AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

Until Truth and obedience to it reign within me, I can never experience true joy, never enjoy true peace, but must remain in service to my own deceitful desires.  Freedom to choose death? what diabolic caricature is that?  Let me be bound hand and foot against that choosing, that I may be saved from my own human taskmaster: yoke me to Christ!  The only will that is truly free is the Will of Omnipotence; I cannot then be in bondage to anything, if I make that Will my own.

We are not intended to understand Life. Life makes us what we are, but Life belongs to God. If I can understand a thing and can define it, I am its master. I cannot understand or define Life; I cannot understand or define God; consequently I am master of neither. Logic and reason are always on the hunt for definition, and anything that cannot be defined is apt to be defied. Rationalism usually defies God and defies life; it will not have anything that cannot be defined on a rational basis, forgetting that the things that make up elemental human life cannot be defined. (Oswald Chambers)

The peace that surpasses all understanding is a description, not of its magnitude nor even of its priority, but of its sequence.  It’s the peace that emerges when the understanding, in defeated exhaustion, has fallen to the wayside.

i. That the glorious poem of creation in Genesis is not literal must be our initial agreement.  To imagine that God palpably kneaded Adam out of a lump of dirt and blew into him would be a very fairy-tale sort of god.  We must remember that the Genesis record was not originally recorded only for us ‘enlightened’ children of scientific modernity, who have been on the historical scene for but a few brief moments, and only recently developed a little curiosity as to the architecture of our nursery. It was gifted long ago for the instruction of peoples who were hardly capable of receiving truth in any form other than poetic myth. 

Having acknowledged that, we must nonetheless also acknowledge that the order in which Genesis traces Life from its emergence out of the waters up through its aquatic representatives and its higher life-forms (hinting on the way the side-development of the bird from the reptile!), and finally to humankind tallies remarkably well with the record of the rocks.  No modern poet, we may be quite confident – given the modest scope and aspiration of modern poetry – could have written a better romance of the Origin of Species.

ii. Evolution, which is God’s method in all His projects, is His greatest glory, provided we will remember that it is not finished.  Our human stage is the crisis, not the goal of evolution.  Put plainly, our brain has been developed in order that the soul which has come into us may get into touch with and learn from the Teacher of Life.  “We are His offspring;” “That which was made, in Him was life.”  And that life was evolved through tremendous struggle that it might return to enrich Him with the garlands of eternal victory.

We have appeared after long ages; and yet, “Of His own will He begot us by the Word of Truth, that we might be a kind of first-fruits of His creatures.” We are at the cross-roads, and Christ died to lead us into the next stage of evolution.  Life, the prodigal Son, is immortal.  From the most primitive cell it has persevered through the race.  But the goal, from eternity, has been the survival of the individual.

And at last, at the end of ages, that goal is in sight.

So many pitfalls of intellectual pride, so much self-satisfied atheism, could have been avoided, had we only fully appreciated the wisdom of St. Hilary of Poitiers, who wrote, many, many years ago: If we assume that an event did not happen because we cannot discover how it was done, we make the limits of our understanding into the limits of reality.

We have words for concepts we cannot conceive, but which have application to something other than linguistic function – which are not simply pieces in a language game.

Some demarcate the necessary, although unknowable: ‘infinity’ is such a word, as is ‘eternity.’

Others have warrant, not of metaphysical necessity, but of revelation.  ‘God is omniscient; God is omnipotent; God is unchanging’ are among them.  ‘God is All-in-All’ is another, as is ‘God is love.’

And then there is ‘Tri-Unity,’ a concept inconceivable, and yet a necessity of revelation. 

For if God is love, then He has been so in eternity.  Creation had a beginning, but God has none.  Had ‘nothing’ ever had application, God could not have emerged from it. 

In that awful abyss of pre-creation, then, when that which is love was alone, where was its object found?  Solitary love is a contradiction in terms.  Unless God is a society of at least two co-eternal loving elements, with the love-relation ever flowing between them, ever perfectly bestowed and ever as perfectly requited, God is not love.

And if there are two elements – call them persons, and call the one Father and the other Son – then one must be source and the other product: the second must originate from the first, for if they have separate origins, the God is not All-in-All.

 And further, this origination must itself be an eternal act.  For if the Father existed without the Son, then He was not love, and would have had to change to become love. Yet God is unchanging.

The Word, therefore, is eternally begotten.

And finally, if God be in eternal relation, the relation that unites the two persons must itself be of God.  That which flows between the two must be as real and as eternal as they themselves, and originate in them.  It must share their life and their being, and must do so eternally.  It is the mutuality in which they both inhere, the medium which they exchange.

 A third element, then, proceeding eternally from the other two, completes the All-in-All.  Call it also a person; call it the Holy Spirit.

And this brings us to the end of thought and back to the inconceivable; or, in other and better words, to the inexpressible.  As Wittgenstein put it, now also long ago, but in the spirit of St. Hilary: That of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.

So the response to this mysterious ‘need’ for expression, which arises within the absoluteness of God, is creation.  We cannot explain how God created.  We can only say why the Absolute entered into external relation, the Perfect into imperfection.   And we can say that God both externalized Himself and animated that externality.  Using the language we have available: He put out a thought – and it lived. That which was made…in Him was life.

This new thing – life – when first begotten, was almost nothing, only a bud or a germ of Himself.  Yet inherent in it was the possibility of evolving into His image and entering at last into its birthright: reunion.

Through this germinal ‘child’ of His, God willed to realize, to actualize His own nature.  Through it, He would venture into history; with it, He would prove the blade of His power and wisdom; by it, received in time back into the realm of its ancestry, He would express forever the height, depth, and boundless possibilities of His love, rejoice forever in the goodness of His own freedom.

And so God is glorified in His saints.  Yet it is the deeper truth that, in them, He has glorified Himself.  The drama of life – from its emergence as the mere breath of God, through its painful evolution from plane to plane, until its achievement of eternal reunion with its Father – it is the story of the Prodigal Son.

 

So it was in order to realize His goodness in virtue that God needed to create something that, again from the meager resource of our language, we may term ‘resistance,’ an arena in which or a foil against which He could make manifest His own perfection.

(The same need for expression drives creation, no matter which facet of God’s diamond-like perfection is brought into view.  God is wisdom, but for omniscience, there is no problem to solve.  God is power, but for omnipotence, there is nothing to overcome.  God is love, but in the shared heart of the divine trinity, there is no scope for sacrifice, love’s proving.  We begin with ‘goodness,’ because it is the Ur-concept of them all.

Put plainly, God is eternally the perfect potential, eternally needful of actualization.  His own revealed name – Yahweh – contains within itself the wonder of this eternal Becoming.)

So, then: for resistance, God needed external relation.  The interior Tri-Unity relation of perfectly coordinated Personality provided no such possibility.  To find a field for actualization, the perfect required an environment.  But where, for the All-in-All, could an environment be found.  God alone existed. 

There could be only one solution: God must produce an environment from within Himself.  Something, besides God, must live, that is, have initiative and will.

And that ‘something’ must be both object and subject. 

Object, because it must provide resistance to call forth His power; it must provide a problem to exercise and prove His wisdom; and it must provide a need to require His sacrifice.

And yet subject, because it must manifest those same qualities through its own will – itself a distribution of God’s nature, God’s image – and thereby serve to actualize His perfect goodness, and so, now crowning His glory, become one again with Him, an eternal addition to the Tri-Unity, the flower of its Tree, a Body for Himself.

This is the whole object of creation.  Surrounded with a society of virtuous persons, born of Him, approved by probation and adopted as part of His eternal household, He shall ever increase the family that was, in itself, too self-sufficient to be proved.

Why there is something, rather than nothing.

Our reflection, to be well-grounded, must begin with a certainty. That certainty is that creation must have answered to some necessity in God. There could not have been any necessity outside of God, acting upon Him, or He would cease to be God, to be All-in-All.

Within His own being, then, there must have been a need, to which creation was the response. But how can there have been a need in God; what could have been wanting in the perfect All-in-All?

The answer lies in the conception. The very fact that God is All-in-All contains, and is, an urgency of necessity – a coefficient of His perfection.

As we will demonstrate elsewhere, and as long understood by Christian reflection, it is eternally essential that God should be a Tri-Unity. But God needs something more than internal relation, something that His Tri-Unity cannot supply. This ‘something’ can only be intimated by words for its nature is beyond our thought, and we must be reverent as well. The best name our language supplies for it is ‘virtue.’

A strange thought, that God should lack virtue, until we consider what virtue is. God is all-good, is perfect goodness. But virtue is at once less and more than goodness. Goodness, in itself, is an untried state of being. It is not, in itself, in evidence. It is on trust. What it would prove to be, were it tested, has not been established.

Virtue is goodness tested, proved, and victorious, Goodness is subjective, virtue objective. Goodness is the potential, virtue is the actual. Virtue is goodness in manifestation; we may say, it is its incarnation.

God’s perfect goodness, then, for its expression and vindication, needed to be crowned with virtue. In its very perfection, there was an ache, because it had not been realized; a hunger, because it had not been fulfilled. Again with reverence, and straitened by the inadequacy of our language, we may say God lacked ‘glory,’ for there was none to prefer Him, nothing to prefer Him to. His perfect and absolute goodness wanted completeness, until it was put into action, proved, judged, and found transcendent.

The Life force within the plant draws sustenance through its – the plant’s – roots, and uses that material to fashion and refashion a plant body for itself. The same Life force, now animating a much grander vehicle, uses our meals and snacks to fashion and refashion our physical reality, our workaday selves.

Within the new birth, the Life force maintains the dynamic, fashioning and refashioning this new creation, feeding, first, on Christ’s own body and blood, and then on our acts of loving obedience to his will.

“I have food you know not of,” he once informed his followers, and every other Christian.

This is not theology; it’s biology.

The relation between God and each one of us is like that between the sun and a revolving, rotating planet. The sun doesn’t change; how the sun is received does.