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The Heresy of Seeking False Assurance

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.

Recent Reading: The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers: Part 3 – The Problem of Trinitarian Analogies

I have wrestled with this issue in my reading of Dorothy Sayers’ book, The Mind of the Maker. The entire work, essentially, draws an analogy to the Trinitarian Being of God from the experience of the human creator of art. It is not hard to quickly see that this analogy falls far short of conveying the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Sayers’ principle is that the human author’s creative work is Idea, Energy, and Power, and that each of these reflect the three persons of the Trinity. I appreciate this analogy, and see its validity so far as it goes, but the great problem with it is evident – all three of these are the work of the author. They are not ‘one Being.’ Rather, they are ideas in the mind of man finding expression in writing – whereas God is a Being, indeed Being itself, rather than a notion.

Years ago I read Robert Letham’s book, The Holy Trinity. It has been paradigmatic for me in many ways ever since. He strongly suggests that analogies are, more often than not, more harmful than good:

As Gregory of Nazianzen stresses at the end of his fifth theological oration, there are no analogies in the world around us that adequately convey the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (p. 6).

The common analogies for the Trinity are egregious. One of the first I encountered was H2O in its various forms as water, ice, and vapor (yet all remaining H2O). This analogy leads to Modalism – three manifestations, or appearances, of the same thing. There is no mystery in ice, water, and vapor – they are simply manifestations of H20 completely dependent upon external forces (i.e. temperature). The same is the case with the analogy of one Man as Son, Husband, and father. He is one Man, says the analogy, and yet as one Man is Son, Husband, and Father at the same time. Again, this is rank Modalism – one person performing three functions. Once I even heard someone go so far as to use the Bat-Mobile (the more modern form of it, as opposed to the old TV show I watched reruns of as a kid) as an analogy. It is one Bat-Mobile, but it can be a car, or a boat, or a plane, depending on the need of the moment. That is brash Modalism – straight heresy.

Historically the analogy of humanity was used – many humans, all sharing one human nature. But there are millions of humans (not three only) and thus the analogy breaks down. Besides this we have the fact that humans do not share precisely the same mind, will, or affections. It is a transformer, not a Trinity. Another common analogy is that of a clover leaf – three proportional leafs in one plant, sharing one branch. Yet these are three separate leaves held together by a stem. Each leaf only makes up a part of the plant, no one leaf can be ‘clover’ in itself. Each is only a third of the clover, and therefore this is no Trinity.

Analogies – all analogies – fail. None of them hit the nail on the head. We must therefore be very careful as we approach this great doctrine. John Calvin puts it this way:

Here, if anywhere, in considering the hidden mysteries of Scripture, we should speculate soberly and with great moderation, cautiously guarding against allowing either our mind or our tongue to go a step beyond the confines of God’s word.  For how can the human mind, which has not yet been able to ascertain of what the body of the sun consists, though it is daily presented to the eye, bring down the boundless essence of God to its little measure?  No, how can it, under its own guidance, penetrate to a knowledge of the substance of God while unable to understand its own?  Wherefore, let us willingly leave to God the knowledge of himself.  In the words of Hilary, ‘He alone is a fit witness to himself who is known only by himself.’  This knowledge, then, if we would leave to God, we must conceive of him as he has made himself known, and in our inquiries make application to no other quarter than his word (Institutes, 1:13:21).

Letham summarizes Calvin:’ The Trinity is a mystery, as Calvin said, more to be adored than investigated’ (p. 11).

But, with that said, this is not what Sayers is trying to do. She is not trying to ‘prove’ the Trinity from human experience (or even, necessarily, to illustrate it). Rather, she is reflecting upon the correspondence of the Trinity to human experience. She is not saying, ‘God is like this. Become a writer and you will better understand Him’ Rather, she is saying that we are the way we are because we are created in the image of God, who is like this in some respects. And, she adds, as it were, that the more we develop this ‘God-likeness’ in our art, the better artists we will become.

In other words, she is letting her doctrine of God, which is derived from the Scriptures, come to bear on her experience. And in her experience she sees a correspondence to the doctrine. And having seen this correspondence, she sees a need to make it stick – to conform her writing more to what she knows of God. She is doing precisely what we should be doing – letting God stand as the basic presupposition, our Governor, governing, even implicitly, all that we do, including art.

Let me put it this way, using the analogy of one Man as Son, Husband, and Father. Sayers is not saying that this man exists as a trinity per se, or that he can understand the Trinity because of his various roles as one man. Rather, she is, as it were, saying that by understanding God correctly we can better understand what it means to be a son, and a husband, and a father. He can learn sonship by looking upon Christ in his perfect sonship in relation to the Father. Indeed we can become sons of God the Father through faith in Christ. We can learn about true Fatherhood from the perfect Father. We can learn to be a better husband by viewing the Son’s relationship to His bride, the church. Put simply, our doctrine of God informs our practice, and not the other way around.

Letham argues that a great need of the modern Western church is that she reawaken to her fellowship with, and foundation of, the Triune God. And correspondingly to explicitly state her (that is, the church’s) beliefs robustly:

Prayer, worship, and communion with God are by definition Trinitarian. As the Father has made himself known through the Son ‘for us and our salvation’ in or by the Spirit, so we are all caught up in this reverse movement. We live, move, and have our being in a pervasively Trinitarian atmosphere. We recall too the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman, that the true worshipers will from now on worship the Father in Spirit and in truth (John 4:21-24). How often have we heard this referred to  inwardness in contrast to externals, to spirituality rather than material worship, to sincerity as opposed to formalism? Instead [of], with many of the Greek fathers, such as Basil the Great and Cyril of Alexandria, a more immediate and pertinent reference to the Holy Spirit…and to the living embodiment of truth, Jesus Christ….The point is that Christian experience of God in its entirety, including worship, prayer, or what have you, is inescapably Trinitarian…The important point is that at the most fundamental level of Christian experience, corresponding to what Polanyi termed the ‘tacit dimension’ of scientific knowledge, this is common to all Christian believers. The need is to bridge the gap between this prearticulated level of experience and developed theological understanding, so that this is explicitly, demonstrably, and strategically realized in the understanding of the church and its members (p. 8).

Sayers’ work then, in my view, is quite helpful in many respects, so long as you do not mistake it for a true analysis of the Being of God. In other words, we must view her work in this way: I cannot learn about the Trinity from my natural experience, but, conversely, a foundational knowledge of the Trinity can greatly illumine my experience. Understanding who God is, as a storyteller Himself, can greatly improve my own telling of stories as I conform my actions to his self-revelation. But, conversely, being a decent storyteller will not necessarily make me a good theologian.

She puts it this way:

In the metaphors used by the Christian creeds about the mind of the maker, the creative artist can recognize a true relation to his own experience… (The Mind of the Maker, p. 45).

No analogy can ‘convey’ the Trinity. Yet the Trinity can inform, implicitly and explicitly, many things we do. The problem is that we are not inherently ‘Trinitarian enough’ for our beliefs to control us to that degree. Sayers was. She was applying the doctrine to experience, rather than trying to infer doctrine from experience. She therefore stands as an example to us of one who let her doctrine guide her practice, and always examined her practice in light of her doctrine.

Recent Reading: The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers: Part 2 – Quotes Galore

These are quotes I found helpful in one way or another from The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers.

Idea, Energy, Power:

For every work of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.First, there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit (pp. 37-38).

Energy and Incarnation:

When making a character he in a manner separates and incarnates a part of his own mind. He recognizes in himself a powerful emotion – let us say, jealousy. His activity then takes this form: Supposing this emotion were to become so strong as to dominate my whole personality, how should I feel and how should I behave? In imagination he becomes the jealous person and thinks and feels without that frame of experience, so that the jealousy of Othello is the true creative expression of Shakespeare. He follows out, in fact, the detective system employed by Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’: ‘I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders…I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action’ (pp. 51-52).

…The writer has ‘favorite’ characters, which seem to embody more of or more important parts of his personality than the rest. These are, as it were, the saints and prophets of his art, who speak by inspiration (p. 52).

…If a character becomes merely a mouthpiece of the author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living creation. Still more, if all the characters speak with their author’s voice, the whole work loses its reality, and with it, its power (p. 52).

Diversity and Freedom of Characters:

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity (p. 53).

But all possess this measure of freedom, namely, that unless the author permits them to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures (p. 67).

Of the ‘Character’ in an Autobiography:

It appears with a double nature, ‘divine and human’; the whole story is contained within the mind of its maker, but the mind of the maker is also imprisoned within the story and cannot escape from it. It is ‘altogether God,’ in that it is the sole arbiter of the form the story is to take, and yet ‘altogether man,’ in that, having created the form, it is bound to display itself in conformity with the nature of the form ( pp. 88-89).

…The autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer’s created works and an interpretation of the whole series. If we want…to find out what the writer ‘means’ by his writings, we shall undoubtedly get some light on the matter by reading his personal revelation of himself (p. 89).

It was said, sneeringly, by someone that if a clam could conceive of God, it would conceive of him in the shape of a great, big clam. Naturally. And if God has revealed Himself to clams, it could be only under conditions of perfect clamhood, since any other manifestation would be wholly irrelevant to clam nature. By incarnation, the creator says in effect: ‘See! this is what my eternal Idea looks like in terms of my own creation; this is my manhood, this is my clamhood, this is my characterhood in a  volume of created characters’ (p. 90).

Right vs. Wrong Not Necessarily Good vs. Evil

In the choice of words, for example, the ‘right’ word will not be the morally edifying word, but the word which ‘rightly’ embodies his Idea, whether the Idea itself is morally good, evil, or ‘beyond good and evil.’ For him, engaged in his creative act, ‘good’ is good craftsmanship, ‘beauty’ is artistic beauty, and ‘truth’ is structural truth (p. 97).

Of Evil as Privation of Good:

Shakespeare writes Hamlet. That act of creation enriches the world with a new category of Being, namely: Hamlet. But simultaneously it enriches the world with a new category of Not-Being, namely: Not-Hamlet. Everything other than Hamlet…acquires in addition to its former characteristics, the characteristic of being Not-Hamlet; the whole of the past immediately and automatically becomes Not-Hamlet…Arguing along these lines, we may make an attempt to tackle the definition of Evil as the deprivation or negation of the Good. If Evil belongs to the category of Not-Being, then two things follow. First: the reality of Evil is contingent upon the reality of Good; and secondly: the Good, by merely occurring, automatically and inevitably creates its corresponding Evil. In this sense, therefore, God, Creator of all things, creates Evil as well as Good, because the creation fo a category of Good necessarily creates a category of Not-Good. From this point of view, those who say that God is ‘beyond Good and Evil’ are perfectly right: He transcends both, because both are included within His Being. But the Evil has no reality except in relation to His Good; and this is what is meant by saying that Evil is the negation or deprivation of Good…But…So long as Not-Being remains negative and inactive, it produces no particular effects, harmful or otherwise. But if Not-Hamlet becomes associated with consciousness and will, we get something which is not merely Not-Hamlet: we get Anti-Hamlet…This, according to the ancient myth of the Fall, is what happened to Men. They desired to be ‘as gods, knowing good and evil.’ God, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, knows Evil ‘by simple intelligence’ – that is, in the category of Not-Being. But men, not being pure intelligences, but created within a space-time framework, could not ‘know’ Evil as Not-Being – they could ‘know’ it only by experience; that is, by associating their wills with it and so calling it into active Being. Thus the Fall has been described as the ‘fall into self-consciousness,’ and also as the ‘fall into self-will’ (pp. 101-103).

Word by Nature has a Propensity to Reveal Itself:

It is the nature of the word to reveal itself and to incarnate itself- to assume material form (p. 111).

Wait on the Spirit:

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 (p. 112).

Once it’s written, it’s written:

Herod showed himself much more competent and realistic than Pilate or Caiaphas. he grasped the principle that if you are to destroy the Word, you must do so before it has time to communicate itself. Crucifixion gets there too late (p. 114).

We Can’t Really See the Work of the Spirit in the Present:

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking (p. 115).

On Originality:

The demand for ‘originality’ – with its implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work – is a recent one…The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which the former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed (p. 121).

Think about the Trinity, but don’t expect everything to be in human terms:

There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. It offers itself freely for meditation and discussion; but it is desirable that we should avoid the bewildered frame of mind of the apocryphal Japanese gentleman who complained:
‘Honourable Father, very good; Honourable Son, very good; but Honourable Bird I do not understand at all’ (p. 123).

Creation as a Story:

This is as though a book were written to be read by the characters within it. And further: the universe is not a finished work. Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the theater and seeing the play for the first time. Or rather, every one of us in on the state, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script or any synopsis of the ensuing acts…This, it may be remarked, is no unusual situation even among human actors…The actor on the state of the universe cannot even go to the nearest cinema and see the result of his work when the sequences have been fitted together, for the film is still in the making. At the most, perhaps, towards the end of his life, he may see a few episode in which he figured run through the pages of contemporary history. And from the completed episodes of the past he may gather, if he is intelligent and attentive, some indication of the author’s purpose (pp. 128-129).

There is one episode in particular to which Christianity draws his attention. The leading part in this was played, it is alleged, by the Author, who presents it as a brief epitome of the plan of the whole world…And examining the plot of it, we observe at once that if anybody in this play has he feelings spared, it is certainly not the Author (p. 129).

The Character’s Dependence on the Author:

…For the satisfaction of its will to life it depends utterly upon the sustained and perpetually renewed will to creation of its maker. The work can live and grow on the sole condition of the maker’s untiring energy; to satisfy it will is to die, he has only to stop working. In him it lives and moves and has its being…(p. 141).

A perfect identity of the creature with its creator’s will is possible only when the creature is unselfconscious: that is, when it is an externalization of something that is wholly controlled by the maker’s mind (p. 143).

Of a Story that is not controlled by the Idea:

The Idea was not sufficiently powerful int he writer’s mind to control the Energy; so that the son, instead of ‘doing the will of the father’ was doing his own will and that of the characters. Patripassianism must, in any case, imply a certain weakness in the father, since it is a heresy that denies and confounds the father’s persona (p. 175).

Recent Reading: The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers: Part 1 – Summary of the Argument for a Trinity in Creative Art

UPDATE: See my collection of quotes from this book HERE.

This book is one of the reasons why I haven’t been writing as much on my reading as usual. This book has been a thorn in my side for over a month (I don’t necessarily mean this in a bad way – it’s simply been a hard one to get through because of its depth).

In the posts to follow I’ll share some thought-provoking quotes, explore implications for our understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as implications for the issue of theodicy and a general view of life, and explore some of the problems of this metaphor. But in this post I simply want to summarize her argument for the implications of the Christian doctrine of God for creative artistry. I will spare opinion for later, and simply go about the business of summary and restatement.

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By way of summary, Sayers argues that the Christian doctrine of God, and specifically the Trinity, is the foundation for all creative work (even when not understood by the artist). In short form, creativity (she focuses mostly on writing, but by way of application all forms of creativity) in humans is a mark of the image of God in man. As she puts it:

In the metaphors used by the Christian creeds about the mind of the maker, the creative artist can recognize a true relation to his own experience… (p. 45).

As such, creativity, at its best, is rooted in trinity. This trinity takes the form of Idea, Energy, and Power – each reflecting the three persons of the Divine Trinity.

1. Idea (Reflecting the Father)
From the writer’s perspective, Idea reflects the Father. It is the ‘Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning’ (p. 37).

2. Energy (Reflecting the Son)
Second is the ‘Energy begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter’ (Ibid).

3. Power (Reflecting the Holy Spirit)
Third is the ‘Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul’ (pp. 38-39). The Power ‘is the thing which flows back to the writer from his own activity and makes him, as it were, the reader of his own book’ (pp. 37-38).

She adds,

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other: and this is the image of the Trinity (p. 38).

We could summarize these three as Idea, Incarnation of Idea, and Application of Idea all sharing one essence. I find it helpful to relate them in that way.

It is the proper balance of this trinity, Sayers argues, that produces the best creative art. Yet most writers struggle to find balance. Either the strength of their work will rest in the Idea, while the Energy and Power lack. Or the Energy will abound while the Idea and Power lack, etc. At times they will excel in two areas, but the third will lack. She describes such writing as follows.

First, there is the Idea-driven, or ‘father-ridden,’ writer, who struggles with Energy and Power:

Writer after writer comes to grief through the delusion that what Chesterfield calls a ‘whiffling Activity’ will do the work of the Idea; that the Power of the Idea in his own mind will compensate for a disorderly Energy in manifestation; or that an Idea is a book in its own right, even when expressed without Energy and experienced without Power…It is the mark of the father-ridden [that is, Idea-writers] that they endeavor to impose the Idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that this is the whole of the work…Father-ridden also is that very familiar and faintly comic figure of the man who ‘has the most marvellous idea for a book, if only he had time to sit down and write it’ (pp. 150-151).

In other words, the Idea-driven writer may struggle to give form to his idea, and/or to convey it in such a way as to make a connection with the reader or evoke any sympathy or emotion.

Second, there is the Energy-driven, or ‘son-ridden,’ writer, who struggles with Idea and Power:

Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea (pp. 151-152).

The son-ridden writer then is all flesh. He can paint a picture beautifully, but you may be left wondering exactly what this picture portrays. There is no governing idea to hold it together.

Reliance on technique…is the besetting heresy of the son-ridden (p. 154).

Third, she considers the Power-driven, or ‘ghost-ridden’, or spirit-ridden, writer:

The ghost-ridden writer…conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea (p. 154).

This is writing geared toward arousing the emotions irrespective of the beauty of the idea and the form it takes.

Sayers then offers a helpful corrective so such ‘ghost-ridden’ writing:

Conquelin’s conclusion is ‘that in order to call forth emotion we ourselves must not feel it’; he does that say that we must never have felt it…What he is trying to tell us is that the artist must not attempt to force response by direct contact with any response of his own; for spirit cannot speak to spirit without intermediary. To interpret sensibility to sensibility we must have, not only controlled technique of the Energy ordering the material expression, but also the controlling Idea, ‘without parts or passions’ that, moving all things, ‘doth itself unmoved abide (p. 155).

In summary, then, she argues that the failure of the creative artist is generally caused by a lack of balance concerning these three areas. It is then, a failure in trinity – a failure to reflect the God of Scripture in our art.

Stay tuned.