Repenting of Our Agnosticism
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
How often do we all conduct our lives as if we lived in some sort of closed universe not actively upheld and sustained by the God who is, who spoke everything into being?
For a few months I have been thinking about a phrase I first encountered in 1995 when I was teaching an introductory course in theology at Wheaton. We were using Alister McGrath’s reader as the primary text for the class and he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) as saying that, in Modernity, we must learn to live “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God is not a given).
Bonhoeffer was trying to figure out how to be a Modern person and affirm Christianity in some sense.
Contra at least one recent evangelical rendering of Bonhoeffer, which follows a trend that has existed for some time of treating him as though he were educated in Moody Bible College rather than in the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin, Bonhoeffer did not hold the historic Christian faith. He was a Modernist, i.e., he accepted as a given the Enlightenment critique of the historic Christian faith and understanding of the world. What does that mean? It means, as one of my undergraduate profs said in 1979: “In the 18th century God went to the corner for a beer and never came back.”
Bonhoeffer, like Karl Barth and others, was trying to figure out how to be a Modern (Enlightened) person and affirm Christianity in some sense. As I understand him, Bonhoeffer was a dialectical theologian. He was proposing a kind of “death of God” theology and affirming a kind of belief in God simultaneously. This is the sort of thing dialectical theologians do.
Are Christians living “Etsi Deus Non Daretur” (As if God is Not a Given)?
The phrase etsi Deus non daretur comes to us from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). He was a great Dutch polymath. He made contributions in biblical studies, legal theory, theology, and politics. He was one of the major figures in Dutch cultural and political life in the 17th century. His treatise, On The Law of War and Peace is still a basic text in international relations. He was also a Remonstrant and suspected of being a Socinian, i.e., a rationalist who rejected the essential Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement. This was perhaps because a number of Remonstrants did become Socinians so that the line between the two movements was blurred. It is also true, however, that Grotius wrote a treatise on the satisfaction of Christ to which the Socinian Crell responded. As I understand it, Grotius used the phrase etsi Deus non daretur to say that natural law would be in effect even if God were not assumed. Bonhoeffer took the phrase, mediated to him by German scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and put it to use in a rather different context (WWII and the Holocaust) and to a rather different end.
What has been troubling me about this phrase is the way it seems to describe so much of Modern and Late Modern life. How often do we Christians go about life as if we were practical agnostics, as if God were not a given? A major impetus of Modernity, i.e., the Enlightenment movements that swept across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to reject the historic Christian understanding of the world, to assert the autonomy of the human intellect and will, and to relegate God to an unnecessary hypothesis. Evangelicals have adapted to Modernity (and Late Modernity) by adopting a God-of-the-gaps approach: whatever cannot be explained naturally they explain with the God hypothesis: the supposition that God exists.
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Immanuel: The Son Revealed in the Old Testament
Many centuries before he was born in Bethlehem, God revealed his Son to his people, the man who would be called Jesus, because he would save his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). God fulfilled his promise to send his one and only Son so that all who believe in him may have eternal life (John 3:16).
Try to imagine God taking on a human body. With God all things are possible of course—the incarnation is not too difficult for God, even though our thinking about it might make our finite heads swirl. Yet, should we be surprised that God came in the form of a suffering servant—the man Jesus Christ, who would save his people from their sins? Let’s go back to the biblical writings a number of centuries before the incarnation.
“The virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isa. 7:14).
About 700 years before Jesus was born in the flesh, the prophet Isaiah proclaimed,“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” [which means “God with us”]. (Isa. 7:14; see also Matt. 1:23)
A child would be born who would rule on the throne of David forever:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).
Isaiah wrote that “the zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this” (Isa. 9:7). In other words, God would bring a child into the world to save and rule his people forever.
“You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (Ps. 2:7).
The prophet Micah, also writing about 700 years before Jesus’ birth, said the king would come from Bethlehem:But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. (Mic. 5:2)
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Christ was the Great Unlike
Together Adam and Noah and Melchizedek and Joseph and Moses and Joshua and Samson and Solomon and Jonah, and they would not make a fragment of a Christ, a quarter of a Christ, the half of a Christ, or the millionth part of a Christ. He forsook a throne and sat down on His own footstool. He came from the top of glory to the bottom of humiliation, and exchanged a circumference seraphic, for a circumference diabolic. Once waited on by angels, now hissed at by brigands.
We have a natural tendency to attempt to understand what we don’t know by extrapolating from what we do. This works well in much of life, but not so much when it comes to theology, for God comes before comparisons and supersedes them all. When it comes to Christ, he is more unlike than like what we know. This quote from the old preacher De Witt Talmage celebrates how Christ was “the great unlike.”
All good men have for centuries been trying to tell whom this Substitute was like, but every comparison, inspired and uninspired, evangelistic, prophetic, apostolic, and human falls short, for Christ was the Great Unlike.Adam a type of Christ, because he came directly from God;
Noah a type of Christ, because he delivered his own family from the deluge;
Melchizedek a type of Christ, because he had no predecessor or successor;
Joseph a type of Christ, because he was cast out by his brethren;
Moses a type of Christ, because he was a deliverer from bondage;Joshua a type of Christ, because he was a conqueror;
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Paralyzed and Blessed
If you long for divine fullness to flow into your soul without a check, embrace your afflictions, get actively engaged in your own sanctification, and let your delight in Christ mesh with your delight in his law. For God has given you the sun, stars, and the universe; he has given you flowers, friendship, goodness, and salvation. He’s given you everything — can you not give him your heart? If God does not have our heart, who or what shall have it?
When pain jerks me awake at night, I first glance up. If the digital display on the ceiling says only the second watch of the night, I push through the pain and try to breathe my way back to sleep. But if the clock says 4:00 a.m., I smile. Jesus has awakened me to enjoy communion with him, even though it’ll be hours before I sit up in my wheelchair.
Do I need more sleep? Of course. Will my pain subside? Unlikely. But at four in the morning, there is a more necessary thing, and it makes me happy to think that long before dawn, I am among the early ones who are blessing Jesus. Filling my chest with Jesus. Rehearsing his Scriptures, murmuring his names, and whisper-singing hymns that cascade one into another, all filled with adoration.
It’s hard to do that when you’re wearing an external ventilator. And so I wordlessly plead that he unearth my sin, fill all my cavernous, empty places, and show me more of his splendor. He always responds with tenderness. He sees me lying in bed paralyzed and propped with pillows, encumbered by a lymphatic sleeve, wheezing air-tubes, a urine bag, and hospital railings that “hold it all together.”
One of my helpers knows all about these nighttime rendezvous with Jesus, and so one night after she tucked me in, she stood over my paralyzed frame with an open Bible. “This is you,” she said, and then read Psalm 119:147–148: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise.”
That pretty much describes it. In the morning when a different helper draws the drapes, unhooks my ventilator, drops the guard rails, removes the lymph-sleeve, and pulls out my many pillows, she’ll usually ask, “Sleep well?”
“Not the best, but I am so happy.”
Blessings that Bruise
Real happiness is hard to come by. Many Christians default to the lesser, more accessible joys of our culture. But the more we saturate ourselves with earthy pleasures, the more pickled our minds become, sitting and soaking in worldly wants to the point that we hardly know what our souls need. We then seize upon the loan approval, job promotion, the home-team victory, or rain clouds parting over our picnic as glorious blessings sent from on high. Yet if Jesus were counting our blessings, would these make his top ten?
I am the most blessed quadriplegic in the world. It has nothing to do with my job, a nice house, my relatively good health, or a car pulling out of a handicap space just as I pull up to the restaurant. It does not hinge on books I’ve written, how far I’ve traveled, or having known Billy Graham on a first-name basis.
Jesus goes much deeper than the physical-type blessings so reminiscent of the Old Testament. Back then, God blessed his people with bounteous harvests, annihilated enemies, opened wombs, abundant rains, and quivers full of children. Jesus takes a different approach. He locates blessings closer to pain and discomfort.
How Suffering Invites Blessing
In his most famous sermon, Jesus lists empty-handed spiritual poverty, hearts heavy with sorrow, a lowly forgiving spirit, eschewing sin, and struggling for unity in the church. Jesus tops off his list with, “And what happiness will be yours when people blame you and ill-treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you for my sake! Be glad then, yes, be tremendously glad — for your reward in Heaven is magnificent” (Matthew 5:11–12, J.B. Phillips).
How does one accept these hard-edged things as blessings? First Peter 3:14 suggests that “even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed.” It is affliction that sends us into the inner recesses of Christ’s heart and shuts the door. There, “a new nearness to God and communion with him is a far more conscious reality. . . . New arguments suggest themselves; new desires spring up; new wants disclose themselves.
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