Stackhouse’s slim volume doesn’t offer a theodicy per se, and I’m not sure what I would think of the book if I read it again today. But some of the book’s small asides have stuck with me over the last ten years. One is when Stackhouse addresses the unstated assumption that lurks behind all discussions of the problem of evil: that if God could offer a comprehensive, morally sufficient explanation for all the suffering in the world, we would be able to understand it. What that assumption exposes is the hubris that often motivates arguments about the problem of evil–the idea that even with our limited understanding, we can understand the basic ordering of the universe better than God can, so much so that we can demand of him an explanation for his actions.

That makes it sound like Stackhouse thinks it’s ridiculous for us to ask God for an explanation of evil, but he’s careful to avoid saying that. Indeed, one of the things that was most helpful for me when I read the books was its argument that God is not offended by our questions. Nonetheless, I think it’s useful every once in a while to recognize the ridiculousness of our posture when we, as human beings who know how frequently we are befuddled and mistaken, to pose dilemmas to God as if we were his intellectual equal.

In this vein, Stackhouse quotes a passage from philosopher Thomas Morris that has always stayed with me:

[Questioners of God are often] people who don’t have a clue as to what exactly they would do about the most pressing problems of their own city if they were mayor, or concerning the greatest difficulty facing their state if they were governor. They would probably be quite hesitant if asked how precisely they would solve the greatest national crises if they were president, but they have no hesitation whatsoever in venturing to declare how they would solve what may be the single most troubling cosmic religious problem if they were God. (p. 91-92)

That’s not anything like a knockdown argument for problem-of-evil questioners, because most of them aren’t saying they know what they would do to rid the cosmos of evil, but only that they assume God should, could, and would know what to do. Still, there’s a useful point being made here, or at least one that has proved useful to me.

This long-ago passage came back to me in a flash over the weekend. Yesterday I worked all day painting a piece of unfinished pine furniture that I bought last week. I had resolved to “distress” the furniture so that it would look antique. So first, I added four coats of milk paint. Then I added a top coat sealant. Next, I sanded the piece in “high-wear” places to make it look distressed. And finally, I added a rosewood wood stain to make the distressed spots stand out. That’s where things went awry. The rosewood stain turned out to be extremely red, and now the finished product looks almost purple–not at all what I had intended.

I know this is facile, but yesterday night as I was gnashing my teeth about all this, the thought did cross my mind: If I can’t even screw up a dresser right, maybe I should think twice before telling God how to run the universe.

This was not necessarily a bad thing. I credit speech and debate with giving me many valuable experiences as a teenager (including lots of cross-country travel) and with laying the groundwork for subsequent academic opportunities. But leaving debate was also, for me, an important step into a more mature adulthood. During my first year in college, I distinctly remember coming to this realization: On every Saturday afternoon, while I was studying for an exam or hanging out with friends, there were thousands of teenagers across the country competing at speech and debate tournaments, their lives consumed by speech and debate. Those tournaments, a year before, had also defined my life in countless ways. But now, from the outside looking in, their significance suddenly paled.

While the point seems obvious in retrospect, it struck me at the time as a revelation. All the awards I had so coveted in the debate world no longer exercised my thoughts and dreams. I now realized that those who had been “celebrities” in the debate world–the most legendary coaches, the most intimidating competitors–were unknown to “the rest of the world,” of which I was now a contented citizen. Every Saturday, in non-descript hotels around the country, the debate world lived on–an entire constellation of stars, a well-defined hierarchy of achievement, a dynamic and self-contained universe. But it went on without me, and the perspective I had gained from without allowed me to see that debate was not the world, but a world among worlds.

I think it was helpful that I came to this realization when I did, because it has also helped me see my professional life in proper perspective. In many ways, the academic universe is much like the debate world: it has its own baubles of fame and commendation, its own celebrities, its own conferences in hotels. At a debate tournament it was normal to scan name badges, normal to stare in awe and converse in hushed tones about certain teenaged champions. And at an academic conference, it is normal to do the same when in the presence of august scholars–even though those scholars would be no more recognizable or admirable to a person outside academia than a champion debater outside the bounds of Debatedom. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to denigrate the norms and protocols of either Debatedom or academia. I only mean to notice an important truth: that a profession, no less than an adolescent extracurricular activity, is not the world, but a world among worlds.

As a Christian, however, I make a startling claim about the church–that it is not just a world among worlds, but the community, the universe of discourse that finally matters. And I am supposed to proclaim this despite the superficial similarities that the “church” world has with academia and high-school forensics. Like those other self-contained universes, the church has its distinctive values, its particular histories, its own defining stories, its roll of saints and notables who are scarcely noticed by the rest of the world. Yet unlike any other particular community, the church claims to be the bearer of universal truths, a witness to the destiny of the world as a whole.

This is a challenging claim, to say the least. It is always possible for the skeptic in me to whisper that the church world, despite its totalizing claims, is really as contingent and particular as academia, which makes totalizing claims of its own on its members. I can see how it would be even easier for the outsider, looking in, to point this out. Slate columnist David Plotz, who has been Blogging the Bible, recently made this troubling observation while reading through the Levitical regulations on slavery:

Every so often … the Bible nods toward a universal brotherhood of men. These are the kumbaya verses that are quoted by modern judges and heralded by modern civil rights activists. But they are aberrations. Most of the time, the Bible conceives of a tribal world, a world of a Chosen Us, and a nearly sub-human Them–an Us who can never be slaves, but a Them that can be exploited ruthlessly, a Them that is property, a Them whose first-born can be smitten.

Much as I’d like to deny it, there is a sense in which this is true. The Bible does conceive, at least in the beginning, of a “tribal world,” and even though Christians believe that, in Christ, the walls of partition between worlds have been torn down, universal brotherhood came through a series of inclusions, rather than all at once. The gospel was preached, as even Jesus said, to the Jew first and then to the Greeks, the Us and then the Them. The gospel writers are not ashamed of this in the least: indeed, the point courses throughout the New Testament’s theology. The incarnation itself declares God’s decision to work through a particular lineage, in particular places, with particular means, in order to accomplish his a-particular, universal ends.

Today I started reading through an anthology of selections from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Early on, Barth confronts the particularity of Christian revelation, and he admits that to the world it seems like “naivety.” For the Christian to believe that Israel, and then the church, were The Elect, seems as immature, from the world’s perspective, as the high-school debater’s obsession with his own private universe of meaning. Yet the church proclaims that “the King of Israel,” in all His particularity, is simultaneously “the God who rules all things.” And “to apprehend and affirm [that] idea we have to think of definite periods in human history” as uniquely important to all humanity.

We have to think of definite places–the land of Canaan, Egypt, the wilderness of Sinai, Canaan again, the land on the two sides of Jordan, Jerusalem, Samaria, the towns and villages of Judaea and Galilee, the various places beyond in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, and finally Rome. We have to think of definite events and series of events which according to the witness of the Old and New Testaments actually took place at this periods and in these places, relating them always to the spoken and actualised ‘I am’ (Selection, p. 33; CD, III, 3, p. 177f).

As Barth concludes, “in the biblical witness the divine world-governance is related to the King of Israel. From a philosophical standpoint the naivety with which it does this is highly objectionable.” That’s an understatement. This same naivety is also objectionable from a psychological standpoint, since, as I’ve explained, it seems like immaturity to think that one small world is really the world. And it seems objectionable from a sociopolitical standpoint, since from the perspective of some, it is precisely the exuberant attachment to the very concrete places and events that Barth enumerates which fuels the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Yet Barth also argues that “it is in this naivety that its real strength lies,” because the biblical witness never has to step outside of its self-enclosed world to make the case for its own legitimacy or for the existence of God. It proceeds from the particular to the universal, instead of from the universal to the particular. Still, the tension between the two is hard to reconcile, and it can only be embraced with faith.

This post makes it sound like my experiences of debate and academia–experiences which make me self-deprecating about the totalizing claims of both “worlds”–stand as an obstacle to my fully accepting the biblical witness. But maybe I should turn this around, just as Barth does. Maybe my experiences of these other small “worlds,” which seem(ed) so much like the only worlds that matter(ed), were less like outright falsehoods than like approximations of the truth–the truth that there is a world that is not just one among many, but the world. If it is easy to understand how one person could be king of a country, it is possible to understand one country’s God as the king of the entire world. If it is possible to understand how one small community could overwhelming claims on one’s identity and activity, then it is conceivable that one community, one world, could in fact be the truly significant One.

Still, the particularity of the Bible–its contradictory message of parochial universalism–is sometimes a stumbling block for me, for many of the same reasons it is to Plotz. Parochialism is not smiled upon in our late-modern or post-modern world; it strikes us, as my former life in debate now strikes me, as adolescent and vicious, the opposite of a mature and cosmopolitan worldview.

The Bible does not flinch at this, however. It says that to enter the kingdom–or even to entertain the idea that one kingdom is the kingdom–we must become like children. Perhaps I must become more like my teenage self again, a person willing to give unstintingly to one world and one cause. Perhaps I must, to paraphrase Barth, view the “naivety” of the biblical witness as its true “strength,” and embrace that naivety in my own “thinking and utterance.” If this is true, though, I must surely start with this prayer: “Lord, increase my faith!”

“three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.”

Of course, the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” doesn’t appear in Holy Scripture. But it’s only one of myriad cliches that have migrated into the biblical consciousness of Christians anyway.

Another such phrase is the supposed injunction to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Like Ben Franklin’s dictum, it’s a statement that doesn’t appear in the Bible. (Though it does appear in the works of the Bard, who quipped in Measure for Measure, “Condemn the fault and not the actor of it.”) But also like Ben Franklin’s dictum, the Bible would be a lot easier to live with if it did contain such a pleasing qualification. For both of these cliches artfully dodge some of the most uncomfortable and most central demands of Scripture. As McKibben notes, “God helps those who help themselves” takes the edge off of the radical command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Likewise, “hate the sin but love the sinner” dulls the force fo the even more radical command to “love your enemy.”

It’s telling that Jesus never qualified his commands to love in this way. He did not say “love your neighbor, if he helps himself.” And easy as it would have been, he did not follow his command to “love your enemies” with a fine distinction about which parts of an enemy his disciples were still allowed to hate. It’s striking, in fact, that Jesus never even describes his attitude towards the sins of sinners with the word “hate.” More often, he describes sin as a sickness that needs healing, and sinners as the sick who need a physician–and those metaphors make it much easier to see how one can love a sinner. At the very least, Jesus never used the word “hate” and “sinner” in the same sentence, never allowed those words to get as close to each other as the common cliche does.

To be sure, other parts of the Bible (particularly in the Old Testament) talk about the things that God “hates.” (Although beware about citing these passages as proof texts for the cliche, since there are also verses in the Old Testament that seem to collapse the distinction between sin and sinner.) And there are plenty of passages that urge Christians to “abhor evil” and “cling to what is good” and the like. But in almost every case these passages that come closest to an instruction to “hate the sin” direct our attention to the evil within ourselves. There is no passage that conjoins hating evil and loving the evildoer the way the cliche does, and perhaps there’s a reason. We are usually oh-so-adept at making the distinction between our evils and our selves, but when it comes to regarding the sins of others, we are hardly ever so discriminating.

Although, as I’ve said, Jesus’s teachings offer precious little in the way of support for “hating the sin” and “loving the sinner,” there is a way in which those phrases do describe what God does and who God is. He hates sin. He loves sinners. But a fuller and more accurate description of God is that he hates sin because he loves sinners, and sin both destroys sinners and stands as an obstacle to a reconciled relationship between God and his beloved. If God hates sin, it is because sin is an expression of hatred directed at him–or at least a choice to love something other than God. God hates that his beloved creatures hate him, not because he is an offended and capricious God, but because he craves relationship with sinners so much. For human beings, I suspect that “hating the sin and loving the sinner” serves as an excuse for supping sinners with a long spoon — for their own good, as it were. But for God, hating the sin is only always a sign of his loving the sinner. To hate the sin and to love the sinner are not two distinct attitudes vying with one another for the control of his affections, but two different ways of saying the same thing.

Perhaps the fundamental error in the cliche “hate the sin and love the sinner” is the way it reifies sin as though it were something that could be excised from a person and seen alongside him or her, so that we could regard one “thing” differently than the other. But sin is fundamentally a breach of relationship, as Lee has recently suggested. It is a relational problem that God solves by loving even those who are his enemies, a solution enjoined on us as well in our dealings with our enemies. And perhaps nothing underlines that “sin” is a broken relationship more than this fact: when the word “hates” appears in the New Testament (see here), it is used, almost without exception, to describe the world’s attitude toward God, not God’s attitude toward the world. It is not God’s hatred that needs to be defused in order for relationship with the sinner to be restored; it is ours.

So when we, as children of God, say we hate the sin but love the sinner, there is only one justifiable reason for such a statement: that we long passionately for the loving reconciliation of sinners, first with God and also with ourselves and others. Unless that longing for love is evident in our avowals of “hatred” for sin, I suspect there are darker motives for such avowals — motives that, far from drawing the sinner closer to ourselves and focusing our ire on the sin within ourselves, serve as excuses for avoiding reconciliation with others.

With regards to universalism, I find myself very close to Kevin Corcoran’s position in one of the comment threads: “I hope it’s true, and even pray that it’s true. But I can’t say I believe it’s true.” De Rose gives a careful endorsement of that same position.

There are a variety of reasons why–despite my hoping and praying (and even believing that Scripture provides reason for hope) that universalism is true–I find it hard to banish all doubts about it. One of them that has troubled me lately has to do with the problem of evil. The only theodicy (and it’s not really a theodicy proper) that makes sense to me is to believe that evil has no ultimate purpose, that it represents a willful defiance of God’s will by created agents, and that God will ultimately act to bring suffering, evil, and death to an end. (If you want an impassioned and beautiful articulation of this approach to the problem of evil, read David Bentley Hart’s recent The Doors of the Sea.) Scripture speaks of this ultimate eschatological hope with a variety of images that give me incredible consolation — like the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, the promise of the parousia, and the resurrection of the dead.

But if evil serves no ultimate purpose, and if God will ultimately act to bring an end to evil, then why is God delaying? What’s taking so long? I don’t mean to scoff by asking that: I think I can distinguish my motivation for asking where God is from the motives of the “scoffers” that Peter warns about in 2 Peter 3:

First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!’

These scoffers seem to be taking God’s delay as an excuse for “indulging their own lusts.” But I think there’s a way of sincerely asking God, “Where is the promise of your coming?” And it’s particularly understandable if the victim of intolerable suffering and evil asks that question.

I suppose, though, that I’ve always understood Peter’s answer to the “scoffers” to be an answer to anyone with questions about why God delays, no matter the motives behind their questions. Peter replies:

They [the scoffers] deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgement and destruction of the godless.

The reason for God’s delay, in other words, is God’s patience (a bone that Jason has also been chewing on recently). As Peter goes on to say,

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

Now, here’s where my problems with universalism arise. On the one hand, nothing about Peter’s passages are what De Rose calls “killer” verses for attacking universalism. On the contrary, God’s fervent desire that all (De Rose’s favorite word) will come to repentance and his equally fervent desire that none will perish seem to speak in favor of universalism. And the reference to the “destruction of the godless,” like so many similar passages in the New Testament, is not knockdown proof that there will be no future chances for repentance even after death. Consider, for instance, that in the context Peter is talking about the Genesis Flood, which is an example of a case where God destroyed the godless and yet gave humanity a second chance. (Incidentally, the Flood myth might be a useful story for the universalist. To any anti-universalist who thinks that God’s destruction of the earth must represent the “final chance” for humanity, the universalist could offer the Flood as a counterexample.)

Still, these passages do (to me) seem to put some pressure on a certain kind of universalism. On their face, they do imply that God is waiting for something to happen — for us to do something, namely, come to repentance — before making good on his promise to come. And they also imply that the reason God is waiting is because he does not want any to perish. Now, if the universalist is right, then God will ultimately see to it that no one will perish. But then why does he delay? If there is a way to end suffering and evil now and for all to come to repentance, then come, Lord Jesus!

As I’ve already said, my concern about God’s delay is not an argument against universalism, but it is a reason why my belief in univeralism wavers. I’m aware there are ways to explain God’s delay without rejecting universalism. Perhaps God’s delay is a point in favor of what De Rose calls “fervent exclusivism” — the position that in order to be saved, one must somehow explicitly and freely accept Christ. In fact, in his explanation of how fervent exclusivism and universalism might cohere, De Rose emphasizes that God can have as much time as he needs to bring people around to a freely chosen repentance. But in the meantime, while God’s taking his time, evil persists in the face of God’s promise that its days are numbered. And if there’s any chance that God might ultimately have to override the freedom of some in order to accomplish universal salvation, then it’s hard to swallow that the freely chosen acceptance of Christ is so important that it justifies the continued existence of a world in which genocides, tsunamis, and child abuse are perennial lacerations.

The anti-univeralist has an interpretation of these passages from Peter that has, in some respects, a better answer to this problem of evil. God is waiting because the evil of eternal torment for millions is even worse than the evils that we presently endure. I’m not saying I believe that account of God’s delay, because it doesn’t help my already fragile theodicies at all to believe that God is ultimately going to consign people I love to hell. But if I deal with that problem by embracing universalism, then I feel left with the problem of God’s delay.

At the very least, I feel I have to amend Kevin Corcoran’s position to this: “I hope universalism is true, and even pray that it’s true. But I can’t say I believe it’s true. And I hope that God will act to abolish evil very soon, and pray with eager expectation that the time is at hand. But I can’t say I believe that it is.”

What is a “document,” and how does it testify to truth? If you find a basement full of Top Secret documents, does that make them instantly reliable?

One could supplement that rhetorical question with a thought experiment. If historians in the year 4006 were to discover a fragmentary issue of the National Enquirer hidden in a cave, would they be justified in concluding that a vast conspiracy in 2006 had somehow suppressed a peripheral sect of people who believed in three-headed babies and alien abductions? Less tendentiously, suppose our future historians were to discover a disintegrating copy of The Celestine Prophecy. Would that discovery make the text “instantly reliable” as a report of mainstream late-twentieth-century spiritual beliefs?

If the documents themselves were all our historians had, then such conclusions about their popularity or their reliability would be wildly speculative. Only with a larger documentary record–a New York Times bestseller list from 1995, for example, or parodic documents spoofing the Enquirer–could historians even begin to venture conclusions about the context surrounding these texts, and even then their suggestions would have to be tentative in the absence of a larger documentary record.

Yet what most of the media coverage about the Gnostic documents underlying the Da Vinci Code’s fictional narrative obscure is that the conclusions some scholars are drawing from these documents are not too different from the kinds of hypothetical conclusions I’ve been attributing to historians in 4006. On the basis of isolated documents–which are extremely fragmentary at that–people are detailing extremely determined and robust theories about first-century spiritual practice and belief. While these theories are offered in the somber guise of historical accuracy, they are in fact incredibly unfair to the experience of people in the past. You’d probably roll in your grave if some journalists in 4006 started claiming that the National Enquirer gives a reliable picture of popular cultural myths in 2006. So you can imagine how first-century grave dwellers feel.

My hypothetical scenarios may seem a little tendentious. I’m not suggesting that the Gnostics are roughly similar to readers of the National Enquirer. But I think these thought experiments place a needed focus on the question AKMA is raising: what is a “document” and what can a “document,” all by its lonesome, tell us about a historical movement or the Zeitgeist of a period? Perhaps one reason people are tempted to say that a single document from the first or second century can tell us a great deal is out of a belief that documents from the period are so scarce. Since we have fewer documents from the first century than we do from, say, the nineteenth century, we are tempted to place a greater degree of evidentiary value on the few documents we have. But the thought experiments I’ve mentioned help show why that logic is flawed. “Documents” are not like gems: their scarcity does not appreciably or reliably raise their value.

(I’ve also noted, in an earlier post, another of the potential reasons why The Da Vinci Code is so alluring: it promises a religion based on gnosis that conveniently avoids the Christian imperative to love.)

“We lose our souls, and hazard our eternal salvation, if we will not accept the public responsibility which we assume when we become disciples of Jesus. It is more than doubtful whether we are doing this if our existence does not force those around us to take notice — with all the painful consequences this may involve for us. But they will not take notice, nor will they be disturbed or annoyed by our existence, if we do not come out into the open as who we are, doing what they do not do; if in our attitude to the given factors and orders and historical forces which they regard as absolute there is no difference between us and them, but only uniformity and conformity.”

— Karl Barth, from The Call to Discipleship

That quote pairs well with another goad I have recently read: the story of Victorinus, as told by St. Augustine.

“Instead of complaining that God has kept himself hidden, you will give him thanks that he has made himself so visible. And you will give him further thanks that he has not revealed himself to the wise people full of pride, unworthy of knowing so holy a God.”

— Blaise Pascal

One of the hardest things that Jesus ever says, if we are to judge by the reaction of his disciples, is found in Matthew 19:23: “it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” To my shame, however, that saying never strikes me particularly hard, mostly because I am able to deflect it. It’s easy to tell myself that I don’t qualify as a rich person, even though by global and historical standards I am among the top 1.43 percent of the richest people in the world. And aside from being easy to deflect, verses like Matthew 19:23 also tickle my preexisting political opinions: it’s easy to use the passage as a flail against American Christians who proclaim a gospel of prosperity and laissez-faire theology. It’s easier, in other words, to point out the blindspots in other people’s range of vision than it is to accept that their blindspots might be my own, which reminds of another of the hardest things that Jesus says.

I do have a plank in my own eye, though, that’s not so easy to dissolve. Jesus warns that it will be hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he also warned (implicitly) that it would be hard for adults. And one reason is that adults know too much — or think they do. For that reason, Paul also warns in some of his earliest recorded writing that it will be hard for the wise or the learned to heed the calling of God:

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe … Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. (1 Corinthians 1:20-26, NKJV)

It will be hard, in other words, for the wise person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It will be hard, James also says, for a teacher to withstand the judgment of God. And that’s a harder camel to swallow than the line about the rich man, for me at least. Although by objective standards I am a rich person, I don’t define myself subjectively by my bank account. That is, I don’t see myself as a person whose aspirations and ambitions are defined by the pursuit of wealth. (I’m an academic, after all, and you don’t get into this business for the money.) To a significant degree, however, I do define myself by the pursuit of wisdom. That’s what I’m inclined to see as my vocation, as “who I am.” And for that reason, wisdom and learning and schooling can be as dangerous to me as worldly possessions, which is also what (in a sense) they are.

I used to think that what Paul meant in this passage to the Corinthians is that it’s hard for the wise to be called simply because their superior minds prevent them from believing. That is, it’s hard for intellectuals to come to faith because of the intellectual problems that faith poses. But I’m seeing more and more that this is also a deflection, a way of making my academic training or my intelligence or my learning a cross that I have to bear. And nothing stinks to high heaven so much as a non-martyr with a martyr complex. Perhaps Paul isn’t saying, though, that the wise have to crucify their intellects because reason poses a unique challenge to faith. The wise must crucify themselves for the same reason that all of us must, which is why the passage in 1 Corinthians also lists a series of other binaries alongside the prominent one of wisdom and foolishness. The cross is not just a goad to the wise, but also to “the mighty,” “the noble,” and, most comprehensively, to “the things that are” (vv. 26-28).

The reality is that wisdom poses roughly the same obstacles to the kingdom of heaven as wealth. In the first place, wisdom — like wealth — easily becomes a baneful source of pride. Pride, ultimately, is what makes the eye of the needle so narrow for the rich and learned alike. And wisdom — like wealth — encourages attachment to the things of this world. My ambitions may not be defined by stock portfolios, but I do have career ambitions that ground me in this world, and more particularly in the world of academia. If asked to give up those ambitions, I become as sorrowful as the rich young ruler who was told by Jesus to give his possessions to the poor. So the wisdom that is according to the world poses the same challenge to the would-be disciple as wealth: it encourages a love for the things in the world. It sets the same snare that everything in the world does: the snare of confusing the lust of the eyes and the pride of life with the will of God that abides forever.

“Then who can be saved?” “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

Yet here’s the irony: the incredible amount of popular interest in Gnosticism seems to drink from the same cup that the Gnostics themselves emptied to the dregs. The allure of the Da Vinci Code is the allure of the conspiracy, the allure of secret knowledge, the allure of the mystery cult. If Christians feel compelled to protest the movie, they could best do so not by picketing or going on hunger strikes, but simply by repeating the injunction of St. John: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

“I was told that it was right and proper for me as a boy to pay attention to my teachers, so that I should do well at my study of grammar and get on in the world. This was the way to gain the respect of others and win for myself what passes for wealth in this world. So I was sent to school to learn to read. I was too small to understand what purpose it might serve and yet, if I was idle at my studies, I was beaten for it, because beating was favoured by tradition. …

“But we enjoyed playing games and were punished for them by men who played games themselves. However, grown-up games are known as ‘business’, and even though boys’ games are much the same, they are punished for them by their elders. No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserved pity, for I cannot believe that a good judge would approve of the beatings I received as a boy on the ground that my games delayed my progress in studying subjects which would enable me to play a less creditable game later in life. Was the master who beat me himself very different from me? If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy, much more so than I was when a playmate beat me at a game of ball.”

— Saint Augustine, Confessions, I.ix, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin

For another translation, see the CCEL.

Perhaps because of its compact size, Simply Christian also highlights Wright’s penchant for metaphors. I like a metaphor as much as the next reader, and in fact, I have a weakness for them in my own writing as well. But nothing tends to annoy a writer like seeing his own tics in someone else’s writing. That’s not to say that metaphors are merely tics: they can be very useful communicative tools, particularly when you are trying to introduce an idea to someone for the first time. It could be that Wright was consciously modeling this book on C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (the publishers, at least, beg you to draw that analogy on the cover jacket), a volume that showcased Lewis’s gift for well-chosen literary devices. (Incidentally, Lee has found a free recording of Lewis’s wartime BBC addresses, which contains a few of the don’s choicest metaphors.) But sometimes Wright’s metaphors overwhelm the point he’s trying to make instead of elucidating it. Take, for instance, this paragraph on the Bible from p. 174:

Tragically, the history of Christianity is littered with ways of reading the Bible which have, in effect, muzzled it. The computer I’m writing on right now will do a thousand things, but I use it only for writing and for access to the Internet and email. In the same way, many Christians–whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations–have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it only to sustain the three or four things they already do. They treat it as a form of verbal wallpaper: pleasant enough in the background, but you stop thinking about it once you’ve lived in the house a few weeks. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t exploit more than a small amount of my computer’s capability. But to be a Christian while not letting the Bible do all the things it’s capable of, through you and in you, is like trying to play the piano with your fingers tied together.

So, to summarize: many Christians treat the Bible as though they were sitting in a room with bland wallpaper, while under-utilizing a computer with one hand and trying to play the piano, fingers tied, with the other. To be fair, that’s a particularly striking example of Wright’s tendency to stir a bunch of metaphors together, but metaphors course, even cascade, throughout the book. To be fairer still, I just used several metaphors in one sentence myself. And fairest of all, one could point out, in Wright’s defense, that talking with metaphors is a time-honored tradition in Christian writing that stretches back to the gospels themselves. In John 10, for example, Jesus goes from being a sheep-gate to a shepherd, all in the course of a dozen verses, and that’s not to mention the fact that he eventually becomes a lamb.

Maybe there’s a deeper reason, then, why Wright’s over-use of metaphors was bugging me. Maybe it’s because it’s not clear to me how metaphors should work in religious language. On the one hand, there is a standard theological position that all of our talk about God is metaphorical: when trying to talk about the transcendent God, language and experience fail us, so we turn to similes and approximations to describe him (realizing at the same time that even to call him “him” is to deploy a metaphor). Wright himself addresses the problem of talking about the supernatural in the introduction to The Resurrection of the Son of God, where he uses, appropriately, another metaphor (”imagine someone trying to shoot arrows at the sun …”) to get at the subject.

I have a deep sympathy with this idea that all religious language is metaphorical. But on the other hand, by employing metaphors too frequently, one runs the risk of undermining the reason for using them in the first place. If the point of using metaphors is to recognize God’s utter transcendence, the risk of using metaphors is that they relate God to our own categories, idioms, and experiences. We resort to metaphors because we do not wish to anthropomorphize God, but our resort to metaphors seems to do exactly what we intend to avoid. There is the merest of lines between a metaphor that reverences God’s otherness and a metaphor that asserts his likeness to temporal things. But perhaps the mystery of an incarnational God lies precisely in the thinness of that line.