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| In her article, “Bring back the Sabbath,”
Judith Shulevitz speaks of the “eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.”
When I came across the phrase it struck me as an elegant and insightful
way to speak of the voice I often hear within myself that tells me to
doubt my own worth unless I can pay for my own way. It is an anxiety
that makes it feel like the question of whether or not my life is
justified is never concluded. When driven by that inner murmur work is
only a means to prove that I am not a bum, and rest is only exhaustion.
It calls to be satisfied, but it will never quit – not ever – through
satisfying it. If the murmur ever ends, it is through stilling it at
the root. It requires a quiet of soul in which activity can cease
because all the work that needed to be done is already completed. This
is exactly the kind of quiet the gospel leads us into.
At the
outset, however, entering that quiet feels like dying. It feels like
putting our very worth at stake because worth so often hangs on work
and activity. But if we console ourselves with productivity when that
death knocks on our door we will flee something that could be a teacher.
The bottom line is this: to be driven by that murmur of self-reproach
flies in the face of a basic truth of the gospel - I don’t mean basic
in the sense of elementary, but basic in the sense that if you do not
understand it you may not truly understand the gospel or what it really
means for how life has to change - that is, you cannot save yourself.
At the heart of the gospel lies the staggering idea that all the work
that ever needed to be done has been done. If this is true, then all
the work we do is free to just become work again, not currency with
which we try to buy our worth. And rest just becomes rest, not a sign
of weakness, but a sign of humanness and that is a good thing. Ceasing
ceases to feel like death but becomes an act of obedience, a discipline
of faithfulness for hearts driven mad by the gospel of work.
The
gospel of work goes against the grain of our humanness. As Edith
Schaeffer said, “It is not a sin to be limited.” The gospel of work
goes against the fabric of the universe. God is the one who feed the
birds and clothes the flowers and makes his people worthy and righteous
and his work stands. And it forgets that our happiness lies in our
simply being creatures before the Creator – not in getting as far ahead
in the game as possible, not in making ourselves shiny and worthy
alone, not in climbing the mountain of human potential - but in resting
in Christ, for that rest is the very peak of the mountain of humanness.
That is where the inner murmur ceases and all our love and joy can
rise, for that is the place we were made for. When Christ said, “It is
finished” it was. The rest is polish. The deep work is done and cannot
be added to and cannot be taken away from.
"The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways it cannot intend
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended,
By what it cannot comprehend.
Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it."
-Wendell Berry | | |
| More from The Knowledge of the Holy, by A. W. Tozer
“Compared
with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of
little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the
rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require and
intelligent and vigorous search before it is unearthed and exposed for
what it really is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we
likely to discover what we actually believe about God.” (2) We
can’t hold all of God in our heads; we aren’t big enough (but, I want
to insist, what we can hold in our heads is still vitally important).
Of what we do understand not all of it travels from our heads to our
hearts. What does make it to our hearts has its hand on the rudder of
our actions in day to day life. You can know a thing and not believe
it, or not believe it with enough combustion that it begins to fire
whatever engine of the heart needs to be fired. Tozer is saying that it
is a necessary part of the Christian life to work backwards form Z to A
and look closely at our visible lives and see what pieces of theology
have been deeply embedded enough to matter and what pieces are still
waiting on the far side of that threshold. Somewhere in there lies our
“real idea of God” and as said before, it is important that our real
idea of God correspond as closely as possible to the real God who is
there. We are to be held responsible for those areas where it does not.
“Before
the Christian church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a
corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simple gets a wrong answer
to the question, “What is God like?” and goes on from there. Though she
may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working
creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe
that God is different than what he actually is; and that is heresy of
the most insidious and deadly kind.” (p.4) It is a mistake to
imagine that the landscape of Christian theology is a flat, uniform
landscape with no variation or disagreement. There are streams and
movements of thought like currents in a river all swirling around each
other, each with their own unique emphases, priorities, and set of
answers to the question “What is God like?” I am not saying they are
all different, for all it’s diversity there is beautiful unity in the
Christian church, but there are differences, and those differences
matter. Which one is right? Without going into any specific debate I
want to say that “right” exists. There is an understanding of God which
fits reality like a key fits the lock it was made for, and in that
understanding lies human flourishing. Tozer is saying that where our
understanding of God is different from that unique shape which he
actually is the hope of flourishing winks out like a candle. Here too,
Tozer wants to hold the church accountable for what is happening
beneath it’s umbrella, so to speak. Is it leading people toward the
worship of God as he is? Is that truth bringing flourishing to every
area of human life? Relationships? Work? Interior mental life? Is there
forgiveness? Is there joy? Are the weak being cared for? Are the
effects of the fall being fought back wherever they are found? All
these will grow and trumpet the truthfulness of the gospel where the
gospel is rightly understood and lived, and that is what the church
must be. | | |
| More thoughts from A. W Tozer's book, The Knowledge of the Holy:
“A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but
to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the
foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the
whole structure must sooner or later collapse.” (2)
Again Tozer
draws a strong connection between doctrine and life. Across the
landscape of Christianity today there is continental drift between life
and doctrine with an ocean growing in between. The “life” side is
highlighted, the “doctrine” side is painted as irrelevant. The result
is a whole collection of things that the Bible has to say fall under
the blacklisted heading of “theology and doctrine,” and the Christian
is called elsewhere (toward good things and things found in the Bible,
to be sure, but toward a vision of Christianity that is absent of
things which smack of esoteric, heady knowledge, which theologians
debate over but which seemingly have little implication for day to day
life). “Systematics” is a dirty word. Tozer is drawing a bigger circle
around the word theology than simply what is in the category of
“systematics.” A “right conception of God,” he says, is the ground we
stand on. It is silly to remove things which actually are pillars in
that right conception of God and expect remain standing. It is not
healthy, in the long run, to draw a distinction between life and
doctrine. This is true even if the alternate picture of the Christian
life is simply holding to “basic Christianity” or “just loving Jesus”.
“Loving Jesus” is a wonderful thing, but it must be understood that
loving Jesus is like standing on a point. From that point there are 360
degrees worth of directions to move and how a person moves from that
point is solely and only determined by his or her conception of God,
his or her theology. There is no standing still – even inaction is an
action dictated by a conception of God. We must move and must make
choices driven by doctrine - I want to make this point carefully. We
are already committed! The real question is not one of standing still
and just loving Jesus, the real question is when you move from the
spot, is the direction you move in determined by as full a picture of
God as the Bible contains? If all things that fall under the heading of
systematics/theology/doctrine are jettisoned in the mind of the
believer, the answer to that question is probably no. | | |
| I've wanted to say something about theology for a long time in a written, organized, complete way, and I've said things about it on this blog lots, but never felt like i got it all out.
So I decided to write some thought about A. W. Tozers book Knowledge of the Holy as a means of talking about theology. Tozer has these wonderful ways of putting it in a concise and clear way and he covers so many of the issues in a great way.
So here are some quotes along with some thoughts...
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most
important thing about us… That our idea of God correspond as nearly as
possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us.” (p.
1,2)
Tozer makes a connection that is rapidly dissolving in the
minds of some Church people today; the connection between theology and
life. This connection is a sword with two edges, cutting in the
direction of two errors we make in our thinking about theology. On the
one hand is the danger of thinking that head knowledge is the whole of
the Christian life, without that knowledge ever really “becoming true”
of us. Tozer undercuts that mistake by insisting that the nature of our
picture of God is such that it has a direct and immediate call on our
actions/values/thoughts in our actual day-to-day lives. If the
connection isn’t flowing that direction it is possible that you haven’t
actually begun to worship the real God; it is the most important thing
because an encounter with the real God does not leave us the same as it
found us. Tozer speaks to the opposite error as well. If you listen,
you'll hear both errors in the air today, but this one seems to gaining
popularity. It is the idea that theology is esoteric. We must preserve
the idea that theology means not less than simply “what we think about
God”. The Christian life is like finding pieces of the picture of God
and putting them in their right places, like a mosaic. Tozer is saying
that this mosaic – what it holds and what it does not hold – is life
and death. Everything flows out of that mosaic (and not just in some
“spiritual” realm of life, but in all of life). If those are the
stakes, then every piece matters. There is a not a category for
“accessories” when it comes to theology. Everything matters.
“We tend by a secret law of the heart to move toward our mental image
of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the
company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most
revealing things about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most
significant message is what she says about him or leaves unsaid, for
her silence is often more eloquent that her speech. She can never
escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.” (p. 1)
Christians, as a body of the Church and as individuals, are continually
bearing witness, both intentionally and accidentally. It cannot be
stopped. This is a very comforting thing and a very challenging thing.
It is comforting because it seems, at least for me, to take weight off
of the enormity of the calling before the Church, as it shifts the
focus from “go and DO” to simply go and BE”. If the Church is there is
cannot hide its witness; it just needs to be what God made it to be, to
love God, worship him with its life, to enjoy him, to love and care for
what he has made. This being speaks with a loud voice, often louder
than any words. But if Tozer eases the burden in one place he
underscores its weight in another. He says the Church is responsible
not only for what it is, but what it is not. The task before the Church
is to love what God loves as a reflection of his character, and what
the Church fails to be, it proclaims that God also is not. That’s a
sobering reality, and what human community is equal to the task of
embodying an infinite, holy God? But that is the calling nonetheless,
and that is the lens we should examine ourselves with.
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