Rationalism against Empiricism, for example, has dominated philosophical discourse and debate since the Presocratics. Aristotle rebels against Plato. Hume rebels against Descartes. And so on. Yet, need it be either rationalism or empiricism? Perhaps it is both rationalism and empiricism. Two truths stand upon our left and our right, and man is left in struggling tension, obliged to affirm both but driven to debate the two in fierce dialectic.

Some may object, shouting “Self-defeat!” Either it is either/or or it is both/and—and thus your argument collapses into the supremacy of either/or! Not at all. It is both either/or and both/and. Delightfully clever, I’d like to think.

Another example. The aesthetic/psychological/sociological debate of nature against nurture. Both/and. Or the literary and artistic debate of hope and community against despair and loneliness. Observe the dialectic between Romantics and Realists, Medievals and Modernists—optimists and pessimists worldwide, more generally. Both/and.

Such debate leads into religion. Faith versus doubt. Every man has faith, it seems to me. Every man has doubt. Is man’s fundamental nature one of good nature or one of sinful nature? We can certainly see human depravity in the world. And, being equally honest and attentive, we can certainly see good men, small bright lanterns. We can see hope and despair, depravity and virtue. Both/and.

Christianity is the most noble example of such a truth. As a religion, it mimics the paradoxical nature inherent in reality. Man (and all of Creation) is good, but depraved. That is why charges of hypocrisy will never topple Christianity—the faith has predicted such hypocrisy. “Man is fallen,” they say, “and man will continue to misrepresent the beauty of his faith.” Likewise, God, they say, is One and Three. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together flout the either/or of Euclidean order to coexist—three in one, both three and one. Christians themselves in tension between a Sovereign God and free will–responsibility and depravity. Worshipers of Christ bow to the Nazarene, fully man, fully God. This ultimate paradox is the heart of their faith. Christ is united with both man and God—He spans that impassable ontological gulf between Divine and mortal. The incarnation is one of the greatest strengths of that most paradoxical, mysterious of faiths. Word and flesh, doctrine and praxis, they are inseparable, in a paradoxical tension. Christianity is a both/and faith for a both/and world.

What then for man? We live in the paradoxical tension of both/and. Essentially, it is the most profound existential struggle—the incarnational struggle. But it is such a struggle that makes a person human. Man is like Melville, whom Hawthorne met with in Liverpool, years after their estranged friendship. Hawthorne said

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

Man is a Melvillian man, wandering over the deserts, who can neither believe nor be comfortable in unbelief. Grant us Melvillian courage and honesty, then, to not try to do one or the other in a both/and reality.

• Mysticism and dialectic share a willingness to suspend the certainty and comfort of dogmatic pronouncement for better things. Mysticism refuses to degrade the divine by insisting that one apparently mutually exclusive truth disproves another, while dialectic refuses to degrade the human by insisting on the hegemony of one discourse. Consequently, the outcome of mysticism and dialectic is humility and openness, the utility is the maintenance of the intellectual virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, and temperance), and the purpose is deeper dependence on God for all things.
• Mysticism is not: mistiness, laziness, fear of analysis, or feelings triumphing over thinking.
• Mysticism is: the courageous, industrious, rigorous pursuit of the more-than-superficially aporetic aspects of faith in the spirit of prayer. In other words, it is the study of and respect for mystery from a posture of openness.
• Mysticism is a theological dialectic.
• Mysticism and dialectic draw the world into the love of God by openness and example rather than by arbitrarily determining lines of election and placing individuals on one or another side of those lines. This is their response to the criticism of the apologist and the evangelist: they are all of those and none of those.
• Dialectic is not: relativism, an indefinite posture of critique, unwillingness to “take a stand,” or a malicious attempt to derail the convictions of others.
• Dialectic is: the courageous, industrious, rigorous pursuit of the aporetic in whatever subject is at stake.
• Dialectic is the necessary precursor to any important problem-solving. Ignoring this is the ultimate practical and policy failing of ideology.
• Prayer, as both the active and passive posture of openness requisite for mysticism and dialectic, has to do both with practice and with a certain character. “Pray always.”

Discuss.

Maimonides comments that some of the more mysterious of haggadah texts should not be taught—because they appear to contradict reason on the surface, potentially confusing the hearts and minds of listeners “whose hearts will never be enlightened.”

This is a common notion—that certain truths are expressed in such a form that only hearts that have been prepared may understand them. Think of Jesus commenting that his parables are intended so that the crowds will not get his point (Matt. 13:10-13).

(I interrupt regular programming at this point to briefly defuse a common objection that comes my way when I discuss mysteries of this nature: no, I am not speaking of gnosticism. The difference is that gnosticism makes its mysteries essential to salvation, a line that divides true followers from false or pre- followers. Mysticism, on the other hand, is analogous to aesthetic taste (in this one way): just as one does not have to understand and appreciate the intricacies of Bach’s harmonic and thematic developments in order to appreciate his music,one does not have to “taste”—a common verb in this context—the flavor of the beauty of the mysteries of faith in order to be faithful. More on this some other time.)

The unique thing, however, from Maimonides and the sages he quotes to back up his view, is that they recommend not teaching these mysteries. I can’t help but contrast this to Meister Eckhardt, whose (unintentionally) inflammatory sermons on God’s identity with the true ground of being of humans got him condemned as a heretic due to what Maimonides would call a superficial conflict with reason. Meister Echkardt is at least as famous as a mystagogue as he is as a mystic—in other words, as famous for the fact that he taught as for the content of his teaching. Deservedly so. Jesus also transgressed Maimonides prescription in this context—most of his teaching was parabolic; one could point to him as the greatest of all mystagogues, and to his execution as a part of the role of the mystagogue. (Though one could object—as I have elsewhere—regarding the dangers of associating our role as preachers with Christ’s.)

I’m not entirely sure where I would fall between these two perspectives on the mysteries. On one hand, it occurs to me that without transmission—without teaching—certain things will surely be lost. But on the other hand, the experience of certain contemporary theologians (I think, for example, of the witness of Sarah Coakley in God’s Advocates*, where she describes gaining access to the treasures of orthodox systematic theology by the “backdoor” of the spiritual practice of silent prayer)  make me suspect that an understanding of the mysteries doesn’t require transmission, because perhaps the spiritual reality of faith has the same “taste” to any tongue that can taste it.

* Joel Kraimer wrote the recently published Maimonides: the Life and the World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds

*HT to Ben Myers for exposing his readers to this interview with Coakley.

This understanding of the life of faith is far removed from uncertainty and doubt. Instead, it declares that the real difficulty lies in becoming a person of faith. Once faith has been achieved, once one is converted (shall we say), then the path lies before one, clear and straight.

I offer this summary as a sort of “essence of fundamentalism.” It will be found even among those who include “fundamentalists” among their poster-enemies.

The real visible marks of the fundamentalism I have just described are as follows: First, a coercive treatment of those within the movement (especially those brought up within it) which follows from the general conviction that the implications of foundational articles of faith should be plain to all. Second, a militantly competitive attitude toward all persons, ideas, or movements (both historical and contemporary) that contradict either the supposed logical coherence of the faith-founded life or any individual article of faith or implication of faith. Third, an emotional and psychological dependence upon the foundational articles of faith such that, when those articles are questioned or challenged in any way, the “faithful” are prepared to grasp any argument or any rhetorical device to answer the question or defeat the challenger.

This conception of the life of faith transforms Christianity (or whatever religion its adherents claim) into an ideology—nothing more, nothing less. And the hinge of this transformation lies, I think, in characterizing faith as a foundation.

I offer that we should replace this metaphor for faith with the metaphor of a target.

While fundamentalists might argue that foundation is a biblical metaphor for faith, I counter that it is actually a person (God, and for Christians specifically Jesus) for whom the metaphor of foundation is customarily used. Faith, on the other hand, is a self-commitment to that person which is described far more often as personally unsettling than as stabilizing and programmatic.

The condition (and probably about 99% of the content) of faith is, therefore, humility. The totalizing claims implicit in (even rhetorical) militancy shift the focus of faith from self-abandoning commitment to self-aggrandizing judgment. One’s boat on the sea of life becomes a pirate vessel for hijacking other ships rather than a life raft bound for the distant shore.

But as self-commitment to a person, the “articles of faith” of a Christian have to do with confessing the nature and work of Christ. The life of faith, then, must in the first place have to do with maintaining the vitality and truthfulness of that confession. 99% of the content of faith is humility. Consequently, one of the real characteristics of the life of faith would seem to be self-subversion. I am reminded, in this context, of Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” whose blithe and unreasonable confidence is all too often supplanted, in real life, with a calculating attempt to work out a program for achieving one’s desires that can then be afterwords baptized as the work of God. The knight of faith’s trust in the person to whom he has committed himself is a target for our own behavior; but, continually, before we can approach that model (which is actually the model of Christ himself) we must subvert our multi-form self-trust, our default ideological stance.

Sometimes thinkers in this tradition point to a “supernaturalistic view of miracles” as an example of an improper dualism. This line of thought leads into paradoxes with a distinctly deistic flavor to them, but nevertheless I suspect that it gets at something real (though badly expressed). The something it gets at is the notion that viewing miracles as an interruption of God’s providence—an “emergency measure”—is rather demeaning. The problem with this criticism—in the reformational forms I have thus far encountered it—is that it has no adequate concept of the miraculous to replace the one it criticizes.

I would like to offer such an alternative.

Suppose that the miraculous is defined not as an interruption in the providence of God, requiring a strenuous and unusual measure on God’s part, but as the mysterious breaching of that important and legitimate duality God/Creation. I’m on the run at the moment, so I’ll have to flesh this out more later, but I should point out one implication before I fly: on this view, the creation of a new person is the most miraculous occurrence. The event of a person, taking place as it does entirely with reference to the community of the Trinity, constitutes the representative in-breaking of God upon creation, the supremely mystical breach of the chasm between creation and her God. The bridge, Christ, who is at once in every sense a member of the trinity and yet also a person in the human sense, is the supreme and complete example of this representative miracle. All the miracles of his career, which have in the history of Christianity been frequently marshalled as evidence of his godhood, are subsidiary to the miracle of his incarnation, yet entirely within the providence of God.

At some point I need to sit down and think and study about this some more—I suspect that I will find that every instance of a “miraculous” occurrence has reference to such a mysterious breach of the duality God/Creation. The prophets for example, caught up in the Trinity as temporary mouthpieces of the Word of God. By this definition the miracle is larger and more encompassing than the objectionable interruption-of-Providence viewpoint…

Actually, the conviction in question has been staring you in the face each time you visited this blog. As a growing admirer of icons, I’ve stuck a cartoonish one of my own up there over the “i” in veil. As you can see, the elegant image thus placed looks like a sun with stylized rays shooting out of it. But I prefer to think of it as a squished bug.

Squished bugs have inhabited my psyche with particular relevance for a long time. I remember a period in youth when I spent a few minutes purposefully squishing ants by an anthill; but afterward I suffered such ridiculously over-powering remorse, that the guilt of it has haunted me from time to time in dreams ever since. In high-school I wrote a brief prose reflection on the callousness with which we extinguish the life of ants, smearing them out on the pavement like a blotch of ink on paper, utterly unaware that we are god-like destroyers, bringing inexplicable wrath to a small but teeming world.

So naturally, when the enormity of Christ’s demeaning wretchedness came home for the first time, I immediately associated it ant-squishing. God got squished for me; and he calls me to imitate that for others. That’s the gospel. I savor the vulgarity of it.

My iconography then, the wagon circle in which I choose to hunker: that the God who rules the day like the sun is also the ant who got squished on the pavement. I detest the attempts I constantly hear to reconcile the shame of the cross to the glory of the creator, or to swallow up the shame of the cross in the victory of the resurrection as if the cross weren’t a part of the victory (incomprehensibly). Either cop-out opens up avenues to escape the shame of discipleship—it fits self-governors, capitalists, and comfortable conservatives just fine to contemplate participating in the victory of the resurrection, but it curdles the blood to consider participating in the victory of the cross.

I.

Blood.

Scripture is soaked in one of the most lurid and physically shocking substances of human experience. At almost every turning point in the history of redemption, blood is involved. The history of blood in the Bible is the history of salvation. There we find blood taken for vengeance and shed in anger; sealing covenants and enforcing laws; crying out from the ground and mutely accusing the murderer from his hands; atoning and punishing; covering and revealing.

What makes blood so valuable, so rich in significance?

Its identification with life, and even more with death. We read in Leviticus, “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” But it is notable that the majority of times blood appears, it is being shed. The first, implicit, reference to blood in Scripture occurs in Genesis. In God’s redemptive tailoring. To cover the newly shameful nakedness of Adam and Eve, God fashioned garments from the skin of animals, shedding blood to deal with sin. Blood continues in the company of death, when Cain sheds the blood of Abel, inaugurating the reign of terror that has been human relationships ever since.

Something about the sheding of blood makes it the only sufficient expiation for a sin, real or imaginary. Cain killed Abel, for example, as payback for an imaginary fault. But on a less psychotic and more terrifying level, we read in Hebrews that, “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness for sins.” And in Revelation, the third bowl is poured out an an angel announces that those who have shed the blood of saints and prophets will be given blood to drink. In Genesis, God tells Noah that the payment for the life of a man is the blood of his murderer.

The shocking presence of blood makes it a fitting and indispensible accompaniment to apocalyptic times. In Scripture, rivers and seas of blood, literally, herald climactic endings. In Exodus, the Lord strikes the Nile River, turning it to blood, as a sign to Pharaoh that he had better let God’s people go. In Revelation, one of the terrifying apocalyptic symbols is the third bowl that turns the rivers and springs of water to blood.

Blood, however, is not always extracted in vengeance and hate. The fundamental twist of blood in Christianity, the twist that sets it apart from so many other bloody religions of human sacrifice, is that blood can be shed willingly on someone else’s behalf. No greater love has any man, Scripture tells us, than to lay down his life. And this, this love, is the mystery to which blood ultimately speaks in Scripture. We do not live in fear of the shedding of blood; we do not live complacently regarding it without compunction; but we live in awe of the mystery of it.

Blood has its deepest significance as a seal of covenants. In Hebrews, we read, “not even the first Covenant was inaugurated without blood.” When God first made a covenant with Abram, thereby announcing his plan for electing a special people, he performed a ritual of covenant. He asked Abram to cut a cow, a ram, a goat, and two birds in half, then God symbolically passed between them, representing himself as a smoking pot and a flaming torch. The significance of this ritual was astounding: God promised to fulfill his covenant on pain of being torn apart like the animals he passed between. The seal of the covenant was God’s blood staked on the promise of faithfulness.

In an economy like ours today, it’s easy to mistrust any claim to absolute value; but we see in Scripture that there is a blood-standard in the Divine economy, one currency with value that cannot slip, one surety, one seal.

Blood.

II.

The Lord instituted animal sacrifice at a dramatic moment. He and Pharaoh were locked in a death struggle of power and will. In terms of sheer sutbborness, Pharaoh had done well for himself, suffering plague upon plague, losing faith in one Egyption deity after another, the Nile, the sun, but still resolutely opposing Israelite emancipation. But God was finished fighting false gods and he was preparing a final blow to bow Pharaoh forever to the dust. This final blow would divide the nation decisively. The Israelites were given these options: declare for the Lord, and mark the doorframe of your house with the blood of a lamb; or do not mark the doorframe of your house and be counted the enemy of the Lord. In Exodus we read, “The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.”

We all know what happened. The Lord masterfully cut his people free of the Egyptions by killing the first born male child in every house unmarked by the blood of a lamb. In this way, blood began to accumulate historically the significance of atonement and salvation, and it began to point forward to the strange and utterly unexpected form of the final atonement in Christ.

The blood of promise had entered salvation history.

Cut free, gloriously emancipated from Egyptian chains, the Israelites marched out into the desert where the Lord would form them from fugitives into a mighty moving nation. Vital to this formation were the religious practices God gave them as part of the Law. And in the liturgy of these practices, blood took a central place, maintaining the significance it had been so dramatically given. In Hebrews we read, “when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hysop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.’” The redemptive use of blood had progressed from the marking of houses to the annointing of people.

Annointing—the application of shed blood—here emerges in its original force. “Wash me in the blood,” we sing, infrequently aware that we are refering to a real, physical symbol of a spiritual idea. To be a priest in the nation of Israel meant getting one’s hands dirty. Sacrifice was a daily event.

The significance of the blood brought forth in sacrificing, by cutting the throat of a bull or goat before burning it on the altar, was substitution. The animal had replaced with its blood the blood of the person who offered it. This blood, too, was the blood of promise. It accomplished nothing by itself—the blood debt of God’s chosen ones could not be repayed by the blood of any number of goats. The blood of sacrifice, therefore, had a provisional character which may not have always been obvious to the Israelites. In fact, we know this wasn’t obvious, because the prophets frequently denounced vain sacrifice as a travesty of true religion. Through Isaiah, for example, the Lord said, “I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.”

Because the nature of sacrifice was promise, the whole sacrificial system resembles an even earlier example of animal substitution. In one of the most perplexing stories of the Old Testament the Lord commanded Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him upon an altar. At the last minute, the Lord stopped Abraham’s deadly knife and provided a ram as an alternative sacrifice. In this instance, the most notable feature of the animal sacrifice was that God provided the animal.

Taken altogether, the blood of promise in the Old Testament raises expectations for a greater act of redemption, a bloody act of substitution, to annoint God’s chosen people lastingly. But what blood, whose blood, could seal such an act of grace?

III.

Cultured Romans accused first century Christians of cannibalism.

These Christian, at their so-called “love feasts,” claimed to be eating the body and drinking the blood of their Lord Christ. Moreover, the gospel of these Christians had their Jesus saying obscene things like, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

These Christian, they were obsessed with blood.

What the cultured Romans didn’t know was that the blood of Christ was the fulfillment of an old, old promise.

It was in the incredibly, brutally bloody crucifixion of Christ that blood gathered all the richness of Israelite history into one momentous act. The cross was a terrible altar. God died there, as ignobly as a stupid goat with its throat cut. He offered himself up, the priest at his own sacrifice. In Hebrews we read, “when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then [...] he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.” The blood by which Christ entered was his own.

Long before, passing between the torn animals as he made a covenant with Abraham, God had staked his blood upon his faithfulness; now, in faithfulness, he gave his blood as the seal of a new covenant.

The chosen of God, as always in the past, are marked by blood. Now they are marked by the blood of Christ. In constant recognition of this mark, the Lord’s Supper is the highpoint of Christian liturgy. One key to the overflowing significance of this sacrament is the history of blood you have heard today. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Christ, we discover in Scripture one long trajectory of Redemption. Along this path we have come, as we read in Hebrews, “to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”

It’s very popular to answer “Yes!”

For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American theologian of human nature, wrote a big book the (apologetic) thrust of which was this (among other things): the biblical description of the nature and destiny of man corroborates like no other description to the actual experience of men. Blaise Pascal, in his even more famous book Pensees, used his religious understanding to propose some elements of a psychology that also rings chillingly true. I would agree with both of these men on many points. But does their biblically formed insight really suggest that the Bible explains life? It would be easy to presume so.

For another example, we all know that one of the chief obsessions of contemporary evangelicalism is Young Earth Creation Science. For many in that camp, the issue boils down to “inerrancy,” a doctrine taken to mean that the Bible does, in fact, explain every element and area of life it touches upon. This issue has such apologetic import for them because they take it as fundamental to following Christ that one must believe the Bible explains life. Supposing for a moment that they are right, that their scientists prove to be the underdogs who win the game and demonstrate as plausibly as scientists can that Young Earth Creationism must be true—what then? Are we justified in consequently supposing that the Bible explains life?

For yet another example, my college, Dordt College, prides itself on maintaining what is known as the neo-calvinist tradition. They lionize Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch thinker whose “Lectures on Calvinism” vastly aided in launching a movement whose popularized shadow is the “worldview movement.” Kuyper proposed that the Bible gives us a world-and-life-view with implications for every sphere of life—i.e., with the potential to explain life, and with the comission to do so in the face of competing world-and-life-views like “Paganism” or “Islam-ism” or “Modernism.” Tellingly, Kuyper’s choice of appelative for the Christian version of a world-and-life-view was “Calvinism”—tellingly, because he put the agenda of Christians on the same playing field as everybody else where we all push our cherished “-ism.” The tradition to which Kuyper gave birth came more and more to cherish the concept of a Christian “system.” With the advent of Herman Dooyeweerd, a philosopher in this tradition, the system then came to stand for a distinct ontology with the glimmers of an epistemology already peeking through it and the utopian hope before it of providing the theoretical basis for a Christian path to concilience. This tradition is perhaps the most complex and rigorous advocate of the belief that the gospel explains life (though in a different sense, as they would haste to point out, than such as contemporary evanglicals).

But what if the Bible doesn’t explain life?

Here, briefly and simplistically, are some questions to consider. If the Bible explains life, then why is it such a raggedy hodge-podge of genres? Why didn’t God just hand down the Encyclopedia Caelestia 6th Ed., instead of this part-story, part-poetry, part-letter, part-dream-record, part-aphorism-collection? Why did Jesus speak in such a way as to purposefully mystify his hearers? (Mark 4) Why is biblical theology such a hotly contested subject? But given that the Bible does leave us with something, are we justified in claiming that this something inspires, clears the way for, limits the horizons of an explanation of life? Moreover, when we take a hard look at this something do we find a “key to all knowledge” or something that shatters the last vestiges of our presumption that we know anything? Paul seemed pretty convinced that Jesus Christ is the gospel, and if Christ was telling the truth on the Emmaus road, then it seems that the rest of the Bible also has to do with this gospel-Christ. But personally, I don’t find the incarnation of the invisible God, or the trinity into whose communion he invites us, or the resurrection for the dead, or the creation of out of nothing, or the origin of evil, or the sinful nature of man, to be particularly helpful in explaining life. In fact, far from knowing more about life, I find that my otherwise workable explanations suddenly falter and fail in the face of such mind-shattering mysteries.

Perhaps Socrates was onto something when he suggested that the best knowledge is a knowledge of how much one doesn’t know?

Suppose that the Bible is serious in encouraging us to imitate Christ. Suppose the posture of dependency and sub-mission (participation in the “mission” of God) really is the point of human life. Doesn’t this preclude the possibility that the gospel will explain life? Instead, doesns’t it implicitly promise that the gospel will challenge the value of explanations altogether?

Suppose, just suppose, that the gospel is an invitation to live in a mystery… How would that change the life of Christians?