Theology from the Bottom Up, God from the Top Down

If I were Hindu, a turbulent airplane flight would be enough to make me reconsider my polytheism. To which god would I turn for my deliverance? Kali? Ganesha? Vishnu? I suppose I would be at least thankful that my gods were distinguished by function rather than territory. There would be no announcement that we were flying over the left bank of the Ganges River and entering Krishna's airspace. No, the Hindu gods are not said to be limited by territory. But then which one is responsible for air travel? Which one did the old stories identify as the Patron Sahib of flying carpets?

This is no doubt a gross oversimplification of Hindu thought. I am sure a well-read Brahmin priest could explain how rightly understood, Hindu thought was free of such discrepancies. But I would probably believe that while the Brahmin was rendering an accurate account of his own opinions, he was misrepresenting majority Hindu opinion, much like the liberal minister who denies the Virgin birth and yet claims to speak for Christianity as a whole. She may be sincere, but she is not representative.

One of the great advantages of Christianity is its belief in only one God. The early church used this teaching to its advantage in making converts among the polytheists of the Roman world. Now not only a well-versed spiritual elite, but unwashed Rufus and Julia knew whom to pray to in distress. What a relief to turn from worthless deities to "the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them" (Acts 15:15)!

The Scandal of Exclusivity

But there is a catch. While the New Testament faith is presented as universal and all-embracing, it is also particular and exclusive. It does worship God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and insists that this Creator can be known from his general revelation in Creation. It also claims, however, that access to this cosmic Lord is only available through faith in the sufferings and death of a Palestinian carpenter, an individual who is known from God's special revelation in Scripture. Having one God has always been a winning point. Offering only one way to God has been more of an embarrassment, however. There have always been those’often our famous theologians and churchmen’who have sought to tone down the particularity of the faith in interests of maintaining its universal appeal.

Theologians have a long history of building universal theologies which ignore the exclusivity of the Christian revelation. At first, this was merely a besetting sin of individual theologians (such as Origen). It took time for this sin to be institutionalized. This required the growth of an institution which could be so corrupted (the theological faculty of the university), and the growing appeal of thinkers whose philosophies were more and more hostile to Christianity.

When the medievals rediscovered many of Aristotle's works, theologians incorporated much of his thought into their massive systems. His thought was so pervasive in academic culture that theologians had to come to terms with him or lose their audience. Most tried to ensure that what they borrowed was compatible with the Christian revelation in Scripture. Some, however, included the observations of Aristotle even when he contradicted Scripture.

They did not believe they were setting the word of man against the word of God. They saw Aristotle as a witness to indubitable philosophical principles. Aristotle was merely a good guide to the general revelation of which St. Paul spoke in Romans chapter one. These theologians just thought they were being honest when they accurately reported what they found in the two revelations. Perhaps differing positions could be reconciled in a way beyond the imagination of the theologian. Their critics were more wary. Aristotle discussed theology in his Metaphysics (probably the first known use of the term). He claimed to set forth how God must be by necessity. The critics believed that God was in a better position to reveal his nature than a pagan philosopher. Autobiography was more valuable than speculation.

As time wore on, the temptation to make more concessions to philosophy became more unbearable for more theologians. An argument could at least be made that Aristotle was a careful observer of natural revelation who only fell short where God's natural revelation trailed off. He could find the traces of the divine in nature, but not traces of the Trinity. The fact that a Pagan school of thought had been taken so seriously by Christian theologians set a precedent, though. Other thinkers whose ideas were more devastating to a Biblically faithful theology were given the same privileged status. The defense was even the same. Theologians who ignored these thinkers would lose the opportunity to speak to the culture. Truth was sacrificed to universal appeal.

Special revelation restricts the possibilities for pandering to current fashions of opinion. If God has given to man a written revelation, well then, what is a theologian to do but to accurately teach what has already been revealed? There are only two possibilities open to the panderer. One is the outright abandonment of the Christian revelation. This is not a very popular move. Even those who wish to be pandered to desire to think themselves Biblical. The second option is to place Scripture alongside of other sources of revelation, such as reason and experience. This is often quite successful.

Grace as a First Principle

Dozens of generations of Christians have been offended by exclusivity and rejected its rigor. The advantage that the modern theologian has over his predecessors is that so much time has elapsed since the faith was first delivered to us. Somewhere in the writings of every age is material supporting a pluralistic Christianity. Much better to present a broad Christianity as the ancient faith than as a newfangled evasion of truth. Old prayers are helpful to this end, for they are esteemed for their antiquity. Who is not moved by the beauty of the Anglican prayer which begins with the address "Almighty and everlasting God, who hates nothing that thou hast made…"? The words come from a passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, an Apocryphal book considered uncanonical by Protestants. It reads:

For you love all things that exist, And abhor none of the things that you have made; For you would never have formed anything if you hated it. And how could anything have endured, if you had not willed it, Or what had not been called forth by you have been preserved? But you spare all, because they are yours, Lord, lover of life, For your imperishable spirit is in all things. (Wisdom of Solomon 11:24-12:1) (1)

All that comforts is not gospel. There is an inconsistency between the implications of this passage and the world which we live in. Since God has made us, if God hates nothing he has made, then he doesn't hate us. In that case we don't need a special revelation to tell us that God loves us. It is known to us as a law of reason. Although this seems to increase our certainty of his love for us, it really tells us nothing about what kind of care we can expect from him. If God hates nothing he has made, but he allows disasters to befall other people he has made, he might allow ultimate disaster to befall us. The prayer which seemed to be good news turns out to be bad news after all.

The real problem with a pluralistic gospel which claims that all are saved in principle is this. It has nothing to say to those who need good news most. While the light of such a principle may shine brightly in prosperity, it must inevitably be dimmed by misfortune, obscured by pain, and extinguished by death. My point is not to paint a bleak picture of life here. It is true that most lives are not characterized by unremitting gloom. My point is that these realities eventually overtake all, and it is precisely when they do that the love of God must be meaningful.

The words "We are good parents who love all our children," are warm words, but they offer cold comfort to the child who has just failed miserably. At this point the only words capable of sustaining hope are "We love you anyway, and will redeem this situation for you." These words assume the reality of failure and take the cost of forgiving it and repairing its consequences into account. They offer hope to the defeated. The more general sentiments turn out to be weaker in comparison. At first the pluralistic gospel sounded better because it applied to all. Now we see that it is weaker because it can only speak to those not yet defeated. To those who truly need it, it has nothing new to say to their situation. When grace is a first principle, it ceases to have the last word.

For grace to be a first principle, it must be written into the fabric of the cosmos. But the cosmos, of which we are a part, is where we encounter our problems. When we are in the midst of woe, the last thing we need to be told is "Cheer up! God has revealed himself in the makeup of the world as a gracious God!" If this is the good news, then the suffering are bereft of help, for God's self-revelation in the world looks anything but gracious to a sufferer. To equate creation as we find it with good news is for some to equate unredeemed suffering with gospel.

Saved with the World from the World

What we need is a redemption to take place in this cosmos by someone from outside. And this is what Christianity offers, but at the cost of another scandal. Aside from its teaching that redemption is exclusive, Christianity is most often attacked for its pessimistic view of the world. What is so ironic is that both of these scandals are necessary for true hope to emerge. It is by avoiding the so-called scandals of Christianity that we create a truly dark picture of the world.

When we reject exclusivity and say that all human beings are in the same state before God, the hidden implication is that people cannot experience a change in status before God. When we reject a pessimistic view of the world and say that the present state of the world is fundamentally good, the hidden implication is that those who live in unrelieved suffering are experiencing God's favor as truly as the prosperous. Together, these implications mean that there is no hope of escape from a bad situation. I could wish myself cut off from the "favor" of such a God and excluded from his worshippers! Contrasted with this set of beliefs, exclusivity doesn't look so bad.

Pessimism about the present state of the world is not a denial of the goodness of creation. The key thing that must be remembered about Christianity is that it teaches that the world was created good, and that mankind fell into sin, and corrupted the world. If we speak of being saved "from the world," we mean that we are being saved from the corruption infecting both it and us. Salvation is world-wide, however, as we are told that the creation will be "liberated from its bondage to decay" (Romans 8:21). In Christianity the ethical gulf is not between good souls and a bad creation. Both humans and the rest of the creation are corrupted and capable of being redeemed.

Some Christian writers have managed to give the wrong impression, however. In his book The One, the Three, and the Many, Colin Gunton argues that many writers in the ancient church contributed to the corruption of the Christian doctrine of creation by combining Biblical teachings with those of Platonism. Although St. Augustine is listed as the main culprit in the Platonizing of our doctrine of creation, Gunton's comments on Origen are more to my point:

While [Origen's doctrine] is certainly not-not quite-the gnostic negation of the world against which Irenaeus fought, there are signs that he treats the temporal order as instrumental to human salvation-as a rather unfortunate pedagogic necessity-rather than in some way itself also redeemable. (2)

Origen's teaching that human souls existed in a pre-material state and became embodied temporarily did not catch on widely. His exaltation of the eternal over the temporal did. Creation has since been seen as a training ground for eternity, a place where people are prepared for heaven, with little value in itself.

It is Gunton's contention that this lack of appreciation for creation is one ground for the modern world's rejection of Christianity. Many people see God's handiwork in creation and marvel. They are interested in it and wish to interact with it. A religion which denies the goodness of this marvelous realm is seen to be morbid or even death-loving. And so people reject suffering under a corrupted version of Christianity for the sake of enjoying a corrupted creation.

The rejection of Christianity is not followed by a golden-age of world-affirming bliss, for modern world is incapable of returning to its pre-Christian past. As C. S. Lewis said:

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are 'relapsing into Paganism'. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan't. [This reflects] the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal….A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. (3)

No; when the modern world rejects Christianity, it ends up by creating a secular version of Christianity, with a secularized version of our insufficient doctrine of Creation thrown in! Communism, for example, sacrifices the temporary good of the individual to the perceived long-term good of the State. Ironically, while it can be shown that the modern world had good reasons for criticizing a faulty doctrine of Creation, it has managed to outdo the church in causing ruin with this same doctrine.

When we try to do theology from the top down, we begin by discussing God as we believe that he must be according to our own reasoning. When we do this, we may hope that we resemble Aristotle or other ancients. We forget that Aristotle is sub-Christian. Even more so, we forget that Aristotle never had to make sense of the Incarnation. It hadn't happened yet.

The ancients who tried to construct a top-down theology with an Incarnation (of sorts) were the gnostics. Their very style of theology led to a different style of gospel writing. Although the four Christian gospels do report what Jesus said, they are primarily accounts of what he did. In contrast, the gnostic gospels are a (mostly-false) report of what Jesus said, with little account of what he did. According to this teaching, what Jesus did was relatively unimportant. Gnosticism was salvation through information.

What Gunton offers as a solution to the world-denying teaching which has corrupted our church and society is St. Irenaeus's more biblical model where Creation is redeemed along with her human creatures:

in Irenaeus no major contrast is drawn between the perfection of the timeless eternal and the imperfection of the temporal. That would have been to concede too much to gnosticism. (4)

Gunton equates a false view of creation with gnosticism. This false view of creation leads to false ideas about redemption. What the original intention was for creation will have a lot to say about how it is to be fixed.

If, as the gnostics say, creation was a botch-up job which imprisoned the uncreated soul of man in a body, then a certain pattern of redemption follows. It will be un-Christian from the start, because it seeks to restore man to a past which Christianity says he never had. We never were disembodied souls. And the body is no prison. And Creation was no botch-job. But given this gnostic understanding of creation, how will the gnostic redemption be achieved? By inducing the higher, non-created element in man to renounce his createdness. By saving man from the evil universe. This is gnostic redemption.

According to some observers, similar teachings are to be found in Protestant churches where you would least expect them. In his book The American Religion, religious critic Harold Bloom argues that Southern Baptist (5) piety resembles that of gnosticism. With their teaching of the "soul's competency in religion" (which sounds like the gnostic meeting of the uncreated human soul with the uncreated divine) and with their emphasis on the vision of walking alone with the resurrected Jesus in a garden (a vision which Bloom claims takes the place of the cross), Bloom argues that Southern Baptists resemble gnostics more than Protestants, or even Christians.

Now Bloom is more concerned with religious imagination than with doctrine. As a self-avowed gnostic, he is not reticent about labeling a Protestant church gnostic, for to him that is no insult. This is not hard evidence one could use in a heresy trial. This broad sweeping view of a style of piety is very helpful though in inducing us to ask whether it might be possible to get swept into a non-Christian piety even as we profess orthodox doctrine. Do our actions imply a false view of creation?

The solution is to make certain that the structure of our practice matches the structure of our doctrine. If both we and the world are fallen, while we cannot expect to find anything in ourselves or creation which is untainted by corruption, neither need we despair of people or creation being used by God as instruments of redemption.

When I hear professing Christians attacking "the institutional church," I suspect gnosticism. This is not to say all church criticism is bad. The charges being just, I have no qualms about people being critical of an individual church or denomination. We live in a fallen world where even churches are subject to sin. It is when the inherent sinfulness of institutions per se is contrasted to the supposed inherent goodness of individuals that gnosticism is present. Both individuals and institutions are corruptible, and either can be the agent of corruption or sanctification for the other.

When I hear the sacraments disparaged for being external rather than internal, I suspect gnosticism. Granted, if in a given case no faith in Christ accompanies the reception of the sacrament, it will not have been efficacious. Gnosticism has crept in, though, if we believe the external is worthless because it is created. According to Christianity, our souls were created, too, by the same God who created the water. He can sanctify a soul, and sanctify water. He set apart a soul by means of water that has been set apart with his word (Eph. 5:26).

It can be said that God saves us with the world from the world. There are two ways this can be taken. On the one hand out of the corrupt creation which we are a corrupt part, God redeems us along with the creation. It is like D-day, where the invader wishes to liberate all that he encounters be it people or places-not like the raid on Entebbe, where individuals are rescued from a place they do not belong. We are saved "with the world" by being saved "alongside" the world. On the other hand God uses the corrupt creation in our redemption. The Bibles printed on less-than-perfect paper communicate the word of life. The water of baptism, though it may contain dirt and chlorine can convey the forgiveness of sins. We are saved "with the world" by being saved "by means of the world."

God from the Top Down

It turns out that Christianity's exclusivism in salvation and pessimism toward the world together make it possible to say something truly hopeful to man. It also turns out that our view of the world is not so pessimistic as some of our brethren have made the world suppose. Our optimism for the world's future lies beyond the world, but as was said earlier, the shape of redemption is partly determined by the shape of the original creation.

Lewis says that the descent of God in the Incarnation is a "familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world." A "faint analogy" to this pattern can be seen in vegetable life where a seed falls from a fair tree into cold soil to become another tree. A stronger analogy is found in animal generation, where there is a "descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum." In the dark womb begins the "slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult." In fact, this is more than a "faint analogy," but in many points, the very process Christ underwent:

In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. (6)

The biological account indeed expresses the descent of God, but Lewis reminds us of the heroic element as well, for God freely chose to undertake this task. Lewis likens God to a diver

first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. (7)

The vivid imagery that Lewis uses to capture the force of the Incarnation may be unfamiliar to us, but the content is Scriptural. It is reminiscent of the Kenosis hymn in the second chapter of Philippians, where we are told that Christ "made himself nothing" and "humbled himself," and that afterwards God exalted him.

At each point in Christ's story, we can derive comfort from the relationship which is set forth between Christ and the world he came to redeem. Not just what he said, or even what he did, but what he was for us is important in each stage. We often forget to think about it in this way. In one of his Christmas sermons, Martin Luther proclaimed the comfort he derived from Christ's infancy. Notice how Luther says we can read the character of God from the fact that God condescended to be an infant:

Let us, then, meditate upon the Nativity just as we see it happening in our own babies. Behold Christ lying in the lap of his young mother. What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! …Look at the Child, knowing nothing. Yet all that is belongs to him, that your conscience should not fear but take comfort in him. Doubt nothing. To me there is no greater consolation given to mankind than this, that Christ became man, a child, a babe, playing in the lap and at the breasts of his most gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? (8)

Like Lewis, how concrete the language! But here Luther speaks of the reality, not its analogy. Where Lewis uses vivid imagery to convey the method of rescue, Luther uses it to portray the rescuer.

How different is this divine infant from the God of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, the typical product of a redemption by knowledge. Harold Bloom says that he cannot even refer to Eddy's "vision" of God. He calls it a "notion,"

because her God is the ultimate product of that long process in which the [God of the Old Testament], (9) a God who was an exuberant personality, has been vaporized into a gaseous entity. (10)

This Child in the lap of his mother is anything but a gas. It doesn't require a careful comparison of doctrines to realize that Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science is not Christian. Just compare our concrete image to her vague notion. Mrs. Eddy does not learn of her God from earth, where his revelation can be made meaningful to us, but from a place beyond earth where all is meaningless.

Other religions are insufficient because they try to understand God not as he has revealed himself in a particular word of gospel, but as he is available to everybody in the word of law written on creation (or in the case of Mrs. Eddy, as he is available only to her in a realm she has invented). And law demands human achievement. The irony is that a top-down theology leads to a bottom-up redemption.

God has come to us and told us his name. He has taken on flesh. He has stepped into the world to redeem our situation when he did not need to. The strange thing is we think we can find more comfort in a distant deity, a vague notion, a faraway ruler. It is because we fear that a more active God would only step in for the sake of doom. One of the comforts of the gospels is that they show us that things are better. The exclusive revelation, whose exclusivity embarrasses us so much, portrays the God of the universe lying in a manger for our sakes. I will happily be confined to this vision of God. I want no other.

Grace as the Last Word

Grace is not a principle or a law from God, but a word from him. The distinction is important. A principle is true irrespective of audience. Grace is something which enters particular situations to change them. One of the best ways of illustrating this difference is by contrasting two kinds of passages.

The Sermon on the Mount, though it might contain some gospel, is a law passage. It presents God's standard of righteousness to the world. It is not spoken to individuals privately. It is a message for the crowd. When and where he spoke it makes little difference. By a lake, in a synagogue, or on the mountain, the message is the same. It is the Law, Moses, an old message which Jesus does not invent, but clarifies.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son, thought it might contain some law, is a Gospel passage. It presents God's grace to particular sinners. It is not addressed to a multitude, but to individuals. When and where Jesus spoke the message matters greatly. It is spoken to the Pharisees and teachers of the law who muttered against Jesus for eating with tax-collectors and sinners (Luke 15:2). The message is that the so-called righteous are the hard-hearted older brother in the parable, and Jesus their father, inviting them to rejoice that their stray brethren have returned to him. While the Gospel was old news in a broad sense (It had been known since the garden of Eden.), it was a new word to the situation of the Pharisees and sinners. It turns their world inside-out.

Law was addressed to crowds, gospel to individuals. But what about us? We have only the written Scriptures to go by. If the law is general and the gospel individual, does only the law pertain to us? Surely that would be awful! Or is the gospel proclaimed to us individually in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, apart from Scripture? That solves one problem, but makes assurance questionable. How would we know we had heard the voice of the Holy Spirit rather than the voice of our own desperate hopes? Or does the gospel pertain to us because it is really general and not individual? Were those lucky enough to be around Jesus during his earthly ministry the recipients of a special kind of gospel?

It is to be admitted that the parables spoke grace to individuals living in Jesus' time. They do not speak directly to us in exactly the same way. For them to apply to us, there must be a principle of application. This does not put gospel parables in the same category as law-preaching, however. The law is true for all, at all times, in all places. Gospel parables apply indiscriminately to the individuals who fit them. The Prodigal Son parable has one word of grace for the Prodigal, and another for his older brother. At different times we may find ourselves in the shoes of either brother. While gospel passages such as we find in the parables apply to many people in different ages, there is still a particularity to them which is foreign to the law.

But what about the gospel's ability to break into a situation from the outside? Can that happen today? It most certainly can. Kenneth Bailey relates how tells how the Parable of the Lost Sheep caused a stir in communist China.

[Is] it wise to leave the ninety-nine and wander away searching for the one? Christian missionaries have debated this point with Communist dialecticians in China. Indeed, it is the shepherd's willingness to go after the one that gives the ninety-nine their real security. If the one is sacrificed in the name of the larger good of the group, then each individual in the group is insecure. He knows that he too is of little value. If lost, he too will be left to die. When the shepherd pays a high price to find the one, he thereby offers the profoundest security to the many. (11)

This Parable broke into a situation where people had received "grace as a first principle" from their communist leaders. The first word which the government spoke to the citizens was comfort. The communist leaders told their citizens that the welfare of all citizens was so important that individuals would be sacrificed to it. This was a message of good news excluding nobody-until any citizen found himself on the wrong side of the party. But God had a better message. Instead of offering a word of grace to "the masses," he spoke of the Shepherd's love for the lost sheep.

In the dialog with the Chinese dialecticians, we can see that the Christian missionaries presented a superior understanding of grace. But we must remember that this grace is not just a good principle which allows us to do things better. If it were, a good outcome for the story would require that the Communist government be nicer to dissenters. God's gospel is better, however. He does not merely offer advice to incompetent shepherds on how better to care for sheep. He can rescue his lost sheep from bad shepherds. He can even rescue us from the bitter fallout of man-made substitutes for his gospel, those which were formulated in response to a corrupted doctrine of creation. Surely the one who can rescue us from a corrupt creation can rescue us from a corrupted doctrine of creation!

Christianity offers to the world one God at the cost of two scandals. One is the exclusivity of grace. The other is pessimism toward the world. These two scandals are the mirror images of the actual Christian claim. World-pessimism is God-optimism, and the exclusivity of grace is the individuality of the word of grace. Because the gospel is not a timeless principle, it can begin to be true in the midst of a hopeless situation.

Theology needs to work from the bottom up. That is, it must start with the God who is revealed to us in Scripture, the God who walked on earth as the Person of Christ. This binds us to a particular revelation which may offend us with exclusive claims. When we are offended, we must remember that there is a bright purpose to these claims. Christ's earthly mission allows us to understand heavenly things. Jesus reveals himself to us as a father who wants his sons back. If we submit to a theology which works from the bottom up, understanding the heavenly Father from the earthly Christ, we find a God who comes from the top down to rescue us. In distress we call upon him, not just because he is the only God, but because he is our God.