"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

Now to Him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations.

–Romans 16:25-26

Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

–1 Timothy 6:20

Continuing in the vein of controversy regarding chivalry and suffrage, I thought I might extend the discussion to a more public item of the day: the sacred feminine. Rather than going off on some iconoclastic tirade about Dan Brown's anti-historical hints, allegations, and things left unsaid, or the intricacies of esoteric Bible Code theology, I simply wanted to touch on some of the more awesome and unassuming doctrines of orthodox Christianity. First, many excellent Christian apologists have responded point-to-point on Brown's interpretation of events. But more importantly, in an age where many are in the dark about what even defines orthodox Christianity, a soft-hearted respect for the best mystery of all is worth countless tellings.

People long to be accepted. But not just by the general populace. They want an inner group, and usually count their rather plebian circle of like-minded geeks as an exclusive set. They may speculate about secret societies, but more to home they want to be included in their own tree house gang. There is something of the elitist, hoping to be chosen in a select company, in even the most bare-faced democrat. Something all such societies share in common, whether in the Masonic lodge or Wiccan coven, is the understood heritage of symbols and regalia, code words and handshakes, dating back to beyond the ancient mystery cults of Greece and Egypt. Such mystique is rather cool and sometimes instructive, as we all played with when we were kids. Dan Brown is just tickling the kid in us all. But we must not let our minds lose pace and forget it is all derivative compared to Scripture's deep truths. The books of the New Testament refer to several Mysteries, but far from being commercialized for soft-brained, obscurist cabals, they're revealed for all who have ears to hear.

The one many have the biggest problem with today is that of the Mystery of marriage. In the Creation account, "God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Paul, in Ephesians chapter five, comments on the relationship between man and woman in becoming one flesh. How amazing that the two can so complete each other and reflect complementary contrasts in the mathematical absurdity of two becoming one. Yet there is it before us every day. Paul takes it one step further and says that this marriage relationship parallels the divine idea of Christ and His Church, where we are rejoined with our first love, now and forevermore. In That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis' fictional account of occultic personae and ideas taking over a university campus, his protagonist expresses, "What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it." Insisting that the Church is one big cover-up for the sacred feminine doesn't solve anything. The gender war still continues and those who advocate goddess religions, spontaneous generation, or in vitro fertilization today really lose out in the end. The sacred feminine is nothing but an unfertilized womb, a barren Eliotian Waste Land without the horned god.

A better school of Wicca, in my opinion, worships the fecundity of both the god and the goddess. And once they understand that good and evil is not divided among gender lines, but rather through spiritual realities that battle over their own souls, they will see that denigrating man does no good and there is no reason why his role cannot be restored to its former glory in Patriarch's religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For Scripture teaches an uncompromising view on marriage and headship, where thanks to the cross the Church can rest secured and valued in a man's servant-like love and the glory of Christ is fully respected and honored in His loyal bride.

If men and women are reconciled to each other, the Mystery of the Gospel, spoken of in Ephesians 3 and Colossians 1, concerns the reconciliation of ethnic races. There Paul elucidates how the world peoples, splintered and disparate since the Fall, can be healed and made whole through the cross of Christ into "fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise." The age-old enmity between Jews and Gentiles has been resolved. Lasting peace in the Middle East is possible and available, but only through Him who tore down the middle wall of separation. Indeed, so far as salvation is concerned, God is no respecter of persons, be they Jew or Greek, male or female, rich or poor, slave or free.

But these are side effects and symptoms. The vehicle God uses for His mission is the local Church, and that mission is the Church's essential duty, the same concise message Jesus preached: the Kingdom of God. The visible reign of God on earth arrived with the Son. Many Jewish people honestly wonder that Jesus did not abolish poverty, war, and disease if He were really Messiah. John the Baptist was operating under the same Old Testament paradigm and didn't yet understand that when Christ came to "baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" that there would be millennia between the two. It is why Jesus quoted only half of Isaiah's verse in the Temple that He had come to "proclaim the favorable year of our Lord." As all his audience would have known, the thought goes on to say, "And the day of vengeance of our God." The Mystery of Kingdom in Mark 4 and Matthew 13 describes a secretive, leavening element among a hazardous world. It is not until the end of the age that the wheat and tares, goat and sheep, righteous and wicked are divided. The Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 most fully expresses that the Coming of the Messiah is a two-stage process. The analogy often given is that of the Incarnation being when God established a D-Day beachhead on earth, enemy-occupied territory, making victory inevitable on the cross. The Second Coming then is victory over sin and death realized as it was on V-E Day. There was a huge amount of bloodshed between Normandy and Berlin, but for the Allied high command it was only a matter of time until victory over the Nazi war machine.

So now history is unraveled and understood as a timetable for the story of God's glory. This two-fold Coming, once in meekness and mercy and then again in justice and glory, makes sense of the world around us and the hope that awaits us as we are allowed this window with the Holy Spirit to effect community transformation. The city of Las Vegas or Lancaster is in all its depravity, still able to repent and come to a knowledge of the truth during this present age. Soon is coming the end of this third age, when the redemptive history of Middle-earth, from Adam to Old Covenant Israel to New Covenant Jewish/Gentile Church, expands to its final conclusion.

In the Godhead lies another Mystery far subtler and more drastic than any neo-pagan mythmaker could weave or some "rationalist" Deist might draft. The doctrine of the Trinity remains one of the most stubbornly ineffable stumbling blocks for those who wish to box in and reduce God to human comprehension. He is simultaneously three persons and still just one being or essence. Human analogies all fall short. God is neither three gods, nor one God in three different manifestations or expressions. Each member of the Godhead is "very God of very God" as the old confession phrases the doctrine in Scripture (Rom 1:7; Heb 1:8; John 1:1,18; Acts 5:3,4) and yet the Father, Son, and Spirit also have functions and roles respective to each other. In the Genesis account God declares "let us make man in our image." Even in the great monotheistic credo, the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, this is pronounced: "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one." The word for "Lord" there is "Elohim," which is, plural. The same plurality can be seen in the original language of other passages like Genesis 11:7-8, Ecclesiastes 12:1, and Isaiah 6:8. Even in the Koran, a book with insight into the Old and New Testaments though lacking divine revelation and inspiration, Allah speaks in a plural sense. The whole Godhead conspires together in activities like Creation (John 1:3, Col 1:16; Gen 1:2), the Great Commission (Matt 28:19), and even common salutations (2 Cor 13:14). There is no cover-up going on to mask a tribe of primitive polytheists gradually evolving into monotheists. If so, the Israelites are terrible at keeping secrets.

More down to earth, we have the Mystery of Incarnation whereby Jesus, the uncreated and eternal Son of God, divested Himself of His divine office and took on the frailty of human flesh. In His person, He is not some half-and-half demigod distillation, but both fully human and fully divine. In becoming human, He did not cease to become God: "For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness of deity to dwell in Him" (Col 1:19). Sometimes human analogies can actually help here. If we ask how one thing can be an amalgam of two different substances (worlds apart even!), remember that quantum physics has witnessed that light is both a wave and particle phenomenon. Or in literature, we wonder at how the Chorus in Greek drama is both a group of actors on the stage and meta-fiction commentators. Only in this way could He enter this world without human parentage and original sin and yet satisfy the laws of God as no other fallible human could. It is unfathomable to consider what is meant by such an act. The Eleusinian mystery cult can't compare with the historical concreteness of the Fisher-King's sacrifice and resurrection (John 12:24).

Yet another Mystery is paralleled for us in the way Scripture was written with the distinct personalities and nuances of men, and yet given to them as they were inspired (literally driven like a dirigible upon the waves) by the Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). You see, His will supercedes the events of the world and our own petty wills even as we are also moral agents able to effect change in the world and decide events. In a Platonic sense, one is the shadow of what is happening and the others in the substance of what is going on behind the scenes. Christians can be spoken of as working alongside of God, but so also demons. As Luther put it, the devil is "God's devil" and "he drags around his chains wherever he goes." So in one thought in Philippians 2, Paul can admonish a Christian to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" and finish it with "for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure." In his own life he would say, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God in me" (1 Cor 15:10). Of Christ it can be said: "This man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death" (Acts 2:23; 4:27-28). Of salvation Peter claims, "We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God," while Christ answers, "Did I Myself not chose you?" (John 6:69-70; 15:16).

I could go on all day, of course, and talk of the Mystery of the resurrection and how we shall all be changed (1 Cor 15:51), or how God can contain perfect justice and mercy within Himself and not let them be contrary to each other, or any number of other paradoxes that express the truths of God's coming to earth, but they are all there for you to discover in His Word and in prayer. But consider the depths of such seemingly simple encounters: in referencing how to pray to God, Jesus talks about "our Father who is in secret" then goes on later to say, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." Concerning how to read and understand the spiritual truths in the Bible, Jesus said, "unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3; see 14:17; 1 Cor 2:14), and Paul later comments, "Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood . . . For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God." Oh brethren, do not let the sophistries of finite man distract from what marvels Peter proclaims — "things into which angels long to look."

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