The Majesty of Mystery

Celebrating the Glory of an Incomprehensible God

K. Scott Oliphint, Scott K. Oliphint

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781577997436
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

How can God be three and one?

How can God take on a human nature?

If God planned everything, how can I be responsible?

Do my prayers make any difference in God's plan?

Christians may attempt to "know" God to the best of their ability--leading some to limit God as they contain Him within tidy answers for human understanding. In The Majesty of Mystery, K. Scott Oliphint encourages believers to embrace the mysteries of Christian faith: the Trinity, the incarnation, eternal life, and the balance between God's sovereign will and human choices. Drawing from the Reformed tradition and interacting with the biblical text, Oliphint shows how a profound recognition of our own limitations can lead us into a richer awareness of God's infinite majesty.

Written with deep theological knowledge and threaded with everyday implications, The Majesty of Mystery connects the dots between humanity and God, belief and practice, mystery and worship. Oliphint invites readers to rediscover the purpose to which all theology aims--the worship of the incomprehensible God who faithfully reveals himself in Scripture.

CHAPTER 1

Mystery: Our Lifeblood

Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics.… In truth, the knowledge that God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding. In that sense it is all mystery with which the science of dogmatics is concerned, for it does not deal with finite creatures, but from beginning to end looks past all creatures and focuses on the eternal and infinite One himself.

—Herman Bavinck

Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation

Have you ever wondered how God can be Three-in-One? Have you been uneasy trying to explain that the One in whom you’ve put your trust has two completely different natures? Have you thought about your affirmation that God is eternal in light of His activity in time and in history? Are you tempted to think that if God is in complete control we cannot be responsible for what we do? Does your confession of God’s sovereignty conflict with your understanding of prayer? Does it make more sense to you to deny that God is sovereign?

If any of these questions has crossed your mind, you are typical of most Christians. You don’t have to be a Christian for too long to begin to see some tensions in what Scripture requires us to affirm. But we also recognize that, even as we affirm certain things, we aren’t capable of thinking about them in the way that we think about so many other things in the world. These are matters that create intellectual tension for us; they seem to conflict in some ways. As I hope to show in this book, this is as it should be. In revealing Himself and His ways in the world to us, God is pointing us to our own limits as creatures. He is reminding us that He is God and we are not.

How, then, do we respond to this reminder? In the course of this book, I hope to spell out what some of these mysteries in Scripture are. I also want to show a proper way for us to see them that should enhance the way we live as Christians—including, especially, the way we worship. Specifically, in light of what Scripture calls us to believe, I will highlight the central reason why we should praise and adore God for the mysteries He reveals to us.

BEGINNING WITH MYSTERY

Nothing should motivate true Christian worship more than the majestic mystery of God. Things that we understand, that we can wrap our minds around, are rarely objects of our worship. We may seek to control them. We may try to manipulate them. We may want to change them. But we will not worship them, not really. If what we are seeking is true worship, it is the riches of the mystery of God and His ways in the world that will produce and motivate worship in us and to Him.

Christian worship, as well as Christian theology, begins with mystery. Mystery is not something that functions simply as a conclusion to our thinking about God. It is not that we learn and think and reason as much as we can and then admit in the end that there is some mystery left over. Instead, we begin by acknowledging the mystery of God and His ways. We begin with the happy recognition that God and His activities are ultimately incomprehensible to us. When we begin with that recognition, we can begin to understand God properly and so worship Him in light of who He is and what He has done.

In his monumental work of theology, Herman Bavinck says that “mystery is the lifeblood of theology.”1 “Lifeblood” is a particularly apt metaphor here. Whenever certain kinds of illnesses arise in the body, one of the primary ways that doctors begin their diagnosis is through an analysis of the blood. Our blood speaks volumes about what is actually going on with specific organs, muscles, and nerves inside of us. Because all aspects of our bodies need blood to flow through them properly, the effect of blood on our bodies and our bodies on our blood is a central diagnostic tool in medicine. If there is no blood, there is no real life (Lev 17:11). What permeates our bodies, and brings life to them, is the blood.

So also, what gives life to all dimensions of our Christian thinking and living is the “lifeblood” of the mystery of God’s character and His working in the world. If we think that mystery is no part, or only a “leftover” part, of our understanding of Christian truth, then what we think is Christian truth can actually be a dry, “bloodless” idea, with no real life remaining in it.

Suppose, to carry the metaphor further, we pick up one of the latest Christian books that deals with the topic of salvation. As we begin to read it, we notice that there is something wrong with the way the author is thinking about his topic. Suppose, for example, that he wants us to believe that the faith that we have is self-generated; we produce it, and God responds to it. How do we begin to diagnose what exactly the problem is with this view?

We might begin by looking into what God actually says about salvation, in all of its multifaceted beauty and complexity. As we do that, one of the first things we could ask in this circumstance is whether, and how, the biblical notion of mystery fits into the author’s thinking about salvation. Is it possible, we could ask, that the reason he wants to argue that our faith is from ourselves (and not from God) is because if it were not from us it would not be our responsibility to have and exercise it? It has to be only and completely our faith, self-generated, he maintains, or we could make no sense of the biblical command to have faith, or believe in, Jesus Christ.

But is that how Scripture views our faith (just to cite one example, see Ephesians 2:8)? Could it be that Scripture affirms both that the faith that we have is ours and our responsibility to have, and at the same time that we cannot have it unless and until God changes our hearts and gives us that faith? Could it be that the view set forth in our imaginary book has yet to give due credit to the “lifeblood” of biblical thinking? We might then want to explore whether our own view of faith undermines the biblical truth of the mystery of God’s salvation to us.

In other words, because—as we shall see—there is mystery at every point of our Christian thinking and living, it is important to give a proper, biblical account of that mystery as we think through the various truths of Scripture. If mystery is absent from our considerations of biblical truth, it may be that we will need to reconsider those truths in light of the “lifeblood” of theology. It might just be that the reason we have come to believe certain things about God, or about Scripture, or about salvation, or about anything else in Scripture, is because we are less than comfortable with a robust, majestic, biblical view of the mystery of God and His ways.

THE RATIONALIST REFLEX

But if mystery is indeed the “lifeblood” of biblical truth, what would make us wary of mystery in our attempt to understand that truth? There are many answers to this question, but chief among them, at least historically, is that we have a natural (i.e., sinful) tendency to ensure that everything that we believe is easily and obviously palatable to anyone at any time.

We can see this clearly in the history of ideas. For example, John Locke, a 17th-century philosopher, wrote a small book titled The Reasonableness of Christianity. In that work, Locke set out to discover just exactly which truths in Scripture could be grasped fully by the human mind. He argued that only “reasonable” truths were worthy of belief. He was deeply concerned to cull out all mystery in Scripture, since our usual ways of thinking could not contain such things. Consequently, Locke’s view of Christianity was “bloodless”; it had no life left in it. For him, Christianity could teach only what was comprehensible to limited (and sinful) minds like ours. Thus, Locke created a dull, empty, minimalist religion. Locke’s “rational” religion was a far cry from the glorious and majestic mysteries of the truth of our Christian faith.

What is ironic about Locke’s book is that he was trying to combat the Deism of his day. Deism believed in a god, but it was not a god who was present in the world. Around the same time as Locke published his work, John Toland, a deist, published a work with the long and formidable title Christianity not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise showing, That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call’d A Mystery. Toland’s deism was set forth so that we would have no more difficulty in conceiving of God than conceiving of anything else in the world. Toland’s view, for example, was that we should view God’s character in the same way that we view human characteristics. It must all be reasonable to us; nothing could be left to mystery.

Locke wanted to combat this view, but his own response to Toland was too similar to the view he wanted to reject. For both Locke and Toland, our beliefs were restricted to only those things that could be comprehended by the human mind. For Locke, Toland, and others, Christianity could not be mysterious. If it were, it could not be “adequately” understood, and if it could not be adequately understood, they thought, it should not be believed.

These ideas undermine the glories of Christianity at its root; they make the human mind the sole judge of what is true. If the mind is the judge, only what is able to be contained by our typical ways of thinking can be affirmed by us as true. As with Locke, the depths of the riches of God’s ways are drained dry, and nothing but a shallow pool of superficial affirmations remains.

This view of things is light-years away from the “lifeblood” of Christianity. We are called to love the Lord with all of our minds, but we are not meant to seek to contain Him with our minds. If we approach our Bibles as Locke did, seeking to expunge anything that goes against our natural ways of thinking, then we will, in the process, lose the heart and soul of the Christian faith. This is a price not worth paying; its cost requires that we miss the glorious mystery of God’s triune majesty.

MYSTICISM OR MYSTERY?

When it comes to biblical mysteries, the temptation that most Christians face is the one we just discussed—i.e., to favor our own thinking, to trust our own minds. If we do this, however, we exclude the rich mysteries of the Christian faith.

But there is another, though not as pervasive, tendency that also could be a temptation. Trusting our own way of thinking buries the biblical notion of mystery, but so does its opposite. The mystery that is the lifeblood of Christian truth is not compatible with a trust in our own minds, but neither is it compatible with a denial of the use of our minds, sometimes called “mysticism.” Mysticism, in the way we’re using the term here, seeks to promote and praise a total lack of understanding and of thinking. It prizes the ineffable above all and sees reason and thinking as obstacles to true faith.

A somewhat obscure example of this can be seen in the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. As a mystic, Eckhart determined that a lack of understanding was the best way to relate to God. For example, in Eckhart’s sermon on Matthew 5:3 (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”) we see an example of a distorted view of mystery.

Eckhart’s sermon had three points. He focused on a poverty of the soul, which he called a “stilling.” His first point was that there must be a stilling of the will if we are to be poor in spirit. His second point was that there must be a stilling of the intellect, so that our goal would be to have no conceptual knowledge of God at all. In attempting to make that point, he says:

Why I pray God to rid me of God is because conditionless being is above God and above distinction: it was therein I was myself, therein I willed myself and knew myself to make this man and in this sense I am my own cause, both of my nature which is eternal and of my nature which is temporal. For this am I born, and as to my birth which is eternal I can never die. In my eternal mode of birth I have always been, am now, and shall eternally remain. That which I am in time shall die and come to naught, for it is of the day and passes with the day. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of mine own self and all things, and had I willed it I had never been, nor any thing, and if I had not been then God had not been either. To understand this is not necessary.2

Any reader or hearer of this sermon would be happy to hear the last sentence—“to understand this is not necessary.” Not only is understanding this sermon not necessary, it may not even be possible! But what Eckhart has in mind in that last statement is that it is better not to understand with the mind what he is attempting to communicate. To the extent that you do understand, you miss the real import of who God is. The way to “know” God, in other words, is by not knowing him (or it).

This is a view that sees understanding and intellectual effort, particularly with respect to God and His character and ways, as detrimental to a proper relationship to God. The best way to know God, the mystic would say, is to affirm that we cannot in any way really understand who he is. All that is left for us is an “experience” of God.

Are there parallels to this kind of temptation in Christianity today? Perhaps. I remember when the phrase “let go and let God” was a mantra for some Christians. The idea was not simply to cease trying to earn salvation—which would be a good thing. The phrase was meant to emphasize that it is best for Christians to take a docile, experiential attitude toward their faith. The more intensely you try to understand or obey God, the less you rely on Him.

There is nothing wrong with relying on God, or with recognizing the importance of experience in our Christian lives. But if experience is our primary way to God, or if it begins to take the place of our efforts to understand what God has said in His Word, we are moving toward a mystical view of Christianity.

Here is the paradox: A true, biblical view of mystery has its roots not in a lack of understanding, but in the teaching of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Mystery: Our Lifeblood
• Chapter 2: The Majesty of the Mystery of the Depth of God
• Chapter 3: The Majesty of the Mystery of the Three-in-One
• Chapter 4: The Majesty of the Mystery of the Incarnation
• Chapter 5: The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Relationship to His People
• Chapter 6: The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Decree and Desire
• Chapter 7: The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Providence and Our Choices
• Chapter 8: The Majesty of the Mystery of Prayer
• Chapter 9: The Majesty of the Mystery of Our Eternal Joy
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Selections from the Westminster Confession of Faith
• Bibliography
• Subject/Author Index
• Scripture Index