. It behooved him to remain hidden. If blame terminated at him each time, as it did in the Garden scene, he would never accomplish his goal of instigating retaliation. The presence of a tempter makes guilt a far more slippery a thing to hammer down—and guilt must be hammered down. A visible talking snake means there is an enemy of God, and it may not be me. But an invisible talking snake means there’s an enemy of God in my head. In that case, the thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘I AM’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘he’ and ‘it’, all slide off the divide into a slurry of distances off the tip of that two-pronged tongue. 

If the serpent’s whisperings were now in some sense buried in Adam’s seed, his greatest strategy would undoubtedly be to never rear his head again—indeed, he never does again, at least not to ordinary eyes. The only thing more dangerous than a talking snake in a Garden is a talking snake in your head. That is the kind of thing that will drive a man mad. It drove Cain mad. 

---

In the Garden the serpent could encourage segregation, domestic violence and even divorce between the two-made-to-become-one. He did so from without, hurling grenades of deception to cause divisions and convincing them, as is his custom, to stop holding each other’s hearts and to start pointing their fingers and clinching their fists. But he could not yet convince them to embrace a segregation and begin to throw stones. He could not convince them to declare a civil war. But the conditions are different in the East. The serpent now begins by splitting a man at his nucleus. The family is divided because the man’s heart is divided. Cain’s pointing finger was not pulled away by some open-air attraction, looking merely for someone to blame and send away like a scapegoat. The projection was much more deeply seated. It grew out of the branches of his heart. As such, it was much harder, sharper and more prodigious than his parents’, their fingers merely meeting their targets through an invisible trajectory. With Cain, the trajectory materialized. His finger pointed all the way through Abel’s body. The brotherly community is now destroyed—nuclear fission in the nuclear family.

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen. 4:8)

The Lord had been gracious with Cain and given him another chance to offer an acceptable sacrifice—to another God. He led his brother Abel into his field, the place of his produce, like a sheep led to the slaughter. Cain waters the cursed ground with Abel’s blood, but his blood cried out to the God of the Garden (Gen. 4:1). The world that once sprouted with life expedites its process of decay. Everything is dying, plants and people withering into the brittle brown of dead leaves and dried blood. This was the work of two gardeners. Everything in the East is going the way of the dust. A man dies. A family dies. Cursed is every man who hides in the shadow of that God-damned tree (cf. Gen. 3; Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

Every man from Adam is born on the other side of yet another divide. With each generation the oneness of creation is more easily disregarded as a creative fiction, thus providing the necessary distance necessary to embrace degrees of separation that increasingly sever empathy with others who live at a distance. Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, that place that guards the heart. Man in the image of God was made to share heartaches. But men became islands unto themselves and took to the image of the beasts. As such, as long as a professional distance is maintained, stabbing another man, or a brother, in a field, or nailing another Man, or a Brother, to a cross, feels only like cutting into a limb with severed nerves. It doesn’t even hurt, even if he does bleed a common blood, unless indeed I AM my brother’s Keeper (Gen. 4:9). 

The Lord confronts Cain. “Where is Abel your brother?” he asks. As with Adam, he gave Cain a chance to confess. “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain has become a smart ass. He has his father’s sense of humor. In addition, he is a liar. He did know where Abel was. Lying is another pathetic form of sewing. It is the grammar of making garments in an attempt to hide our guilt from the one before whom “all are naked and laid bare…to whom we must give an account of our lives” (Heb. 4:12-13). 

---

Cain is sent to wander on the wide and aimless easterly road, a fugitive. Anger in community gives way to fear in isolation. His own internal sense of justice condemns him. Cain discovers his conscience, but we discover in Cain that our condemning conscience does not lead us to repentance but only deeper into a more permanent form of our modus operandi: self-preservation. Cain, like his father and like the first criminal in the crucifixion account, and like most every man, seeks sympathy from God, not forgiveness. He asks for salvation from his guilty conscience, not forgiveness for his guilt. He demands pardon from his punishment but is unwilling to confess that he deserves it. So he rejects God as a Person and constructs an eastern worldview indeed of an inescapable and impersonal karma: 

“Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me” (Gen. 4:13-14).

He killed and knew what he deserved. But the Lord, even here, shows a deeper arrangement. It is grace for Cain while preserving justice in the world (Gen. 4:15-16). It is not an exacting arrangement, at least not yet, and it requires personal and preferential bias, intervention, indeed, Incarnation.

God marks Cain to protect him. He then sends him away from his presence. Eden continues to shrink. The Lord returns to his Garden. Cain builds a city. In God’s world, families are the center, in Cain’s world, cities. The partitions grow. The world apart from the presence of the Lord, from the Garden of the Lord, has nothing but the future in potentia. There is no model or microcosm for home, only natural resources for the limitless imagination. The world has lost its essence and all is reduced to utility. Men continue moving forward, telling themselves that the pot filled with gold is bigger than the emptiness they seek to fill. Those futile attempts to fill that inner infinite void, however, has only ever served to keep us “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). The soul made for rest has no recourse for restlessness from within because rest indeed only comes from without. 

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” ~ St. Augustine

This world knows nothing of true rest, though something called rest exists within the grid of utility. Utilitarian rest serves the function of efficiency. Rest is calculated to maximize production. Relationships, too, are calculated accordingly, subsumed within the crowd and therefore entangled in untruth (Kierkegaard). There is no time for eye contact, much less for reflection, contact with one’s self and its host of inner demons. Such is was keeps us so distracted. Men only band together to run from themselves, to build cities, to hide. The world looks progressively less like a Garden. It is too painful to remember the trees, so they built, so we build, concrete gardens. 

 

 

Which God Exists Is More Important than That God Exists

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with persuasive speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” 

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Christians and nonchristians alike have sought to discover or verify the truth of the Christian faith by way of interrogation at least since Pilate’s question—What is truth?—to which Jesus responded with definitive silence. From the theological questions of Nicea to the existential questions of Heidelberg to the philosophical questions of Westminster to the ecclesiological questions of the Vatican to the cosmological and moral and historical questions of modern apologetics, the people of the world have sat with Pilate on the judgment seat to demand a word of truth from God in response to their questions. From its inception the perceived responses have formed and reformed the Church in a never ending dialectic–something like Hegel’s history–sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, sometimes inspired, sometimes not. 

The problem is not the questions or the answers, per se; the problem is that the Church’s understanding of proclamation often finds its grounding in the perceived answers. This never-ending dialectic may be necessary for Christian theology, but it is a never-ending threat to Christian proclamation,  because Christian theology is always tempted to shove aside the Christian kerygma, such that we become accustom to hearing its explicit claims—Christ died for your sins; Christ is risen; Jesus is Lord—in the form of a description, rarely, if ever, in the form of an address. Whatever happened to second-person proclamation? We speak about the death and resurrection of Christ as the climax of the “story” or in a “conversation” about how “Jesus changed my life” or “the world.” We may speak about the claims of the Gospel into a microphone of a public forum or lecture or debate, and we may even do so in a way that anyone so persuaded can reach up and claim our words for themselves. All well and good. My concern, however, is that all the while we may very well be inadvertently teaching people to believe in a Gospel understood as the people’s word about God, not God’s Word to the people. 

The effect is that our descriptions descriptive presentations of the Gospel replace our prophetic role to bring “You!” and “God!” into the same space. We may come to believe in David’s God, but we will not hear David’s God say to us what he said to David, “You are the man!”  (2 Sam. 12:7). Of course, that can quickly be abused, and indeed has, but abrasive and invasive fundamentalism is not the only ditch in which American evangelicals are building their churches. Also, I should be quick to concede, God can surely do whatever God wants to do with our always less-than-adequate Gospel words and syntax, but it seems wise, in terms of a normative method, to align our words with those we’re told the Spirit would ‘give himself to’ in a “demonstration of [his] power,” which is decidedly not a demonstration of our persuasion. Foolishness has an important role in sorting out sources and referents in Christian proclamation.

My concern is not with apologetics as a specialized field, but with the fact that apologetics is no longer a specialized field, that it is becoming normative as a method for evangelism. The foreign language of the academy is becoming the colloquial language of the laity. That the truths of the historic Christian faith are under attack in our culture is as obvious as is unobvious our willingness to allow those truths to set us apart from the culture attacking them.

The threat of this attack has sent our people into frenzy with churches running apologetics workshops and authors pumping out apologetics-for-dummies books and apologetics study Bibles to make sure everyone is armed and ready to defend their God and their Gospel, who and which are apparently under great threat of becoming a stumbling block to Republicans and foolishness to Democrats (e.g., Apologetics Study Bible; The Truth Project; Case for Faith for Kids; Fact or Fantasy: A Study in Christian Apologetics for Children; Evidence for Faith 101: Understanding Apologetics in Plain Language). The Church sees itself in valor trying to guard its treasured faith. The world sees the Church in panic trying to hide its anxious doubt. 

Apologetics, for good or for ill, finds itself in an awkward situation, seeking to be both set apart and welcomed in. It needs to be distinct in conclusion but indistinct in method, to score a touchdown by rounding the bases. This is nothing new among Christian academics. Biblical studies has long been under the methodological lordship of the historical-critical spirit, a spirit which may not have produced many effective evangelists or preachers of the living Word of God, but it sure has led to the discovery of a lot of neat fossils.

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This academic tendency is perfectly natural. Given the inherent foolishness of believing that dead people are not going to stay dead, Christians in the academy wander like black sheep into the scholar’s pasture, awkwardly looking for a way to fit in. And perhaps such a sheep or two needs to be sent to such a pasture to explain their odd color in the foreign language scholars use to talk to each other, but what is not needed is the entire flock frantically attempting or pathetically pretending to understand that language by memorizing a few truncated syllogisms immune to anything but scrutiny. The rest of those decidedly black sheep who insist on speaking that decidedly white language reveal not only that most don’t really seem to know what they are talking about but, more plainly and pathetically, they desperately just want to blend in, to be white like the rest, in an embarrassing inversion of the Church’s original boldness that sounds to the world something like: “I am ashamed of the Gospel, even though it is the power of God for salvation!” (cf., Rom. 1:16). Apologetics has become more loyal to the methods of the “whites” than the conclusion of the “blacks,” a conclusion that remains forever hanging in the imbalance of our age of suspicion.

The current felt-need preoccupation in apologetics has replaced the Church’s enduring often-unfelt-need for education in theology. We have forgotten what most throughout the world and human history have taken for granted: which god(s) exists is infinitely more important than that god(s) exists. The greatest victory in the weak and whimpering trend of the so-called “new atheists” was to send Christians into a panicked frenzy trying to prove that the preexistent God is the exact opposite of the preexistent nothing, making each divisible and definable by the other, leading to a Creator as indistinct as a formless void.

The early apologists were decidedly focused on the task of Christology, setting out to prove that God was the God revealed in Jesus Christ, that is, which God: the eternal Son of the God the Father bound together in the eternal union of the Holy Spirit. They were theologians, and their arguments were conformed to divine revelation, not to the formless calculus of human reason.

Today’s apologists argue that any and every question raised by the skeptics will find their conclusion in the universal answer “God!” All that is required, of course, is that God be abstracted from all his Galilean particularities and generalized into a set of first-principles-with-a-capital-P, concluding with the familiar platitude that “all truth is God’s Truth!” That, of course, is a half-truth, because we should not be so presumptuous to assume that God revealed in Jesus Christ cares to associate himself with everything we call “truth” anymore than he cares to associate himself with everything we call “good,” or “god for that matter. Jesus refused to associate himself with the rich, young ruler’s standard of the “good,” even (or especially) when he judged Jesus favorably by that standard, because “No one is good but God alone,” (Mk. 10:18), and Jesus refuses to associate himself with anyone else’s standard of the Good based on their false notions of God, and of him mere as a “good teacher” (Mk. 10:17). (Wasn’t that the erroneous knowledge and rebellious usurpation of the Fall in the first place? (cf., Gen. 3:1-6)?) No one can judge the Good but alone, declared the God-Man to the mere man who mistook himself as the Judge.

And indeed, “no one is True but God alone.” My hunch is Jesus has a similar reluctance to associate himself with anyone else’s standard of the True as he does the Good. “Let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4). Forcing “God” to fit into the answer of every question posed by the skeptic, regardless of the trajectory to which it points, does not validate the Gospel of God’s Son to the skeptic; it validates the skeptic’s path to whatever god he was pointing to when he asked. Typically, the job of Christ’s witnesses is to demonstrate to skeptics that neither do we believe in the God they don’t believe in, and the only way to do that is to speak of the God revealed in Jesus Christ with the radical particularity of Christ crucified, born in Bethlehem, ministered in Galilee, and murdered in a collusion of Sanhedrin and State outside the gates of Jerusalem.

As a general rule (speaking as a skeptic in recovery), the end of the skeptic’s path will typically either lead you to a very small god or to a very serious insanity. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, the witness only tries to get his head in heavens for a glimpse of the truth, but the skeptic tries to get the heavens into his head to understand the whole truth, and when he does, his head splits. Indeed, Christ has called us his witnesses, not his defenders. Not that any questions are out of the question for believers and unbelievers alike, but those questions should not be confused as maps that can lead anyone to arrive at the conclusion of an encounter with the living God. The truth is, neither the meandering path of the skeptic with all their critical questions nor the one-way path of the gullible with all their blind affirmations can lead either to a conclusion that they could possibly equate with God himself, nor accordingly can our answered questions produce faith itself. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” God comes to us. God comes to us in Christ crucified, as Christ crucified, and only one path leads to Golgotha.

The language of apologetics has to begin on the defensive, an answer, a reactive form of speech. It only speaks when spoken to. It is a response to questions guided by “the god of this world,” in Paul’s words, “who has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). The problem is blindness, at bottom, and the only thing that can help a person see the glory of Christ is the Gospel of Christ, which is the pro-active form of speech the witnesses of Christ have been sent with which to address the world in second-person proclamation. That does not mean it is combative, nor does it have to feel confrontational (though neither does it have to feel non-confrontational or accommodating). Rather, second-person address is the language of relationship. It typically requires eye-contact. It feels personal, because it is personal, and what other form of communication better embodies the Gospel about God’s Word becoming flesh to speak to the world face to face?

Proclamation is address and can only be spoken by the mouths of witnesses. There may be proofs for the existence of God, but, as Abraham Heschel has remarked,  “There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.” Anyone can make an argument for God, but only those who have heard the Word of God—Jesus Christ—from the Word of God—from Jesus Christ—can say, “Thus saith the Lord!” Christians have the terrible responsibility of speaking on behalf of God, and we should relieve ourselves of the crushing burden of saying more than what we’ve been told to say because we’re so deluded to think we can say it more persuasively using the wisdom of our words than the Holy Spirit can using the obedience of our words. We should also recognize why Paul warned us about how our words can get in the way when we fail to trust the Holy Spirit to do the convicting and convincing: “that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:5). As my grandfather used say, “What you win them with is what you win them to.”

Witnesses must speak of God as though he has spoken to them. “Christ crucified,” for example, Paul’s distilled words of foolishness to the sophisticated people of Corinth, are not couched in proofs of the historical Jesus or the persuasive words of Christian apologists. How much time and energy and effort was spent by a generation of Christians engaging in the quests for and the seminars of the historical Jesus to show that a man so named walked the streets in the first century Palestine and ended up on a cross outside Jerusalem. Of course, a few notable Christian scholars contributed soundly to that research and represented the faith well to the academy. But how many were there who went to seminary with a sense of calling only to become pseudo-scholars who in turn misrepresent the faith in the Church and the academy alike?

This continues, naturally, with unspeakable energy and effort pursuing and expounding historical arguments for the resurrection. Something has to account for the rapid expansion of the Christian religion despite the unlikely circumstances of this otherwise failed messiah. How else could one explain the empty tomb, the women as first eyewitnesses, the disciples’ newfound courage, the crowds who witnessed his appearing? And so the arguments go, being held up like links that only need to be yoked together on the causal chain of history. The goal is to make the resurrection of Jesus the best explanation of all existing evidence, despite the millions of years worth of bones beneath the earth that testify against the Defendant and his witnesses. Whether or not the goal is thought to be reached, the result is always the same—to smooth the edges and make all this seem much more reasonable and believable than it really is. And so the truth of God is moved obediently along the chain, in the way men have always moved their subjects along their chains, so that God and God’s ways of making himself known becomes almost natural, mechanical, necessary, expected, and somewhat prosaic. They speak as though via negativa should naturally lead to the Via Dolorosa, no matter the god, no matter the universe. But can I confess—it all still seems to me very strange and unlikely and unexpected and frankly unbelievable. And yet, here I am. I can’t help but believe it, even as I doubt it. And when I doubt it, I always find myself doubting God to his face, because I know no other way to doubt the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

When the resurrection is proven by historical proofs it is thereby buried in a tomb of history. It happened. People can be convinced of that. But the resurrection, which did indeed happen, is proven when the same Spirit “who raised Jesus from the dead” is found to be confronting “you,” in order to “live in you” (Rom. 8:11). People come to believe in the persuasive words of eloquent speech and frankly need no such confrontation, without which they have no such life, because “anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:10). If all our persuasion led all the world will believe in the necessity of God, even the Christian God revealed in salvation history, at best, it seems to me, we would have succeeded in helping both the Church and the world forget how unnecessary were his saving acts, how unexpected it is that he is the God he is. We would forget the foolishness that is the Gospel—that the Lord of Life, in infinite freedom, became smaller than all, slave of all, to subject himself to the great contradiction of a Creator’s defeat, the death of Eternal Life, which in turn reveals precisely the opposite for all who are in Christ Jesus, the beginning new creation, the sharing of eternal life, God’s own life, with mere mortals.

There may be something rational about God creating life, but there surely is nothing rational about life uncreating God. This can never be viewed as the expected wisdom of God, as though that is just what a god should do. It should always maintain a firm grasp on foolishness. It is not a truth that can be expected, explained, or argued like any other truth—but beheld, treasured, and only then humbly proclaimed as something too high for us, something that, if true, has a claim on all those who speak of it and those who hear it. It is so lofty a claim, however foolish, that it cannot be received in the form of an answer to a question or a response to an argument, but as an unexpected visit from an unexpected Visitor, who has come to answer questions no one cared to ask, and perhaps to ask some questions of his own. “The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths…It does not require representatives with a sense of responsibility, for it is as responsible for those who proclaim it as it is for those to whom it is proclaimed. It is the advocate of both…God does not need us. Indeed, if He were not God, He would be ashamed of us. We, at any rate, cannot be ashamed of Him.” The Gospel will offend or enrapture. If we do not let it do the former, we should not expect it to do the latter. It is the supreme work of art that demands all of our love or all of our disgust. It is the image of God in all his beauty and the image of Man in all his gore brought into focus at the intersection of human history that redefines all abstract notions of truth, goodness, and beauty in the gaping face of a Jewish peasant hanging on a Roman cross. Fix your eyes on that, the author and perfect of the universe. You either see his glory or you do not. That is how beauty works.

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The elemental kerygma for Paul had at its nucleus one event that, in its most distilled form, can be stated as three historic facts (two past, one future) which verified one universal fact: (1) Christ died for the forgiveness of our sins; (2) God raised him from the dead; (3) Christ will return in judgment: accordingly, Jesus Christ is Lord. This is corresponds with the work of the “Spirit of truth,” as Jesus referred to him in John 16, whom he would send “to convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn. 16:8), with the proclamation of the apostles, the first witnesses of Christ, in Acts (e.g., Acts 17:30-31), and the summaries of the Gospel in the New Testament epistles (e.g., 1 Cor. 15; Phil. 2). These statements were the starting point for apostolic proclamation. The apostles proclaimed these facts as though they were as concrete and intrusive and unacommodating as Mount Everest, or Mount Sinai, as though the indicatives about their Lord carried with them the imperatives of the Lord of all, so that believing what As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out American Christians have adopted the kind of thinking that produces sentences like: “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.” They have been taught to think like that. The apostles, by contrast, taught and demonstrated a way of speaking that was both loving and compassionate and yet as stark and life-altering as discovering Nepal on the way to China by arriving at the base of the biggest mountain in the world. Apologetics, on the other hand, seeks to make a manageable model of the mountain so that it not seem so intrusive and impassable to the human will, not so massive and objective—so other—that it is unable to accommodate for the size of the human brain. No one walks away from an apologetics conference saying, “Here am I!”, at least not in the way Moses said it.

There’s not a skeptic on this earth who is ever going to ask a question that would lead to the only appropriate answer that our proclamation is intended to communicate. Unless someone asks Who is my Lord and when is he coming to judge me and my family and friends? or something to that effect, you should probably expect to be offering answers, again, to questions nobody is asking. To the degree those answers are not being offered, Christians are forgetting how to speak the Gospel in the form of indicatives and imperatives proper to an announcement of the world’s Lord, which are binding on hearer and speaker alike. Nobody tries to convince people of election results (well…until recently at least) or a bill that passes into law. There are some things that just are. The only role we have in providing evidence of Christ’s lordship [and thus his return] is our light, that is, our way of life under his lordship (cf. Matt. 5-7), but it’s easier to argue, isn’t it?

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The truth is this. To bear witness to Jesus Christ requires both an affirmation and an announcement of an apparent contradiction. God was not oblivious to this design. He chose a Roman cross, for Christ’s sake! God set up it up so that the contradiction would have to run its course before it can do the work of drawing people back in. We must first look away only to realize we cannot look away. We must be repulsed by Christ’s death only to be seduced by it. We must see who God is in Christ, so that we can see decisively who God is not in us. We must first see the infinitive qualitative distinction of Christ crucified in order to see the infinite qualitative beauty of Christ crucified. We must behold the One lifted up as we behold the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as an unattainable spectacle of impossible grandeur, as something that is kept from our reach but given to our eyes, as something so absolutely alien but somehow so absolutely at home.

Insofar as we can cultivate a vision to see Jesus as he is, I suppose it beings by learning to handle the truth of God’s Word by submitting to his judgments alone of what is good–which comes to us in the form of commands for how to live and how to speak–only then should we expect to be able to more clearly behold the beauty of God but that through our lives and speech others might be caught up in it as well. Without overcoming the blindness to his beauty, we should never expect anyone to overcome their deafness to his truth. But we cannot run to the academy for proofs of God’s beauty, because, in Von Balthasar’s words, “Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.” 

If the Church’s concern is not only to proclaim the Gospel to the world, but that the world embrace its Gospel, we must avail ourselves of more than, or rather other than, a defense of scientific and historic and philosophical arguments, even more than just our way of life under his lordship (which can all too quickly become self-referential). We must learn to always point away from ourselves into the infinite and declare a deep mystery, a contradiction. We must build into our understanding of proclamation a gap, so that we never assume a direct correlation between what we say and how people respond, so that we never assume that our words are enough. We should never feel confident explaining exactly why we believe, with certainty like a mathematic formula. We should find ourselves in a very real sense at a loss for words, as though someone had asked you to explain why you stop to look out to the horizon at sunset? How could you explain that? “Well, it’s the lines and the colors and the shades and…I don’t know! It’s just beautiful! Can’t you see?”

Apologetics can stick around for Christians who are curious to know if the foolishness of God has some points of contact with the wisdom of men. Surely it does. Surely, in the end, it is more foolish to believe in any unified theory of reality without reference to a transcendent ground of being. Surely it is more foolish to believe there is no higher intelligence responsible for the universe and love and laughter and Mozart than Mozart, than us. And perhaps for the nonchristian the apologist can show that there are links that point to heaven, even some that reach much higher than the nonchristian ever imagined. But he must never do so without pointing to the gap. He must always concede that his highest link on the chain of reason is like the distance between the highest title wave and the moon. But then, for all lack of appearances, and in an act of self-humiliation, he must proclaim that there was a day that the moon came down and drown itself in the sea, only to return three days hence to rule the night sky.

But he should not expect that he can prove this actually happened. He should not pretend it is not a foolish story. More foolish still, he must concede that he was not even there when it happened, and yet proclaim it as though he witnessed it himself, because he did witness it himself. It is such an absurd story indeed that when one does believe it, it will be nothing short of a miracle, and his faith will not rest in the wisdom of men but this miracle of God (cf. 1 Cor. 1-2). He will only believe it because he cannot get the vision of it out of his head, because it is in his head in a way unlike any other fleeting idea or fact or truth is in his head. It is in his head not like people are in an airport but like busyness is in an airport. He will only believe because he cannot help but believe it, because it has taken up residence in his mind, wrapped its roots around his heart, and sprouted hope in his eyes. It will change the way he sees everything, and this new vision will seem so necessary, so beautiful, that he will want others to see as he sees, not because it makes him feel so large and in control, but precisely because it makes him feel so small and out of control; precisely because it has restored for him a vision of the wonder and mystery that he had as a child tromping around in an infinitely large and wonderful world; precisely because he has again become a child. So he will tell others, not as a man with a unified theory of the universe, but as a child pointing aimlessly into the night sky. He will begin by conceding the great gap between the end of his finger and the beginning of the moon, and continue by declaring what he saw, all the while praying a naïve prayer, as naïve as a child’s birthday wish, that the moon would once again descend from the heavens and land in the abyss of another’s heart.

The gap of Christian proclamation is the ether through which God travels in an atmosphere of otherwise eclipsed and clouded by godless, human wisdom. It is the only place where a person will see the “demonstration of the Spirit’s power,” so attending to the gap is the only way the Church’s words will ever become God’s Word. Truth and goodness are two of the pillars holding up a triune proclamation, a proclamation that falls into description if it tries to stand on two legs. If we lose the beauty of the gap, we lose the vision of the God who arrests our affections, awakens our adoration, and fills in the dark, stagnant corners of our faith with the living, warming radiance of his glory, which is the aspect of God we understand the least but compels us the most. It is the aspect of God that the Church has largely exchanged for Enlightenment.

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The following excerpt is from a letter that Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote to Natalia Fonvizina, who had given him a copy of the New Testament before he would spend four years in chains. In it is perhaps the truest expression of what faith in the gap looks like. I suspect it will offend those who have made an idol out of their notion of truth. Whatever else Truth may be, it can never be a predicate of a sentence or series of sentences spoken by human subjects. Those who think otherwise simply have not grappled with the mystery of the infinite. My hope and prayer for the Church of Jesus Christ today is that no matter how well we are able to articulate the Christian faith to the satisfaction of our own skepticism and that of others, we will at the end of the day, as we watch the sun set, be more readily able to confess that the gap between our articulation and the beginning of God is an infinitely beautiful gap, a gap that only God can cross, and that crossed he has, cross he does, and cross he will again. Indeed: Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!

“I shall tell you that at such a time one thirsts for faith as ‘the withered grass’ thirsts for water, and one actually finds it, because in misfortune the truth shines through. I can tell you about myself that I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have always been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin. What terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it. And, despite all this, God sends me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others; and it was during such a moment that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is clear and sacred for me. This symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be. Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ than with the truth.”

Which God Exists Is More Important than That God Exists

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with persuasive speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” 

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Christians and nonchristians alike have sought to discover or verify the truth of the Christian faith by way of interrogation at least since Pilate’s question—What is truth?—to which Jesus responded with definitive silence. From the theological questions of Nicea to the existential questions of Heidelberg to the philosophical questions of Westminster to the ecclesiological questions of the Vatican to the cosmological and moral and historical questions of modern apologetics, the people of the world have sat with Pilate on the judgment seat to demand a word of truth from God in response to their questions. From its inception the perceived responses have formed and reformed the Church in a never ending dialectic–something like Hegel’s history–sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, sometimes inspired, sometimes not. 

The problem is not the questions or the answers, per se; the problem is that the Church’s understanding of proclamation often finds its grounding in the perceived answers. This never-ending dialectic may be necessary for Christian theology, but it is a never-ending threat to Christian proclamation,  because Christian theology is always tempted to shove aside the Christian kerygma, such that we become accustom to hearing its explicit claims—Christ died for your sins; Christ is risen; Jesus is Lord—in the form of a description, rarely, if ever, in the form of an address. Whatever happened to second-person proclamation? We speak about the death and resurrection of Christ as the climax of the “story” or in a “conversation” about how “Jesus changed my life” or “the world.” We may speak about the claims of the Gospel into a microphone of a public forum or lecture or debate, and we may even do so in a way that anyone so persuaded can reach up and claim our words for themselves. All well and good. My concern, however, is that all the while we may very well be inadvertently teaching people to believe in a Gospel understood as the people’s word about God, not God’s Word to the people. 

The effect is that our descriptions descriptive presentations of the Gospel replace our prophetic role to bring “You!” and “God!” into the same space. We may come to believe in David’s God, but we will not hear David’s God say to us what he said to David, “You are the man!”  (2 Sam. 12:7). Of course, that can quickly be abused, and indeed has, but abrasive and invasive fundamentalism is not the only ditch in which American evangelicals are building their churches. Also, I should be quick to concede, God can surely do whatever God wants to do with our always less-than-adequate Gospel words and syntax, but it seems wise, in terms of a normative method, to align our words with those we’re told the Spirit would ‘give himself to’ in a “demonstration of [his] power,” which is decidedly not a demonstration of our persuasion. Foolishness has an important role in sorting out sources and referents in Christian proclamation.

My concern is not with apologetics as a specialized field, but with the fact that apologetics is no longer a specialized field, that it is becoming normative as a method for evangelism. The foreign language of the academy is becoming the colloquial language of the laity. That the truths of the historic Christian faith are under attack in our culture is as obvious as is unobvious our willingness to allow those truths to set us apart from the culture attacking them.

The threat of this attack has sent our people into frenzy with churches running apologetics workshops and authors pumping out apologetics-for-dummies books and apologetics study Bibles to make sure everyone is armed and ready to defend their God and their Gospel, who and which are apparently under great threat of becoming a stumbling block to Republicans and foolishness to Democrats (e.g., Apologetics Study Bible; The Truth Project; Case for Faith for Kids; Fact or Fantasy: A Study in Christian Apologetics for Children; Evidence for Faith 101: Understanding Apologetics in Plain Language). The Church sees itself in valor trying to guard its treasured faith. The world sees the Church in panic trying to hide its anxious doubt. 

Apologetics, for good or for ill, finds itself in an awkward situation, seeking to be both set apart and welcomed in. It needs to be distinct in conclusion but indistinct in method, to score a touchdown by rounding the bases. This is nothing new among Christian academics. Biblical studies has long been under the methodological lordship of the historical-critical spirit, a spirit which may not have produced many effective evangelists or preachers of the living Word of God, but it sure has led to the discovery of a lot of neat fossils.

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This academic tendency is perfectly natural. Given the inherent foolishness of believing that dead people are not going to stay dead, Christians in the academy wander like black sheep into the scholar’s pasture, awkwardly looking for a way to fit in. And perhaps such a sheep or two needs to be sent to such a pasture to explain their odd color in the foreign language scholars use to talk to each other, but what is not needed is the entire flock frantically attempting or pathetically pretending to understand that language by memorizing a few truncated syllogisms immune to anything but scrutiny. The rest of those decidedly black sheep who insist on speaking that decidedly white language reveal not only that most don’t really seem to know what they are talking about but, more plainly and pathetically, they desperately just want to blend in, to be white like the rest, in an embarrassing inversion of the Church’s original boldness that sounds to the world something like: “I am ashamed of the Gospel, even though it is the power of God for salvation!” (cf., Rom. 1:16). Apologetics has become more loyal to the methods of the “whites” than the conclusion of the “blacks,” a conclusion that remains forever hanging in the imbalance of our age of suspicion.

The current felt-need preoccupation in apologetics has replaced the Church’s enduring often-unfelt-need for education in theology. We have forgotten what most throughout the world and human history have taken for granted: which god(s) exists is infinitely more important than that god(s) exists. The greatest victory in the weak and whimpering trend of the so-called “new atheists” was to send Christians into a panicked frenzy trying to prove that the preexistent God is the exact opposite of the preexistent nothing, making each divisible and definable by the other, leading to a Creator as indistinct as a formless void.

The early apologists were decidedly focused on the task of Christology, setting out to prove that God was the God revealed in Jesus Christ, that is, which God: the eternal Son of the God the Father bound together in the eternal union of the Holy Spirit. They were theologians, and their arguments were conformed to divine revelation, not to the formless calculus of human reason.

Today’s apologists argue that any and every question raised by the skeptics will find their conclusion in the universal answer “God!” All that is required, of course, is that God be abstracted from all his Galilean particularities and generalized into a set of first-principles-with-a-capital-P, concluding with the familiar platitude that “all truth is God’s Truth!” That, of course, is a half-truth, because we should not be so presumptuous to assume that God revealed in Jesus Christ cares to associate himself with everything we call “truth” anymore than he cares to associate himself with everything we call “good,” or “god for that matter. Jesus refused to associate himself with the rich, young ruler’s standard of the “good,” even (or especially) when he judged Jesus favorably by that standard, because “No one is good but God alone,” (Mk. 10:18), and Jesus refuses to associate himself with anyone else’s standard of the Good based on their false notions of God, and of him mere as a “good teacher” (Mk. 10:17). (Wasn’t that the erroneous knowledge and rebellious usurpation of the Fall in the first place? (cf., Gen. 3:1-6)?) No one can judge the Good but alone, declared the God-Man to the mere man who mistook himself as the Judge.

And indeed, “no one is True but God alone.” My hunch is Jesus has a similar reluctance to associate himself with anyone else’s standard of the True as he does the Good. “Let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4). Forcing “God” to fit into the answer of every question posed by the skeptic, regardless of the trajectory to which it points, does not validate the Gospel of God’s Son to the skeptic; it validates the skeptic’s path to whatever god he was pointing to when he asked. Typically, the job of Christ’s witnesses is to demonstrate to skeptics that neither do we believe in the God they don’t believe in, and the only way to do that is to speak of the God revealed in Jesus Christ with the radical particularity of Christ crucified, born in Bethlehem, ministered in Galilee, and murdered in a collusion of Sanhedrin and State outside the gates of Jerusalem.

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As a general rule (speaking as a skeptic in recovery), the end of the skeptic’s path will typically either lead you to a very small god or to a very serious insanity. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, the witness only tries to get his head in heavens for a glimpse of the truth, but the skeptic tries to get the heavens into his head to understand the whole truth, and when he does, his head splits. Indeed, Christ has called us his witnesses, not his defenders.

Not that any questions are out of the question for believers and unbelievers alike, but those questions should not be confused as maps that can lead anyone to arrive at the conclusion of an encounter with the living God. The truth is, neither the meandering path of the skeptic with all their critical questions nor the one-way path of the gullible with all their blind affirmations can lead to a conclusion that could possibly be equated with the living God himself. Nor accordingly can any conceivable answer to every conceivable question produce faith in the living God. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” God can only be heard as God when God as God speaks. God comes to us in Christ, we hear, faith is born. Only God can reconcile us to God. Indeed, God comes to us in Christ crucified, as Christ crucified, and only the path he left us in that earthward journey and back, by way of Golgotha, leads us crosswisely heavenward.

The language of apologetics has to begin on the defensive, an answer, a reactive form of speech. It only speaks when spoken to. It is a response to questions guided by “the god of this world,” in Paul’s words, “who has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). The problem is blindness, at bottom, and the only thing that can help a person see the glory of Christ is the Gospel of Christ, which is the pro-active form of speech the witnesses of Christ have been sent with which to address the world in second-person proclamation. That does not mean it is combative, nor does it have to feel confrontational (though neither does it have to feel non-confrontational or accommodating). Rather, second-person address is the language of relationship. It typically requires eye-contact. It feels personal, because it is personal, and what other form of communication better embodies the Gospel about God’s Word becoming flesh to speak to the world face to face?

Proclamation is address and can only be spoken by the mouths of witnesses. There may be proofs for the existence of God, but, as Abraham Heschel has remarked,  “There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.” Anyone can make an argument for God, but only those who have heard the Word of God—Jesus Christ—from the Word of God—from Jesus Christ—can say, “Thus saith the Lord!” Christians have the terrible responsibility of speaking on behalf of God, and we should relieve ourselves of the crushing burden of saying more than what we’ve been told to say because we’re so deluded to think we can say it more persuasively using the wisdom of our words than the Holy Spirit can using the obedience of our words. We should also recognize why Paul warned us about how our words can get in the way when we fail to trust the Holy Spirit to do the convicting and convincing: “that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:5). As my grandfather used say, “What you win them with is what you win them to.”

Witnesses must speak of God as though he has spoken to them. “Christ crucified,” for example, Paul’s distilled words of foolishness to the sophisticated people of Corinth, are not couched in proofs of the historical Jesus or the persuasive words of Christian apologists. How much time and energy and effort was spent by a generation of Christians engaging in the quests for and the seminars of the historical Jesus to show that a man so named walked the streets in the first century Palestine and ended up on a cross outside Jerusalem. Of course, a few notable Christian scholars contributed soundly to that research and represented the faith well to the academy. But how many were there who went to seminary with a sense of calling only to become pseudo-scholars who in turn misrepresent the faith in the Church and the academy alike?

This continues, naturally, with unspeakable energy and effort pursuing and expounding historical arguments for the resurrection. Something has to account for the rapid expansion of the Christian religion despite the unlikely circumstances of this otherwise failed messiah. How else could one explain the empty tomb, the women as first eyewitnesses, the disciples’ newfound courage, the crowds who witnessed his appearing? And so the arguments go, being held up like links that only need to be yoked together on the causal chain of history. The goal is to make the resurrection of Jesus the best explanation of all existing evidence, despite the millions of years worth of bones beneath the earth that testify against the Defendant and his witnesses. Whether or not the goal is thought to be reached, the result is always the same—to smooth the edges and make all this seem much more reasonable and believable than it really is.

And so the truth of God is moved obediently along the chain, in the way men have always moved their subjects along their chains, so that God and God’s ways of making himself known becomes almost natural, mechanical, necessary, expected, and somewhat prosaic. They speak as though via negativa should naturally lead to the Via Dolorosa, no matter the god, no matter the universe. But can I confess—it all still seems to me very strange and unlikely and unexpected and frankly unbelievable. And yet, here I am. I can’t help but believe it, even as I doubt it. And when I doubt it, I always find myself doubting God to his face, because I know no other way to doubt the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

When the resurrection is proven by historical proofs it is thereby buried in a tomb of history. It happened. People can be convinced of that. But the resurrection, which did indeed happen, is proven when the same Spirit “who raised Jesus from the dead” is found to be confronting “you,” in order to “live in you” (Rom. 8:11). People come to believe in the persuasive words of eloquent speech and frankly need no such confrontation, without which they have no such life, because “anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:10). If all our persuasion led all the world will believe in the necessity of God, even the Christian God revealed in salvation history, at best, it seems to me, we would have succeeded in helping both the Church and the world forget how unnecessary were his saving acts, how unexpected it is that he is the God he is. We would forget the foolishness that is the Gospel—that the Lord of Life, in infinite freedom, became smaller than all, slave of all, to subject himself to the great contradiction of a Creator’s defeat, the death of Eternal Life, which in turn reveals precisely the opposite for all who are in Christ Jesus, the beginning of new creation, the sharing of eternal life, God’s own life, with mere mortals.

There may be something rational about God creating life, but there surely is nothing rational about life uncreating God. This can never be viewed as the expected wisdom of God, as though that is just what a god should do. It should always maintain a firm grasp on foolishness. It is not a truth that can be expected, explained, or argued like any other truth—but beheld, treasured, and only then humbly proclaimed as something too high for us, something that, if true, has a claim on all those who speak of it and those who hear it. It is so lofty a claim, however foolish, that it cannot be received in the form of an answer to a question or a response to an argument, but as an unexpected visit from an unexpected Visitor, who has come to answer questions no one cared to ask, and perhaps to ask some questions of his own.

“The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths…It does not require representatives with a sense of responsibility, for it is as responsible for those who proclaim it as it is for those to whom it is proclaimed. It is the advocate of both…God does not need us. Indeed, if He were not God, He would be ashamed of us. We, at any rate, cannot be ashamed of Him” (Barth, Romans). The Gospel will offend or enrapture. If we do not let it do the former, we should not expect it to do the latter. It is the supreme work of art that demands all of our love or all of our disgust. It is the image of God in all his beauty and the image of Man in all his gore brought into focus at the intersection of human history that redefines all abstract notions of truth, goodness, and beauty in the gaping face of a Jewish peasant hanging on a Roman cross. Fix your eyes on that, the author and perfecter of a fallen universe. You either see his glory or you do not. That is how beauty works. And if Beauty, so too Goodness, and how on earth can we speak of anything like a unified Truth without the whole of its heart and the glory that calls us to it?

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The elemental kerygma for Paul had at its nucleus one event that, in its most distilled form, can be stated as three historic facts (two past, one future) which verified one universal fact: (1) Christ died for the forgiveness of our sins; (2) God raised him from the dead; (3) Christ will return in judgment: accordingly, Jesus Christ is Lord. This is corresponds with the work of the “Spirit of truth,” as Jesus referred to him in John 16, whom he would send “to convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn. 16:8), with the proclamation of the apostles, the first witnesses of Christ, in Acts (e.g., Acts 17:30-31), and the summaries of the Gospel in the New Testament epistles (e.g., 1 Cor. 15; Phil. 2).

These statements were the starting point for apostolic proclamation. The apostles proclaimed these facts as though they were as concrete and intrusive and unaccommodating as Mount Everest, or Mount Sinai, as though the indicatives about their Lord carried with them the imperatives of the Lord of all, so that believing which God Christ revealed determined which life all were called to live in preparation for the coming judgment. American Christianity has led to Christians who, as Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out, can produce sentences, without irony, like: “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.” They have been taught to think like that.

The apostles, by contrast, taught and demonstrated a way of speaking that was both loving and compassionate and yet as stark and life-altering as discovering Nepal on the way to China by arriving at the base of the biggest mountain in the world. Apologetics, on the other hand, seeks to make a manageable model of the mountain so that it not seem so intrusive and impassable to the human will, not so massive and objective—so Other—that it is unable to accommodate for the size of the human brain. No one walks away from an apologetics conference saying, “Here am I!”, at least not in the way Abraham and Moses and Samuel and Isaiah said it.

There’s not a skeptic on this earth who is ever going to ask a question that would lead to the only appropriate answer that our proclamation is intended to communicate. Unless someone asks Who is my Lord and when is he coming to judge me and my family and friends? or something to that effect, you should probably expect to be offering answers, again, to questions nobody is asking. To the degree those answers are not being offered, Christians are forgetting how to speak the Gospel in the form of indicatives and imperatives proper to an announcement of the world’s Lord, which are binding on hearer and speaker alike. Nobody tries to convince people of election results (well…until recently at least) or a bill that passes into law. There are some things that just are. The only role we have in providing evidence of Christ’s lordship [and thus his return] is our light, that is, our way of life under his lordship (cf. Matt. 5-7), but I suppose it’s a hell of a lot easier to argue rational proofs, is it not?

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The truth is this: to bear witness to Jesus Christ requires both an affirmation and an announcement of an apparent contradiction. God was not oblivious to this design. He chose a Roman cross, for Christ’s sake! God set up it up so that the contradiction would have to run its course before it can do the work of drawing people back in. We must first look away only to realize we cannot look away. We must be repulsed by Christ’s death only to be seduced by it. We must see who God is in Christ, so that we can see decisively who God is not in us. We must first see the infinitive qualitative distinction of Christ crucified in order to see the infinite qualitative beauty of Christ crucified. We must behold the One lifted up as we behold the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as an unattainable spectacle of impossible grandeur, as something that is kept from our reach but given to our eyes, as something so absolutely alien but somehow so absolutely at home.

Insofar as we can cultivate a vision to see Jesus as he is, I suppose it begins by learning to handle the truth of God’s Word by submitting to his judgments alone of what is good—which comes to us in the form of commands for how to think and speak and live, which comes to us, that is, by way of repentance—only then should we expect to be able to more clearly behold the beauty of God in Christ, and so be able to more clearly speak, truly, as Christ’s witnesses, as those through whose lives shine like the face of the descending Moses and whose words burn like the heat from Isaiah’s lips. Without overcoming blindness to his beauty, we should never expect anyone to overcome deafness to his truth. But we cannot run to the academy for proofs of God’s beauty, because, in von Balthasar’s words, “Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another” (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, I: Seeing the Form).  

If the Church’s concern is not only to proclaim the Gospel to the world, but that the world embrace its Gospel, we must avail ourselves of more than, or other than, a defense of scientific and historic and philosophical arguments, even more than just our way of life under his lordship (which can all too quickly become self-referential). We must learn to always point away from ourselves in all our methodological and rhetorical sophistication out toward the infinite horizon and declare a deep mystery, a contradiction. We must build into our understanding of proclamation a gap in proportion to that mystery, so that we never assume a direct correlation between what we say and how people respond, so that we never assume that true Gospel words and a true Gospel response travel back and forth on an unmediated horizontal plane. A triangulation is necessary and the third coordinate, unlike a satellite orbiting the earth, is the transcendent One beyond the universe who sets all suns and planets into its orbit around the Word that holds all immanence together by his own creative power. When the Gospel is spoken and the Gospel is heard: new creation!

We should never feel confident, therefore, explaining exactly why we believe what we believe, with certainty like that of a mathematic formula. We should find ourselves in a very real sense at a loss for words, as a man asked to explain what he sees in the face of his daughter or why he stopped to look out to the horizon at sunset? Well…it my daughter. I..Do you have children?” “I stopped, because…the colors, the sense of the day’s completion…the…I don’t know! It’s just beautiful! Can’t you see?!”

Apologetics can stick around for Christians who are curious to know if the foolishness of God has some points of contact with the wisdom of men. Surely it does. Surely, in the end, it is more foolish to believe in any unified theory of reality without reference to a transcendent ground of being. Surely it is more foolish to believe there is no higher intelligence responsible for the universe and love and laughter and Mozart than Mozart and the rest us. And perhaps for the nonchristian the apologist can show that there are links that point to heaven, even some that reach much higher than the nonchristian ever imagined. But he must never do so without pointing to the gap. He must always concede that the highest link on his chain of reason is like the distance between the highest title wave and the moon. But then, for all lack of appearances, and in an act of self-humiliation, he must proclaim that there was a day that the moon descended from on high and drown itself in the heart of the sea, only to return three days hence to rule the night sky.

But he should not expect that he can prove this actually happened. He should not pretend it is not a foolish story. More foolish still, he must concede that he was not even there when it happened and yet still proclaim it as though he witnessed it himself, because he did witness it himself. It is such an absurd story indeed that when one does believe it, it will be nothing short of a miracle, and his faith will not rest in the wisdom of men but this miracle of God (cf. 1 Cor. 1-2). He will only believe it because he cannot get the vision of it out of his head, because it is in his head in a way no other idea or fact or truth is fleeting and flittering in his head. It is in his head not like people are in an airport, just passing through, but like busyness is forever in an airport. God will be an abiding presence in his consciousness (proven as much by his need to willfully ignore him when he wants to be left alone as by his need to seek him when he wants to be found) to such an extent that he will come to think of himself as an abiding presence in God’s own infinite consciousness, which is to say, God’s own life, the one “in whom [he] lives and moves and has [his] being” (Acts 17).

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
 If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
    I awake, and I am still with you.”
—Psalm 139:17-18

He will only believe because he cannot help but believe it, because faith has taken up residence in his mind, wrapped its roots around his heart, and sprouted hope in his eyes. It will change the way he sees everything, and this new vision will seem so necessary, so beautiful, that he will want others to see as he sees, not because it makes him feel so large and in control, but precisely because it makes him feel so small and out of control; precisely because it has restored for him a vision of the wonder and mystery that he had as a child tromping around in an infinitely large and wonderful world; precisely because he has again become a child.

So he will tell others, not as a man with a unified theory of the universe, but as a child pointing aimlessly into the night sky, not with great confidence but with great delight. He will begin by conceding the great gap between the end of his finger and the beginning of the moon, and continue by declaring what he saw, all the while praying a naïve prayer, as naïve as a child’s birthday wish, that the moon would once again descend from the heavens and land in the abyss of another’s heart.

Christian proclamation does not begin with a man who speaks because he thinks he’s right about Jesus and others are wrong about him. That’s just not the point. He speaks because he thinks Jesus is beautiful and eagerly wants others to see in him what he sees, like a man who eagerly wants his son-in-law to see in his daughter what he sees. For similar reasons, therefore, his vision of Jesus will at times come with the greatest of heartaches, the kind of heartache that is felt the day the most splendrous sunset begins to fall into your vision, but you’ve no time to find someone to share it with; the kind of heartache the anxious museum curator feels as he begins fumbling over desperate words trying to capture the attention of a distracted group of teenagers, who at some point will have to realize that nothing can persuade a person to see Beauty but Beauty itself; the kind of heartache the father feels as he sits with his daughter the day after the divorce, weeping with her, weeping for her. Love weeps.

The gap of Christian proclamation is the infinite ether through which God travels in an atmosphere otherwise eclipsed and clouded by godless, human wisdom. This distance of this gap is precisely the same distance as sight is from the blind. The world is blind to the glory of Jesus because “the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers” (2 Cor. 4:4), and the Gospel of Jesus is the only concrete means God has prescribed for us to see their eyes opened:  “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:5-6).

Thus, we tend the gap with all attention to our faithfulness to the Gospel with an unapologetic indifference to itching ears. That’s not to suggest inattention to practical considerations for effective communication, only to suggest that effectiveness is only conceivably measurable to the extent the Gospel is heard, not to the extent the hearers were pleased or impressed or delighted (or whatever) by what they heard, and unfortunately our only objective measure for what gets heard is what gets said. So attention to theology must remain our unapologetic apologetics.

Attending the theological gap is the only way the Church’s words will ever become God’s Word. We tend to the gap like an artist describing his painting to his blind friend, praying for a miracle that the vision formed within his mind would become visible to his sight without, praying for a “demonstration of the Spirit’s power,” praying for beauty the beheld to become the beauty they both could behold. Truth and goodness are two of the pillars holding up a triune proclamation, a proclamation that falls into godless descriptions caged within the immanent frame of human reason if it tries to stand on its own two legs. If we lose the beauty of the gap, the freedom of God’s love to shine forth in our foolish proclamation, we lose the vision of the God who arrests our affections, awakens our adoration, and fills in the dark, stagnant corners of our faith with the living, warming radiance of his glory, which is the aspect of God we understand the least but compels us the most. It is the aspect of God that the Church has largely exchanged for Enlightenment, the glory of God for images resembling mortal men and beasts alike, virtually and almost genetically identical, in fact.

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The following excerpt is from a letter that Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote to Natalia Fonvizina, who had given him a copy of the New Testament before he would spend four years in chains. In it is perhaps the truest expression of what faith in the gap looks like. I suspect it will offend those who have made an idol out of their notion of truth. Whatever else Truth may be, it can never be a predicate of a sentence or series of sentences spoken by human subjects. Those who think otherwise simply have not grappled with the mystery of the infinite. My hope and prayer for the Church of Jesus Christ today is that no matter how well we are able to articulate the Christian faith to the satisfaction of our own skepticism and that of others, we will at the end of the day, as we watch the sun set, be more readily able to confess that the gap between our articulation and the beginning of God is an infinitely beautiful gap, a gap that only God can cross, and that crossed he has, cross he does, and cross he will again. Indeed: Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!

“I shall tell you that at such a time one thirsts for faith as ‘the withered grass’ thirsts for water, and one actually finds it, because in misfortune the truth shines through. I can tell you about myself that I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have always been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin. What terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it. And, despite all this, God sends me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others; and it was during such a moment that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is clear and sacred for me. This symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be. Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ than with the truth” (Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky).

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“And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, ‘Behold, this child will be laid down for the fall and the rising of many, and for a sign that is opposed, (and a sword will pierce your own soul also), so that the thoughts from many hearts may be revealed” (Lk. 2:34-35). 

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The baby was born. They called him James.

There’s not much to say about James. He doesn’t say much about himself in the letter he left for us. The only other thing the Bible says about James is that he was the brother of Jesus (Gal. 1:19). All we get from Church history about James is in fragments, no cohesive narrative. A guy named Hegesippus called him James the Just. It stuck.

But it’s no surprise there’s not much to say about James, because all that is said of him is said under the shadow of his big Brother. James the Just, brother of Jesus the Judge, born in the shadow of the Savior. A hard act to follow.

I wonder if Mary felt guilty. She was found to be with child, again, but not by the Holy Spirit again. This time by plain ol’ unholy Joe. This child surely would not be so godly as her First. I wonder if she felt guilty before James was born, knowing that she could not love her soon-to-be newborn son as much as her Firstborn (of all Creation)?

But even more than that, I wonder if she felt guilty after he was born. I wonder if she felt guilty when she realized that she loved her second-born just as much.

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I remember when we were expecting our firstborn. All Keldy thought about was the baby. She loved him in I suppose the way only a mother can love an unborn child. I on the other hand felt guilty. I could not relate. For those nine months my reaction to her pregnancy was a kind of surprised “Oh yeah…”, coupled with a nagging fear that I wasn’t going to love him like a father is supposed to love his son. I literally feared that I would love my dogs more than my son. Babies just hadn’t been all that impressive to me, because I am not a woman. The honest men out there know what I’m talking about. Women have no clue.

Except for maybe Mary. Mary knows. Mary had, after all, held at her bosom the one who came from the bosom of God the Father (Jn. 1:18). Mary had indeed “kissed the face of God.” But this second-born would be just another face in the shadow of the Almighty. Mary wasn’t yet used to having children who weren’t God. And middle children already have a syndrome named after them, but what of the one that comes second to the Savior of the world. Mary knows.

When Kezek was born, I started treating my dogs like dogs. I loved my firstborn so intensely that I was afraid I loved him more than God. I was afraid that if anything were to happen to him I would hate God. That fear lingers.

When Keldy told me we were expecting again, I was doubly guilty and doubly afraid. Not only did I love my firstborn more than or as much as God, now I feared that I would not love my second-born as much as my firstborn, perhaps only as much as the dogs.

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The baby was born. We called him Levi Ryser. There was no sound. He was blue. The voices of the people in white raised an octave. They stopped looking us in the eye. They were looking at some protocol that was visible only to those who knew some unspoken “code.” Ryser needed decoded.

The doctor handed him to me to carry as I was paced at an uncomfortable pace en route to the NICU. It seemed far too much like a formality for my first embrace of my second-born son, like it was a consolation, a mere gesture, the beginning of some process necessary for some Contingency Plan Z. It felt like I was greeting my newborn son with a goodbye. 

There are no words here that will do.

I held him as close to my heart as humanly possible. I tried to hold him as close to my heart as humanly impossible, or as inhumanly possible. I tried to pour my life into his. I tried to empty myself to fill him up. I tried to breath for him. I wanted to cut out my heart and put it into his body. I wanted to die so I could raise him from the dead. Anything. Just please…

I think that was the first day I ever actually interceded for someone. I beat on heaven’s door like one of those old grandmothers who’s earned the right to act that way. I was pleading, then I was demanding, then I was crying. I had felt the joy of a father’s love with my firstborn but with my second-born I was brushing up against the prospect of a father’s grief. I was feeling the very sharp other edge of love for the first time. I learned that day something about the sword Simeon told Mary about (Lk. 2:35). 

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Four days later, he was stable. Over those four days I started to understand what I suppose Mary had come to understand with her second-born: that the love of God and the love of a son are not two separate loves. The sword that pierced Mary’s heart and the spear that pierced her Son’s were felt first in the love that was laid at the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). God is love in a very nounish sense, like the nounish sense of the word creation or the Word Incarnation. Mary couldn’t compare her love for Jesus with her love for James, because her love for James came from the life of Jesus. There is no love apart from that Life. Indeed, there is no life apart from that Love. If it is in God that we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), then Love is the ether of all our relationships. To love is merely an act of alignment.

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His name has become more fitting than I had intended. Levi Ryser means, by my assignment, death and resurrection, or offering and acceptance, or more simply “Gift of God” (with the intentionally ambiguous genitive). It is the second-born of Mary, after all, by whom we discover ourselves, since we all are second-born of the dead. We discover that unto us a Child is born, to us a Son is given, in order to restore love to its proper form, that we might love our own as we love God, because he loves us as though we were his own. That is the meaning of yesterday’s Birthday and therefore every birthday in the light of its shadow.

Levi was born on the altar, where all gifts are born. He was born without breath, blue. But while he was yet unknown and unknowing, en route to the NICU, he was already being born in the bosom of his father. I think in that moment, if for only that moment, I understood Mary. I think I understood something about motherhood that day. I understood what it was like to carry a life that could not carry itself apart from my own. I understood what it was like to carry life with a sense that if one dies, we all die, if one lives, we all live. I think I learned something about being the Mother of God that day. I’m certain I learned something about being a father that day, maybe even something about being a Son.

We had decided to call him Ryser before he was born. But Levi was Ryser before he was born. He was raised in his mother’s heart for nine months. And he was raised in his father’s for four days. He is now growing up in both. And all this is from God, because he has been raised from eternity in the heart of Love. And my only plea for his life is that through our feeble hands he will continue to be held in that Love. God, help us.

Ryser is our number two, but he is loved just as much as the Firstborn, even if he was born in His shadow, even if we did use leftover nativity scene wrapping paper for his birthday presents this year.

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Happy Birthday, Ryser. You are loved with an everlasting love, my son.

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of man take refuge in the shadow of your wings.” 

~ Psalm 36:7

An excerpt from The Magnificat: Mary’s Song of Praise

“And his mercy is for those who fear him
    from generation to generation” (Lk. 1:50).

My five year-old and three year-old call it their “blankie.” My two-year old calls it “bankie!” Charlie Brown’s best friend Linus called it his “security and happiness blanket” (Good Grief, More Peanuts, 1956). Child psychologists refer to it as a “comfort object” or “transitional object,” often referring to a (literal) security “blanket” but sometimes to a stuffed animal or other such item. These are objects that are typically used in early childhood as children begin to develop self-awareness and a sense of relative independence. Newborns see the world as an extension of themselves, but soon the illusion of an undifferentiated connection with the whole is reduced to just the mother, who “brings the world” to the infant. The baby’s inarticulate desire is translated to screaming in the middle of the night; screaming in the middle of the night is met with the faithful mother who comes to satisfy the desire; the mother is the child’s “security blanket” from the world full of hunger pains. 

But eventually, the child must be disillusioned if he or she is going to make it in the world. As it’s been said, the parent’s job is “to teach the child how to live with God and without you.” The child must learn not only that mom isn’t going to be around forever to “bring the world to us” but also that the world that will be brought to us is sometimes not the world we had hoped for. Sometimes the real world it is precisely the world we feared it might be.

This is where blankies and passies and teddies come in handy. It’s about having something familiar to hold onto in a world that often forces the unfamiliar upon us. Ambulances are stuffed full of “emergency blankets” to give to victims of trauma, not because trauma victims are necessarily cold, but because there are times we all need a “blankie.”  In fact, after polling over 6,000 people trying to track down the owners of about 75,000 stuffed animals in 452 hotels, the hotel chain Travelodge discovered that 35 percent of British adults still sleep with a teddy bear.

Life is scary, especially for adults.

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That’s why we prefer the illusion. It’s also why we refer to retirement funds as “security blankets,” which is just another way of talking about the “blankie” we take to our death bed. We hold on to the illusion because between recessions, ISIS, corrupt leaders, teenagers texting and driving, old people texting and driving, not to mention the inevitability of death, letting go of the illusion would mean holding on to exactly nothing, unless you are a follower of Jesus. In that case, letting go of the illusion would mean holding on to exactly nothing but the claim of Christmas: that the God who is sovereign over life and death has sent his Son to be our security in life and in death, and that Christ is coming back to “bring the world” to us (Rev. 21). 

But I must confess that this promise isn’t all that comforting, at least not like a blankie is comforting. This, after all, is the same one of whom Mary said, “His mercy is for those who fear him.” Nobody fears their blankie; they use it to hide from their fears, to hide “under the covers” from hellish monsters. So it’s a terrifying prospect to walk through life empty-handed, armed only with the assurance that the One we fear most is the Same who is coming for us, like the little boy who daily dreads his father coming home from work, sometimes late from the bar. No wonder it’s hard to let go of the illusion. 

But that’s not the kind of fear we have because that’s not the kind of Father we have.

As my good friend, Joe, recently pointed out in an Advent devotional he is writing, fearing the Lord is not the same as being afraid of the Lord. Being afraid is about feeling out of control but also about not trusting the one you think is in control. It’s the little boy who is afraid of his father, the little boy hiding under the covers from him and all the other monsters in the world. This is what the Bible calls the fear of man: 

“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe. Many seek the face of a ruler, but it is from the Lord that man gets justice” (Prov. 29:25-26).

But the Bible does not speak of the fear of the Lord in this way. In fact, Precisely the opposite, in fact: 

“In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death” (Prov. 14:26-27).

This is the boy who thinks his father is the strongest man on earth and runs to the door each day to leap headlong into his father’s unrelenting arms, never even considering the prospect of his father dropping him. He is the strongest of all men not only because of the immensity of his strength but, more importantly, because he is in perfect control over his strength. That is why he is not a monster. His temper doesn’t demon-possess him; never comes home late and takes it out on the boy. He uses his strength to hold, not to harm, to embrace, not to abuse. The boy’s reverent fear takes the form of confidence. The only thing he has to fear is turning from his father and jumping into the arms of someone whose strength cannot be trusted, either because his strength is too weak to catch him or because his will is too weak not to harm him. 

Such gods and fathers and leaders and others may be stronger than the boy, but they are not worth the boy’s fear, because they do not compare to the strength of his true God and the good-will of his true Father. Fear the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only one who can catch you when you fall, the only one whose will is to work all things together for your good, even when you are bad. 

This is the way Scripture speaks of the fear of the Lord. We are called to fear the only One we don’t have to be afraid of, the One who is indeed coming for us, to bring the world to us, as we jump headlong into his arms.

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So it’s no surprise that when the angels were sent to announce his coming, the first words of their announcement were, “Fear not!” In fact, Mary herself was one of the first to hear it (1:30), second only to Zechariah (Lk. 1:13), and then the shepherds (Lk. 2:10). And Jesus himself would say it five more times just in the Gospel of Luke. Fear not, for the One you fear most is coming for you, and he is the One who loves you most fiercely. Indeed, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10), but it’s not the end of wisdom:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 Jn. 4:18).

Perhaps, then, we could all learn a little lesson from Linus. Linus was known for being the kid who refused to let go of his blankie. But who can blame him when the alternative is to resort to a life of exchanging one illusion for another, graduating from one fear to the next, but never ultimately finding freedom from fear?

But, in fact, Linus did let go of his blankie, he did find freedom from fear. He just waited till the appropriate time. He waited till he found something worth holding onto: the One who came to catch him when falls, the One who is bringing the world to him, indeed, to us all. 

Just notice the exact moment he drops his blankie.

Now go and do likewise.

Joseph’s Dream at the Stable in Bethlehem  ~ Rembrandt

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled…And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus…And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Lk. 1:26-34).

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“I’ll take that baby!”

It wasn’t heroic so much as it was impulsive. It just seemed like the only appropriate response to the moment’s need. For weeks, Keldy and I had been talking through a situation with a young gal we were mentoring who was walking through a situation with her friend. Her friend was expecting, it was unexpected—an unplanned pregnancy. The alleged father was not answering the phone. Time was ticking.

She was terrified to get an abortion but more terrified not to. Besides the fact that her secret life would soon swell up and announce itself to the world, she would eventually be kicked out of the Christian University she attended. And when she finally decided to confide in her mother, entertaining the notion of proceeding with the pregnancy despite the costs of doing so, her mother told her she would be left on her own, unsupported, if she got kicked out of school—because that was the most pressing issue.

Our mentee told us that day her friend believed, ironically enough, she was left with “no choice” and so scheduled an appointment at the abortion clinic for the following week. In her mind, it wasn’t a pro-choice decision; it was a no-choice situation. Having no one else she could trust, she had asked her most loyal friend if she would go with her, if she would support her through it all, because “I cannot do this by myself.” It was just a wrenching mess. Now her friend, our mentee, was confiding in us. And my half-hearted, half-brained offer missed the point altogether. It was based on the assumption that this girl didn’t want her baby. She did want her baby. The problem was that no one else wanted her baby—not the father, not her mother, not her Christian academic overlords—and neither did they want an unmarried-and-with-child version of her.

What struck me as I mulled over the situation that day and many days since is that the reason a little baby would end up being aborted by the person it depended on for life is that the baby’s mother was under the threat of being aborted by the people she depended on for life. It indeed takes a village to raise a child, perhaps to abort one too.

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And so God forms a village to raise Mary’s Child, God’s Son, while Herod sent an army to abort Him (Mt. 3:16). It was an unplanned pregnancy, at least as regards the young couple’s plans. They had been planning for a wedding but would now have to plan for parenthood. Their only conceivable plan for parenthood up to this point was to become a father and mother after becoming husband and wife, and only after that. But now we have something like a pregnant nun situation. And just as pregnant nuns become ex-nuns, pregnant virgins become ex-virgins, which is grounds for Mary becoming Joseph’s ex-fiancé.

Culturally, Joseph should expose her shame and leave her at the disposal of the community and her unborn child’s father. But she, along with the entire human family from Adam, was already at the disposal of her unborn Child’s Father. And He was going to make sure that she could proceed with the pregnancy without becoming an ex-anything. She need not not fear, for she had “found favor with God” (Lk. 1:30). The young virgin would give birth to the Eternal Son.

“Joseph was a righteous man and did not want to shame her” (Mt. 1:17), but he still wanted to leave her. So God sent an angel to explain the situation and to make sure he took care of her. And Joseph did so until (presumably) he died. She would then, a widow, have to depend on her Son. But He would die young too. Under ordinary circumstances, this would render her among the most vulnerable of society, second perhaps only to the unborn. But the day she stood at her Son’s high hanging feet, his final provision before saving the entire human race was to ensure his mother would be taken care of:

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (Jn. 19:26-27).

The Gospel begins with Mary receiving an unplanned Son and Joseph receiving an already-pregnant fiancé and it ends with the Beloved Disciple receiving another Man’s mother. The family of God would forever hence be defined at the foot of the cross. 

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The Church of Jesus Christ, I believe, must be pro-life, but I believe we must be pro-life in the way Joseph was pro-life at Jesus’ conception and the way the Beloved Disciple was pro-life at Jesus’ death. We must embrace the life of the unborn precisely by embracing the life of the mother. Churches throughout America have exactly the same amount of opportunities to abort young women (not to mention young men and young couples together) in need of our support as young women have to abort babies in need of their support. We cannot directly prevent the nation’s abortions, but we can directly prevent our own. And we have every reason to believe that when a community of love and support makes the sincere and sustained effort to gather around young women and couples in a way that demonstrates they are wanted and valued, in a way that assures them they won’t have to try to raise their children all alone, live life all alone, we will prevent far more abortions than we ever could by making a commensurate effort to surround ourselves with other people who agree that abortion is wrong, no matter how loud we shout it.

If we truly want young women to be no less than Mary for every unplanned pregnancy, we can be no less than Joseph for every fatherless child, no less than the the Beloved Disciple for every unsupported mother. But this costs more than the occasional protest. It costs us being inconvenienced by others in the way Mary and Joseph and the Beloved Disciples were inconvenienced by others, perhaps even in the way the unplanned Other in question was inconvenienced by all of us.

If Christ shares the burden of human death, surely he can expect us to share the burden of human life, whether that means adopting babies or adopting mothers—for we all are adoptees (Rom. 8:15; Eph. 1:5). And while this may or may not require a formal adoption process, it will require an effort to make room for others in our lives in very tangible ways. It will require welcoming young women and men into our homes and to our tables, into conversations, into mentoring relationships, friendships, and into our gatherings, and doing so before they find themselves in such desperate situations. But it also means welcoming young women and men in precisely the same way after they find themselves in such desperate situations. It means being committed to making room for others’ lives so that they can commit to making room for life when it comes, planned or unplanned, because this is always God’s plan for human life.

Indeed, God’s ‘planned parenthood’ for the whole human race began with a little Galilean village that committed to raising a Child as though he were their own, only to later discover that through this Child God would raise them, indeed would raise us all, as though we were children of His own. Because in Jesus Christ “that is what we are” (1 Jn. 3:1; Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:12-17).

“For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).