Romans 8 rightly occupies a beloved place in the affections of many weary Christians.  It contains some of the most profound meditations on God’s redemptive work in Christ on behalf of sinners in the entire New Testament, as well as the sweetest promises that could ever be imagined.  In a world of evil and death, all things nonetheless are working for our good.  Resurrection is coming–not only for Christians, but for the entire cosmos.  Every good thing we will ever need is personally guaranteed by God, since that feat is quite easy in comparison to the really hard thing which God has already accomplished for us (not sparing His own Son, but handing him over to death for us–the echoes of Genesis 22 are obvious).  In the face of our ongoing guilt, Jesus our righteous high priest intercedes for us before the throne of God.  And in the face of the often overwhelming sufferings of this present life, we are more than conquerors through the crucified and risen Jesus.  Therefore, nothing could ever separate us from the love of God.

Yet within this soul-stirring chapter, 8:26-27 are two verses that stick out like a sore thumb.  Self-evidently they are meant by Paul to be received as further positive reinforcement.  But what in the world do they mean?  And how do they lead into the astounding promise of 8:28, to which they are clearly connected?  The overall context is fairly clear.  In the face of our ongoing weakness as Christians–namely, that in spite of the redemption we have already received in Christ, we often find ourselves unsure of where we are going and what God’s will is–the Spirit intercedes for us to ensure that we reach our final destination.  Whatever else Romans 8:26-27 is saying, the overall thrust is that Christians can be assured of God’s protective guidance in spite of often being unaware of where they should be going.

In this Paul manifestly alludes to the “new Exodus” motif that the Old Testament prophets (especially Isaiah and Jeremiah) promise.  Just as God once liberated Israel from bondage to slavery in Egypt, led them through the barren wilderness, and eventually brought them to the promised land, so also a greater, more decisive Exodus will one day be accomplished for the people of God (Jeremiah 16:14-16, Hosea 11:1, 8-11, Luke 9:31).  As the narrative logic of Isaiah 40-66 progressively unveils, a day is coming when the “way of the Lord” through the “wilderness” will be prepared, and the Lord Himself will return to Israel to lead them back into the promised land from the four corners of the earth to which they have been scattered through exile.  Central to this new Exodus is the strange vocation of the Servant, who will suffer and be exalted in the pursuit of Israel’s restoration.

In Romans 6-8, Paul indicates in a number of ways that this new Exodus has now taken place through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Though formerly slaves to sin, Christians have been freed from their captivity (Romans 6).  However, they have not yet reached the promised land (Romans 8:18ff).  Instead, they find themselves “groaning” just as Israel once did, longing for the full liberation that God has promised (Exodus 2:23-24, Romans 8:22-23).  So we too find ourselves in the “wilderness”, being tempted to turn back to the slavery we have been rescued from (8:15), all the while being exhorted to look ahead to the “inheritance” to come (8:17).  And just as God once led His people through the wilderness, when they often found themselves not knowing where they were going, through the pillar of cloud and fire, so today the Spirit leads God’s children (8:14).

So this is the essential meaning of Romans 8:26-27.  Having experienced the new Exodus in being liberated from sin and death through the Messiah, God’s people can take comfort that the Spirit will infallibly guide them through the wilderness until they reach the promised land–even though, like Israel of old, they often do not know the way they are going.

Yet the details are still obscure.  How exactly does this guidance work itself our in our lives?  Three questions can be put to Romans 8:26-27 that help to clarify the meaning.  First, who is searching hearts? Second, what does he know?  Third, why do all things work for our good? Let’s take these one at a time.

First, who does Paul have in mind at the beginning of 8:27 when he states that “he” is searching hearts?  Most commentators and ordinary readers automatically assume that “he” refers here to God the Father.  This interpetation is possessed of an a priori plausibility because of what “he” is said to know–the mind of the Spirit.  If “he” knows the mind of the Spirit, it would seem that “he” cannot be the Spirit.

Nonetheless, I think this intuition is mistaken.  First, the identity of “he” is not stated clearly in the Greek, and just as in the English language, in Greek a pronominal reference usually points back to the last explicitly named entity.  In 8:26, the only “he” mentioned is the Spirit.  So our initial assumption should be that “he” in 8:27 picks up this reference.  Otherwise an unstated switch of reference to the Father would be abrupt and without any prior indication.  Second, the word ”searches” (eraunao) is only used one other time by Paul in his letters, in 1 Corinthians 2:10.  And there the one who is “searching” is the Spirit, not the Father.  Finally, what “he” knows–the “mind of the Spirit”–is not nearly the defeater for identifying the Spirit with “he who searches hearts” as is ordinarily thought.

This leads to the second question.  What does “he” (the Spirit) know in Romans 8:27?  As a result of searching hearts, “he” knows “the mind of the Spirit.”  What could this mean?  Though the English translation virtually demands the reader to take the phrase as a reference to the cognitive mental thoughts of the Spirit, this is not the most likely meaning.  The phrase Paul uses here (to phronema tou pneumatos) is used another time in Paul–and it appears only a few verses earlier in this same chapter!

In Romans 8:5-6 Paul writes that “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on (phroneo) the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on (phroneo) the things of the Spirit.  For the mindset (phronema) of the flesh is death, but the mindset of the Spirit (to phronema tou pneumatos) is life and peace.”  The word in 8:27 that is rendered as “mind” in most English translations actually refers in 8:6 to the subjective attitude or moral disposition of Christians who walk according to the Spirit, and not to the objective cognitive data within the Spirit’s own “mind”!

Thus, Romans 8:27 should be understood to be saying something like this: “The Spirit who searches hearts knows (recognizes) those whose attitudes are bent in faith toward dependence upon the Spirit, not to the selfish desires of the flesh.”  This also makes sense of what is (on the traditional interpretation of this passage) the apparently arbitrary reference to “searching hearts”, which throughout the Scripture always indicates a divine examination of human dispositions.  This phrase has no relevance for the idea that the Father knows the mental thoughts of the Spirit–and such a meaning would be nonsensical in the logical flow of the passage.

So, a quick summary of where we are so far.  Though Christians often do not know where they are going–they are still weak on this side of the resurrection!–the Spirit is interceding for them before God the Father with groans that we do not hear (literally, “without speech”).  How does this behind-the-scenes dynamic work?  8:27 provides the answer.  Though we do not where we are going or what we should pray for–that is, our weakness here is epistemological or cognitive–the Spirit is searching our hearts to discern if we are devoted to the Lord in righteousness, or to ourselves in sin.  If the Spirit discovers, in His searching ministry, that we are among those who walk according to the Spirit and not the flesh (8:4-12), then He proceeds to interecede for us before the Father “according to the will of God.”  That is, God honors those who honor Him.  He pours out grace on faith.  And this is a great comfort to wandering Christians, for though we cannot know the way home, we can walk according to the Spirit of God in our wilderness journeying.

And this provides the answer to our third question: why do all things work for the good of those who love God and who are called according to His purpose (8:28)?  This promise is almost always disconnected entirely from the immediate context and made to stand alone.  Yet Paul does not arrive at this conclusion willy nilly–for him the reason all things work for the good of Christians is obvious.  It is because of 8:26-27!  The result of the Spirit’s intercession in leading the weak, wandering people of God is that we will never be severed from God’s guiding hand.  Note that this is not a promise that our “weakness” in 8:26 is ever removed.  Paul does not says that.  We still find ourselves, and always will on this side of the new creation to come, not knowing what to pray for or where we are going.  But the promise of Romans 8:26-28 is that if we follow Jesus wholeheartedly and walk according to the Spirit, we will never be lost or abandoned.

Notice the intentional play on words in the passage.  We do not “know” where we are going (8:26).  But the Spirit “knows” if our hearts are inclined toward God in the midst of this ongoing weakness (8:27).  And therefore, the one thing we do “know” is that all things are working for our good (8:28), for the Father unfailingly responds to the Spirit’s intercession when it is according to the will of God.  We will reach the promised land if we follow the crucified and risen Jesus through the wilderness, no matter how forsaken or alone we may feel we are along the way.  On the basis of perceiving that we are following Jesus in faith, the Spirit intercedes with groanings before the Father, who is prompted to powerfully turn our confusing paths toward Him for our everlasting good.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo embarked upon the perilous mission to destroy the ring, “even though I do not know the way.”  But as Tolkien says at another point in the story, “not all who wander are lost.”  As one Old Testament writer proclaimed, nicely summarizing Paul’s meaning in Romans 8:26-28: “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward Him” (2 Chronicles 16:9).

These are amazing promises to cherish as God’s people.  Yet one particular implication stands out to me that seems worth highlighting.  Many Christians today are obsessed with “knowing God’s will,” in the sense of discerning exactly what God wants them to do in each and every important decision in their lives.  In itself, this is not a bad emphasis–though on any reading it can become dangerously lopsided.  The desperation to know God’s will can easily lead to the subtle conviction that God’s will in the lives of individual Christians is ultimately dependent on Christians discerning and grasping that plan.  This is manifestly foolish.  So even while acknowledging the goodness of the desire to know God’s will, I am persuaded that passages like Romans 8:26-28 remind us that something else is far more important in life than knowing God’s will–namely, a heart that loves and longs to do God’s will.  And God’s will is, above all else, that we follow Jesus in faith by taking up our cross and denying ourselves, putting the interests of his kingdom and our neighbor above our own.  And insofar as we do this, we will never find ourselves outside of God’s gracious will for our lives.

Consider two hypothetical scenarios.  In the first, a young man is relentlessly focused over the years on finding God’s specific will for his life–what he should major in, what career he should choose, who he should marry, what house and neighborhood he should live in, etc.  All of these are worthy things to desire to know and to pursue knowledge of, to be sure.  But imagine that this focus is so overwhelmingly prevalent in the man’s life that, along the way, he increasingly loses sight of God’s moral requirements in all situations.  Imitating Jesus falls rapidly on his list of values.  People and relationships are moved to the periphery.  Unselfishness, humility and suffering love are marginalized as priorities in favor of discovering various techniques and prayers devoted to discerning God’s will for his next decision.  In the long run this Christian, though perceiving himself to be spiritual and godly, strikes many people as shallow, self-obssessed, and generally unavailable to others in the nitty gritty business of real life.  Knowing God’s will has become a functional excuse for not following Jesus in everyday life, and the pursuit of the “right decision” has often functioned as a means of hiding various idols and sinful desires that have never been dealt with.  But his confidence is high that he stands fully assured in God’s will in all his decisions.

Now imagine a woman who regularly finds herself unsure of God’s leading in most of the “big” decisions in her life.  She rarely feels confident that she hears or understands the voice of God along the way.  This is a source of grief and consternation to her, yet she consistently devotes herself to the Lord, seeking to please Him in all things, and finds a thousand practical ways to take up her cross and live by faith in the many relationships and situations she finds herself in (and finds herself in without any strong assurance that this is where God is leading her!).  Though years later she still finds herself unsure as to God’s specific will for her future, when she looks back upon her past she sees (by God’s grace) a long history of gospel fruitfulness, of friends whose lives have been changed and drawn closer to Christ through her humble service and love, and a steadfast joy in Christ that has slowly begun to overshadow all other desires.  She doesn’t know where she is going, but she looks a lot like Jesus.

Truly I say to you–this woman was in God’s will through it all, though she often did not know how to pray.  For the Spirit, perceiving that her heart was fully devoted to the Lord, sovereignly intercedes for her according to the will of God.  And for this woman, all things have mysteriously worked together for good.  And not just for her good.  For the good of the world.  Simply because she loved God.

The message of Romans 8:26-27 is that if we follow Jesus, we have nothing to ultimately fear as we navigate our way blindly through this howling wilderness, through this present evil age.  He will bring us safely home.  And thus we sing:

How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in his excellent word;
What more can he say than to you he hath said?
You, who unto Jesus, for refuge have fled.

In ev’ry condition – in sickness in health,
In poverty’s vale, or abounding in wealth,
At home and abroad, on the land, on the sea,
As thy days may demand, so thy succor shall be.

Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed!
For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o’erflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace all-sufficient shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design,
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

E’en down to old age, all my people shall prove
My sov’reign eternal, unchangeable love;
And then, when grey hairs shall their temples adorn,
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne.

The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,
I will not, I cannot, desert to his foes:
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake

Lewis came to recognize that human suffering was a necessary means–if one receives and encounters the experience from the posture of faith, looking to God desperately time and again in our darkness and pain and confusion–to having our eyes opened to what God is really like.  No more childish games of fantasy, so disconnnected from reality, are possible.  Or desirable.  And we also begin to have the blindfold removed as to what we are essentially like.  There is no other path to true sight, with respect to both God and self.  Consider the progression of thought and insight in the following exerpts from A Grief Observed, as suffering opens Lewis’ eyes to his distorted views of his deceased wife Joy, of God, and of himself.  God, in turns out, is in the business of smashing down false images and replacing them with concrete reality, no matter how much it hurts to get us there:

“Meanwhile, where is God?  This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.  When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be–or so it feels–welcomed with open arms.  But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in windows.  It might be an empty house.  Was it ever inhabited?  It seemed so once.  And that seeming was as strong as this.  What can this mean?  Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?…

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So this is what God’s really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.’

…Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the [Joy] I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  Founded on fact, no doubt.  I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t).  But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?  The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real [Joy] so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.  The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant–in a word, real.  Is all that work to be undone?  Is what I shall still call [Joy] to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams?  Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away…The image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want.  It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands.  It is a puppet of which you hold the strings.  Not yet of course.  The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the strings out of my hands.  But the fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase…

If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine…Come, what do we gain by evasions?  We are under the harrow and can’t escape.  Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.  And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness?  Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing?  Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts?…[But] my real fear is not materialism.  If it were true, we–or what we mistake for ‘we’–could get out, get from under the harrow.  An overdose of sleeping pills would do it.  I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap.  Or, worst still, rats in a laboratory.  Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’  Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?…

Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language.  What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?  Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?  What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it.  But how if He were mistaken?  Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning.  He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed.  The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross.  The vile practical joke had succeeded…

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game, ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’  Apparently it’s like that.  Your bid–for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity–will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it.  And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.  Nothing less will shake a man–or at any rate a man like me–out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs.  He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses.  Only torture will bring out the truth.  Only under torture does he discover it himself.  And I must surely admit that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better.  And only suffering could do it.  But then the Cosmic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector becomes an unnecessary hypothesis…

[My subjective] mood is no evidence [of God's intentions for my suffering].  Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him is she can.  But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector…

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist.  The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.  A cruel man might be bribed–might grow tired of his vile sport–might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety.  But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good.  The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.  If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.  But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?  Well, take your choice.  The tortures occur.  If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one.  If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.  For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.

Either way, we’re for it.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?’  Have they never even been to a dentist?…

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality.  He knew it already.  It was I who didn’t.  In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once.  He always knew that my temple was a house of cards.  His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down…

Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind [as I reflect on my process of suffering and grief].  One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode.  But the other, that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’…

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.  I want [Joy], not something that is like her.  A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular.  (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it).  To me, however, their danger is more obvious.  Images of the Holy easily become holy images–sacrosanct.  My idea of God is not a divine idea.  It has to be shattered time after time.  He shatters it Himself.  He is the great iconoclast.  Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?  The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.  And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not not.  But the same thing happens in our private prayers.

All reality is iconoclastic.

The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her.  And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.  That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.  And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.

But ‘this’ is not now imaginable.  In that respect [Joy] and all the dead are like God.  In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him.  In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love–its eyes cannot here be used–to the reality, through–across–all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings.  I musn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her.  Not my idea of God, but God.  Not my idea of [Joy], but [Joy].  Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor…

He will knock down [my house of cards] as often as proves necessary.  Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever.” (C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, pp. 4-5, 19-20, 23-24, 31-34, 43-44, 46, 49-51, 61, 75-78)

“Jesus’ most socially radical statements concern slaves, children, and the poor.  He made a sharp contrast between the oppressive regime of the Gentiles (he did not have to instance Rome in particular) and the way things should happen in God’s kingdom.  In the latter, he said ‘whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mark 10:42-45).  Jesus endorsed this statement with his own, shocking example, when he insisted, against their protests, on washing his disciples’ feet.  Washing feet, an everyday menial task, was, more exclusively than any other task, the role of the slave.  It was what every free person regarded as unthinkably beneath their dignity.  Jesus enjoined his disciples to follow his example by washing one another’s feet, and he was proposing, not a mere symbol of humility, but an actual concrete instance, the most telling possible, of how the disciples should relate to each other.  The ordinary everyday requirement of washing feet they are to do for each other.  If this is not beneath their dignity, nothing is.

Jesus thus took the unparalled step of abolishing social status, not by giving all the disciples the status of master (then there would always be others, outside the community, to set themselves above), but by reducing all to the lowest social status: that of slave.  In a society of slaves, no one many think him–or herself more important than others.

Also strikingly original is Jesus’ choice of small children to illustrate what God’s rule requires.  Only by becoming like a child is it possible to enter the kingdom.  The point is probably not so much the unquestioning trust that children display, but the fact that they had no social status.  To become like a child is to renounce any claim to status above others.  Just as Jesus said that the one who wants to be foremost must be the slave of all, so he also says that ‘whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom’, where ‘humble’ is an attitude relating to social status.  At first sight, it looks as though Jesus was creating a new form of hierarchy, a sort of inverted one, in which the most slave-like or the most childlike is top, but really these sayings serve to subvert all notions of status or rank.  The same is true of his aphorism: ‘Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’  The kingdom is a topsy-turvy world that inverts all claims to personal importance in order to do away with all self-importance.

The kingdom belongs to the likes of children, just as it also belongs to the likes of the poor.  This is the essence of what it means that Jesus preaches ‘good news to the poor’: he tells them that the kingdom of God belongs to them.  These poor, as we have noticed, are not the ordinary people, but the destitute, the people at the bottom of the social and economic heap.  Jesus does not suppose that the kingdom belongs exclusively to them, but that they are the model citizens to which everyone else must conform.  The least radical implication is the advice Jesus gives to ordinarily prosperous people, when they give dinner parties, not to invite their relatives, friends, and neighbors, but ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind’.  This is more than generous charity, which was a well-recognized duty.  It means treating the destitute as one’s social equals.  On these terms, but only on these terms, Jesus did not confine the kingdom to the destitute, any more than he confined it to the children.  He did very seriously privilege the destitute and the children, in order to deprive all others of privilege.

The poor require a little more attention.  We have the series of ‘beatitudes’, with which Jesus characterized the model citizens of the kingdom, in two versions.  In Luke’s version, the first beatitude is ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’.  In Matthew’s version, it is ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’.  Matthew’s expansion of ‘the poor’ to ‘the poor in spirit’ does not imply that he removes the socio-economic meaning, transforming poverty into simply an attitude.  Rather, in the background, is the Jewish tradition of linking poverty with the right attitude to God, just as wealth was linked with the wrong attitude to God.  The poor, having nowhere else to turn, are aware of their utter dependence on God, whereas the rich, feeling self-sufficient, epitomize arrogant independence of God.  These are, of course, stereotypes, but, at least in a society that took a religious worldview for granted, not without correspondence to reality.  Matthew’s phrase ‘poor in spirit’ merely makes explicit the link between material circumstances and religious attitude that is implicit in Luke’s simple ‘poor’.

Thus the poor model citizenship in God’s kingdom not only in their lack of socio-economic status and resources but also in the kind of relationship with God that typified that status.  Jesus, we are reminded again, never thinks of relationships between humans without reference to God.  What transforms society in Jesus’ ideal is knowing God as the utterly reliable and endlessly generous provider of all good, on whom all creatures are completely dependent.  Trusting this God is what enables the generous sharing among people that makes God’s generosity credible.  The kind of trust in God’s provision that Jesus envisaged is enshrined in one petition of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.  Adequate provision for material needs, not luxury, and day-by-day provision, not wealth stored up, are all that is asked.  It puts every disciple of Jesus in the position of the beggars, who depend day-by-day on charity, or the day laborers, those agricultural workers who had least security, employed only a day at a time, never earning more than the next day’s meal requires.  Jesus requires of all disciples the radical trust that for the destitute is the only sort available.” (Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 76-79)

Thus, when Christians engage philosphically with the dilemma of widespread unbelief in the world (that is, with the conscious, intentional lack of intellectual assent to the truth claims of the gospel), they must be careful to lodge their epistemology consistently on a Christian foundation.  It seems to me that two possible explanations for human unbelief must be ruled out if Christianity is true.  First, it cannot be the case that people disbelieve because there is not sufficient evidence for God’s existence or reality:

“For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven upon all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of human beings, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.  Because what is known about God is clearly evident among them, for God has made it known to them.  For the invisible things of God have been clearly perceived since the creation of the world in the things that have been made–his eternal power and divinity–so that they are without excuse.  Because even though they knew God, they did not glorify or thank him as God, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” (Romans 1:18-22)

Second, it cannot be the case that people fail to believe in Jesus because they are not intelligent enough or incapable of evaluating the evidence coherently.  While sin smears the ways we choose to perceive the world, it is ultimately our affections that are the problem, not our brute capacity for seeing what is there.  Human beings would not have had higher IQ’s if they had not become sinners.  They would simply be more open to the truth in love instead of suppressing it in unrighteousness.  For Christians, the primary epistemological problem is humanity’s hardness of heart toward spiritual beauty.  We simply like the fantasy worlds of our own construction (where we are at the center) better than the real world where there is an awesome Lord who stands over against us in judgment and grace, calling us to account and beckoning us to align our perception of reality around Him.  Consider this unabashededly straightforward claim from the Gospel of John:

“And this is the judgment–that the light entered into the world, and human beings have loved the darkness rather than the light.  Why?  Because their deeds were evil.  For every person who practices wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds be publicly exposed.  But the person who does the truth comes to the light, in order that his deeds might be revealed–revealed that they have been accomplished by God.” (John 3:19-21)

Recently I’ve stumbled across a wonderful exposition of a truly Christian epistemology in action.  The Magician’s Nephew is the neglected first book in C. S. Lewis’ Narnian tales, taking place narratively prior to all the other stories, though it was not first in the original order of publication.  Midway through this “origins” book (in chapter ten, to be precise) the creation of Narnia is wondrously depicted as Digory and Polly and Uncle Andrew find themselves unwittingly transported to this strange new place by way of their magic rings.  Coming along on the ride with them to a Narnia that is still “formless and void” is an evil enchantress who will eventually become the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.   The scene they go on to witness is breathtaking.  Calling forth Narnia and all of its talking creatures out of darkness through his magical voice, Aslan’s song of beauty and power is marveled at by all the characters.  Except, of course, for the witch.  And also except for Uncle Andrew, who is increasingly revealed in the narrative to be a dastardly, cruel fellow who is filled with brutally selfish ambition and self-deceptive arrogance.  His moral compass is pathetically misdirected due to his tragic preoccupation with the trivialities of self.  Consider how Lewis explains the “reasons” for his stunning insistence on unbelief, and in doing so exposes my own sinful tendencies to hide from reality in its manifold nuances:

“We must now go back a bit and explain what the whole scene had looked like from Uncle Andrew’s point of view.  It had not made at all the same impression on him as on the Cabby and the children.  For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

Ever since the animals first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket.  He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him.  Like the Witch, he was dreadfully practical.  He simply didn’t notice that Aslan was choosing one pair ouf of every kind of beast [to be able to talk in human language and to reason].  All he saw, or thought he saw, was a lot of dangerous wild animals walking vaguely about.  And he kept on wondering why the other animals didn’t run away from the big Lion.

When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the whole point; for a rather interesting reason.  When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song.  And he had disliked the song very much.  It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel.  Then, when the sun rose he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,’ as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing–only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world.  ‘Of course it can’t really have been singing,’ he thought, ‘I must have imagined it.  I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order.  Who ever heard of a lion singing?’  And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.  Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.  Uncle Andrew did.  He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.  Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.  And when at last the Lion spoke and said, ‘Narnia, awake,’ he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl.  And when the Beasts spoke in answer, he heard only barkings, growlings, bayings, and howlings.  And when they laughed–well, you can imagine.  That was worse for Uncle Andrew than anything that had happened yet.  Such a horrid, bloodthirsty din of hungry and angry brutes he had never heard in his life.  Then, to his utter rage and horror, he saw the other three humans actually walking out into the open to meet the animals.

‘The fools!’ he said to himself.  ‘Now those brutes will eat the rings along with the children and I’ll never be able to get home again.  What a selfish little boy Digory is!  And the others are just as bad.  If they want to throw away their own lives, that’s their business.  But what about me?  They don’t seem to think of that.  No one thinks of me.’

Finally, when a whole crowd of animals came rushing toward him, he turned and ran for his life.  And now anyone could see that the air of that young world was really doing the old gentleman good.  In London he had been far too old to run: now, he ran at a speed which would have made him certain to win the hundred yards’ race at any Prep school in England.  His coat-tails flying out behind him were a fine sight.  But of course it was no use.  Many of the animals behind him were swift ones; it was the first run they had ever taken in their lives and they were all longing to use their new muscles.  ‘After him!  After him!’ they shouted.  ‘Perhaps he’s that Neevil!  Tally-ho! Tantivy!  Cut him off!  Round him up!  Keep it up!  Hurrah!’

In a very few minutes some of them got ahead of him.  They lined up in a row and barred his way.  Others hemmed him in from behind.  Wherever he looked he saw terrors.  Antlers of great elks and the huge face of an elephant towered over him.  Heavy, serious-minded bears and boars grunted behind him.  Cool-looking leopards  and panthers with sarcastic faces (as he thought) stared at him and waved their tails.  What struck him most of all was the number of open mouths.  The animals had really opened their mouths to pant; he thought they had opened their mouths to eat him.

Uncle Andrew stood trembling and swaying this way and that.  He had never liked animals at the best of times, being usually rather afraid of them; and of course years of doing cruel experiments on animals had made him hate and fear them far more.

‘Now, sir,’ said the Bulldog in his business-like way, ‘are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?’  That was what it really said; but all Uncle Andrew heard was ‘Gr-r-r-arrh-ow!’”

Karl Rahner, a prominent 20th-century Catholic theologian, is famous for his “rule” about thinking rightly about the Trinity: the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.  I know, I know: this slogan makes you want to stop right here, turn aside, and starting worshipping God with unrestrained passion.  Delay that explosive impulse for a moment to keep reading.  What Rahner means by this very boring, typically dry academic statement is in fact–all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding–a crucial and beautiful reality that all Christians should know and treasure.  In a word, Rahner is reminding us that the God who makes Himself known in Jesus is not arbitrary.  Instead, He is deeply faithful and ever true in the manner He chooses to communicate with us, in all the assorted ways He reveals Himself to His creation.  He never hits a false note or acts out of character.  When the triune God interacts with His creatures in creating, sustaining, judging and redeeming the world, He does not put on a “mask” to hide what He is really like from us or play “peek-a-boo” with a hopelessly naive audience.  Instead, the way that God interacts with us is dynamically consistent with the way He has always been in Himself.  Jesus’ delightful, voluntary obedience to the Father did not start with the Incarnation, nor did the Spirit’s mediation of the Father’s pleasure in the Son begin at Jesus’ baptism.  This is what God has always been like, with no beginning and no end.  To summarize: when we see the ways in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate to each other and to the world and the people of God in the Christian narrative, Rahner insists (rightly) that we can be confident that these very same character traits have always been present within God’s own triune life.

But perhaps a further, even more radical suggestion can be made.  What would it look like for the God who is characterized by self-giving, mutually reciprocated love to enter a fallen, self-centered world?  If the God of Jesus Christ has always been the kind of God who puts the interest of others ahead of His own, and who is not self-seeking, false or manipulative–well, what happens when that sort of person shows up in the flesh?  It’s not hard to figure out; the gospels tell us.  Rejection.  Humiliation.  Crucifixion.  This is self-giving, others-centered love brought to its climactic fulfillment.  Jesus, in putting the interests of others ahead of his own, acted out  in the Incarnation and on the Cross what, in a very real sense, he had already been doing forever (Philippians 2:5-11).

Yet if God the Father loves the Son with infinite desire and committment, then He cannot let that horror be the final act of the drama.  And so, through the Spirit, He raises His beloved Son from the grave.  But this time, He brings us along for the ride, to enter into God’s own life.  Therefore, the gospel story is a fitting enactment of God’s own triune life writ large on the canvas of a world gone astray in sin and evil, by overcoming evil with good.  Consider these wondrous claims.  And this time, I really do hope this moves you to exalt in the matchless glory of our triune God who makes Himself known in the face of Jesus Christ:

“In self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.  For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary.  For when He was crucified He ‘did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness.’  From before the foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience.  And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son…There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy.  It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love.  It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy.  It does not exist for us, but we for it.” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pp. 136-38)

And:

“The story of Jesus is what the eternal trinitarian life of God looks like when it is projected upon the screen of history, and this means on the screen not only of human history but of sinful human history. The obedience of Jesus to the Father, his obedience to his mission, is just what the eternal procession of the Son from the Father appears as in history. His obedience consists in nothing else but being in history, in being human. Jesus did nothing but be the Son as man; that his life was so colorful, eventful and tragic is simply because of what being human involves in our world. We for the most part shy off being human because if we are really human we will be crucified. If we didn’t know that before, we know it now; the crucifixion of Jesus was simply the dramatic manifestation of the sort of world we have made, the showing up of the world, the unmasking of what we call, traditionally, original sin…

The crucifixion in this sense is the supreme expression of Jesus’ humanity…the supreme expression of his obedience to the Father, of his eternal Sonship. On the cross he casts himself simply on the Father. It is his prayer to the Father, the only prayer known to Christians, and the resurrection is the Father’s response…

And this communication of eternal prayer and response is what the Holy Spirit is–which is why Jesus speaks of sending the
Holy Spirit in history when he is united with his Father. Just as the crucifixion/resurrection is what the eternal procession of the Son from the Father looks like when projected upon sinful human history, so the sending of the Holy Spirit (so that we share in the life of God, so that the mystery of the Church exists) is what the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit looks like when projected on to that sinful human world. And the Holy Spirit appears in our world of course as catastrophic and destructive, as a revolutionary force making the world new, or the Church new, the individual new, by reducing them first to chaos.

That (I’m afraid) is a very compressed sketch of what the Christian means to be saying when he speaks of God as Trintiy. And in the end what it all boils down to is this central mystery that God is love.” (Herbert McCabe, God Matters, pp. 22-23)

“The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word “mystery” lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say (as nominalists, in contrast to Aquinas, seemed to want to say) that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are endlessly comprehensible and expressible. Not darkness, but too much light is what we encounter here. That irritating conversation stopper, “it’s a mystery,” doesn’t mean that we have nothing further to say but that we can’t say enough about the matter in hand. The mysteries of faith are so far-reaching in their meaning and so breathtaking in their beauty that they possess a limitless—that is to say, literally an unending and inexhaustible—power to attract and transform the minds and hearts, the individual and communal lives, in which they are pondered, digested, and, ultimately, loved and adored.” (J. Augustine Di Noia)

(HT: Wesley Hill)

“Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.  For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it it written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’  Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the scholar?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of what we preach [i.e. the message about Jesus crucified] to save those who believe…And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony [or 'mystery'] of God with lofty 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 in much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, in order that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:17-2:5)

The obvious follow-up question: did Paul actually practice what he preached?  In another context altogether Charles Cranfield provides indirect confirmation for Paul’s single-minded committment to the breathtaking content of the gospel, over and against the showy form it might be delivered in, as he carefully weighs the literary merits of Paul’s greatest letter:

“As far as style is concerned, the epistle shows considerable variety.  The style varies with the subject matter.  Quite often it approximates closely to the style of the Hellenistic diatribe.  Sometimes it is the style of liturgical utterance or of the solemn confession of faith.  Sometimes there are resemblances to Jewish Wisdom, sometimes to the manner of Jewish biblical exegesis such as we find in some of the Qumram texts, sometimes to the rules of the Rabbis.  There is nothing to suggest familiarity with classical Greek literature…and there is little, if any, evidence of the concern for literary grace for its own sake which is characteristic of classical Greek prose.  John Chryostom recognized that it was no use looking for the smoothness of Isocrates, the majesty of Demosthenes, the dignity of Thucydides, or the sublimity of Plato in Paul’s letters, and admitted Paul’s poverty and the simplicityand artlessness of his composition; and Gregory of Nyssa speaks of Paul as adorning his sentences mone te aletheia ['only for the truth'].

For the most part the real grandeur of Romans as a piece of literature derives from its content and from the sincerity, directness, and personal involvement of the author.  At the same time, it would be quite incorrect to assume that the epistle is totally devoid of literary elegance; for it affords clear evidence that Paul knew the various figures of speech of the rhetoricians and that it came naturally to him to make use of them from time to time…But these things are used by Paul unselfconsciously, not as ends in themselves but as natural means to the forceful and compelling expression of what he has to say.  It is the content that is all-important.  And it is to this concentration on the content of what has to be expressed and subordination of outward form to it that at any rate some of his anacolutha [broken syntax in sentences] should be attributed.” (C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans 1-8, ICC, pp. 25-26)

The only (glaring!) weakness is Dodd’s unfortunate relegating of Romans 9-11 to the status of an ’excursus’ from the letter’s main theme of the revelation of God’s righteousness, rather than (rightly) the actual climax of that manifestation in keeping His promises to Israel, albeit in highly unexpected fashion.  I can feel the great wrath of N. T. Wright as I read that sentence, and tremble beneath it.  Notable imperfection notwithstanding, however, I encourage you to take up and read Romans all through, once more afresh, in the light of these reflections from Dodd, and to see what new insights you might gain as you do so:

“There has been much discussion whether [the righteousness of God] is for Paul an attribute of God, or of men saved by God; whether, that is, the Gospel reveals the fact that God is righteous, or communicates to men a righteousness of character which is divine in origin.  No doubt it does both of these things.  But the key to the problem is to recognize that in Paul’s religious vocabulary the term righteousness stands, not only for a moral attribute (as in ordinary English, and Greek, usage), but also (in accordance with Hebrew usage) for an act or activity.  When he says, therefore, ‘God’s righteousness is revealed,’ he means that a divine act or activity is taking place manifestly within the field of human experience–whereas much of His operation is inscrutable and mysterious (11:33).  Paul’s background here as everywhere is the Old Testament…

A judge or ruler is thought of as ‘righteous,’ not so much because he observes and upholds an abstract standard of justice, as because he vindicates the cause of the wronged; his righteousness is revealed in the ‘justification’ of those who are the victims of evil.  In the faith of Judaism the ultimate act of vindication is the work of God…in the developed thought of the prophets, this sense of ‘righteousness’ as an act of vindication is still maintained…The Hebrew word always carries with it the idea of the victory of right…

The vindication of right involves a real righteousness of the people on whose behalf it is wrought.  Thus the ‘righteousness,’ or act of redress, has for its ultimate issue, not only a people delivered from wrongful oppression, but a people delivered from their own sin, a ‘righteous’ people in our sense.  But always ‘righteousness’ is not primarily an attribute of God or of His people, but an activity whereby the right is asserted in the deliverance of man from the power of evil…In all probability the familiar beatitude, ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ contains the same meaning. For an English reader, as for a Greek reader, of the Gospels, that suggests ‘those who ardently desire to be good’; but, in accordance with Old Testament usage, the original Aramaic beatitude would naturally mean ‘Blessed are they who ardently desire the vindication of right, the triumph of the good cause’—the same people, in fact, who are referred to in Luke 18:7: ‘Will not God see justice done to His elect who cry to Him by day and night?’

Now, in the prevailing thought of Judaism in the two or three centuries before Christ, it was assumed that in this present age the cause of right is in eclipse.  Althought ‘the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men’ (Dan. 4:17), yet for reasons best known to Himself He permits evil powers to hold sway.  But in the good time coming–’the Age to Come’–the arm of the Lord would be bared for the discomfiture of evil and the establishment of good.  Then His ‘righteousness’ would be revealed.  That was where Paul stood as a Pharisee.  The Gospel which he proclaims as a preacher of Christianity is that ‘the righteousness of God is revealed.’  The Age to Come has come, and the great vindication of right is taking place before our eyes.  The present tense of the verb is all-important: it would be even better rendered ‘the righteousness of God is being revealed,’ for the Greek present is primarily a tense of continuous action.  The revelation, as we shall see, is not yet complete; but it is real and even now in process.

This is the theme which is developed in the course of the epistle. First, the need for such a revelation is displayed in a somber picture of the world under the dominance of sin, bringing its terrible retribution.  This [the revelation of God's wrath in 1:18ff] is not yet the revelation of righteousness, though it is preparatory to it.  Next we have the righteousness of God displayed in ‘justifying’ His people, i.e. in putting them in the righte before Him ( Rom. 3:21-4:25).  Then it is displayed in the ‘salvation’ of men from the power and dominance of sin (Rom. 5-8).  Then, after an excursus which seeks to justify the ways of God with men (Rom. 9-11), we have, finally, the revelation of His righteousness in the living of a good life by the people He has saved (Rom. 12-15).  Thus Paul finds in the Gospel of Christ the answer of history to the aspirations of the prophets after a decisive assertion and vindication of right against all evil in the world of men.  The life and death of Jesus Christ, His resurrection, and the creation of the Church through His Spirit, constitute a decisive Act of God, an objective revelation of His righteousness.

The meaning, therefore, of the phrase ‘God’s righteousness is revealed,’ might be given by some such paraphrase as this: ‘God is now seen to be vindicating the right, redressing the wrong, and delivering men from the power of evil.’” (C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, pp. 9-13)

“For the early Christians the knowledge of the world began with the knowledge of God, and God could be known only in faith…Natural law is a minor tributary in Christian antiquity.”  (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, pp. 161, 321)

Today most western Christians tend to place great weight on the possibility and importance of evidential apologetics.  That God’s existence and nature can be seen and known and proved through appeal to the created order seems both intuitive and biblical to us.  Thus we love the ontological argument, the argument from design, the fine-tuning of the universe, etc.  Yet I have found myself slowly moving away from an earlier optimism I possessed for both the usefuleness and the centrality of such argumentative strategies.  Like most long, slow fades away from one’s prior convictions, I find myself unable to give voice to many of the concrete, particular reasons that have prompted me over the years toward a more Barthian perspective on so-called “natural theology.”  But I have been enboldened in my stance of late by finding a much older predecessor than Barth to point to in my defense. 

Blaise Pascal, in his one-of-a-kind Pensees (every Christian should read this), repeatedly pulls the rug out from under those who would put their faith in evidential, rationalistic “proofs” for God’s existence and excellence.  To paraphrase Paul, if anyone had a reason for confidence in the flesh (i.e. the ability of reason to work its way up to God unaided), it was Pascal, the legendary philosopher and mathematician.  Yet he intentionally came to forsake this attractive pathway to the divine, as I believe the passages cited below demonatrate. 

What accounts for Pascal’s diminished view of creation’s inherent ability, apart from the gospel, to win over the minds and hearts of human beings to the reality of God?  I think the impetus for Pascal’s rejection of natural theology can be divided into two categories: ruin and revelation. 

First, because human beings are prone to futile idolatry and darkened in both mind and passion, the testifying witness of the created order is not so much absent, as ineffective.  Yes, the world cries out the glory of the eternal God, as Paul writes in Romans 1:18-32.  Yet in that same passage he also contends that sinful, twisted humanity inevitably distorts, corrupts and suppresses the silent speech of the heavens (Psalm 19).  I find this to be spectacularly true in personal experience.  Human beings on their own, from a million distinct vantage points in life among which the only common ground shared equally is the sin resident within each biased observer, cannot in actual practice come to know God through wisdom.  At best, nature can render us inexcusable, but it cannot enlighten us as long as we remain autonomously aloof from the God who unceasingly beckons to us through the gospel and the church.  As Camus pointed out in The Myth of Sisyphus, no one has ever yet died for the ontological argument.  Nor should they have.  But thousands have died for Christ.  And they should have; such decisions will be publicly vindicated on the last day.

Second, from the divine side of the ledger now, reason is not the chosen avenue by which God has appointed human beings to come to know him (1 Corinthians 1-2).  And at the bleark prospect that charges of fideism might be laid at my feet, let me state plainly here that I do believe reason is indispensable to knowing God.  But I do not believe it is primary.  The gospel, as both Origen and Edwards argued, has its highest and most proper proof within.  The beauty, power and goodness of the gospel flows from the story of Jesus itself, and not from any external standards, criteria or logical forays into that story by disinterested outsiders.  In hindsight, reason confirms the legitimacy and coherence of our faith in a thousand ways.  Yet reason was not, is not, and never will be our trailblazing pioneer into the knowledge of God whose prowess receives eternal adulation .  For by God’s own design, the world did not come to know the God of wisdom through wisdom, but rather only through the foolishness of what is proclaimed.  That is, the only true God only comes to be known through the heralding of the unbelievable message that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of all, having accomplished our salvation through his triumph over sin and death.  For Pascal, then, such a gospel necessarily has enormous epistemological implications.  If the God who saves us that way is the God we are talking about, then the process of knowing Him does not take essentially place through our own efforts and ability.  Knowledge of God is created, sustained and consummated according to the Spirit, and not according to the flesh.  Such a claim is not irrationalism, but simply the recognition that the knowledge of God does trade in goods that are fundamentally beyond the reaches of reason’s ambitious arm. 

Stanley Hauerwas provocatively argued in his Gifford lectures that Karl Barth–that fiercesome, caricatured enemy of all “arguments for God” which find their origin in isolation from the very gospel they seek to defend–actually turns out to be the natural theologian par excellence, because he starts with Jesus and is only then willing to look at the world.  Only from a tentative, humble committment to Jesus, assuming his story as my own story, can I then inquire of creation and see that it sings of the God who made it with any sense of certainty and coherence.  From any other position, creation will either seem to me futile and ruthless, or else to belong to a god other than the one that the gospel tells me of.  As Calvin famously put it, the Scriptures provide us with the reading spectacles we must wear if we hope to read creation rightly.  Otherwise God is still there, but we will not see his handiwork in proper focus. 

Hauerwas even argues that Thomas Aquina’s famous “proofs” for God’s existence in his Summa are not, as so often thought, actually proofs at all.  Instead, they are (in historical context) intramural attempts from within the community of faith to help Christians who already believe to understand how rational their faith indeed is.  Whether this is a justified reading of Aquinas I am in no position to decide, but I do find it to be utterly persuasive as an interpretation of what my experience (when I am most honest with myself) has been with arguments for God, as well as of the proper role of the gospel itself in creating and sustaining within us a knowledge of God that is Christ-centered through and through.  Which, of course, is the only kind of knowledge of God there really is in the universe. 

I leave you now to ruminate upon Pascal, and encourage those of us who have come to know God in Christ to only depend upon “arguments for God” in derivative, secondary ways.  What should we do with all the time on our hands we now find freed up?  Proclaim the Story.  And then live the Story together.  Nothing persuades the human mind and satisfies the human heart so much as when those things are done well, in conscious dependence upon the grace of God.

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#3: “‘Why, do you not say yourself that the sky and the birds prove God?’  No.  ‘Does your religion not say so?’  No.  For though it is true in a sense for some souls whom God has enlightened in this way, yet it is untrue for the majority.”

#189: “We know God only through Jesus Christ…All those who have claimed to know God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to offer…In him and through him, therefore, we know God.  Apart from that, without Scripture, without original sin, without the necessary mediator, who was promised and came, it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality.  But through and in Christ we can prove Christ’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality.”

#190: “The metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake.”

#406: “We have an incapacity for proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome.  We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.”

#417: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ.  Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.  Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.”

#429: “This is what I see and what troubles me.  I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness.  Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety.  If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith.  But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state, where I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, she should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, they should be completely erased; that nature should say all or nothing so that I could see what course I ought to follow.  Instead of that, in the state in which I am, not knowing what I am not what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty.  My whole heart strains to know what the true good is in order to pursue it: no price would be too high to pay for eternity.”

#449: “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the center towards which all things tend.  Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything…And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind: not just because I should not feel competent to find in nature arguments which would convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge, without Christ, is useless and sterile.  Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation.

The Christian’s God does not consist merely of a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements.  That is the portion of the heathen and Epicureans.  He does not consist merely of a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of years to those who worship him.  That is the portion of the Jews.  But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him.

All those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go no further than nature, either find no light to satisfy them or come to devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity.”

#463: “It is a remarkable fact that no canonical author has ever used nature to prove God.  They all try to make people believe in him.  David, Solomon, etc., never said: ‘There is no such thing as a vacuum, therefore God exists.’  They must have been cleverer than the cleverest of their successors, all of whom have used proofs from nature.  This is very noteworthy.”

One passage in particular that has taken on an utterly different twist for me on account of this narrative strategy, as I quietly ask the end to explain the beginning for me, is the strange saying of Jesus recorded in Matthew 11:11-12 and Luke 16:16-17.  You know, the part about how the kingdom of God is apparently taken and entered by those who are violent.  Many a scholar has tried to evade the awkward reality that Jesus seems to praise and commend those who do violence here.  Nonetheless those who are willing to employ force here are clearly the “good guys.”  They are not those who wrongfully persecute Jesus’  peaceful followers.  Is Jesus then suggesting terrorism?  Is this typical religious rhetoric for militaristic domination and expansion?  Should we see images of planes crashing into skyscrapers as we listen to Jesus’ words? 

Of course not.  Throughout the Gospels (and the NT at large), military images and warfare language are consistently employed in subversive fashion.  Jesus’ disciples are to be violent–but only in that they are to so value the kingdom that they are willing to cut off their own hands or gouge out their own eyes if these cause them to stumble.  They are to “conquer” (in the language of Revelation) by laying down their lives and refusing to return evil for evil.  They are to hate with all of their own being–but the object of their hate is their own lives in this age, in comparison to the coming of God’s restored reign in a new heaven and a new earth in the world to come.  And so on, and so on. 

I am comforted that many other Christians throughout history have understood that the gospel turns such traditional religious expectations upside-down–a logical necessity given the way God chose to accomplish our redemption through Jesus’ “strange triumph” on the cross.  Consider this passage from Jonathan Edwards, on how the good soldiers of Jesus Christ manifest their “boldness” as they enlist in his army:

“But here some may be ready to say [in light of JE’s argument that meekness is a central Christian virtue]: Is there no such thing as Christian fortitude, and boldness for Christ, being good soldiers in the Christian warfare, and coming out boldly against the enemies of Christ and His people? 

To which I answer: There doubtless is such a thing.  The whole Christian life is compared to a warfare, and fitly so.  The most eminent Christians are the best soldiers, endued with the greatest degrees of Christian fortitude.  It is the duty of God’s people to be steadfast and vigorous in their opposition to the designs and ways of such as are endeavoring to overthrow the kingdom of Christ and the interest of religion.  But yet many persons seem to be quite mistaken concerning the nature of Christian fortitude.  It is an exceeding diverse thing from a brutal fierceness, or the boldness of beasts of prey.  True Christian fortitude consists in strength of mind, through grace, exerted in two things: in ruling and suppressing the evil and unruly passions and affections of the mind; and in steadfastly and freely exerting and following good affections and dispositions, without being hindered by sinful fear or the opposition of enemies.  But the passions that are restrained and kept under in the exercise of this Christian strength and fortitude, are those very passions that are vigorously and violently exerted in a false boldness for Christ.  And those affections that are vigorously exerted in true fortitude are those Christian holy affections that are directly contrary to them.  Though Christian fortitude appears in withstanding and counteracting the enemies that are without us; yet it much more appears in resisting and suppressing the enemies that are within us; because they are our worst and strongest enemies and have greatest advantage against us.  The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world…

The directest and surest way in the world to make a right judgment of what is a holy fortitude in fighting with God’s enemies, is to look to the Captain of all God’s hosts, and our great Leader and Example, and see wherein his fortitude and valor appeared, in His chief conflict, and in the time of the greatest battle that ever was or ever will be fought with these enemies, when He fought with them all alone, and of the people there was none with Him.  He exercised His fortitude in the highest degree that ever He did, and got that glorious victory that will be celebrated in the praises and triumphs of all the hosts of heaven throughout all eternity. 

Behold Jesus Christ in the time of His last sufferings, when His enemies in earth and hell made their most violent attack upon Him, compassing Him round on every side like rending and roaring lions.  Doubtless here we shall see the fortitude of a holy warrior and champion in the cause of God in its highest perfection and greatest luster, and an example fit for the soldiers to follow that fight under this Captain.  But how did He show His holy boldness and valor at that time?  Not in the exercise of any fiery passions; not in fierce and violent speeches, vehemently declaiming against the intolerable wickedness of opposers, giving them their own in plain terms: but in not opening His mouth when afflicted and oppressed, in going as a lamb to the slaughter, and, as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, not opening his mouth; praying that the Father would forgive His cruel enemies because they knew not what they did; not shedding others’ blood, but with all-conquering patience and love shedding his own.  Indeed, one of his disciples, that made a forward pretence to boldness for Christ and confidently declared he would sooner die with Christ than deny Him, began to lay about him with a sword: but Christ meekly rebukes him, and heals the wound he gives.  Never was the patience, meekness, love, and forgiveness of Christ so gloriously manifest as at that time.  Never did He appear so much a Lamb, and never did he show so much of the dove-like spirit as at that time. 

If therefore we see any of the followers of Christ, in the midst of the most violent, unreasonable, and wicked opposition of God’s and his own enemies, maintaining under all this temptation, the humility and quietness and gentleness of a lamb, and the harmlessness and love and sweetness of a dove, we may well judge that here is a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” (Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, pp. 277-79)