Divine Comedy

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

—from Shakespeare’s As You Like It

I thought of these lines recently in Church. The parson of the day was expounding upon that outrageous promise God makes to his chosen people that everything is working together for their ultimate benefit. The Play, I thought, that drama presented on the stage of creation, is a comedy—a story in which the hero (God’s chosen ones) comes out especially well in the end, and all the tragic situations of the plot (including his own missteps and character flaws) turn out to have contributed to his success.

It strikes me that this is something that makes (or should make) Christians very odd. Since we have read the script and know the outcome, how do we keep ourselves from laughing 24 hours a day like Paul did: “Where, O death, is your sting!?” It may be that we are not laughing because we spend too much time reading the negative reviews. The Modern reviewer ignores the script and calls the play a tragedy, or if he is Postie enough, he sees it only as a War Story played out in the Theater of the Absurd. To such critics, we comedians look like the greatest of fools, but I say the Risen One, our firstborn, the Author and Finisher, justifies my giddiness.

And now, the comedic words of William Cowper:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
and rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
of never-failing skill,
He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
the clouds ye so much dread,
are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
but trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
but sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
and scan his work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
and He will make it plain

A Good Saturday Morning

I spent this morning with two of life’s great pleasures, a great cup of coffee and a really good book. The coffee was Kenyan Kiaguthu Peaberry roasted to the City+ level. Mmmm. The only way to get really good coffee is to roast it yourself, which I’ve been doing for a couple years now. I had roasted some of this Kenyan bean before, but I think I overcooked it. This batch was much better.

The book is called Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin. If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about Michael Polanyi, the 20^th century scientist and philosopher whose work was the subject of my thesis. Newbigin’s book is a great quick reference for the application of Polanyi’s thought to the Christian life, and I highly recommend it. It’s only 105 pages and is written in a very accessible style. I read the whole thing this morning.

If you’re curious about how Christian thought fits (or doesn’t fit, as Newbigin shows) into classical, modern, or post-modern ideas about knowledge, you should read this book. If you’re one of those young evangelicals that is disenchanted with the hyper-rationalistic hyper-individualistic concepts of Christianity, you should read this book. If you want to figure out whether truth is objective or subjective, you should read this book. If you want to know what is really wrong with fundamentalism or with liberalism (and you won’t find it in what they say about each other), you should read this book.

Here’s a quote to give you the flavor: “The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being. The implication of this, of course, is that the gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propogated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.”

A few weeks back, my friend Jon (who also introduced me to home roasted coffee) wrote an interesting piece for his blog about a recent trend among young evangelicals in which many are departing to more liturgical versions of Church, especially various Eastern forms (by the way, I think the Emergent Church is sort of a wimpy American-consumer version of the same trend). It’s all a sort of pre-modern postmodernism. If we all read Polanyi (or Newbigin’s short version of Polanyi), this trend would evaporate.

By the way, I FINISHED my thesis last week, and after a very helpful proofread from my English professor friend Bob, it has now been shipped to the seminary! I wish I had read Newbigin’s book at the beginning of the process. It is chock full of pithy Polanyian language.