It was a little old lady who said it (and sometimes little old ladies are better to have around than children when you are looking for something to the point), but it was a little old lady who said, “Sometimes, you know I just don’t understand God.” Me too! It’s pretty hard to say ahead of time just exactly how things are going to turn out. And if you will think along such lines for a little while, let your mind run from Amos to Bultmann—the whole gamut from A to B.
What ever happened to that wonderful preaching of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.? There can be no argument that we have in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah four of the greatest preachers that ever lived. And the end product of all their preaching, by the success standards of our own day, was nothing but failure. They came to preach the truth of God to the existential situation, they preached with skill and with a desperate zeal, and the end of the matter was that the people were not converted and the nations north and south were not saved, and about the only thing left was gruesome suffering all around. Did they need instruction in methodology? Did Hosea fail somehow to identify? Was there something wrong with interpersonal relationships? Did they need group dynamics? (What has happened to that term?) Was it a failure of mimeograph machine? Maybe they should have organized. God moves in mysterious ways, so there came a root out of a dry ground. It was not quite the way we would have figured it.
It is almost impossible to open up a discussion with lay people on the subject of religion without the moot question of predestination coming out in the first two or three questions. This is as true of college and university students as it is of the after-meeting inquirers in the local church. “What about predestination?” they say. “What about it?” you counter. “Well, if God does everything, every little thing, do we have to do anything, does it matter what we do, are we only machines?” the questions tumble out. It seems pretty difficult so long as you keep the question an academic discussion to evade the conclusions they are pressing. The only trouble is that predestination works its way out a different way. Paul was a predestinarian thinker and tried endlessly to make everything different. Think about the Puritans, the Beggars, the Covenanters, the Huguenots; believing as they did surely that God is absolutely sovereign in the small things as in the large, that times are always in God’s hands, that no man comes to Christ except the Father draw him, they nevertheless gave themselves up to change people and to change events. Says Fairbairn in The Cambridge Modern History and very bluntly, “Calvin saved Europe.” Why work so hard at things when God does it all? Somehow as the discussion moves into action, true Calvinism remains predestinarian and at the same time bears no relationship to Kismet or Fate. It’s not what one would expect, but there it is.
There are other things which never cease to give me wonder, just little things which are full of suggestion. Why for example do the same people like new versions and old liturgies? They read Phillips, but they announce a Gregorian chant and recite a prayer from an ancient prayer book, and all in one service and all quite proudly from all appearance. Conversely, why do the exponents of the King James Version keep feeding us the modern jump tunes in the same service? Whatever they may think is especially pious about reading the KJV they immediately cancel out by getting me to sing (always under the leadership of the O-so-personable song leader) “I’ve got the peace that passeth understanding down in my heart, down in my heart.…” ad nauseam. How can anyone sing about “the peace that passeth understanding” to that kind of tune? Apparently because he has never really experienced it.
Take time to ponder the conservative liberals and the liberal conservatives. Have you ever been abashed and astounded to find a liberal completely illiberal especially in an argument with a man he thinks is a conservative. He acts as if he had forgotten all about loving the unlovely, that agape core to his theology. And it isn’t just a question of his attitude, it is also a question of his ignorance. In Wilbur Smith’s Wherefore Stand (and one would expect this from a man of his wide reading), every liberal is given his due. In books from liberal authors I search in vain for recognition of, understanding of, or plain dealing with the whole tradition from Hodge to Henry. If there is an answer to James Orr’s Problem of Old Testament History or Oswald Allis on the unity of Isaiah, I haven’t found it yet; but I have found sneers, jeers, and catcalls. Or try the conservative arguments proving that Song of Solomon is an allegory and that Jonah is sober history, and then try the liberal arguments proving that Song of Solomon is to be taken at its face but that Jonah is an allegory. Now reverse the arguments and it looks as if you have been dealing with movable parts, cut to fit any problem.
If this weren’t such a rainy, slushy, dull day, I could do better, but just as a parting shot, let me ask this: Is there anyone in the field today who quotes Scripture more than Bultmann does and in suspiciously proof-text fashion on occasion too? When he gets us finally to his basic kerygma, when all the demythologizing is over, will that kerygma be, just maybe, just possibly, just perhaps, a CREED?
