In her essay entitled Strong Meat, Dorothy Sayers quotes Augustine speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ (Confessions, 7.10):
I am the food of the full-grown; become a man, and thou shalt feed on me.
She comments,
Here is a robust assertion of the claim of Christianity to be a religion for adult minds (Creed or Chaos?, p. 14).
It has often been said that the basics of the gospel – Christ living the life that we couldn’t live and dying the death that we deserve – are simple enough for a small child to understand, while the complexities of Scripture are profound enough that the aged genius can’t even begin to plumb the depths. I think that statement is true. And one end of it shouldn’t take away from the other. We should not let the simplicity of the basic message fool us into thinking that this isn’t hearty food, that this isn’t a religion for adult minds.
This past week I spent a good deal of time re-studying the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God. The church fathers took great effort, essentially exhausting their resources formulating this doctrine, and still they leave us with only a hint of what this doctrine is, and might entail. This is ‘strong meat.’ One of the great things about Christianity is that it never stops challenging the mind.
John Piper once commented on the brilliance of John Owen, and the application of his life and work to us, that the Christian life is like cliff-climbing. You spend time, perhaps years, climbing one intellectual cliff. You look at a doctrine from every angle possible, and ultimately you come to place where you think you have understanding. You get to the top of the cliff and you think you’ve made it. Then you look up – and there’s another cliff to climb. Maybe this one is a smaller cliff, so you climb it more quickly, only to find another, and another. You never stop climbing.
This is why the authors of Scripture speak of the attributes of God in such broad, grand ways:
- Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Rom. 11:33).
Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
your judgments are like the great deep (Ps. 35:6-7).
The Apostle Paul realized that this was no easy matter, plumbing the depths of Jesus Christ, and so he recorded his own prayer for Christians:
- …that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:17-19).
This is knowledge so great, and so demanding, that it takes the very presence of the food, already in you, to help you digest the food to come. You might say that Jesus, in Paul’s picture, is like the mother bird who must chew the babies’ food before them, and for them. If we were to eat it on our power we could never digest it. And it is only through this process that we grow intellectually. In other words, it is only through approaching the truth like a child, knowing that it is not something we can fully comprehend, that we attain adult minds.
I will ‘bottom line’ this post in this way: Don’t be deceived into thinking that Christianity is a shallow religion. Our God is not shallow. We come as children to a Father, but we do not check our minds at the door. We come as children longing to eat grown-up food. And there is food in abundance to be found.
