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June 11, 2003
Hello everyone,
You know, there is an observation I have long since noted about human behavior and it is revealed most clearly in places such as smoky barrooms and “seedy” hangouts. The observation I am referring to involves the peculiar tendency of human beings to use vulgarity and profanity when dealing with the most intimate and sacred subjects. Now let’s take a brief moment to refresh our memory and define our terms: vulgarity refers to offensive language that often deals with sexuality and profanity involves offensive language that intentionally blasphemes God and spirituality. Why do you suppose it is that people so thoughtlessly spout such sentiments? And have you ever really thought about what it might mean if we were to take these statements at face value? Such use of language does not really make good sense when taken literally, so there must be something deeper that goes on behind the scenes—and indeed there is.
Of all the things that are the most sacred, certainly none of them are more so than God and His Divine institution of marriage and human sexuality. Perhaps the reason people make light of the deepest issues is the same reason that people sometimes laugh at funerals. As A Cultural Guide [to] Singapore reports, “Do not be surprised by a laugh or smile at what may seem inappropriate times. This response may be used to mask feelings of embarrassment, nervousness, or other emotions.” In sum, people sometimes use profanity and vulgarity precisely because dealing with these subjects is uncomfortable. While this is certainly not the only reason, there is a good explanation for this, for neither sex nor God is safe: both are sacred: both touch at the core of our greatest hopes and our greatest fears at once. Simply put, the things which mean the most involve the most risk. Yet, as Rebecca St. James writes on page 121 of her book Wait for Me regarding singing at a memorial service at the request of the fiancée of a soldier who gave his life in Afghanistan, a speaker rose and “said something that I will not soon forget: ‘the courageous do not live forever, but the timid never live at all.’” (One could perhaps take issue with the use of the word “timid,” but the point remains.) Concerning the “safeness” of God and sex, I am reminded of two separate sources, the first entitled The End of Courtship by Leon R. Kass, Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and The College at the University of Chicago:
Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, points to an end that is partly hidden from, and finally at odds with, the self-serving individual: Sexuality as such means perishability and serves replacement. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: Sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. This truth the salmon and the other animals practice blindly; only the human being can understand what it means. According to the story of the Garden of Eden, our humanization is in fact coincident with the recognition of our sexual nakedness and all that it implies: shame at our needy incompleteness, unruly self-division, and finitude; awe before the eternal; hope in the self-transcending possibilities of children and a relationship to the divine. For a human being to treat sex as a desire like hunger—not to mention as sport—is then to live a deception.
Thus how shallow an understanding of sexuality is embodied in our current clamoring for “safe sex.” Sex is by its nature unsafe. All interpersonal relations are necessarily risky and serious ones especially so. And to give oneself to another, body and soul, is hardly playing it safe. Sexuality is at its core profoundly “unsafe,” and it is only thanks to contraception that we are encouraged to forget its inherent “dangers.” These go beyond the hazards of venereal disease, which are always a reminder and a symbol of the high stakes involved, and beyond the risks of pregnancy and the pains and dangers of childbirth to the mother. To repeat, sexuality itself means mortality—equally for both man and woman. Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. “Safe sex” is the self-delusion of shallow souls.
Indeed, sex is not safe, which could explain the natural, inborn fear we experience when we feel powerfully attracted to someone of the opposite sex. That fear is a God-given instinct to protect us from possible danger and harm, not to mention the heartache of losing the one we love most. The games people play these days, made possible in large part by the illusion of liberation brought about with contraception and the resultant sexual revolution, cause them to treat sex very casually. As RBC suggests, sex inside of marriage is like a cozy fireplace, blazing merrily away, offering light and comfort to the entire room. Sex outside of marriage is like heaping those burning logs onto the living room floor, where the same flames can soon blaze destructively out of control (and even if they don’t, they will still leave their mark).
The second reference regarding God comes from none other than C.S. Lewis in the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the Chronicles of Narnia. If you have never read the story, Aslan, a lion, is an allegory in this magical land for Jesus Christ: the lion, as the king of the jungle, is a perfect symbol for the King who is above all kings, not to mention He is referred to in Scripture as the Lion of Judah. As we enter this scene, Peter, Edmund, Lucy, and Susan are sitting around the table talking to Mr. and Mrs. Beaver about how terrible the White Witch is and how when Aslan comes, He will set all things right. Lucy has just asked Mr. Beaver the following question regarding the identity and nature of Aslan:
“Is—is he a man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh!” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Have you ever noticed the vulgarity that does not laugh at sexuality, often laughs at other bodily functions and their by-products: human excrement, semen, urine, the menstrual flow? Why is it that the sewage pipe of the body so often is a source of merriment and derogatory jesting? Why is its waste product an adjective and a noun used to describe many different things? In fact, I can remember one person at work who could talk of nothing but the subject of human waste (or at least it seemed that way to us who had to listen to him every day) and I began to refer to him as the “Professor of Scatology”—we figured he must have earned several Ph.D.s in the subject. (Don’t get the humor? Look up the word scatology.)
But have you ever considered that God made all things good and beautiful in their time? Take the sewage pipe of the body, for instance. What would happen if the body did not come equipped with a way to dispose of the portions of food that we do not need to use as the building blocks for our bodies? What if we had no way to disperse with the methane gases some of the chemical processes in our intestines release? The Creator of the universe, in all of His knowledge and wisdom, knew that in order for this amazing machine that heals itself to function, it would need an exhaust pipe. The same sorts of observations can be gleaned about the menstrual flow—the cleansing property of the female reproductive system that otherwise would result in the transmission of life (there is no greater gift than a newborn child: just ask married couples who would give anything to have one). The same is true with the urinary tract and other things people commonly profane. As the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 22:12–27:
The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as He wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
No, even the unsightly parts of the body are indispensable and we should never demean or devalue that which God has pronounced good. “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day,” (Genesis 1:31). When we demean and devalue His creation, no matter what level we demean and devalue it on, we are ultimately demeaning and devaluing ourselves. As I write in On Earth, As it is in Heaven, concerning cutting other people down to make ourselves look better:
The very reason we do understand the Golden Rule is because we all know what it is to hurt, to feel, and to care and care deeply. We very much know what it feels like to be snubbed or to feel abandoned or excluded. Let us never resort to using these tactics on others to try to make ourselves feel better, for we will never, ever gain what we seek by devaluing ourselves or another. We are important in God’s eyes—all people are infinitely valuable to God. To not respect another human, to not show him or her love, is like slapping God’s face and shows just how ignorant we remain to the King of the universe. Again I say, anytime we demean or devalue another, we demean and devalue ourselves and the God in whose image we have been created.
Indeed, it is because we have been created imago Dei—in the image of God—that we have our ultimate worth and value. But you see, God is not safe. Neither is sex. And there is a parallel between the two in a way that few people understand. The Apostle Paul writes of it in a passage in Ephesians that is often misunderstood. His words are as follows:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it; That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
What does he mean when he says, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh,” followed immediately by this strange clause, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church”? You see, for years and years humanity has looked at spirituality as a path, and, as Kreeft would say in The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality, man has turned the truth of spiritual reality into a vehicle for his own ends—into his prostitute. But we who know Christ came upon a startling discovery, one that Evelyn Underhill implicates in her chapter Mysticism and Magic: we discovered not a spiritual path, but a Person. We discovered not the idea of, “How do I manipulate or prostitute this path to my spiritual gain?” but instead we stumbled into the arms of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we cried, “I love You, Lord Jesus.” And as we began to know and see the ways of our new Lover, our souls began to cry out more and more in gratitude: “How may I serve You more?” We fell at His feet and washed them with our tears and dried them with our hair. We, His holy bride here on earth, opened ourselves up to Him, asking Him to penetrate us, filling us with His glory and presence. In this act of spiritual consummation, we became one flesh: He became our Husband and we became His bride. Our desire is for our Husband; our desire is to please Him.
Do you see the difference in approach? Anyone who enters by any other entrance but the front gate of Jesus Christ Himself is a robber and a thief. He is seeking to rape or violate spirituality and turn it into his prostitute to do his bidding. But this is the antithesis to Christianity. We enter into the Front Gate: the narrow gate that few find. We enter into a union with Jesus Christ, because the Truth is not a path, it is a Person. We fall into His arms, we open ourselves wide and allow Him to penetrate us, to fill us; we become His bride in the greatest of all spiritual mysteries and our desire is to serve Him who is now one with our flesh, who now is inside of us in what theologians call the mystical union of the church. We no longer serve ourselves, but in dying to Him—in serving Him, opening up ourselves and letting Him penetrate us—we find our life again. We find our greatest happiness in saying, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” We cry out in our weakness and our helplessness and if we are honest, we say, “Lord Jesus, I do not yet love you as I should. I am so selfish still. But oh! How I love You, You who have given up Your life for me. Oh, help me love Thee more! Here I am: I surrender myself up to Thee. Take me, ravish me, fill me, complete me, I am yours, sweet Lord Jesus.” And He that is our faithful Husband, lifts our face with gentle fingers up into His own, the unspeakable love in His eyes filling us to the very core, offering us the fulfillment we have always longed for, for in Him we lack nothing. Just as He did not come to be served, but to serve, so too, we, unlike those who try to enter through any other entrance but the Front Gate of Jesus Christ, find our greatest contentment when we finally learn that the spiritual realm is not intended to serve us and conform to our wills but rather that we are to serve Him who forms the gateway between man and God and conform to His perfect will. There is no other way to find that Answer we seek; we either serve God or we serve self.
Indeed, this is “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to His saints,”
For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; And, having made peace through the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven. And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight. (Colossians 1:16–22.)
Doesn’t your heart do a flutter when you hear your Husband described in this way? This is the great mystery of which the Apostle Paul speaks, this is the dying so that we may live, this is paradox we find in life: Love is the greatest paradox of all. It defies logic, it defies reason, out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom, the foolish things of the earth shame the wise, we must give all to get all—and a love as precious as this we must guard carefully, lest we foolishly cast our pearls before swine and find them trampled into the dirt by men who have no such understanding of the mystical union of Christ and His bride, the church. But while I speak of this mystical union here in terms of a metaphoric (and rather graphic) description of the consummation of marriage, I am speaking of a true reality. Christ is literally alive and He is literally the only way to the Father, because Father and Son are not paths, they are entities: they are intelligences: they are Persons. It is only through falling into the arms of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, that we will find our way to the Father.
In Him, we will find that all paradoxes meet: both the living and the dead are joined together in Him; both the visible and the invisible find their unity in Him. By Him all things consist, all things were created for Him, by Him, and through Him. It pleased the Father that in Him all fullness should dwell, whether on earth (where things are visible and living) or in heaven (where things are invisible and those who have died yet live). He joins together the strands of both time and eternity; He holds the keys to death, heaven, and hell. In Him who is found the fullness of Divinity is also found One Who humbled Himself to take on the form of man; in Him that has all life was found the sacrificial Lamb slain for the sins of the world: in Him who was sinless was Him who was made into our sin.
The words of former atheist A.S.A. Jones in her excellent and insightful article Learning to Think Spiritually are rather fitting here. She has a number of different illustrations to demonstrate that most skeptics, in their inflated arrogance, trip over the truth of Christ, the stumbling block to the Jews (who failed to see He was the fulfillment of all the prophecy) and the foolishness of the Gentiles (who were in search of a path—a philosophy—and not a Person). One of these is an illustration of a stereogram—one of those pictures that when you unfocus your eyes and move a certain distance away, you see a three dimensional object. I will not reproduce it here; to see it, go to Learning to Think Spiritually (see Example 2). After showing this stereogram (which conceals a galloping horse), she goes on to write (among other things) in the paragraphs below:
When I read the bible with the mindset in which it was intended to be read, I perceived the objective reality of its god. Just like with this poster, if you only look at it superficially, you won’t see the hidden picture. The visual effect of a stereogram is produced through the careful placement of points comprising one image from two slightly different perspectives. You need two eyes to see the hidden 3-D picture. If you cover one eye, you will lose the image; its picture is a function of depth. The bible is a spiritual stereogram and its effect, the perception of the reality of God, is produced through a careful design of ambiguity and paradox, which allow you to discover truth from different perspectives. You need two aspects of the intellect to see the reality of God in its pages; you need to utilize both the logical and spiritual (or poetic) component of your thinking to see Him. If you use only one in the absence of the other, you will lose the effect. It’s like covering one eye. The truth of the bible, like the poster, is also a function of depth. I think that the reason why a lot of people aren’t seeing its truth today is because we have become a nation of shallow thinkers.
The spiritual, or intellectual effect that is produced in the bible is no less powerful than the visual effect found in the stereogram. When you ‘see’ it, you’ll know it. The hidden picture in both the bible and the stereogram isn’t the product of a child’s random scribbling. Both are a product of intentional design. The bible was written in three different continents over a span of 1500 years and in three different languages, yet it remains consistent in its inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes and ironies. It may have been penned by over forty men, but it is evident to me that it was designed and directed by one author, by one mind. His signature is all through it! To create such a book, with no higher direction to maintain these common threads and produce the effect, would be the equivalent of creating the stereogram by accident. It ain’t gonna’ happen. And that’s why I believe this book is inspired by the God it describes.
Ever the literature major, I was especially heartened to read the second paragraph of this excellent article:
Learning to think spiritually isn’t about accepting the supernatural. I am referring to that part of the human intellect that allows the mind to understand things that are not readily made obvious or explicitly stated. It is the same skill involved in interpreting poetry or in detecting the nuances that are present in higher literature. Most people already have this ability; they just need to learn how to apply it when it comes to the issue of God.
Thus far, we have covered a great deal of ground, even if it hasn’t been the most coherent presentation in the world. However, it hangs together around this one fact: it speaks of Christ, in Whom all things hang together, and as such, it has its own internal unity and consistency. I do hope and pray that you too will begin to see the world more and more through stereoscopic lenses, that you will begin to see the world more and more as “two streams, two strands of space-time reality,” as Schaeffer writes, “one is the seen and the other is the unseen.” As we reach the conclusion of this newsletter, I would like to make further appeal to Schaeffer: specifically the words found on page 52 and spilling over through page 55 in True Spirituality:
With these two lines before us [the seen and the unseen strands of reality], two equal lines of reality, I would like to return again to the conclusion of our previous chapter. When God tells us to live as though we had died, gone to heaven, seen the truth there, and come back to this world, he is not asking us merely to act on some psychological motivation, but on what really is. That is the second line, the second strand, of reality, that of the unseen, in which we personally will share between the moment of death and our return with resurrected bodies to the seen world at the second coming. Thus I am to live now by faith, rooted in the things which have been, such as Christ’s death and resurrection; what is, such as the second stream of reality in the unseen now; and what will be, such as my coming bodily resurrection and return with Christ. . . .
He goes on to write of accepting this with “active passivity.” Christ does the work but we accept it by choice, in the same way that Mary said, “Lo! the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it unto me as Thou sayest,” and actively resigned herself to something she had no active part in bringing about—her surrender to the Lord being conceived in her womb was an act of active passivity. This is the Christian’s response, by faith, to a work he or she can not bring about on his or her own. Schaeffer goes on to speak of “the doctrine of the mystical union of the Church (those living now and those who have died) but I am not thinking of it as a ‘doctrine.’ I am thinking of the reality: that God ties us in at the present time to the reality of those who are already in this other situation.” Picking up from here, Schaeffer writes:
. . . They are the two streams of present reality, both equally promised. The Christian dead are already with Christ now, and Christ really lives in the Christian. Christ lives in me. . . .
Here is true Christian mysticism. Christian mysticism is not the same as non-Christian mysticism, but I would insist it is not a lesser mysticism. Indeed, eventually it is deeper mysticism, for it is not based merely on countentless experience, but on historic, time-space reality—on propositional truth. One is not asked to deny the reason, the intellect, in true Christian mysticism. And there is no loss of personality, no loss of the individual man. In Eastern mysticism—for which the West is searching so madly now that it has lost the sense of history, of content, and the truth of biblical facts—there is always finally a loss of personality. It cannot be otherwise in their framework. You will remember the story of Shiva [from Hinduism], who is one of the manifestations of Everything [Brahman]. He came and loved a mortal woman. Shiva put his arms around this woman in his love, and immediately she disappeared and he became neuter. This is Eastern mysticism. It is grounded in the loss of personality of the individual. Not so Christian mysticism. Christian mysticism is communion with Christ. It is Christ bringing forth fruit through me, the Christian, with no loss of personality and without my being used as a stick or a stone, either.
In many passages in the bible, the relationship of Christians to Jesus Christ is described in terms of the bride and the bridegroom. Who is this “bridegroom,”—my bridegroom? He is the Christ who has died, whose work is finished, who is raised, who is ascended, who is glorified. It is this Christ. It is not simply an idea. It is the Christ who was seen after the resurrection, the Christ who was seen by Stephen, by Paul, the Christ who was seen by John; it is this Christ who is my bridegroom. It can be properly said that in this sense we are all female. Christ is the bridegroom; we—that is, the Christians—are the bride.
No, vulgarity and profanity reveal that there is an uneasiness with the deepest things of life. There is good reason for this: ’course such things are not safe (far from it, in fact)—but they’re good. One will find no greater fulfillment than in learning to enter into the sanctity of these sacred institutions of life. In both instances, new life is conceived out of the union; in both cases, there is the recognition of mortality, like the salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die. However, when we die in Christ, we rise again, a new life birthed within us. So too, when a man and woman come together, new life is born of their union and the two become one flesh giving life to a third: a tangible “fruit” or manifestation of this union. This is a great mystery, but I speak of Christ and the church.
God bless,
Eric
“God is especially incensed against these “teachers” who live by lust, addicted to a filthy existence. They despise interference from true authority, preferring to indulge in self-rule. Insolent egotists, they don’t hesitate to speak evil against the most splendid of creatures. Even angels, their superiors in every way, wouldn’t think of throwing their weight around like that, trying to slander others before God. These people are nothing but brute beasts, born in the wild, predators on the prowl. In the very act of bringing down others with their ignorant blasphemies, they themselves will be brought down, losers in the end. Their evil will boomerang on them. They’re so despicable and addicted to pleasure that they indulge in wild parties, carousing in broad daylight. They’re obsessed with adultery, compulsive in sin, seducing every vulnerable soul they come upon. Their specialty is greed, and they’re experts at it. Dead souls!”
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