I ended my last post on
suffering with a comment about “the mysterious will
of a personal, powerful, just, and compassionate God.” I can just about hear a
critic responding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! You Christians always take refuge in
mystery, but you won’t let us do it. Your insane ideas are mysteries while the
difficulties with our materialism are contradictions. Well, I think that what’s
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
This is a reasonable response given the way
many believers do retreat into mystery whenever they cannot explain something. The
oft-heard reply, “It’s a mystery; you just have to believe it!” means something
like, “I’m scared of facing hard questions, and you are an evil person for
asking them.”
By way of contrast to the carping critic and
the befuddled believer, I think it is helpful to distinguish two legitimate uses of “mystery.”
First we may speak of a mystery when the
general principles of a matter are tolerably clear, but the details and
specifics far exceed our comprehension. Quite a few laypeople have a basic grasp
of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. They know that as an object approaches the
speed of light, its mass approaches infinity; they know that gravity bends
space and slows clocks. They may even appreciate how Minkowski’s space-time
interpretation of Special Relativity helped Einstein to formulate his General
Theory of Relativity. Not many laypeople, however, can make any sense out of
the series of partial differential equations that express Einstein’s theory in
mathematical form. Those equations are a mystery.
That is what I meant by “the mysterious will
of God.” The Bible’s general explanation of human suffering is clear. The Bible
explains the origin of human suffering; several of the purposes suffering
serves in the lives of believers and non-believers; what God has done and will
do to end suffering; and even how suffering fits into God’s comprehensive plan
for human beings. These things are not, properly speaking, mysteries. I have
written quite a bit about them elsewhere.
The mystery of suffering lies not in the
general picture. It lies in the specifics of the countless happenings in the lives
of the billions of human beings who inhabit our planet. It would be, in
principle, impossible to write a book that would explain everything about
everybody. Of course, people are always making guesses about such things: “This
happened to me because….” I can’t prove it, but I suspect that these guesses
are totally wrong ninety percent of the time and less than half right even when
they are partially correct. What God is doing in our individual lives is mostly
a mystery to us.
Second we may speak of a mystery when we have
clear evidence that two apparently incompatible things are both true. With
careful thought, we may be able to define and describe them in such a way that
they no longer appear contradictory, but we still have trouble putting them
together in our imaginations.
Light is a good example. By the mid-19th
century, it was clear that light acted like waves on the surface of water, but
in 1905 Albert Einstein showed that it also acted like bullets shot from a gun.
How can light be both waves and particles? Our minds have trouble picturing
such a thing. We can, however, speak of these two behaviors of light in a
non-contradictory way. Light propagates
as a wave, but it is absorbed as if
it were a stream of particles. In other words, light behaves in different ways
in different situations.
Light is like the doctrine of the Trinity.
God is both three and one, but He is not three in the same way that He is one.
He is one essence and three persons. Although it is difficult to
define essence and person, it can be done in a
non-contradictory way. The mystery arises from our inability to find any exact
parallel to the Trinity in creation. There is not another being to whom we can
adequately compare Him. In other my writings, I have explained why many of the
common illustrations of the Trinity are more misleading than helpful, and I
have provided some other illustrations (and explained their limitations). My
point is that the Bible’s statements about the Trinity are clear enough, but
our world lacks a suitable analog that would enable us to understand how God experiences
His threeness and His oneness. The great mystery is not in the doctrine of the
Trinity, but in God’s inner being.
(It is worthwhile pointing out that the
so-called trinity of the great gods in Hinduism is quite different from the
Biblical picture of God. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva do not act together with one
purpose and one energy in every divine work, as the Father, Son and Spirit do.)
Why does it make sense to accept one mystery, but not another? The wave-particle nature of light suggests two criteria. First, there is
compelling evidence that both aspects of light’s behavior are true. Second, the
mathematical equations that bring these two behaviors together also describe
many other phenomena as well. The result is Quantum Mechanics, one of the two
most powerful theories of the twentieth century. (The other is the General
Theory of Relativity.) We can fruitfully apply these two criteria to the
doctrine of the Trinity.
First, compelling evidence. The compelling
evidence for the Trinity is, in a word, Jesus. As I suggested in my previous
essay, the New Testament consistently shows us God interacting with God. God in
human flesh speaks to God as His Father. And yet this God in human flesh
insists that there is but one God. An acceptance of the Trinity begins with the
FACT of Jesus. The biblical Jesus has been often distorted or denied, but it
has not been found easy to get rid of Him. He is too powerful a figure for
that. In every age, there have been those who tried to remake Jesus into
something easier for the human mind to digest, but if we leave Him as we see
Him in the New Testament, we have the embryo of the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity.
“Trinity” is not a biblical word. It was made
up in the third century by a theologian who wanted a shorthand way of
expressing what the Bible teaches. The tri-unity of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit leaps off the pages of the New Testament. There we see three who act
together in distinct ways, but they penetrate each other so fully that they are
one Being, one life.
A Christian is someone who has found the New
Testament portrait of Jesus so attractive and compelling that he has cast
himself on Jesus as Savior and committed himself to Jesus as Lord. Therefore, the
very best way for a non-Christian to hold on to his unbelief is to avoid
reading the New Testament with a seeking heart. As soon as one is committed to
following Christ, if He should prove Himself true, then that person is in real
danger of becoming a convert. Jesus said, “If anyone is willing to
do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself” (John 7:17).
Second, explanatory power. It took a little over
three centuries for the early church to come to grips with the amazing data of
the New Testament. It was clear from the beginning that Jesus was divine, but
it was very hard to come up with ways of speaking about God that did justice to
the full scope of the Bible’s teaching. Every possible aberration of the
biblical picture was tried and found wanting. As soon, however, as suitable
terms and definitions had been agreed upon, the church began to realize that it had been given an inexhaustible treasure.
Like quantum mechanics, the doctrine of the Trinity provided answers for all
sorts of problems it had not been devised to explain.
For example, philosophy has been unable to
solve the problem of the one and the many: Is reality ultimately one (Hinduism)
or is reality ultimately a set of disconnected facts (materialism)? If reality
is one, are the particulars illusory? If reality is many, is there any
overarching purpose toward which all the individual things are moving?
The doctrine of the Trinity insists that
ultimate reality is both one and plural. Individual people really do exist, and
history has a unified direction and goal set by the one God. Both of these
truths are essential for making sense out of suffering. If our individual
existence is an illusion, so is suffering. If history has no goal, our pains
are real but meaningless.
The earlier essays in this series pointed out
that we cannot adequately explain why we are outraged by suffering if ultimate
reality is impersonal. We might not want to suffer, and by placing ourselves in
another person’s shoes, we might feel sorrow at the sufferings of others. Even
animals sometimes appear to grieve the loss of a companion. Aversion to pain,
sorrow, and grief are not problematic. Outrage, however, arises from a sense of
injustice, a sense that a great moral wrong has been committed. As that old
atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche clearly saw, (and as some of the “new atheists”
seem determined to ignore) true moral wrong depends on true moral righteousness.
Moral righteousness is always personal and
relational—one person can be rightly related to another. Two stones cannot be
rightly related to each other. In the Bible, righteousness is not a standard
above God, which He must obey. Neither are right and wrong determined by God’s arbitrary
command (which appears to be the case in Islam). God’s righteous character
consists of the right relationships between the members of the Trinity. The
Father loves the Son and gives Him all that He has; the Son loves the Father
and obeys Him perfectly; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son
together uniting them in perfect harmony. (See my The Beauty of God for a Broken World, chapter 10).
The foundation for our moral
outrage at suffering reflects a deep sense of a broken relationship, a sense
that a covenant between persons has been violated. That is exactly what the
Bible claims has happened. God’s covenant with man has been violated; man’s
covenant, under God, with other men has been violated. But God’s inter-Trinitarian
covenant insures that these other covenants will eventually be put right.
Thus, the doctrine of the
Trinity turns out to be essential for understanding—
Ø our own personhood,
Ø the nature of
righteousness,
Ø the reason for our
outrage at suffering,
Ø and the reason for
our hope that all that is broken will be made whole.
When we accept the mystery of
the Triune God, a great light shines into our darkness. That is the reason the
church treasures this marvelous doctrine.
