Nervous about the mystery

It’s important to say that God is a mystery, as I suggested in my last post, but I can understand why many evangelicals might be a bit nervous about saying it. I’m a bit nervous myself.

The problem lies not in the truth of the assertion, which I think is unarguable, but in the use to which it is put. You see, if we accept that we may know certain things about God clearly and truly, and also that other things about God remain uncertain or a mystery (because they are not revealed to us), the obvious question becomes, “Well, which things do we know truly, and which things uncertainly or not at all?” And what if there is only an extremely small number of things we know truly and a great many things that we should be agnostic about?

Enter the various species of ex-, post-, open-, emergent or liberal evangelicals who will assail the foundational truths of evangelical theology one by one—not by denying them outright, but by reassigning them to the category of uncertainty. You will remember that I suggested that a good theologian must know when to speak clearly and boldly, when to speak hesitantly and humbly, and when to speak not at all. For those who have lost confidence in the Bible and its theology, the desire is to lump as much as possible into the middle category. To achieve their purpose, they do not need to refute or demolish the point at issue; they need merely to raise enough doubts such that we can no longer afford to be dogmatic. The argument is not won, but declared a perpetual draw since no clear answer can every be arrived at.

Examples abound—the clearest one in my lifetime being the debate over the role of women and men in Christian leadership. Here, for example, is a very clear and careful summary of the Bible’s teaching on the matter, taken from the Confessional Statement of The Gospel Coalition:

In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.

The Gospel Coalition judged the subject of male and female roles to be in the ‘clearly and boldly‘ category of theological assertion, based on what God had revealed on the matter in the Bible. And in this, they are quite correct. All the elements of their statement have ample and unambiguous biblical warrant. To deny this statement is very difficult if one wants to be an evangelical because there is just so much clear biblical truth in it.

However, many evangelicals have accepted an egalitarian position—not because the Gospel Coalition’s key points have been refuted, but simply because enough doubts have been raised and enough important people have acquiesced. Through political persistence and repetitive dust-throwing, the subject has been successfully moved into the ‘tentative’ area, about which we cannot be dogmatic, and thus if someone wants to hold a different view, we can hardly stand in their way.

What’s the answer to all this? It’s certainly not to overreact and lump everything into the ‘clear and bold’ category, as if there is nothing about which we cannot be ferociously dogmatic. But neither is it to throw up our hands whenever there is disagreement or opposition, and lose our trust in the authority, clarity and sufficiency of Bible. The way forward is to read and re-read the Scriptures with a trembling, humble and obedient heart, and to proclaim without fear the truth about God we find there.