"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

I should have known. If I wanted to read a good book, a tale of romantic orthodoxy, grounded in the ancients yet told with a fresh style and vibrant scholarship, I should have picked out a John Piper or Douglas Wilson. But I was young and foolish and had my fair share of mistakes left to make.

In reading John Eldridge's Waking the Dead a couple weeks ago, I enjoyed him expounding on the centrality of the heart and the three truths that there is more to life than meets the eye, the battle is underway, and that we have a crucial role to play. He even mentions the urgent necessity of small group or local church life as modeled by the early Church. It led me to reread Wild at Heart, where he fights the "westward expansion against the masculine soul." The thesis of Wild at Heart is probably more concise, that "deep in his heart every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure, and a beauty to rescue. That is how he bears the image of God; that is what God made him to be." In other words, the last thing the world needs is "nice guys" as the paragon of masculinity. We need guys that are passionate, holy, and dangerous. In the scope of this, he nails the essence of masculinity and femininity (even though, sadly, he failed to mention headship), the healing of our Wound, life as myth and the divine drama, and spiritual warfare.

Though the two books are almost so complementary as to be repetitive (not to mention his others) and despite the interruptions of endless pop cultural references, he proclaims the deep things that I've wanted the world, and especially the lackluster men of this modern age, to awaken to. And yet, we are not yet to the third chapter of Wild at Heart, page thirty to be precise (you can tell I'm fired up when I actually go to the trouble of citing something), when I am struck back with one enduring offense: God takes risks.

*          *          *

With Adam, apparently God was gambling on the odds that the serpent would be bested and, get this, His faith in Adam would not prove groundless. "In our attempts to secure the sovereignty of God," Eldridge writes, "theologians have overstated their case and left us with a chess-player God playing both sides of the board, who makes all his moves and ours too. But clearly this is not so. God is a person who takes immense risks." And I thought I was iconoclastic. If this sentiment does not jar Christians, it is because the Church has gradually whittled away at the doctrines of God for the past two centuries since the advance of naturalist-materialism.

Now, you might say with Pope, "What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, / What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things," but in the wake of America's towering heritage of solid seventeenth century theology, we have no excuse ignoring the Biblical foundations of God's character. Sadly, I don't think Eldridge is aware of the backdrop or impact of the claims he is making or the ruin that it promises since he quickly inserts that he does not believe in compromising God's foreknowledge as the Open Theist Movement does. (Which begs the question of how one might take a risk when the outcome is, excuse my Greek, predestined). Indeed, if this truly was some cosmic roll of the die, apparently God lost. I do not understand such detractions. Monsieur Pascal may wager all he likes, but the nature of God and eternity is something I'd rather have assurance and a sure hope of, as the New Testament promises.

Nor is Eldridge alone among the contemporary scene. He frequently cites Kurt Bruner's book The Divine Drama. Seeing a damaged copy at the outlet Christian bookstore a couple of days ago, and having two dollars to waste, I bit. (I know, I know. I still hadn't learned my lesson by then). Bruner imparts the great truth that life is only understood as a story, which is not fantasy fiction, nor mere fact-telling of the "Enlightenment" tradition, but Myth, the deeper spiritual reality of life. As Bruner says, "The meaning of life can be found in story and the meaning of story can be found in life." In our postmodern climate, it is story, the language of the soul, that cuts past non-believer's intellectual defenses.

Basically, he retreads what Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, Campbell, and others have said with more eloquence and more depth, but with the same root problem that Eldridge faces in his risking-taking God: human free will. On page nineteen: "We know that we are free to choose whether and how we will play our part. We call that free will." Thence follows the claim on fifty-eight: "Even though it would have been far less of a hassle to maintain the status quo, [in creating Adam] God took an enormous risk." He cannot go more than a few pages for the rest of the book without mentioning free choice this and that. All at once, the delight of enjoying a book about epic myth is reduced to Arminian propaganda and the divine drama ends up portraying a farce starring mankind, a mock epic belittling divine omniscience and immutability.

Silly me, I always thought of Christ as center-stage and cynosure. Bruner goes so far relating the ways of God to man that anthropopathism ceases to be a poetic device and crosses over into heterodoxy. He suggests God was probably nervous upon first making Adam, like a kid on a first date, on tiptoes to see what we would do.

I almost wonder if such men are reading the same Bible as I. Then I remember Eugene Peterson's hackwork and begin to understand. What unmitigated arrogance that allows us to take a devotional response and call it a paraphrase of God's Word, or to take a paraphrase and call it a translation. And we wonder why the authority of Scripture is so downtrodden in our times. And so it is that The Message is an abomination to my ears when I know that I could instead hear from the very Word of God, preserved through the ages, meticulously copied by scribes, and dyed in the blood of those martyred for wanting to bring the Word of God to the people of God.

It is a fine endeavor to want to bring the "informal and earthy flavor of the Greek into the rhythms and idiom of everyday English" provided that the meaning is carried over too. What is so awful (in the modern sense of the word) about Scripture that we feel the accuracy of meaning must be watered-down? Perhaps this is merely indicative of the widespread Biblical ignorance that prevails today, as exampled in our addressing God as "Jehovah." He never did so. The Hebrews, fearful of misusing His Name, came up with the vowels of Adonai and the consonants of His revealed Name YHWH, hence Yahowah or Jehovah. Then came King James and the rest is history. I do not mean to be contentious or mean-spirited here, but if we are so lax as to not call Him by the Name He gave us (or the nearest vowel approximation), how can we seek to know His nature?

But allow me to digress back to that fact that these openness ideas are by no means new or original, not by half. This generation has seen a huge upsurge in the Open Theist heresy led by Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, and others. But we should not lose heart so quickly. Each church council of old produced confessions of excellence by having to reform their ranks in response to heresy and around heterodoxy and let truth set our boundaries: in the essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love. Thus, the life and writings of Paul show all the brighter in contrast to those Judaizers that sought to spy out the Church's liberty. It was Pelagianism that sharpened Augustine into the great defender of God's glory in all that He does. A thousand years later, the Reformation battled its brother Arminianism, and our American forbearers, Jonathan Edwards in particular, wrestled with "Enlightenment" Deism not more than two hundred years ago.

More recently, Open Theism has come to advocate an aleatory god far removed from the God of Scripture and readily accepted into mainstream churches. Partly, I believe this is so because today's Christian writers are not so much regarding neo-Arminian theologians like Pinnock, but are tapping guys like C.S. Lewis who was not immune from the Arminian bugaboo. It is hard to overestimate Lewis' contributions and influence over the church. I and countless others owe an immense debt to him. But remember as well that he admitted his greatest human debt was to George MacDonald, who towards the end of his life was committed to both a temporal, purgatorial view of hell and an idea of Christ's insufficient atonement, where we are the ones who must do the atoning.

But there is something rotten in the state of Arminia concerning the nature of God presented here. On one hand, they speak of God as a mild and ever-patient gentleman, never wishing to impose His wishes on man's sovereign self-determination. On the other, they say He is wild, boundless, and, oh yes, risk-taking. But these two tenets cannot hold together in free will theism; God cannot be both risk-taker and a gentleman. Either He is dangerously Wild at Heart, a boundless Sabaoth hunter of our souls, or the timorous excuse of a patron with which our pride is more comfortable. What is a hunter or warrior who is impotent to kill (or in Christ's case bring life)? What is a gentleman who will not impose himself before an insult to honor and see the wrong righted? What is a God who wants to be the hero who saves the day, but is forced to play the role we script for Him? For one thing, it is not He Whom I spell with a capital "H." What this is is splicing some of His more comfortable, plushy attributes and inflating them to crowd out those that sting like three-corded whips and wrought-iron nails. We cannot have it both ways. He has not left us that option. He never intended to. Eldridge himself is forced to see the disparity in Wild at Heart: "The Lord is a gentleman??? Not if you're in the service of his enemy" (25).

And it is not long before Bruner has fallen between the horns of a dilemma by paraphrasing 1 John 4:10: "He didn't make us so that we would love Him, but so that He could love us." I'm not sure if he realized the implications of using this verse, but this is literally the divine rape, a concession of that holy, forceful love that strips away our self-full will to cloth us in His righteous love.

*          *          *

Christians of the past knew it for what it was: amazing grace, before and after, sufficient in its totality. Anglo-Catholics like John Donne, who tend to downplay doctrines like Total Depravity or Irresistible Grace, have nevertheless writ it large in holy love sonnets. His fourteenth Holy Sonnet is worth quoting in full:

Reflecting the resolution, the last two lines are the most metrically sound. The whole composition is risqué without compromising orthodoxy. (But perhaps I should not point out that "heart" can also be Elizabethan slang for vagina).

For a similar scene, we can turn to one of my all-time favorite poems, "The Hound of Heaven" by the Catholic Francis Thompson: "Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! / My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me, / And smitten me to my knee; / I am defenceless utterly" which ends with God's beauteous rejoinder: "'Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'"

Save for hymnists like Luther, Wesley, Cowper, Newton, Watts, and select elements of the contemporary worship movement, Protestant Reformation-type believers have little in the way of great lyricists that portray this. Somewhere in between is the Anglican George Herbert, who is incomparable for any clime. Still, there are yet a few such confessions in Protestant verse we can discover. John Stocker gives us the memorable lines ("Thy Mercy, my God"):

And Charles Wesley has the masterful classic: "And can it be that I should gain / An interest in the Savior's blood? / Died He for me, who caused His pain — / For me, who Him to death pursued?"

More recently Derek Webb portrays the relentless hunter God. Some excerpts:

Or with more emphatic affection:

Finally, there is the prose testimony of countless believers. Lewis himself, from whom many modern Christians derive their Arminianism, describes being cornered and caught by the divine hunter, "dragged kicking and screaming — the most reluctant convert in all the world — into the Kingdom."

And leaving personal testimonies of song back to Scripture, just how is it that "every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father", "with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth", "by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself" so that "the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all" if mankind exercises sovereign freedom of the will? If the earth is God's footstool, it is no big matter for Him to make the wicked and hardened of heart to "take a knee."

He obviously knows the future for all of the hundreds of prophecies in Scripture.¹ Moreover, He does what He pleases and His purposes stand,² even over evil in the world.³ And we are indeed chosen⁴ and have nothing what we has not received⁵ and are forgiven for His Name's sake⁶ though man is still morally responsible, which this Scripture simultaneously affirms.⁷

To see it more explicitly, we may look in John 6:44. "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day." It is very likely that "draws" (helkuo) could also be translated as "drags" due to other NT usages.⁸ Also, in 2 Peter 1:21, "for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God," the Greek literally means "forcefully borne along" (pheromenoi). The same phrase, by the way, is used to describe how the sailors had to succumb to the tempest winds in Acts 27:15-17. Obviously, it is crucial that God be so heavy-handed in the process of using men so any imperfections or vacillations do not corrupt His intentions.⁹

Lastly, Jeremiah 20:7-9, if I accommodate our paraphrasing friends with the Catholic Christian Community Bible, provides the sensual imagery we are getting at: "Yahweh, you have seduced me and I let myself be seduced [compare to literal trans. here]. You have taken me by force and prevailed. . . . So I decided to forget about him and speak no more in his name. But his word in my heart becomes like a fire burning deep within my bones. I try so hard to hold it in, but I cannot do it." Remember that this God breathed into Adam and the Valley of Dry Bones, you and me. He is almost necrophilic in His quest, just as we would say of Prince Charming to Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. It is not so strange a concept that we cannot weave it into our folk and adventure stories.

*          *          *

However, this is not the brutality of a dejected stalker. "In love, He predestined us,"¹⁰ "according to His kind intention,"¹¹ and "according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will."¹² This is not whimsical arbitrariness, but wise and loving deliberation. D.A. Carson in The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God outlines the problem of how God's love has been taken out of context from His sovereignty, justice, immutability, holiness, and, in subordination to His holiness, wrath. Then he is careful to distinguish the five types of love in the Bible. Here might be a key place to remark that this essay refers specifically to God's love for the elect who once were lost, rather than His conditional, universal, providential, or intra-Trinitarian love. No one type claims exclusivity over the others, just as His love does not outweigh His justice; God knows no alloys, but, as Jonathan Edwards said, "an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies." And Carson shows the doctrine of immutability rightly upholds that God's attraction for us is rooted not in our intrinsic beauty but in His gracious nature (63). Just think of how the question is framed in the first place: If God is sovereign, are people really free? Instead, we ought to at least put God's integrity first in asking: If we are free, is God really sovereign?

The problem is we pretend we all start out on the equal footing and clean slate of pre-fallen Adam and that perfect freedom of choice is within our nature to enjoy. Clearly, this is not so. Even if we never sinned, we are still born (let us even say baptized) with a sin nature, thus blowing the lid off the adage to "hate the sin and love the sinner."

When it comes down to it, there is little that we chose or are able to choose in our lives. Our parents and conception, our country and race, our environment and upbringing, were all determined independent of our yea or nay.¹³ We forget that He is awful (in the old sense "full of awe") and exalted over all our ways.

In an effort to see man in God's image, today's writers overstate their case and makes God more like man. But God is also Wholly Other, who acts in sovereign freedom. It is contradictory to juxtapose God's completeness unto Himself and man's sovereign self-determination. It is the unstoppable force versus the immovable object. One must give in to the King of the Mountain. Were this not so and by my self-determinism I could snatch myself from His hand, woe is mankind and woe is the gospel that His sacrifice can cover only the faithful and not the faithless as well and that we prove God a liar when He said otherwise.

Either we can strong arm Him to do own bidding in our salvation, prayers, and evangelistic efforts, or He is mighty to do all according to His good and acceptable and perfect will independent of the conflicting "polls" of Christians' prayers. I, for one, would hate to see my still unsteady will, though freed now in the Holy Spirit, to ever have dominion over His.

However, autonomy by definition is a mountain unto itself. And what if God were not on this mountain, if the cosmos permitted man his every whim and fancy – dear Lord, such a hell of chaos God never made. James calls this idea of human sovereignty "boasting in our arrogance."¹⁴ So we see that man has responsibility, but his will is bound up on every side. The Word is quick to admonish with an ad hominem those who presume otherwise.¹⁵

It hinges on our short-sighted view of freedom. Shackled to sin is obviously not desirable. As Christians, being capable of choosing Christ over sin by the Holy Spirit is better. A glorified life continually kept in the grace of God is supreme and the end state of true freedom God works us towards.¹⁶ True freedom in the end is what Paul called slavery to Christ. Sadly, we mean it today to say freedom from Christ.

If there seems to be any point in our life that we could claim partnership with God's grace, surely it could be found in that initial reception of His salvation into our lives. And yet, the Scriptures never waver to our wide interpretation and narrow bias. As typical of the New Testament epistles, Peter opens his letters with God's sovereignty in election, declaring that is was done for God's own glory and goodness¹⁷ and so is meant to be certified and assured and perfected since it was our perfect God's calling and choosing,¹⁸ not our typical churchified language of "receiving and praying for Jesus to come in." It is not Paul's habit to speak of "Christ in us" so much as "us in Christ," not "Christ is mine" but "I am Christ's." The distinction is crucial in order to see internally.¹⁹

And Paul is an even more difficult man to start a conversation with, always wanting to insert something about being thankful that God is in control of everything from our birth to our second birth to our eventual and assured glorification.²⁰ The man repeats himself thrice in Galatians 3:33.

It's like, "Hi, I'm Daniel. What's your name?" "Oh, I'm Paul, called to be an apostle, not by my will, but the will of God, who, by the way, also selected me and sealed me to be a son, not according to anything I've ever done or could ever do to make His like me, but by the goodness of His own pleasures which He established in the glory His Son before the foundations of the world. So, do you go to school around here?"

Can you hear his exuberant thankfulness bleeding through? There is no pause between his name and his identity in Christ. Next time you're at an awkward social gathering, just pop out with that ice-breaker: "Hi, my name's ___, called to be a follower of Christ Jesus, who chose me to be the praise of His glory from eternity past, having been purchased by His all-sufficient and all-atoning sacrifice on the cross. If you haven't been called yet, I implore you to be reconciled to God through Christ today." Or, "I sure am glad to meet you, nevertheless, not I, but Christ in me." And, trust me, the babes will love it.

We can see then that there is no risk to be taken by God. If God is not the nervous suitor, uncertain and ignorant of future expectations, but rather the omnipotent Creator and King of the Bible, then the whole picture changes. Only if He is seen as no quisling "gentleman", but the truly Wild at Heart divine hunter in Scripture, then our vision is restored. Thus, as our view of sin increases, and of man decreases, then our view of God is free to increase and be exalted higher and higher, and we can begin to grasp some of His unfathomable greatness that leads Paul off into so many "tangential" doxologies. Then it is simple to understand, if somewhat less of a headline than the "Risk-Taking God," about the "Perfectly Happy God, Entire in Himself."

For only if God holds Himself above all else, does He prove not to be an idolator. And only if God is entirely in control and unable to take risks, are we able to take them. This is John Piper's full-throated response in The Pleasures of God (54-62) and Don't Waste Your Life (79-98). Since risk implies uncertainty, we can only take risks if we know we are backed by a God who cannot, who indeed holds the very epitome of chance in His hands.²¹

*          *          *

We do not realize how serious the sin nature is before Christ. For the past month, I've laboured in the fields at my brother-in-law's Castle Ministries in Strawberry Plains, east Tennessee. Probably half of the forty acres are covered in kudzu, thorn bushes, trees of paradise, and, we've since discovered, poison ivy. We could have delicately flirted the edges of these various flora, or merely trimmed the margins of the wildwood, but there would have been nothing of the land reclaimed. No, we went in covered in long-sleeves and jeans, boots and gloves, sweat and blood. Enormous machetes flying, we spent ourselves for weeks at the task and struck down all that did not bear fruit, even tossing it in the fire, and striped off the lower branches of what did so that it would bear more fruit.

I cannot help but wonder that men are so, well, man-centered that they would skip over so much of Scripture and forget that God is the God who rent own His Chosen Tree. And with that Family Tree, he lobbed off some of the upper branches of the Jews so He could place in the Gentiles. He planted the roots, maintains its blossoms, gives light, and waters it of Himself. From the world's point of view, we are just "persuaded" to follow Christ, as though it were the newest flavor coffee or seven-step, self-help book. From the heavenly point of view, we are conducive to the transfusion of His sap only because His grace has made it so. Though Gerard Manley Hopkins may have had a different reaction in "Binsey Poplars" ("even where we mean / to mend her we end her"), we can be confident that the Lord never breaks a bruised reed that ought not to be broken.

I enjoy Eldridge, but in the end his soft prose, weak theology, and repetitive works (I've just seen a catalog showing he's put out a few more of the same) cannot satisfy the way meatier books can. And, to be honest, I confess I am a bit stoked by browsing through the back of a Piper book and seeing the lists of works cited and Scripture reference. Sometimes it is just refreshing. In a culture where 90% of Christian books are rehashed, redundant efforts of mediocrity and marketed to milk every niche (Left Behind prequels, for kids, for albinos, etc.), Eldridge gets an honorable mention for keeping substance behind the sale. But if theology is knowing God, and worshipping God in Spirit and in truth is something to be strived for, then do not look for the depths of the Psalmist or Apostle.

For instance, the wildness built into men is not that of the thrill-seeking berserker, as Piper says, "not the heroism, or lust for adventure, or courageous self-reliance, or efforts to earn God's favor. It is childlike faith in the triumph of God's love – that on the other side of risks, for the sake of righteousness, God will still be holding us." Furthermore, it emphatically does not mean that we will not suffer loss, but that "in all things (tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, the sword) we are more than conquerors." Why? Because we are manly men? No, because there is nothing we or anyone else can do to separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:35-39), and in our claiming Christ's victory as "more than conquerors," we do not just defeat but shame and subjugate evil to serve our own godliness.

Yes, Wild at Heart got it right on there. Men are savage by nature, for that is the likeness of their Maker. And it makes me think of how every guy wants to have cool battle scars and war stories, but hardly ever supposes that it is because God has a Son with the coolest scars, who can boast at Himself, pulling up a sleeve, "Look at this one I got saving the world." Nor would they pause to consider that in doing so, God was flexing an even bigger and more incomprehensible muscle: His sovereignty over salvation history. He is truly and literally the Authur and Finisher of our faith, who supplies seed to the sower and is the Seed Himself, who works in us both to will and to do according to His good pleasure, and there is confidence that the good work He began in us will be perfected.

Towards the end of my reading this month, I came upon a startling sentence by D.A. Carson: "We grasp that God has not drawn us with the savage lust of the rapist, but with the compelling wooing of the lover." I could have changed my title then to something less abrasive like "The Pursuing Love of God", but I declined. For it is not a "savage lust" the poets of the past are describing, but a noble savagery. It is not a human rapist they see, but a divine one. The shift is a qualitative one, and I do not think "compelling wooing" can flesh out what drove the Man of Sorrows to do what He did. So what it comes down to is this: we can't stop Him from loving us. He will have His way with us, and in this we have nothing to boast of, but Him. And to those He loves with His very blood, He will not stop until He loves them to death. And then? Even so, we shall be as Him and feast eternally. Amen and amen.

1. 1 Sam 23:10-13; 2 Ki 13:19; Jer 38:17-20; Matt 11:21; Isa 46:9-10; 42:9, etc.
2. Psa 33:10-11; 115:3; 135:6; Pro 16:4, 9, 33; 19:21; 20:24; Isa 14:24-27; 46:9-10; Job 42:2; Dan 4:34-35; Matt 19:26; Eph 1:5,11; 1 Tim 6:15; Heb 6:17
3. Job 1:21-22, Lam 3:37-38; Amos 3:6; Isa 45:7
4. Matt 22:14; John 13:18; 17:6,9,24; Rom 8:28-33; 11:4-7; 1 Cor 27-28, etc.
5. Deut 29:4; Isa 63:17; Jer 10:23; 32:40; 1 Chron 29:14; John 6:44; Acts 13:48; 16:14; Rom 9:14-23; 11:24-36; 1 Cor 4:7; 15:10; 2 Tim 2:24-26
6. Ex 9:16; Deut 4:20; 7:6-8; 10:14-15; 14:2; 32:6; Jos 24:2-3; 1 Sam 12:22; 2 Sam 7:23; Jer 14:7,9; Psa 79:9; 25:11; 106:7-8; Dan 9:9,15; Isa 43:21; 44:1-2; 48:9-11; 63:12-14; 64:8; Ezek 20:5,9; 36:20-23; 39:25; Neh 9:7,10; Acts 9:16; Rom 1:5; Rom 9:10-13; 1 Pet 2:9; 1 John 2:12
7. Prov 16:9; Acts 2:23; 4:27-8; Phil 2:12-13; Heb 13:21; John 6:37, etc.
8. Jn 12:32; Jn 18:10; Jn 21:6; Jn 21:11; Acts 16:19; Acts 21:30; Jam 2:6
9. Ezek 3:14, etc.
10. Eph 1:4-5
11. v.5,9
12. v.11
13. Isa. 42:9; 44:7, you get the drill
14. James 4:16
15. Job 38-42, esp. 40:1-5; 42:1-6; Rom 9:19-24
16. Gal 5:1
17. 2 Peter 1:3
18. v.10, 1 Peter 2:9; 5:10
19. i.e., 1 Cor. 10:7
20. 1 Thes 1:4; 2:12; 2 Thes 2:14; 1 Cor. 1:9; Rom 8:28-29; Gal 1:6; 1:15; Eph. 1:11, Phil 1:29
21. Prov 16:33; Is 46:9-10; 42:9; see Desiring God 34-38

Have a comment about this article or one of the others in this month's issue? Use our Respondere page to write to our editors.