An irreducible minimum

Some thoughts on the kind of faith I long for

When I was a child, I thought as a child, and I longed for a faith fit for a child. This was the close-clinging comfort of unquestioning complacency, the taken-for-granted grace of a God of proximity and predictability. When I was a teen I looked for a faith where belief and belonging were synonymous, where the tribe and the truth could converge and where safety was found in numbers. As a student, I longed for a faith that could foil the cleverness of the academy, that could stand with the certainty of a rock in the confused stream of ideology that I dabbled my feet in. As a young husband and father I accepted, like a borrowed garment, the compatible faith of dualities and modalities, of brass tacks and practicalities, of clean lines and well-kept quarters for my understanding to dwell in. These were my longings and this was my life.

Now, in middle-age, I still live with many of these blessings and look with no derision at those old desires. But the longing continues, and it courses now through the channels and valleys that life to this point has made for it. I long today for a faith which is the ineluctable centre of all things, for the kind of cosmic Christ that Paul portrays in Ephesians 1; the singular reality of the universe, the one to whom everything gravitates and all is being gathered. I want faith with the dynamics of flight, pitched against the prevailing conditions, insistent and incessant against the resistant forces that ultimately draw it to rise above the tedium and tiredness of this mere world.

I want a faith which is cavernous in its mysteries, where exploration and discovery of the light-bending perfections of God dangle the soul perilously across the chasm of intellectual endeavour. I want a faith which is unafraid of questions, which clings to the mind of the God who is grander than any seasons of doubt and big enough to hear me gasp out loud the most uncouth Psalms the Scriptures yield. I want the terrible and spacious glory of the gospel of Christ to engulf my searching and my singing, to dwarf all of my pretensions and vexations in the aseity and simplicity of a God too great to measure, too near to ignore.

I want a defiant gospel, a disruptive and rebellious message that messes with all of my self-justification, that insists on the obscenity of Calvary as the centre of my sin-trammelled hope. I want a Saviour so mighty that the elements dissolve in the radiance of his glory, but one so tender that the infants and outcasts can run to his arms. I want a gospel that passes by the queue for cotton candy worship, a gospel which overturns the trinket tables of easy answers and lazy compatibilities, that names our idols and dashes every Dagon of the heart to the dust. I want to find all of my safety in these dangerous truths, all of my solace in the shattering grace and love that are in Christ.

I want a gospel that won’t cut any deals, that won’t be apprenticed or indentured by any earthly power. I want a Bible that tyrants fear and long to burn, but that burns their palms when they dare to hold it aloft as a talisman. I want a gospel that is not codified by any nation’s constitution but is written in the Patmos ink of the exiled outsider, that rattles the heavens like the unparsed thunder that made John tremble.

I long for a gospel that meets me in these muddled middle passes, that trains my eye on the ‘not-yetness’ of how hope works, that gathers all of my scattered days into the great Day to come, that consoles lastness with the great re-ordering of glory, that promises the ultimate negation of all of the positive harms that harrow these days of mine.

I long, in short, for the gospel in its essence, in its irreducible minimum, in its maximal grandeur, free from approximations and crass appropriation. I want the soul of it that I have come to sense in the pages of Scripture and the breathing of the Spirit.