We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine – ‘dull dogma,’ as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – and the dogma is the drama.
Dorothy Sayers, The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, from Creed or Chaos?, p. 3
In her essay The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, Dorothy Sayers makes this passing comment about Jesus Christ:
…When confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by a rule of thumb.
– From Creed or Chaos?, p. 6
I don’t think I have ever read a better summary of the subversive character of Jesus as a man of conversation. He confounded men with the head-side of a coin, and with heads of grain. He asked trick questions. He told the educated that they knew nothing. He could take any man and make him a character in a story that inevitably demonstrated that he (the man) was a real-life bad guy (Imagine if Jesus were to turn your life into a parable). He would tell people that the way up was the way down, that strength was actually weakness, and weakness strength. He promised life through his own death. And he was not afraid to be misunderstood – for our misunderstandings of him do not harm him, rather they only reveal us to be what he said we were in his parables.
By ‘humour,’ Sayers does not mean that Jesus was a comedian. She speaks of his mood or state of mind. He spoke in paradoxes, which means that he thought in paradoxes. Chesterton said that a paradox is the truth standing on its head. I’ve added to that that a parable is the truth rolling around in the dirt, and irony (another favorite of Jesus) is the truth doing a back-flip. What fun it must be, therefore, to have the mind of Christ. His mind is doing gymnastics. Therefore his speech comes out like cartwheels – which is a lot more fun (and of course true) than the vast majority of speech we hear these days, which seems to only walk (slowly) in zigzagged lines and backpedal from time to time.
Jesus’ opponents often considered his speech to be blasphemous. They also likely considered him to be flippant. He wasn’t flippant, he was only flipping – the truth on its head. That was his mood, and it should be ours as well. Call it subversiveness. Call him the greater Jacob – the Usurper – he grabs ahold of the truth’s ankle, picks it up, and lets it dangle upside down as a spectacle. And men still don’t want to look – or more precisely, they don’t want to listen.
Though I have finished the book, I am still writing my way through In Defense of Sanity (a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton). In addition to that, starting tomorrow I will begin a series of posts on another collection of essays. This time I will be posting on Creed or Chaos? by Dorothy Sayers.
Dorothy Sayers is special to me because of her book The Mind of the Maker. Quite frankly, that book changed my life, and I find myself referencing it all the time in various contexts. She is a great writer, full of insight and clarity, and I look forward to thinking, and writing, about her essays.
In the meantime, you can read my summaries of The Mind of the Maker HERE , HERE , and HERE.
In an essay on Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton picks up an interesting line of thought. He notes the fact that the Book of Genesis records the creation of light occurring before the creation of the sun (Gen. 1:3-19).
To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like so many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and very sound idea.
Chesterton then delivers this sound meditation on the creation narrative:
Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed.
Like Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker, he relates the idea to literature:
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as a mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour seriously – a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them.
He continues,
The last page comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death before the dual. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the whole story prior to any possible events in it.
(G.K. Chesterton on The Pickwick Papers, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 127-128)
I do not know if there is a better illustration for the foreknowledge of God than the mind of the writer, the mind of the maker. I saw an interview with J.K. Rowling a while back in which she discussed how she first created the Harry Potter character. As she rode in a train, he essentially just appeared in her imagination, and she knew his destiny right away. C.S. Lewis wrote of his recurring vision of a fawn with an umbrella carrying parcels in the snow. They knew their own characters before they ever set pen to paper. God did too.
Or as one translation puts it:
In a conversation with some Christian teenagers a few weeks ago I discovered, or was reminded of, a few things. The first is that even Reformed believers hold false stereotypes of the Puritans. I asked them, ‘What do you think of when I say the word “Puritan?”’ Their answers were, ‘boring,’ ‘legalistic,’ ‘strict,’ and, this one not in so many words, ‘joyless.’
These answers broke my heart. I, of course, am not naïve enough to think that the Puritans were perfect. Every era, and person, has its flaws. But these ideas are so far from the truth.
Another thing I was reminded of during this conversation is that young Christians, especially in Reformed camps, often lack genuine spiritual experience (which was something the Puritans emphasized). Let me qualify that. What I mean is that they have certain spiritual experiences – they attend to the means of grace, and this is wonderful. But mostly, they are catechumens. That is, they have been taught solid doctrine, but have never had a heart-felt experience of those doctrines.
They understand the first question and answer of the Shorter Catechism. They understand that they are to glorify God, but they have no idea what it is to enjoy God. I try to stress that God can be enjoyed in the things he has given us. I am not a mystic and I don’t think we should all join monasteries. I don’t believe that God can only be experienced through ecstatic ‘spiritual’ experiences. I do believe that the ordinary means of grace, and the gifts and grace and providence of God in themselves are means, and probably the most common means, of enjoying God. But our fathers in the faith believed there was an intimacy, a communion, with God available, that modern, non-charismatic believers shy away from. Why are we so shy? The throne room of grace is open to us. The Holy Spirit is in us, and with us, and constantly available to us. Jesus Christ offers his spiritual presence to us. Why be content with mere head-knowledge?
It has been an interesting process watching my oldest daughter come along in the faith. I was not raised in a Christian home and so I have no personal experience with the spiritual development of a child within the context of the Covenant of Grace. She is being catechized. She is reading the Bible. She is being instructed. She is being prayed with and prayed for. Yet I have no doubt that God is an abstract concept to her. I have no doubt that Jesus is a character in a book. Does she believe in Jesus? Yes. Does she realize she is a sinner? Yes. She meets all the tests. Until you ask her about love for God. She doesn’t even understand the concept of loving someone she’s never met. Neither do I. She needs to meet him.
I didn’t understand these words of Dorothy Sayers until recently:
It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations (Mind of the Maker, p. 112).
Doctrine (education) is the kindling for the fire. But we need the fire to fall. All kindling and no fire leads to no heat. (And conversely strange doctrine leads to strange fire, but that’s another topic).
My understanding of a covenant child’s position with respect to the covenant is that they are under the dominion of the Covenant of Grace. That is, they come into this world under the special lordship of Christ as members of his visible church. A few passages clarify this:
Parents are to be obeyed ‘in the Lord.’ That is, children, by obeying their parents, are obeying Christ. We’ll clarify this in a moment.
‘Of the Lord’ is key here. Fathers are representing Christ to their children. They are, as it were, standing in his place. They are ‘being Christ’ to them as they administer his discipline and instruction.
These two verses have influenced me heavily with respect to my view of children in the covenant, and my view of myself as a father. I am to be Christ to my children – to live as he lived, to talk as he talked, to nurture as he nurtured, to instruct as he instructed, to discipline as he disciplines (in love). I am to live out his sacrificial life for those under my authority.
I am my children’s authority (you could say they are under my lordship and protection), but I am to exercise that authority through service and sacrifice. Thus, by knowing the lordship of their father, the children are actually experiencing the lordship of Christ.
But here’s the rub. I can demonstrate Christ’s lordship. I can even demonstrate his sacrifice to a minimal degree. But I cannot atone for their sins. They need the fire of the Spirit to fall in their hearts, to regenerate them and bring them into actual communion with the living God through faith in Christ.
I am an educator – a maker of disciples – and I am waiting for Pentecost.
Covenant children come into this world under the covenantal lordship of Christ, but until the Spirit comes, they do not know him as Savior.
The Reformed tradition values personal experience of Christ. The Reformed tradition values communion with God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are not simply making disciples (i.e. students). We are doing that, but we are doing more than that. We are preparing hearts for the fire of the Spirit. We are setting kindling. The problem is that we’re afraid to call the fire down.
Reformed kids don’t lack knowledge generally. They lack experience of the doctrines they already know. They lack intimacy with God. They lack desire for God (because they’ve never tasted this intimacy).
We should not be afraid to pray that our children would experience the presence of God in a sensible way. This is where spiritual joy will come from:
We should not be afraid to pray that our children would long after, and pant for, God:
We should not be afraid to pray that our children would experience not only salvation, but the joy of salvation:
We should not be afraid to ask, not only for faith, but, that Christ would manifest himself to them:
I call this spiritual apprehension. It’s a beholding of the glory of the Lord in the heart (see 2 Cor. 3). Borrowing language from Jonathan Edwards, it is a spiritual sense of the glory and beauty of Jesus Christ.
Mind you, this is not what justifies a believer. We are justified by faith alone. But, as David puts it in Psalm 51 (above), you can have salvation while lacking the joy of that salvation. I would not even go so far as to say this is sanctification, though it certainly affects sanctification. We should desire not only to raise up a generation of children who believe (though that is our desire), but who also burn.
Are you praying that the fire will fall?
Perhaps you are not even praying this for yourself, much less your children. Are you spending all of your time putting the kindling in place without realizing you need the fire? No wonder there is no heat, no passion, no zeal. Ask God for yourself, and then ask him for your children.
The issue of assurance of salvation is a great one for many believers. Lack of assurance is often a problem that plagues us, hinders us, and stunts our spiritual growth and witness to the gospel. Assurance is something we should seek. But we must be careful not to seek it in the wrong way. A wrong-heading seeking for assurance can not only lead to false assurance on the one hand, and destroyed assurance on the other, it can also lead to a heretical confusing of the persons of the Godhead. This is how Octavius Winslow puts it:
It is the work of Jesus alone, his perfect obedience to the broken law of God, and his sacrificial death as a satisfaction of Divine justice, that form the ground of a sinner’s acceptance with God, – the source of his pardon, justification, and peace. The work of the Spirit is, not to atone, but to reveal the atonement; not to obey, but to make known the obedience; not to pardon and justify, but to bring the convinced, awakened, penitent soul to receive the pardon and embrace the justification already provided in the work of Jesus. Now, if there is any substitution of the Spirit’s work for Christ’s work, – any undue, unauthorized leaning upon the work within, instead of the work without, the believer, there is a dishonour done to Christ, and a consequent grieving of the Holy Spirit of God (Personal Declension and the Revival of Religion in the Soul, pp. 136-137).
He continues,
If I look to convictions of sin within me, to any motion of the indwelling Spirit, to any part of his work, as the legitimate source of healing, of comfort, or of evidence, I turn my back upon Christ, I remove my eye from the cross, and slight his great atoning work; I make a Christ of the Spirit! (Ibid, p. 137).
Does this mean that we are not to be diligent to make our calling and election sure? (2 Peter 1:10). By no means. But it means that we must, as Robert Murray M’Cheyne put it, look to Christ more often than we look to ourselves: ‘For every look at self, take ten looks at Christ.‘ A continual looking to the self, and to the Spirit’s work within us, is a looking away from Christ. The Spirit’s work is to glorify Christ, to reveal Christ, to point to Christ. How then can the Spirit do his work within us if we refuse to look away from his work within us and fix our eyes on Christ. As Dorothy Sayers put it,
We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking (The Mind of the Maker, p. 115).
Our ‘hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid rock I stand! All other ground is sinking sand.’ Build your assurance on self and become a miserable failure. Build your assurance upon the Spirit and you confuse the persons of the Godhead. Build your assurance upon Christ and find a bold stability.
