At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or “theory” is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use “justification by faith” — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the “law and gospel” distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.

-Robert Jenson, Christian Century (May 2, 2007)

As far as the gnostics were concerned, the “many” were overly fascinated by historical happenings, even by the historical events in the life of Christ. Elaine Pagels, writing on the ahistorical views of Heracleon, reports that he claimed: that those who insist that Jesus, a man who lived in the flesh, is Christ fail to distinguish between literal and symbolic truth. . . . Heracleon goes on to say that those who take the events concerning Jesus “literally”—as if the events themselves were revelation—have fallen into flesh and error. Concern about the mighty acts of God in both the Old and New Covenants was from a gnostic perspective a lower stage in the development of an authentic Christian understanding. To know Christ was not in any sense to have knowledge about the “historical man of flesh and blood” but rather to be personally related to the mythical heavenly being who liberates humanity from historical concerns…

…The reason for this totally different concern of the gnostics is their conviction that the root problem of humankind is ignorance. Judaism and Christianity in their orthodox expressions would understand the basic source of all our misery to be sin, humanity’s failure to meet God’s expectations or its own potential; gnosticism would see the human predicament as resulting from a profound blindness concerning the human situation. “Ignorance of the Father,” states the Gospel of Truth, “brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see.

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Edmund A. Stiemle, From Death to Birth

That every thing is poetic is for Chesterton a matter of fact. The idea that some things are poetic is a fictive literary device. There’s nothing more ordinary than “Smith”. And yet the children playing in the village know the mystical and magical power of the smith. They hear the pounding of his hammer amidst the flames that lick it all around as slams down again and again on his anvil. They see him literally bend metal. Metal bends to his will. It yields to him. It’s ironic that the name “Smith” has become a synonym for uninteresting and completely conventional. You can call the village smith many things, but he is no parvenu. “From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor.”

Things bore us because we can’t see them for what they are. A mailbox can seem boring because we forget that it’s not a “mailbox”, it’s a sanctuary for human words. A lover waiting to read her beloved’s sentiments is enraptured when she sees the red lever upright, indicating that the long expected missive has come. If we think that Mr. Smith or his mailbox is boring it’s not because we’re unrefined, it’s because we’re over refined. Everything around us is poetical. “It is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic.” This insight wasn’t lost on some of the greatest literary minds in the modern West. It’s the point of Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service and The Red Wheelbarrow, two very different poems written by two men who were not mutual admirers of one another in the least. It’s also central to Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s an insight that also might help explain why the Harvard Classics edition of 1910 includes numerous versions of the Odyssey while the Iliad remains conspicuously absent.

Rudyard Kipling wondered how someone could love England who knew only England. Chesterton wonders just the opposite. You can only love a place when you know it deeply. Kipling didn’t belong to England because he thought of it as a place. But when someone is rooted in England, or in any place, it ceases to become a place. The place vanishes because we’re rooted in it, like a tree, and we live like a tree “with the whole strength of the universe.” The telescope makes the world smaller, only the microscope makes it larger. Cosmopolitans, bored, are always seeking adventure. They love the thrill of traveling, experiencing Arabia as “a whirl of sand” or China as a “flash of rice fields.” But Arabia and China are not just the sum total of the sites the cosmopolitan sees. “They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures.” If we wish to know them we must not do so as tourists, seeking the cure to our boredom, “it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets.” When you conquer a place you lose it. The person standing in her kitchen garden, “with fairyland opening at the gate” is the one with large ideas. Her mind creates distance, the 747 and the internet destroy it. The globetrotter seeking a cure to boredom lives in a smaller world than the peasant. Globetrotters motivated by boredom find themselves bouncing from place to place but they lack the patience that would make their destinations anything other than places.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. The point of this proverb was lost on Chesterton in the days of his youth. But as he grew older, it’s profundity became more apparent. “The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead…the moss is silent because the moss is alive.” The moss is alive, and it might seem boring, but it’s incapable of boredom.

“In his explanation of the commandments, Luther begins every one with these words, ‘We should fear and love God…It is perhaps well known that there are some Christians today who maintain that Luther made a mistake in this. They strike out the ‘fear’ and say that we should love God, nothing more…But when people of our superficial generation have read the the Bible as thoroughly as Luther did, they will see that Luther was right also in this…He has seen that love to God does not exclude fear, but that they mutually strengthen each other…The greater the good in life, the more dangerous it becomes to us, if we misuse it. And since the grace of God is life’s most precious good, grace is more dangerous than anything else int he world, if we misuse it.”-Ole Hallesby, Under His Wings

How does one make sense of a passage like this in light of the most preponderant commandment in Scripture: “Be not afraid”? What about John’s insistence that “perfect love drives out fear”. (1 Jn 4:18)?

There is certainly a sort of fear that is inappropriate for the baptized. Such fear is more likely the product of an unsanctified imagination than a pious heart. Perhaps it’s the sort of fear rooted in the suspicion that when confronted with God, we will meet someone or something much like ourselves. One who reckons, forgives, judges much the same way we do. This is indeed a fearful prospect, but in the end it probably tells us more about ourselves than about God (which as Calvin reminds us isn’t a bad thing, as true knowledge of self will ultimately, by God’s grace, lead us into knowledge of God).

The fear Luther finds appropriate, which the Scriptures tell us is the beginning of wisdom, must be rooted in something much more like the Psalmist speaks of in Psalm 147:

“He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and and his judgments to Israel.
“He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments.
Hallelujah!”

It is only when one comes into the embrace of grace that one even glimpses the nature of divine judgment and justice. Von Balthasar gets at something like this in Love Alone Is Credible:

“…the moment we see our sins objectified before us on the Cross, it becomes all the more impossible to leave the One who died for us to his fate; so loveless a thought reveals our whole evil heart to us, love awakens fear in us, and the terrifying reality of being left behind by God (which is timeless as far as the one abandoned is concerned) shows us vividly that hell is no pedagogical threat, it is no mere ‘possibility’. Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity…We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed justify it conceptually as love (and not perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible ‘knowledge’ apart from or beyond love and at the same time related to it. We are required only not to let go of love, the love that believes and hopes through both is suspended in the air so that its Christian wings may grow. Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss below, which is only part of my own flight. Similarly, I can speak of hell only in relation to myself, precisely because I can never imagine the possible damnation of another as more likely than my own.”

There is perhaps no more painful fear than that of wounding or betraying one’s beloved. And yet this fear is not possible without first pledging, with one’s whole self, one’s love. Before that, it is abstract, a possibility, one that cannot produce the sort of fear that is rooted in love. Perhaps perfect love drives out imperfect fear, replacing it with a fear that flows from faith, rather than inhibiting it.