http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15345601/invincible-joy-confirms-our-election

Around the turn of the century, some 20 years ago, well-informed citizens might claim 20 sources of news. They’d watch a national and local TV news program, pick up a newspaper delivery or two each morning, wait each week or month on a few magazine subscriptions, forward some emails with bizarre threats, and tune in during morning and evening commutes to a talk radio station or two.

In the last 20 years, however, the number of sources has expanded to 200 . . . to 2,000 . . . to 200,000 . . . to 2 million . . . to 200 million . . . to 2 billion and beyond . . . to every person around the world who can open a Facebook profile, a couple burner Twitter handles, an Instagram account for public and one to hide from the parents, and on and on.

This revolution has implications for every corner of our lives, but perhaps none more consequential than that of Christian formation and discipleship.

From Curation to Algorithm

When pastors stepped into the pulpit 20 years ago, they held a knowledge advantage over most church members. They knew more about the Bible, more about other Christians around the world, more about history and theology. That didn’t mean the congregations would always agree. They could read the Bible for themselves. They could purchase the history books from Borders or Amazon. They could subscribe to Christianity Today. But this study required time, money, and effort.

At the time, it was still a curated world, controlled by editors and publishers and producers. Like pastors, these gatekeepers benefited from broad agreement. TV shows and periodicals could sell more advertisements that way. Pastors could focus on study and shepherding with one eye on the most popular cable news and talk radio hosts among their congregation.

The curated world has largely disappeared. The inconspicuous editor has been replaced by the opaque algorithm. And the algorithm knows more about us than any pastor or any editor ever could. The algorithm gives us what we might not even admit we want. Church leaders can only give us what they think we need.

Internet-Shaped Christians

Compared to 20 years ago, the Internet — not the local church — has become the primary place where Christians are formed today. Before their leaders ever speak, church members already know what they believe. And they expect their leaders to conform — or else. No wonder so many church leaders feel like they’ve lost their footing in the last two years.

“The Internet — not the local church — has become the primary place where Christians are formed today.”

Every pastor, of course, is led to think his situation is unique. Elders resign with accusations of theological drift. Younger members leave in frustration because pastors didn’t change their sermon to speak about the latest viral video. Deacons break decades-long friendships after they discover a new favorite YouTube channel.

In the aftermath, pastors reflect on what they did wrong. Did they unintentionally offend someone? Should they develop a new policy for when to revise the pastoral prayer? Did their favorite person to quote actually do all the terrible things that the podcast suggested?

When it’s happening to one pastor, it’s good to look in the mirror. When it’s happening to a denomination, it’s good to look at the culture of training leaders. When it’s happening in every single church, though, it’s a revolution.

The (Technological) Reformation

Revolution’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Martin Luther lived through a revolution. More than a century before Luther unwittingly launched the Protestant Reformation, Jan Hus had raised many of the same concerns about the medieval Catholic church’s ethical offenses. Hus, too, had the support of powerful political leaders in his native region of Europe. But Hus was executed as a martyr in 1415 at the Council of Constance. Luther died a natural death in 1546 after effecting schism with Rome. Under God’s providence, what made the difference?

Luther seized upon the print revolution of the early sixteenth century. And according to biographer Andrew Pettegree in Brand Luther, he effectively invented the popular theological treatise. He didn’t wait on the church hierarchy. He didn’t write only in scholarly Latin. He took his case straight from the Bible, straight to the people. This revolution of grace prevailed in much of Europe, and now continues to spread on every inhabited continent.

Today we’re living through the early days of a revolution of equal scale but with an uncertain outcome.

Terror to Bad or Good?

Luther and Hus remain heroes to the podcasters and YouTubers denouncing today’s church leaders as corrupt. If any figure in church history would have excelled in the volatile back-and-forth of Twitter, it would be Luther. Hus only wishes TikTok had been available on the road to Constance. If you’ve been hurt or outraged by corrupt denominational leaders, the Internet is your insurance. You don’t need a magazine editor or TV producer to investigate your story. They’ll sit at home and report on your Twitter Spaces. You have the power.

This revolution is a double-edged sword. It’s a terror to bad conduct. But sometimes it also slices the good. How can we, then, leverage this revolution for God’s glory?

Luther didn’t exploit the emerging celebrity culture and printing press for revolution’s sake. His revolution returned Christians to the ultimate authority of the word of God, which is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). This word of God condemns anyone who taxes the free gift of the gospel (Galatians 5:12). This word of God exterminates the brood of vipers who speak good but practice evil (Matthew 12:34).

“Any technology revolution that returns the word of God to the center of Christian life and practice will be blessed by God.”

Any technology revolution that returns the word of God to the center of Christian life and practice will be blessed by God. For the accountability of the word, every true church leader gives thanks. For the videos of BibleProject, the sermons of John Piper, and small groups on Zoom during a pandemic, we give thanks. For Paul’s command that our speech should “always be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6), we give thanks — and ask God for slower thumbs.

Wherever the word rules, no one who belongs to God should fear.

Stumbling Toward Sobriety

This is the day the Lord has made. Ultimately, the Internet holds together not in California server farms, but by the word of his power. And yet church leaders today can no less ignore the Internet than the pope could dismiss Luther as a wild German boar.

So what’s the solution to the crisis of church leadership at the dawn of the Internet revolution?

Shifting all our ministry online would make the problem worse. In fact, church leaders do well to tread carefully and even consider stepping away from social media. You don’t pass the glutton another pint and expect him to stumble toward sobriety. Sometimes the best defense against the Internet’s never-ending pseudo-events is ignorance. You may not be able to ignore the Internet, but you should probably ignore most Twitter beefs.

As the Internet has expanded our horizons to the whole world, most church leaders should feel released to focus locally. Ministries like Desiring God and The Gospel Coalition have grown in the last 20 years to help fill the void of digital discipleship and counter anti-gospel messages with biblical truth. But the best our staff can do is help support local church leaders — the ones who know the real you, not the Instagram selfie. We can’t, and won’t, break the body of Christ and pour the blood of Christ at the Table so that you might taste the Lord’s goodness in the forgiveness of sins. When you stray from the word, we can’t knock on your door and offer encouragement and prayer. We can’t preach the word in power after sitting by your bedside in grief.

Our Soul’s Best Defense

The Internet exposes false teachers even as it enables false teachers to spread their destructive heresies (2 Peter 2:1). In every revolution, good people suffer from darkness masquerading as light (2 Corinthians 11:4). The best defense or discernment in the digital age is a local church leader, submitted to God’s word, who knows your name and knows your weaknesses and loves you all the same.

When we reorient toward the local church, the Internet revolution will enhance — not supplant — the ministry of the word. Another Reformation, where God’s people read and heed his word, may unfold in real time. And God’s name will be praised in our spiritual unity, rather than being reviled in all our man-made division.

One of the most impactful theological conversations I remember being a part of happened when I was in my early twenties as a Bible-college student in Southern California. Some friends and I had stayed up way too late talking, and at one point our conversation turned toward the topic of heaven. I can’t remember what precise words we said, but I can recall the feeling. As we pondered the glories of the eschaton together, we whipped ourselves up into a flurry of joy, wonder, and longing.

Happier Visions of Heaven

At the time, I recall being captivated by the profound earthiness of the new creation. Like many, while growing up I had somehow absorbed the idea that the final promise of the afterlife was to depart from the real, physical world — the world of food and games and laughter and adventure — to ascend to an ethereal, floaty cloud-place, populated by chubby cherubs with harps. (And yes, I secretly dreaded going to heaven because of how boring such a place promised to be.)

By the time of that late-night conversation, I had thankfully been disabused of that conception. The promise of the afterlife, I had come to learn, was not the obliteration of all things God had previously declared good, but rather their restoration. Their transfiguration. Their glorification. It was not that the material would be swallowed up by the immaterial — as if we were ridding our souls of our flesh and bones — but rather that the mortal would be swallowed by immortal life (2 Corinthians 5:4).

“What makes heaven heaven is not merely that we will experience Earth 2.0, but rather that we will see God.”

I had come to see that everything good in this life would see its heightened and imperishable fulfillment in the next. The promise of the eschaton is not the intermediate state, but rather the resurrection — and not just our resurrection as humans, but the resurrection of the cosmos (Romans 8:18–25; Revelation 21:1–22:5). So, my friends and I let our imaginations loose as we wondered about how the sensations of the physical world we so enjoy now might be magnified and enriched in the age to come. And our blur of excited words was worship.

What I have since come to discover, however, is that even these aspects of the new creation are not final. Those heavenly joys my friends and I fantasized about were, like their present earthly corollaries, the joyous means to the greatest end: the vision of God himself. Theologians call this the beatific vision (or the blessed or happy vision). What makes heaven heaven, in other words, is not merely that we will experience Earth 2.0, but rather that we will see God. Now, if it seems like I am backtracking what I just affirmed and am once again trading an earthy vision of the eschaton for an ethereal one, let me assure you I am not.

Beckoned Through Beauty

The childhood conception of heaven I gladly shed in my early twenties was one of reality diminished. But the beatific vision promises something infinitely more enriched than anything we experience here. It is the ultimate end of our every joyous encounter with goodness, truth, and beauty.

The desire that earthly beauty awakens, for example, is not intended to terminate in the object that awakened the desire. This is why every delight that comes with the experience of beauty is accompanied by a stab of longing for more. When I am struck by the beauty and magnitude of the Grand Canyon at sunset, the longing that such a sight elicits is not satisfied by the visual encounter itself. The greater the enjoyment, the greater the longing. All this is by design: the earthly beauty that arouses our desire beckons us through and beyond to something greater. Earthly beauty constantly calls us not to itself, but through itself to its final source: the God of all Beauty.

This truth is often missed as the context for C.S. Lewis’s memorable line: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity, 136–37). In saying this, Lewis does not merely affirm that every human has a longing for God that can only finally be satisfied in the age to come. He is saying at least that much, but the immediate context shows that he goes a step further to say that all our longings in this life serve to arouse a deeper longing for enjoyment of God. He writes,

If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. (137)

The beatific vision — or the happy vision — is beatific because it is the vision of the all-blessed God. The one who is infinitely happy in himself begraces us with a participation in his own blessedness. Since the triune God is the plentitude of life and light and love — he ever burns in the white-hot fire of infinite pleasure as Father, Son, and Spirit — the blessing of eternal life is our coming to experience by grace what God is by nature: blessed. And this infinite blessedness is signaled to and previewed through all our earthly joys. God is, through all of them, beckoning us to come “further up and further in.”

Our Unnamed Ache

You are beginning to see now, I trust, that even while the doctrine of “the beatific vision” may sound exotic and alien to your ears, you have already been primed to receive it. It is true that the doctrine has fallen into obscurity in evangelical circles (though it enjoyed near-universal centrality for the majority of Christian history). Even still, the desire for the beatific vision is awakened by all manner of well-known evangelical convictions.

“Earthly beauty constantly calls us not to itself, but through itself to its final source: the God of all Beauty.”

The desire to experience the beatific vision is the deepest longing of the Christian Hedonist, who has been taught by John Piper that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” It is the longing provoked by every immersed reader of the Narnia books who yearns — along with the Pevensies and their comrades in The Last Battle — to go “further up and further in” to Aslan’s country. It is the longing Jonathan Edwards awakens when he opines about heaven as “a world of love.” It is the deep longing of those who have come to pray with Augustine, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee” (Confessions, 1.1.5).

We all have been aching for the beatific vision, whether we had language to articulate this desire as such or not.

Where Every Desire Leads

The promise of the beatific vision is that none of our desires aroused in this life is ultimately for naught. None of them is wasted! Even our sinful desires are perversions of God’s good creation. He made us with certain faculties in our souls for longing, and this soulish thirst — even where it has been desecrated by the muddy cisterns of sin (Jeremiah 2:12–13) — is never intended to be utterly extinguished; it is designed to be satiated by God himself. This is why we can never be finally satisfied by anything in this life.

The soul’s cravings are infinitely insatiable because their object is itself infinite. God will never cease to be infinite, and we will never cease to be finite. Therefore, our enjoyment of God will, in the beatific vision, expand perpetually. We will never grow tired of delighting in God, any more than we will grow tired of delighting in anything, for earthly delights are summed up, purified, and perfected in our delight of God.

Every creaturely desire finds its final satiation in this happy vision of God. All the joys we experience in this life, which are ever tinged with the sting of disappointment, are designed to awaken a hunger that will be ultimately satisfied in God. But this state of rest in the happy vision of God — this state of eschatological Sabbath repose — will not be static thanks to God’s infinity and our finitude.

Let me explain. Sometimes we are tempted to lament our finitude, as if our creaturely limitations were themselves a deficiency. But God made us finite on purpose, and in the beatific vision, our finitude becomes a means of joy. Because God is infinitely delightful, and because our delight of him is finite, we can be assured that the beatific vision is a state of perpetual expansion. As we behold God, our joy in him full, our capacity for sight and joy will expand, and our satisfaction of beholding and enjoying him will also expand. We will never grow tired or become disappointed or bored. Our longing will increase in perfect proportion to our satisfaction, so that every “happiest” moment will be topped by the next “happier” one forever.

All roads of desire lead here, to the blessed hope of seeing God. When we become truly convinced of this fact, we pray sincerely with David, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). There are, of course, many questions left unanswered about the beatific vision. But worshipful longing rushes in where intellectual certainty fears to tread. Amen, may it be.