“Blessed wonder and surprising delight…”

Maybe it’s just me, but I assume that there is a time in all our lives when the thought strikes us that we are nearer our death than our birth. Of course none of us can ever know when we reach this point, because that would require knowing when we were going to die. Fortunately, for most of us this is unknown, if not necessarily unknowable. Perhaps such thoughts only come when one reaches a certain stage in life when statistically, the law of averages being what it is, we think we are at, or are beyond that point. This was brought home to me recently when I received a couple of projections from my pension company (there’s a big clue!). Their actuaries had calculated that I (probably) had about twenty years of life left. But then what?

Here we have a problem. It is at this point that the evil twins of materialism and naturalism demand  a high price. Materialism is a creed and therefore it is something to be believed. It is not something that is necessarily true. It proclaims that the universe only consists of stuff that can be seen, touched, tasted, heard or smelled. Only matter exists and there is nothing else, nothing beneath and nothing above. Naturalism is the related belief that everything that is arises from natural causes, and therefore only natural explanations, that rule out a priori supernatural causes, are acceptable. Again, this is a belief. Many would hold that these two are the ruling beliefs of the age. And the problem is that even those of us who reject both of them are influenced by them.

Previous generations would have thought nothing of my "then what" question. Most would simply have spoken of heaven to come. Today we are patronizingly apt to claim that this was because they knew so much less than us, although they believed so much more. Now we know so much more, and consequently believe so much less. How easily their answer to “then what” is dismissed as just a form of superstitious wishful thinking. But this falls into two traps. The first is the chronological snobbery that C.S. Lewis defined as the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”. The modern (or the postmodern, or post-postmodern) is inevitably right, the past is inevitably mistaken. Secondly, it leaves us ensnared in the trap of believing that somehow we no longer  believe. Certainly there are things that we no longer believe. But that is different. Materialism and naturalism are creeds that are believed. It’s not that we don’t believe, rather that we believe something different. We have ruled out all talk of heaven to come, not so much as unbelievable but as irrelevant.

But Christian believers, those who take seriously God’s self-revelation of His purposes in His Word, need to be a lot less coy about what we believe. It’s not that we believe and the naturalist and materialist don’t. We believe something different and need to be less shy about saying so. And perhaps there is no more important issue than our final destination and state. If it’s not up to much, we should be clear about it. If it is only just a little bit better than the alternatives, then that would be worth knowing. An informed choice can then be made about whether it can really supply the hope and comfort actually needed to offset the trouble we’re likely to face for being believers in it in the first place. But if it were to turn out that it is a prospect that is glorious and joyful (not words we’ve heard much in recent days), indeed if it were revealed to be full of “blessed wonder and surprising delight” then this is surely worth knowing too. A clear vision of such a state would surely be an important resource helping us in the here and now, as well as healing us in there and then.

In his book “Rejoice and Tremble”, Michael Reeves highlights some of the writing about heaven from the past, including some from Isaac Watts. Watts is perhaps best known today as a hymn writer; he wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and the Christmas carol “Joy to the World”. But he was also a non-conformist pastor, tutor, philosopher and logician, and wrote what became a standard textbook on logic (titled “Logic”!), published in 1724 and running to some twenty editions. It was widely used in universities such as Oxford and Yale, well into the nineteenth century. So he is not easily dismissed as an obscurantist medieval mystic. Indeed he was well aware of, and had respect for science. But he knew it had limits:

“What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress.”

So it is interesting to read what Watts wrote about heaven. He certainly wrote about it in terms rarely encountered today:

“In heaven the blessed inhabitants ‘behold the majesty and greatness of God’ in such a light as fixes their thoughts in glorious wonder and the humblest adoration, and exalts them to the highest pleasure and praise.” (“The World to Come”, Vol I, 1811, p389)

“When … the soul, as it were, beholds God in these heights of transcendent majesty, it is overwhelmed with blessed wonder and surprising delight, even while it adores in most profound lowliness and self-abasement.” (p390)

So there you have it. According to Watts, I can look forward to being “overwhelmed with blessed wonder and surprising delight”. Clearly he could be just plain wrong. But what he wasn’t was stupid, and therefore should not be lightly dismissed. As an answer to “what then”, it’ll do me.

Faith in fantasy…..

I rather like Matthew Parris, one of the columnists for The Times. He’s a thoughtful fellow, who has the good sense to share some of my prejudices (or is it the other way around?). We don’t agree about everything, but his analysis is often thought provoking, and that’s useful. Usually he comments on the political issues of the day and other ephemera. But on Saturday (behind a paywall), on the first day of a new year, and because it was the first day of a new year, he asked for forgiveness “for discussing those deeps rather than the surface storms”; he was referring to those deep, great underlying currents which “shape history”. The basic conundrum he decided to tackle was why nice people can champion wrong causes, and wrong’uns can sometimes do the right thing. This he finds perplexing. But what he really had a problem with was notions of good and evil.

His problems are, in part, due to a number of assumptions he makes. Among these is the notion that good and evil have no independent existence; the words “good” and “evil” are only adjectives and should not be used as nouns. This springs from the related notion that there is nothing outside of ourselves, by which he means explicitly (this is how he ends his column): “no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light”. As he claims in his final sentence “There is only us”. Along the way to this assertion however, he writes approvingly of Augustine. Now, you would find it difficult to find someone in history who would more violently disagree with his concluding statement. Augustine was only too aware of, and conceptualized, all the things that Parris claims don’t exist. He was utterly convinced that there is not only us. What Parris specifically approves of in his column is the thrust of Augustine’s statement in his “Confessions” that “I still thought that it is not we who sin, but some alien nature that sins within us” (Confession10:5). In other words there was a time when Augustine thought that he wasn’t the problem, but some power acting on him. Parris’ central claim is in agreement with this; there is no such force, no such power. Such an idea is a fantasy mainly got up by the Christians (and Muslims for good measure). There is just us, and the things we do. The real question, which he claims others persistently dodge, is why then we act as we do.

I am always intrigued when atheists, even cultured and intelligent ones, take up with approval what Christians teach. Of course, Parris can’t possibly approve of everything Augustine taught, and that’s why he misses some of the answers that are to be found in Augustine’s writing. Augustine knew he was not as he should be or as he could be. In the Confessions he recounts what happened to him as he was struggling with this, specifically with his “impure life”. Part of his struggle was that he was not able to do anything to deliver himself from the distressing condition he found himself in, any more than a drowning man can rescue himself. But he recounts how he heard a child’s voice chanting “take up and read”, which he took to be “a Divine command” to read the Bible. He immediately went off and found Paul’s letter to the Romans (which as it happens he had been reading) and read from Romans Ch13 “..put on the Lord Jesus Christ…”. The effect was stunning:  “…it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” (Confessions 8:12). What he is recounting is one of the most famous conversions to Christianity in all of history and literature. Augustine would go on to be one of the most important Christian theologians.   

What Augustine found in Scripture was an account of how we are all marked by a bias against how the God who made us and sustains us would have us think and behave. Our wills are warped; we’ve become “wrong”. But there’s nothing we can do about this for ourselves. We need the intervention of God’s grace to bring about our rescue and that’s what Augustine experienced for himself in a Milan garden. There had been an internal battle going on, and it was resolved when Augustine accepted the grace that he was offered in Christ. But there is also an external battle going on in that there is an adversary who’s whole project is to trip us up and keep us away from the grace that would rescue us. This mixture of our nature, and both internal and external battles helps explain much of our behaviour, in both its good and bad aspects. All of this, Parris asserts, is fantasy. But his is an assertion not an argument. And the problem is that it leaves him perplexed. Denial of God, Heaven, Hell, good and evil is all well and good. But it has all the hallmarks of an unproductive approach. There is something to be explained, and this approach does nothing to explain it. What Augustine found in the pages of the Bible was a powerful explanation. Now this, in itself, doesn’t make it true. But what he then came to experience was God speaking to him personally through His word the Bible. To quote Paul in Romans again “..faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). This is not at all about dead propositions on a page, dry and dusty arguments providing a proof in words for a particular view of good and evil. This is a combination of an objective explanation (something outside of us) and the subjective experience (something inside of us) of God speaking to us for Himself.

So if you wanted a project for 2022, one that will leave you less perplexed at the end than at the beginning (and certainly less perplexed than dear Matthew Parris) - “take up and read”. Bibles aren’t hard to find. You can get recent translations (like the NIV and ESV) free, online. And you can easily pick up analogue Bibles (probably for free) in a church nearby, or in all good bookstores (probably for cash). Or you could place your faith in Parris’ fantasy that there is only us.