"A Footnote To All Prayers"
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
- C.S. Lewis
I've been thinking, conversing, reading, and writing a lot lately about our desire for certainty, and what I believe is a more appropriate alternitive: Mystery. The biggest challenge I face is communicating this lovingly to those who are certain about certainty. Maybe this poem by Lewis does a better job than I ever could (no, I don't know what "Pheidian fancies" are...). Certainty is largely an illusion not because God fickle and arbitrary, but because we are human, our intellects are prone to failure and selfish motives, and the language we use to communicate is so limited and open to misunderstanding. Even a brilliant communicator like Lewis could see that he was not able to contain God in language, that even his prayers were incomplete, and only meaningfull because God is great enough to make sense of our childish babble. We don't even have the intellectual power to really comprehend the God we attempt to worship. Lord, don't take me at my word...words can't contain you...take me at my heart...it's the only thing that can come close to knowing you...
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
- C.S. Lewis
I've been thinking, conversing, reading, and writing a lot lately about our desire for certainty, and what I believe is a more appropriate alternitive: Mystery. The biggest challenge I face is communicating this lovingly to those who are certain about certainty. Maybe this poem by Lewis does a better job than I ever could (no, I don't know what "Pheidian fancies" are...). Certainty is largely an illusion not because God fickle and arbitrary, but because we are human, our intellects are prone to failure and selfish motives, and the language we use to communicate is so limited and open to misunderstanding. Even a brilliant communicator like Lewis could see that he was not able to contain God in language, that even his prayers were incomplete, and only meaningfull because God is great enough to make sense of our childish babble. We don't even have the intellectual power to really comprehend the God we attempt to worship. Lord, don't take me at my word...words can't contain you...take me at my heart...it's the only thing that can come close to knowing you...
posted by Neal | 2:06 PM
5 Comments:
Of course, we shouldn't be certain about mystery, right? What I mean is that we shouldn't cling to mystery in the face of knowledge--when someone says the earth goes round the sun, we don't say, "Well, theologically it's a great mystery." And at resurrection time, when the curtain of the world is drawn back, we wouldn't rather have the mystery than the True Knowledge. (Lewis would agree here.) Mystery for mystery's sake is problematic.
"Mystery for mystery's sake is problematic."
As is certainty for certainty's sake (as Lewis would also agree). I actually agree with Ryan...going too far down the path of mystery leaves us with an unknowable Jesus and a indecipherable Gospel...a Gospel of which I am CERTAIN. Yet, we can't act like the language of mystery is absent from scripture. Yet the problem in the 21st century church is not an overemphasis on mystery (by the 22nd century, that could be true...). But our certainty-infatuated church culture where my concrete, absolute (yet totally non-objective) interpretations battle your equally concrete, absolute, non-objective, yet totally different interpretations, to the detriment of our unity, is CERTAINLY problematic. The point is not to swith to a mystery-heavy hermeneutic...the real point is to break the troublesome stranglehold of certainty in current church culture and come to a point where we can value both. As was mentioned a few posts back, certainty yields little in comparison to fidelity...in the same vein, mystery is probably of little value without it pointing to something greater and more holy than us.
I agree...Concepts of certitude and verification simply aren't 'on the radar' for anyone in the Bible or early church (except arguing the resurrection did occur--via eyewitness accounts). Faith in the Old Testament never meant believing in God's existence or being able to prove the revelation really came from God--belief was action.
Biblically speaking faith is based on evidence and only goes as far as the evidence reveals. More than that is conjecture and opinion.
Deuteronomy 29:29
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
There were some things during the days of the OT which were a mystery, but were laid bare (ie, revealed) in the NT with the coming of Christ and the establishment of his church.
Neal thank you for this article. I started a comment here that turned into this post. I appreciate your work here.
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