A Launchable Idea:

Thy manifold mercies.

(Nehemiah 9:19)

Rachel thanked me for that last blog about God’s spaciousness; so, I’ll keep working on it. The idea of God’s spaciousness came from my reading of that impossible book The Beauty of the Infinite by D.B. Hart. It had to do with the Trinity and the eternal spaciousness of the Godhead.

A non-Trinitarian god would lack complexity, wonder and spaciousness—would be boring of himself. But our spacious triune God has all sorts of eternal wonders dancing around within Himself—the dance of the Father, Son and Spirit. There’s infinite space within the Godhead for love and joy between the Three in One. That’s why the Bible says, “God is love”—of and within Himself.

It’s not as if I got it, but it got me; and launches me to places the author may not have had in mind. Like when this eternally spacious God creates the heavens and the earth, you might expect something of his vast spaciousness to shine through. As Psalm 104 goes:

How manifold are your works, O Lord!

      In wisdom you have made them all;

      the earth is full of your creatures.

There’s nothing singular or oppressive about creation. It’s vast and spacious, like God, with all sorts of space for all kinds of wild creatures. Even “leviathan who rollicks in the sea” (vs 26).

The first thing we notice about the universes is its unimaginable spaciousness accommodating stars and massive galaxies along with all sorts of strange stuff like pulsars and boomeranging nebula and black holes. Same is so of the micro universe of an atom. I’m told that if we were to drop in on an atom we would be baffled by its vast spaciousness. It’s 99% space—just like the big universe. How can matter be so specious? Maybe it’s because its Creator is so spacious.

We too bare this image of our Creator. He gives us space. Authentic relationships allows the other space—sacred space given by our Creator. To violate that space through violence or tyranny or cunning is a sin against our Creator. It’s God who gives us space to see and honor the beauty of the other; and, of all creation.

That’s my one big idea from The Beauty of the Infinite. That’s all we can ask of any great thinker like Augustine or Lewis or Bonhoeffer—just one or two launchable ideas is more than enough.

Dense Books:

Bring my books.

(Second Timothy 4:13)

I’ve been deeply bogged down with D.B. Hart, particularly his book The Beauty of the Infinite. I’m supposed to know it for a Directed Studies class I’m trying to teach. Here’s an example from a note I sent to a student:

Write what you know—“know” in a biblical sense as something you experience. For example, Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite took me to places I did not know. Much I still don’t know and will never know, and I’m not convinced Hart actually knows. But there was something in The Beauty of the Infinite that I didn’t know and now know. Something in me that wasn’t in me before. It’s Hart’s idea of “spaciousness”. That there is infinite space within the Godhead. So much space that God the Son can die on a Cross all the while, God remains God. Something of our spacious triune God can be seen in us—the image of God. Beauty requires distance and space. As our national hymn goes, “O beautiful for spacious skies.” Our infinitely spacious God creates a spacious universe.

The bogged down part comes from Hart’s relentless metaphysical density. Physics is like E = mc². Metaphysics is, to put it in Einstein’s words, “the mystery of why math works” to describe the physics of the universe. How, or why, did the Big Bang explode into mathematical coherence—what the Greeks called, the logos? Philosophers (metaphysicians) wonder about such things and try to make sense of such things.

Singing Hymns together is how we best do our metaphysics. Take, for instance, how Hart helped me better understand how God could die on the Cross for us (mentioned above) while at the same time still being God. Yet, even better, when the congregation gathers to sing…

Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, should die for me?

’Tis mystery all: the Immortal dies:
Who can explore His strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine.
’Tis mercy all! Let earth adore,
Let angel minds inquire no more.

(And Can it Be, Charles Wesley, 1738)

Like the angels, sometimes we have to let our relentless inquiring rest, and simply sing our hymns of wonder and adoration.

Another thought on Patriotism:

Not even half had been told.

(First Kings10:7)

One last thought before leaving Songs of America. Can we be patriotic even though our nation’s history and its leaders are flawed? Thomas Jefferson comes to mind as the framer of our Declaration that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”; and yet, Jefferson owned slaves. What are we to make of our nation’s blemishes?

The Bible can’t stop boasting about the wonders of the nation David and his son Solomon brought forth. David the warrior who cleared the way for Solomon’s wise rule (1K 4):

God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, and breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than anyone else, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, children of Mahol; his fame spread throughout all the surrounding nations.

He composed three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in the Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish. People came from all the nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon; they came from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.

For a brief moment, Israel stood toe to toe with the great nations of the earth. When the Queen of Sheba saw it with her own eyes it took her breath away and she sighed, “Not even half had been told.”

This was Israel’s Golden Age. And yet, both David and Solomon disappoint. There’s that David and Bathsheba thing and the tragedy that unfolds: “Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!” And, Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines proves too much, not only for God, but for us as well. It’s just as Samuel warned (1 Sam 8): “This is the way of kings…”

We can be patriotic even though our leaders disappoint. As nations go, the U.S.A. isn’t bad—it’s right up there with the best of them. It would be sanctimonious not to be grateful for such a nation. We can be good patriots, while at the same time acknowledging that “here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come (Hb 13:14).

Reflections on Patriotism:

Here we have no Lasting City

(Hebrews 13:14)

Finished Songs of America on the front porch of the Kinser Cabin at Lake Tahoe. All sorts of reflections… like how the Lake was at its most beautiful—filled to the brim; and how God created the world more beautiful than need be. Or, the sad part about how Gary wasn’t here to enjoy it all, and how we miss him. All the while, reading the history of our nation in prose and song. The read caused me to wonder about what it means to be patriotic.

It’s not a simple matter. As our Lord explained to the Roman Governor (Jn 18):

My kingdom is not from this world.

      If my kingdom were from this world,

my followers would be fighting

      to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.

But as it is,

      my kingdom is not from here.

Even though “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phl 3:20); the Apostle Paul boast of his Roman citizenship: “I was born a citizen of Rome” (Ac 22:28). So we live with a dual citizenship. Sometimes they complement each other as when Paul makes use of his Roman citizenship to propagate the Gospel; or, sometimes we find ourselves at odds, as when the Apostles confessed that they “must obey God rather than any human authority” (Ac 5:29). In which case there’s a good chance one might become a martyr.

While, reading Songs of America, I was taken by how the civil rights movement, from Frederick Douglass to MLK managed to honor both kingdoms. Martin Luther King insisted on non-violence because he believed in America. He was a patriot who cherished our founding documents: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Or again, “In Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice …and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Non-violence, King reckoned, would move Americans to be faithful to their founding declaration. All the while, pointing through hymns, prayers and relentless biblical illusions (“I’ve been to the mountain and I’ve seen the promise land”), to that eternal Kingdom.

Watch these two kingdoms dance in the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Written somewhere between Douglas and King, the hymn is now best known as the Negro National Hymn/Anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ENoYXaMmuA