DAY of DESTINY

 If Rice's ideas about God were right, how could God, hundreds of years before the birth of Cyrus, prophecy with such unwavering certainty about this individual person, that he was one day going to do the eternal Ruler's bidding in a historical context of supreme significance?  Or, to take a short-term prophecy we all know so well, how could Jesus foretell with such infallible foresight that Peter would deny Him three times before the cock managed to crow once, on that memorable morning?

I tell you ahead of time, said Christ to His disciples, in order that when it comes to pass, you should know for sure that "I am He"; that is, the Omniscient God of heaven.  The first Christians learning the details about Peter on that occasion, could not fail to be convinced.  Even for a limited span of time like that, no one with less than an absolute degree of foreknowledge, could ever have saved his reputation of being an infallible Prophet.

Provonsha suggests that Christ's ability to foretell so accurately what would happen to Peter (his obstinate denial), might be accounted for by His accurate knowledge of Peter's general character, since He could read that man's heart at any given present moment.  Peter's actions in the future might be regarded as "necessitated by his imperfect character" ("Freedom and Foreknowledge," a handout to classes in theology at Loma Linda University, p. 12).  What does that introduction of a "necessity" mean here?  Does it mean that where there is no getting away from the evidence of perfect divine foreknowledge, the expositor is forced to return, after all, to the notion of a non-freedom of the human will ("servum arbitrium"), a notion he has been fighting bravely and most admirably in all the rest of his writings?  Is it all that important to ban the suspicion that volitional freedom and divine foreknowledge can exist side by side?

                By the way I shall have to admit that Provonsha does not confine his introduction of the Spirit of Prophecy to the obscure corner of an appendix in his discussion of FREEDOM AND FOREKNOWLEDGE (OR MAYBE MORE CORRECTLY, IN THIS CASE:  FREEDOM VERSUS FOREKNOWLEDGE).  In fact his essay is so teeming with quotations from Ellen White's writings that you might be tempted to think she is the main source of Jack's ideas about this topic.  He gives ample space to pointed passages like the one in Desire of Ages, already referred to:  "From the beginning, God and Christ knew of the apostasy of Satan, and of the fall of man through the deceptive power of the apostate.  God did not ordain that sin should exist, but He foresaw its existence, and made provision to meet this terrible emergency."  Here, however, Provonsha has recourse to an interpretation of the expression "from the beginning" which bears every sign of what I have often called the "adult spirit".  The "child"

                Ellen White, even if she had lived to be 100 years, would never have managed to be sufficiently sophisticated to think in categories of that order.  She was not one of those modern Westerners who, in Bonhoeffer's terms, have "come of age".  So I would definitely call Provonsha's interpretation of her words a Reinterpretation.  "Again," he says, "we may ask, what is meant by the term `beginning'" Provonsha is making reference to something he has said on page 8 about a well-known OT statement that God knows the end from the beginning.

                "But from what beginning?  Surely not God's beginning since He has none.  And yet, if there is a point in time short of eternity, where He becomes able to foretell this end, the traditional argument is demolished.  Might we not be able to say, `knows the end from the beginning' insofar as the end is in or a consequence of a beginning."  (Ibid. p. 8.)

                What is this trend toward reinterpreting plain Biblical language?  Is it part and parcel of Christian realism?  Not the way I have come to understand it.  Rather it is a vain subterfuge.

                I am glad that I here have an opportunity to prepare something very important I have to say later on, about some incredible developments of recent date toward what some critics, originally springing out from circles of the very core of an old-fashioned Seventh-day Adventism, call by the rather ambivalent name of Sabbatarianism.

                I see my brother in the faith and colleague Jack Provonsha as a fairly typical exponent of an attitude which a large number of our learned theologians today are gradually adopting.  You may feel awkwardly perplexed when you try to evaluate some of these people.  On the one hand they may manifest a warm appreciation of something as radically characteristic of Seventh-day Adventism as Ellen White's writings.  On the other hand they may go squarely against most essential points of the explicit realism contained in those writings.

                What does this ambiguity mean?  I assume that most readers of Insight Magazine have found a recent article by Provonsha (or rather an interview with him) comfortingly Christian.  It has helped me to understand that interesting personality still better than ever before.  Here is a man who expresses a heartily sincere desire for Christian fellowship, I may safely say Seventh-day Adventist fellowship.  To the surprise of some he even proclaims that he considers himself to "be in the mainstream of Adventism", as the interviewer's expression goes.

                And then he immediately goes on to express something which I assume to be right on target.  In my book entitled Omega II:  The Satanic Dynamics of Pagan Philosophies, Infiltrating the Endtime Church I speak about this at great length under the classical title of SYNTHESIS, a wonder-making device in modern Western philosophy which is expected to reconcile the most irreconcilable opposites in the holy name of philosophy.  Our old teachers have taught us in a way that has certainly left its deep imprint upon our minds and hearts.  But let me now come back to what Provonsha adds immediately after having assured us that he considers himself to be in mainstream Adventism:

                "I am also committed to the notion that language must always be updated.  The way in which we express our truths must be kept contemporary or we'll cease to really talk to people.  I feel that it is my duty to see that the thought forms and language continue to express contemporary ways of looking at things.  Many Adventists do not understand the essence of their message; they simply know its language.  To them, if you have changed the language, you have changed the message.  I'm afraid that many who have committed themselves to the church have done so at a much too superficial level.  The essence of what's involved in the doctrines such as that of the investigate judgment and the heavenly sanctuary has not been well understood."

                Maybe we shall soon find out what this speech actually means.  Hopefully it is something better than that barren humanism we are all tempted to espouse these days.  With that wish I have come to the conclusion of my present chapter.

                Why Are we Tempted to Find Something so Fascinating and Attractive in Certain Definitely Unbiblical Conceptions about God?

                As a general rule, why do we human beings seem so anxious to have a God who does not know our future, rather than one who knows it intimately?  This might very well be just another case of a well-known urge in man's inmost nature:  Our self-dependence and our insistence on personal sovereignty in all things seems to be threatened to the same extent that another Person knows all about us.  Man does not want anyone else than himself on the throne of his life.  This is what inspires humanism to behave in the strange ways it usually does.

                In our present case that type of reaction in man is of course fundamentally nonsensical.  It is just ridiculous to imagine that God's total foreknowledge about us could do us real harm in any possible way; the more so as we ought to be familiar enough with the fact that God's character is tender mercy, harmoniously blended with perfect justice.  His eye of omniscient providence, constantly resting upon us, ought rather to fill us with gladness and trust.  For it is the warranty par excellence that no efforts will be spared for the purpose of bringing us safely into the promised harbor.  The only thing that can fail is our own willingness to be led in.

                Now, how does the theory launched by Provonsha and Rice compare to this?  To tell the truth, what they draw up in front of our wondering eyes, is the most meaningless image of God ever invented.  It is a God who, like a blindfolded madman, has launched out on an adventure whose eventual success or tragic failure He had no qualifications to foretell.  And all this is done in a vain attempt to meet the slanderous tales of wicked detractors who shout that "if God has the foreknowledge He boasts about, and still does not save all those whom he has created, then He is worse than the devil himself."  Is it necessary for Christians to accommodate such detractions, just stammering:  "Oh, please excuse our doctrinal mistake.  We retract everything we have said about God's perfect foreknowledge.  Of course He is not really omniscient."

                What will happen to us if we yield to such an act of cowardliness?  Take our situation today.  You know what inevitably happens to God's people on earth at present with more seriousness than ever before.  They are faced with passages in His Word in which He goes to the "strange extravagance" of foretelling events of tremendous eschatological magnitude, involving the most hidden depths of human hearts.  What if you and I, in the face of such a challenge, should say haughtily:  Whence does that God derive the authority to proclaim such things?  Have not our most learned theologians proved that prophecy is a virtual impossibility?

                The Case Parapsychology Compared to the Case of the "Openness-of-God" Philosophy of Rice and Provonsha

                A double fact of the strangest kind has overwhelmed me, as I have now had opportunity to compare two groups of learned researchers of the present day.  One group is that of modern parapsychology, whose fantastic conclusions I have tried to evaluate with all the realistic knowledge at my disposal, that is, in the light of Biblical theology.  (The Science of the Occult.  Its Revolutionizing Findings about Precognition, Seen in the Light of Christian Realism).  What is the conviction at which those men of modern science have arrived, after a long-term program of intensive research in university laboratories, ranging from the West Coast of the United States to the Ural Mountains of the USSR?  It is simply that MAN possesses, in himself, as a natural endowment, the wonderful ability to go beyond any barriers, conventionally known, of time-space limitation!

                In other words, the fabulous thing has happened that MAN is now being crowned as the great precognition master.

                About the very same time, however, something at least equally strange is taking place in another field of most sophisticated academic study.  Men of serious Biblical research, concentrating their quest around the nature of God, arrive at the conviction that the God of Heaven does not possess the ability of breaking through the limiting barriers of time.  He does not have a present knowledge of what is to happen in the future to the essential destinies of personal minds.  Thus He is not entitled to speak knowledgeably about this.

                What a fantastic shift of the roles attributed to MAN and GOD respectively.  Could you think of a more audacious attempt at tearing God down from His heavenly throne, and putting man upon it?

                What has surprised me most about parapsychology is not its proud claims regarding man's congenital gift of precognition (just another term for foreknowledge).  No, it is the failing response, on the part of Christian thinkers and Christian scholars, by and large.  Why are they so silent in the face of such a sledge hammer hurled against the rock-bottom philosophy of the Bible, applicable to all fields of realistic knowledge?

                And now you should also be able to guess what surprise me most, as regards the formidable sledge hammers -- one after the other in rapid succession -- having been hurled out against the most precious and absolutely crucial corner stones of our faith as a people.  What is here happening, right in our midst, is unprecedented.  But worst of all is our individual failure to react.

                Are we just cowards?  Or do we consciously and intentionally connive with the enemy?

                I must refer my readers to the above-mentioned book The Science of the Occult, dealing realistically with those "revolutionizing findings" about precognition, which have shaken the minds of serious laboratory researchers of late.  It is in the light of Christian realism, that I have dealt with this "impossible problem."  And that is the writing in which I have dealt most thoroughly with what the Bible says, unmistakably, about the extent of God's knowledge.  Of course time does constitute a realistic dimension in God's existence.  Here, too, the Bible is clear as noonday in its realism.  But not for one moment is the idea permitted to emerge that time rises up in front of God as a sort of barricade preventing the Creator from having a perfect knowledge of what the future of His created world is going to be like.  On the contrary, precisely that perfect foreknowledge is triumphantly brandished as the sign par excellence of God being God.

                After having dwelt for such a regrettably long time on this modern denial of God being God, we shall now pass on to something gloriously positive, namely what the Sabbath commandment in the Bible reveals in a magnificently logical way in terms of God being FREE.  There is nothing more marvelously inspiring to the student of God's character, as the absolutely Incomparable One, than the FREEDOM of God.  Let us get to know the supreme way in which the astonishing philosophy of the Holy Scriptures manifest the Character of that divine freedom.  You will be surprised to discover how it is revealed in the very formulation of the Sabbath texts.  Remarkably enough, that is a formulation modern logicians of our world today would qualify as illogical.  And then, upon deeper reflection, it is seen to possess a logic without flaw.

                But now first I want you to see, through a simple illustration, what the evident result would be if God were doomed to be circumscribed by the barriers of unfreedom that humanist philosophers have imposed upon him.

                I just want to take the case of a miracle to which the gospel of John gives great prominence.  In his 11th chapter John treats the happening in a way that clearly indicates his intention to gradually move toward a climax of dramatic tension.  That gospel writer is the only one of the four, by the way, who mentions the event at all, which fact has led some super-learned expositors to infer that it can hardly have been a commonly known event at all, and accordingly of dubious historical value.

                We prefer to have implicit faith in what the Bible says.  And what does it say about what happened to Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary?  He simply died.  That has happened to many people.  The remarkable fact of the present case, however, was that he was raised from the dead, right in front of a large assembly of people.

                Now has it ever occurred to you what a "dangerous act" Jesus here ventured upon, if certain philosophizing theologians are right about God's limited foreknowledge?  Where did He "find the courage", the matchless self-assurance, to wake up to new life -- and to the new human risks of perdition -- a person who was already safe for the final event of translation at the time of the great resurrection.  His sister Martha expresses very clearly her firm faith in that safety there:  "I know he will arise in the resurrection of that last day."  (John 11:24).  But it is equally clear that she is all the time suggesting to Jesus the possibility, on His part, of an act of resurrection of a more immediate and most extraordinary kind.  "I know that whatever you ask of God, that He will give you."  (verse 22).

                Does Martha think seriously about a certain "openness" to be feared in the case at hand.  I am speaking about an openness to which living persons in our world are always exposed; that is, the openness toward two alternative options.  Let us not deny the danger that manifestly exists for any human being to whom is given the opportunity of a prolonged life span in this world of hazardous possibilities?  Still we do not blame Martha.  We know what a great balm it would mean to her heartache to have her brother back in the family again.  We can easily forgive her if her suggestion should turn out to be an act of thoughtlessness.

                But now, what about Jesus.  If Provonsha and Rice are right in their "God talk" (their philosophizing reasonings about God's possibilities, or rather impossibilities, of knowing with certainty what any particular human being will do in the future, regarding the most decisive issues of life), then the question is bound to arise -- and it is bound to be a question filled to the brim with secret blame:  How in the world could Jesus take upon Himself the responsibility of waking up from the dead even one single of the numerous human creatures He actually did wake up at the time of His earthly ministry?  That is the implicit question.

                Could a blame of this kind, even just tacitly implied, be anything short of regular blasphemy?

                There is one thing we should know:  If God were without a perfect foreknowledge, He would also be without the ability to intervene in a fully satisfactory way at any time that intervention was needed.  He would be at the mercy of unforeseeable events.  He would be a hopeless victim of the most formidable enemy of all freedom:  AUTOMATISM.

 One Biblical concept diametrically opposite to that of automatism, in terms of humanist scientism (determinism), is divine providence.  And what happens to that Providence (with a capital P, making it something very close to a synonym for God Himself), at the moment when the openness-of-God theory is accepted?  Providence turns into a nonentity.  For when the Bible's God says:  I shall "lead you with my eye", then that would have to be a leadership made meaningless or impossible.  In fact, how could an eye made partially blind, blind to the most decisive moral events in a creature's life in the future, give any leadership (guidance) whatsoever in terms of "seeing ahead of time", or "looking forward" to something.  For that, you see, is what "providence" means.

                Ironically, the good intentions of the openness-of-God theorists have turned into the very opposite of what they intended.  They evidently were most eager to take away the curse of barren automatism that seemed to be brooding over our poor space-time world.  We can understand such humanist theologians perfectly.  They ere unable to find meaningfulness in either stoic fatalism or in Calvinist predestination.  However, their humanism turned out to be a tragic solution to the "problem."  The result of their "remedy" has proved more meaningless than anything else.  Their ingenious theory simply prevents God from intervening providentially.  If that non-intervention were a logical necessity, as they claim, then our surrender to automatism would have to be complete.

                Would it seem likely that we, as Christian realists, could have much to gain by going to pagan philosophers, spiritualist and pantheist humanists, in our efforts to vindicate the maligned God?  (It will be my duty, in another place, to go more deeply into the surprising story of how -- and why -- Alfred North Whitehead, a most gifted theorist of Occidental philosophy, became a 20th century heir of Platonic idealism and spiritualism, eventually going into the same cryptic type of downright pantheism which I have ascribed to Plato in my chapter: "The Genius of Platonism", in Man -- the Indivisible.  That is a case of philosophical acrobacy which our usual historians pay little or no attention to.  We should here be aware of one important fact in the history of ultra-modern Western philosophy:  It is to Plato, the father of Western spiritualism, Whitehead attributes the discovery that "the divine element in the world is to be conceived as persuasive agency and not as coercive agency."  Of course this may sound very meaningful.  It would seem to provide a halo of the greatest honor to both God, Plato and Whitehead.  The great British philosopher praises this hypothesis of an exclusive persuasion in God as one of the "greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion" (Adventures of Ideas, p. 213.)  At first glance, the ingenious theodicy of philosophizing theologians of this class may appear to exempt God from responsibility for evil.  But does it really?  I think the very opposite is a demonstrable fact.

                We do of course all know what ultimate escape the spiritualist thinker manages to find in order to still save his own weird concept of meaningfulness.  That is the famous theology called "universalism":  The absolute goodness of God is imagined to come to His rescue in the nick of time.  God is "so good" that He will -- automatically so to speak -- find a way to save even the devil himself in the last round.

                Little do those super-humanists realize that, with this final trick of their salvation philosophy, they have reached the bottom level of all irrationality.  The last ingredients of a necessary JUSTICE, as an elementary reality in God's Agape, have then been cast overboard.  (Please see The Part of the Story You Were Never Told About AGAPE AND EROS, p. 72, ff:  "Does Agape Explode All Known Barriers of Law and Justice?", and particularly pp. 145-167:  "The Fable about a Separation of Law and Gospel" --Nygren's (and the hyper-heretic Marcion's) daring suggestion is, that we have to face the fact of a veritable offence (an undeniable scandal) in Christ's parable about the stern sentence passed by the Great Judge, the Owner of the vineyard, regarding the salary to be paid to two different categories of workers).  "The offence only ceases when the principle of justice itself is eliminated as applicable to the religious relationship."  This is what the famous author of the first modern dissertation on "Agape and Eros", Anders Nygren, dared to pronounce.  Are you and I equally scandalized to see stern justice having its proper place right in the core of God's Agape?  Are we bound for the fairyland of universalist pansalvation theology?  Are we looking forward to the magic of automatic atonement (at-one-ment with God)?

                The Universality of the Dead Universe

                A term most closely related to that of "eternity" in the pagan platonic sense, is that of the "universal".  So this is the proper time to evaluate that as well.  Let us then courageously resume the questionable part of Father Lagrange's previously mentioned assertion, in which he stated the "necessity" for the Church to modify certain points in the Decalogue "in order to give it a character just as universal as that of the gospel".

                Again I ask, in what respect is Sunday "more universal" in its fundamental character than the Sabbath?

                I do feel, with Alfred Vaucher, that it would be considerably more correct to say:  In instituting Sunday in the place of the Sabbath, the Church was anxious to give the fourth commandment a character "just as universal as the sun cult".

                Just how was the sun cult "universal" then?  Of what type is the universality of the sun cult?  My answer:  It is, and always has been, the universality of a dead universe.

                What do I mean by this?  Let me be a little more explicit:  A sensational turning-point in the history of Christendom happened when its members became "adult".  That is my way of expressing a fateful event in human lives.  Some will call it different names and maybe also evaluate it very differently:  Men reach an epoch where they "come of age."  And that certainly happened to Christendom a long time before the days of Bonhoeffer.  Very early indeed Christianity managed to establish itself comparatively well as a "world religion", really able to "complete" --in an external, political way, the way that men understand and admire -- with other world religions.  The event coincides fairly well with the triumphant establishment, at about Constantine's time, of compulsory universal Sunday observance, in a world in which a sun-worshipping type of paganism had for a long, long, time been prevalent.

                In fact Christianity, as such, had this one single chance of asserting itself in its life-and-death battle against its constant rival, paganism:  It must maintain its proverbial peculiarity (see Titus 2:14:  "a peculiar people").  On the other hand, paganism had only one chance of saving its proud, boastful "universality", its precious prerogative of not being "local" or "transient".  That was by systematically levelling down that very peculiarity, in its rival, the newly emerging Christian world religion.  In other words, it was just by means of elevating a stupefying compromise as the great governing principle.  The important thing was to take away from Christianity its very differentness, reduce it to an impersonal dummy.  This is exactly what it takes to become "universal" in the vain pagan sense of the term.  It is very much the same means and the same goal that have inspired ecumenism of various types and at sundry times.  But why, then, is man so surprisingly anxious to save his "universality" in this cheap sense of the term, -- almost at any cost?

                Here I feel rationally compelled to stick more closely than ever to my previously stated theory:  Man in our culture, the most unhappy and internally disrupted being in history, is torn asunder by two opposite forces:  One is his still functioning sense of duty toward self-surrender, -- a total submission of self to God.  For this same man -- recognize it or not -- did have his historic encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.  The other force in his life is his never vanquished pagan desire for self-indulgence and self-glorification.

                So it is by no means his sober-minded realism (the definite choice, marked by an "either-or"), that has gained the upper hand in man.  It is rather his sentimental day-dream of wavering, wishful thinking that has won the day and now bosses him around.  But that undecisiveness causes him to opt for any trail in the wilderness that may happen to appear least menacing to his human desire for momentary peace of mind.

                One thing is sure:  he has obviously selected his "gods" from among those who are most notorious for their flat anthropomorphic mediocrity.  He likes to make sure that they are not too different from himself -- and by no means greater than himself.  Above all they should not distinguish themselves through any form of salient personality.  Such traits in them would make him definitely uneasy.  for his secret desire is to be a god himself, a god among other gods, --primus inter pares.  This self-deification is a phenomenon I have already alluded to (and shall describe more closely in another chapter) as a curious type of "theology" pervading all paganism.

                And what was always man's easiest way to make sure of his own "divinity"?  I have found it precisely in that ultimate "democratization" of the "divine", realized by pantheism.  Universum turns out to be the one great god, penetrating everywhere; and what a gentle, harmless god that is!  Humanity has finally arrived at the last summit, its blissful dream of pantheist automatism.

                And we, also, have finally arrived at the salient point of our present demonstration:  This is precisely what I meant by my expression, the universality of a "dead universe":

                You will have no difficulty in realizing what an outstandingly pleasant god the Sun must be:  he happens to be the most conspicuous phenomenon of that "comfortingly automatic" universe of which man hails himself as another part,--an "equally divine" part.  For the sun, you see, is, even in all its splendor, a phenomenon fairly undisturbing to that "blessed" calm and regularity that has, from times immemorial, been the ideal of pagan thinking.  Its proverbial clock-work fidelity --or let us rather say uniformity and monotony, in order not to become too personal -- is suggestive of such an "admirable" degree of non-intervention; and the "greatest thing of all", impersonalism.

                Admittedly, even with the sun, the sham god above all sham gods, irregularities are not entirely excluded.  For instance, occasional eclipses do occur "once in a blue moon."  They certainly were not always particularly reassuring occurrences to folks in primitive lands or in primitive times.  In many dramatic texts from ancient history we vividly perceive how the usual feeling of man's "astrophysical security" was suddenly shaken when those glorious majesties of the sky (the sun and the moon) began to indulge in some capricious mood of "behaving differently."  To be quite frank, from the dawn of our era, among average heathens such "natural irregularities" as eclipses have provoked a consternation unknown to the genuine Christian, the man dependent on God.  Why was there no similar sudden terror in his soul?  Simply because, with the Christian, intervention is an expected phenomenon, the normal phenomenon.  It is even hailed as a desirable phenomenon, the one great phenomenon we need if we are not to perish!  The historical records of Christendom at times of dire adversity are uncontradictable evidence of this.

                But a main concern of pagan religions was invariably the opposite.  (I have already alluded to that peculiarity in my characterization of modern pantheism, as compared to the common type of idolatry in more primitive lands.)  Even at their best, pagan religions as a whole appear to have had one great preoccupation:  the negative one of just pacifying one's gods, or rendering them harmless, as far as feasible.  This supreme aim is pursued by means of mystic rites and incantations, sometimes even by means of human sacrifices.  More "advanced" non-Christian religions have fairly different means, but the goals are the same.

                It all concurs to tell an almost incredible tale, the tale of a definite and most desperate pleading.  A pleading for "divine" neutrality.  For non-intervention!  The virtual content of that pathetic supplication is simply that the gods -- if gods there be -- may please abstain from interfering with the lives of humans!

                Hardly ever do we see the strange undercurrent of pagan disruption in human minds more glaringly revealed than in times when some threatening "freakishness" on the part of a higher and personally intervening Authority, far above the "innocuous deadness" of an insensible universe, suddenly seems to undo all customary theories of an "automatic uniformity", otherwise elevated to the dignity of an axiom for that universe.  The week of creation was one case of such an intervention in our world.  And what a majestic intervention it was, both cosmologically and spiritually speaking, on the part of a personal God.  The second coming of Christ will be another one.  It is contrary to the very spirit of Holy Writ to water down, or spiritualize away, the shaking drama (that is, the realism) of those interventions.  To do so is to tell God that He is not considered as a real friend, far from it!  Politicians who feel that their country is threatened, are often anxious to have their potential enemies sign treaties of non-intervention.  Do we men consider God as our great "potential enemy"?  If not, then why are we so eager to take away from our image of Him one of His main characteristics:  the great mark of the God who intervenes -- the Sabbath!

                Simple realism forces us to say that the "hope" of the genuine pagan, whatever his cultural level, is a desperate hope.  It is, indeed, the hope of Nirvana indifference, of ultimate "neutrality".

                Shall I then venture upon a psychological interpretation which may rationally cover the evident facts of intelligent men's strikingly hostile attitude toward the Sabbath commandment, the clearest order of the God who intervenes?

                Frankly speaking, I cannot arrive at any other than this one:  It is a desperate urge to lull oneself into a daydream "reality":  the "status quo" of sheer wishful thinking.  It is the vain attempt, on the part of theorizing and generalizing pagan idealism, to impose its abstractions as the exclusive values,--even at the expense of life itself.  "Circulos meos noli tangere", says the blind stubbornness of that intellectualistic exclusivism of a pagan pride.  "Don't touch my circles!"

                Note that those circles had been drawn already by the "eternal ken" of philosophizing humanity.  So they should not be interfered with by any other intelligent force.

                At proper intervals man makes particular ex-cathedra enunciations about his own infallible autonomy in all matters of moral behavior in his life.  Evidently that is when he feels a particular need of assuring to his own heart that he is "a law unto himself."  But right in the midst of those boastfully ringing votes of self-confidence there are audible overtones of what is most vexing in all extreme fits of self-consciousness.  What is that secret fear still haunting the minds of past masters in human ethics?  It is obviously a lurking anxiety lest some mysterious element may after all have escaped from the loosely knitted framework of the theoretical schema of eternal moral obligations universally embraced by the keenest human minds.

                The God of biblical legislation has constantly been accused of being a tyrant.  But what about the tyranny devised by human ethicists at the moment when they launch their definitely spiritualistic imperative:  "See to it that you do conform to a universal principle of perfect automatism in your moral life."

                The trend and the underlying motive here should be clear as noonday to the watchful eye of the historian of ideas, enlightened by Christianity.  Every token of a personal interference on the part of God,

the truly Autonomous One, is received by a gentile world with visible displeasure, nay with open protest.  That is invariably seen to be the response of a humanity saturated with the spirit of self-agrandizement

                Would it be preposterous then to draw this conclusion:  If the Sabbath is the adequate symbol of a personal creatures' most personal meeting with a most personal God, then Sunday is bound to be the symbol of personality-fearing idolater's most impersonal meeting with a most impersonal idol.  In one word, it is man's wilful encounter with automatism, as the great favorite god of this world.

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1F.D. Maurice, Theological Essays, 1853, p. 436.

2Mere Christianity, 1964, p. 141.

3Ibid., p. 142.

4Lewis has an interesting illustration making the difference between God's eternity and man's time clear:  "Suppose I am writing a novel.  I write, `Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!'  For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock.  But I, who am Mary's maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all.  Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary.  I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book, and for as long as I please, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary's time (the time inside the story) at all."  Ibid., p. 142.

5Ibid., p. 144.

6George W. Forell, The Protestant Faith, 1960, p. 247.  Emphasis supplied.   

CHAPTER XXI: SIGN OF A FREE GOD—SABBATH VERSUS AUTOMATISM 

                Now you have probably heard the concept "automatism" mentioned just a sufficient number of times to feel the need of a definition.  In other words, the pedagogical moment has arrived for an explanation that will "stick".  And no topic, I think, could be more proper for such an explanation than that of the Sabbath.

                Genesis 2:1-3 contains the first information the Bible has to give us about the Sabbath.  Does it provide any polemic against automatism as a pagan view and longing?  Let us have a close look at the exact wording:

                "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them.  And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made.  And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it:  because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created."  (Emphasis supplied)

                Was it really on the seventh day that God "ended" His work?  Then what does "ended" really mean?  Was not man the last creature He created; in fact, the crowning glory of His creation?  And did not this take place on the sixth day?

                First, who is the hero, the focal point, of the creation story?  Karl Barth, in his Church Dogmatics, Vol. III, Book 1, says:

                "It is not man, entering upon the work appointed at the creation, who is to be the hero of the seventh and last day of creation...  It is not man who brings the history of creation to an end, nor is it he who ushers in the subsequent history."

                Who is it then?  It is God!  The rest is first and foremost God's rest.  This first Sabbath day is clearly described as a most solemn occasion filled with God's joyful satisfaction.  God rejoiced wholeheartedly in what had taken place.

                And what are the features of God thrown into relief by this historic rest?  The first is His freedom.  God asserts His freedom just as much by resting from His work.  He reveals Himself as the Autonomous One, you might say, just as much by celebrating the "end" of the work, as by starting it.  In my vocabulary, "freedom" here is just the opposite of "automatism".  Freedom is the extremely good thing in this context.  Automatism is the extreme evil.  And perhaps it is an automatism in this same sense that Barth too has in mind when he says:

                "A world principle without this limit to its creative activity would not be free like God, but would be tied to the infinite motion of its own developments and evolution.  In its unlimited creative activity it would not really belong to itself.  It would not really be active, but entangled in a process imposed upon it and subjected to its higher necessity."  (Ibid.  Emphasis supplied)

                This aptly describes what I mean by the tragedy of pagan automatism; that is, the automatism asserting itself, not only in every spiritualist's outlook on life, but equally in every evolutionist's outlook on science.  How different from this is the attentive Bible student's image of God as he observes Him in the first Sabbath text of the Bible.

                What is freedom?  Barth tries to explain it as follows, still in connection with Genesis 2:2:

                "A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity:  and only the works of a being like this are acts.  God is a being like this.  His creative activity has its limits in the rest from His works, determined by himself, i.e., the rest of the seventh day.  His freedom revealed in this rest is a first criterion of the true deity of the Creator in the biblical saga." (Ibid)

                Let us compare this freedom of the Genesis Creator, the Creator who rested on the Sabbath day, to the boundness of pagan "creators".  For it would be wrong to say that paganism does not have its "creation sagas".  On the contrary, it does know the most weird types of some sudden comings into existence.  Paganism has remarkable records, indeed, of certain "fits of the supernatural".

                In primitive thought and primitive religion there may be no miracles in the Biblical sense.  But instead there is magic.  Certain mysterious formulas, for instance, are conceived of as producing the wonders.  And they produce them automatically.  This, I think, is an essential thing to notice.  That automatism even avers itself as fatal to the magician himself sometimes, as in Goethe's dramatic poem, Der Zauberlehrling, the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

                That miserable tinker's unfortunate fate consisted just in not being able to stop.  He had observed his master's tricks of conjuring up things by means of a fixed formula.  So during the sorcerer's absence he wanted to do the same thing himself.  But he had failed to retain the formula that was to stop the process.  This also reminds me of a similar tragedy in a popular Scandinavian fairy tale:  A little girl belonging to a very poor community has by accident found a magic saucepan.  She has also hit upon the magic formula that causes that pan to start cooking.  It produces porridge automatically -- unending quantities of it.  All the hungry people of the village are happy and enthusiastic!  But alas, the girl does not have the necessary magic word to stop the process.  So the whole village soon becomes inundated by porridge.  There is place for nothing but porridge.  The people are simply drowned in the swelling waves of the invading ocean of porridge.

                One hardly knows what to call an event like that.  Is it a tragicomedy of pure tragedy?  Wherever a religious point of view prevails, it would probably have to be relegated into the realm of pure tragedy.

                How different the Creation story in Genesis, chapters one and two!  When the God of the Bible, as the great master Wonder Maker, calls into existence His wonderful worlds, this is no process of an impersonal -- or a more or less mechanical -- type of magic.  The creative act is always dependent on the Creator's conscious will.  He has made up His mind to create.  And He does create.  The whole process coincides with His personal determination.  Its conclusion, as well as its development in every detail, is therefore minutely in accordance with His majestic command.

                As a rule, the pagan gods are essentially different:  They are not gods of creation.  They are properly gods of contemplation, therefore, essentially inactive.  At least this applies wherever pagan theology takes a more serious character, as in spiritualism.  Here, neither beginning nor end causes any trouble to the immortal gods.  It all floats into one great confusion of everything and nothing.  Their "perfection", if any, is that of the eternal cycle.  I could think of nothing better than inertia to describe the essence of this inability to either begin or end.  Here it is short-sighted to think of the inability to end as less tragic than the inability to begin.

                Let us illustrate this double tragedy of automatism, versus the blessedness of personal and conscious initiative, by referring to a well-known, concrete case of recent astronautic events.

                The end of the year 1968 might have become memorable in a negative sense, a peculiar nightmare sense, if the travel of three astronauts around the moon had failed at some decisive point.  In that case millions of radio listeners on planet Earth would have spent their Christmas holidays witnessing a tragic drama, impressing upon their minds what it really means to be at the "mercy" of automatism.

                When those spacecraft pilots set out on their course and gradually left behind the familiar reals of their native planet's gentle pull, that was nothing but the physical abandonment of three men to a certain

automatism.  For most of the time of those three days they were in the grip of just that inertia whose law says:  Without any power from outside a body cannot change either the speed or the direction of its movement.  On approaching the moon they did apply, with success, just such a power.  So at a given moment they did escape the sad lot of just continuing endlessly into the depths of outer space.  They managed to bend their way into orbit around the moon.  But as soon as this stage was reached, we may say that they had fallen into the clutch of a new automatism, namely that of a resultant between two inexorable powers; on the one hand, the gradually increasing pull from the moon as a larger body irresistibly attracting a smaller body:  the spaceship; on the other hand, there was still the "stubborn" force of eternal inertia, this time in the form of the so-called centrifugal power; that is what tries to prevent us from performing circular movements.  In every-day life it is described as out tendency to "go off at the tangent", just like a boy's toy plane, kept at the end of a string.

                Those two forces together, keeping each other in check, is what produces any body's circular movement around another and larger body, this time a spaceship in orbit around the moon.  But if that movement never changes all by itself, this means that it is automatic.

                By and by the thrilling moment arrived when it was to be seen whether the three astronauts would prove able to free themselves from this automatism, too, through a new initiative on their part.  They had the power and applied it in the right way at the right moment.  This lucky command of the situation sent them on their way toward their old home planet again.  But of course immediately after the change had been realized, they were once more in the "claws" of their merciless foe:  automatism.  If this new clutch of automatic happening had not been loosed at the right second when they approached the earth, there would have been a 10,000 mile per hour crash and nothing more.  A new personal intervention on the part of those men was needed in order to prevent a catastrophe.

                We here get some illuminating idea of what a wonderful privilege it is for man to retain some morsels of free initiative--the privilege of stopping something, of changing his course, or decisively breaking out from the blind tracks of routine movements.

                What then is the true significance of the concept "end" in the Bible's first record of a merciful God's unique Sabbath exploits?  I have no hesitation in describing even this "negative" or "passive" detail (the ending of His work) as an "exploit", for it may assume the dimensions of heroic feat, of majestic performance.

                In what, then, did this "rest from work", this mysterious "ending", really consist?

                Obviously most readers have taken it to mean just "finishing off" -- full stop!  And who could blame them for understanding it in this way?  "To end" does mean this in all common usage of speech.  To end a work, is to perform it all the way up to its final phase:  and this is what any human being is supposed to have behind him by Friday night, isn't it?  So, when Genesis 2:2 states that God ended His work on the seventh day, it almost looks to you and me as if He ended it a second time.  If someone circulated the rumor that every week you tend to end your work only on the seventh day, you would hardly for very long preserve your reputation for being a good Sabbath-keeper, I am afraid.  People in the church would shake their heads at you, saying:  Oh, that's bad.  He should have all that finished on Friday evening.

                Perhaps we have in our imagination the picture of a human artist who is fully absorbed in his art.  Just imagine such a "creator" on the human plane:  At the end of his regular work days he "finishes" a work of art.  Then comes his day of rest and relaxation (if he has any).  But his mind is still so completely on his work that even on the holiday he goes to his studio.  Before he recognizes what has happened, he is absorbed in his work once more.  He has found some detail with which he was not satisfied.  Now he gives his work a "last finishing touch".  He literally "ends" it--hopefully in full earnest this time.

                Was this the way God "ended" His work on the seventh day?  Was it a matter of a finishing stroke?  We understand that this sense must have been the one foremost in the minds of the Septuagint theologians.  In fact, they simply assumed that the expression "on the seventh day" here must be an error, necessitating an amendment.  It ought to be replaced by "the sixth".  And they actually did change the text on that point.

                But I agree with Barth that this "emendation" makes null and void the deeper sense of "end" as descriptive of an essential trait in the personality of Yahweh, the unique Author of the Sabbath institution.  Precisely the seventh day was the day when God put into effect His plan, not to do any more what He had been doing.  We might express it in this way perhaps:  On the Sabbath day He made this significant creative work of His the great occasion for an actual celebration.  He celebrated its end; that is, His own glorious ability to have a total break, and to enjoy it, whenever this was the new form of initiative in which he took the greatest pleasure.  Ending assumes the sense of glorious divine completion (kalah).  This is the sense Yahweh intends to inculcate indelibly on His people's minds.  But what, then, is that quite unique trait in God's character that is here revealed?

                First we ought to make sure whether the Bible really has a peculiar mode of expression here, an expression exactly corresponding to a typical mode of thought.  The theoligian B. Jacob confirms that this special meaning of the word "to end" (to refrain from further creation) is not an isolated phenomenon.  He compares Ex. 2:2 to 2 Chron. 29:17.  I must remind my reader, by the way, that here, as well, the topic is sanctification, or consecration; that is, the most elevated of all elevated actions where the Creator establishes a most solemnly intimate relationship with His intelligent creatures.  The reference is to the inauguration of the sanctuary, how the priests "sanctified themselves" and then "went into the inner part of the house of the Lord, to cleanse it" (2 Chron. 29:15,16).  Some special circumstances are mentioned, and the time it took:

                "Now they began on the first day of the first month to sanctify, and on the eighth day of the month came they to the porch of the Lord:  so they sanctified the house of the Lord in porch of the Lord:  so they sanctified the house of the Lord in eight days:  and in the sixteenth day of the first month they made an end."  (2 Chron. 29:17)

                What was the thing of which they "made an end" on the sixteenth day?  It evidently was something very great.  And during how many days had this been going on?  During fifteen days.  Still, not on the "fifteenth", but on the "sixteenth" only, did the work of those fifteen days come to its fulfillment.  This--and only this--was the great day when the priests "made an end" (killu).  Then they ended their work in the important sense that they did not work any longer.  They realistically demonstrated their blessed stage of completion, fulfillment:  The enjoyed rest was a great reality.  It was the definitive break from the routine of daily action.  It was the greatest act of all.

                May we perhaps put it in this way--and that applies to all real and significant accomplishments:  They day of "no more work" is a day at least as important as the whole series of "days of work".  The efficient "proof" of an end is reserved for this day only.  It is the day decisive confirmation that the work is done.  In the case of the Sabbath, there is actually a solemn celebration of the fact that this work now belongs to the glorious record of past accomplishments.  So this is a day of full satisfaction, of final triumph.  Thus, the very fact of staying away from further work may turn out to be, not only perfectly equal, but sometimes even superior, in its significance, to the fact of working.

                This may be one sense in which the truth of an old word of wisdom is confirmed:  "Better is the end of a thing than its beginning."  (Prov. 7:8).

                The seventh day was, in an important sense, definitely better than the sixth.  Maybe I could illustrate this matter as follows:  Suppose you have made the great decision on a late Wednesday night that this is going to be your last day of smoking.  You solemnly put a note in your calendar on Wednesday, February the 10th:  "I quit the dirty habit of smoking!"  You gather your pipe and your tobacco packages and your cigarettes together and make a solemn bonfire.  You are definitely through with this miserable thing that has enslaved you for years.  It is the evening of Wednesday, February 10, 1982.  What a glorious day.  What a memorable day in your life.

                Well, I do not say that this is not a great day, a decisive day.  But there may be a greater and more decisive day in front of you.  For remember that the real test is not on this Wednesday night.  Your body may have had all the nicotine it demands for this day, and during the night you are fast asleep anyway, I assume.  (You did not at any time get to the point where you smoked in your sleep, did you?  I never heard of somnambulic smoking.)

                But there is a day coming.  That is Thursday the 11th.  What about that day?  As far as I can see, that is the day you "stop smoking"--if you make it at all!  That is the first day when it really means something whether you take another cigarette.  Wednesday the 10th was perhaps the day you "finished smoking" in a very theoretical way.  And I do not say that theories are useless or insignificant.  They have their place in the household of human life.  But there is nothing like the practice--the practical realization of those nice theories.  So Thursday the 11th is the day when you really prove that you quit smoking.  Thursday is the day of triumph and of real exploit as far as your decision to quit smoking is concerned.

                So I think the Biblical way of reckoning here is a most realistic one.  Do you still feel superior in terms of stringent logic?  You are wrong.

                And now we come to the main reason why the Sabbath may be said to symbolize God's freedom and all that freedom stands for:

                In that freedom there is something implied that human philosophy does not at all immediately realize as self-evident.  I am referring to love.  With God, freedom is entirely in the service of love.  Freedom is simply the way love lives and expresses itself.

                This is an idea among the most difficult for man to grasp.  The type of "love" man is naturally acquainted with, is Eros.  But that is the type in which the creature has perverted his freedom.  Eros is the perversion of Agape.  Hence it comes to happen that man, whenever he tries to philosophize about freedom, even in terms of perfect freedom, total freedom, such as the Creator has, he is tempted to reason along rather spurious lines.  To the human thinker that unfailing autonomy of God (His unlimited freedom)--for instance in matters of creative power, of unhampered initiative, His perfect ability to do or to refrain from doing--all this is immediately conceived of as something that would tend to "prevent Him from being primarily the Loving One."  What a fallacious trend of philosophy.

                This is where we human reasoners need to be reminded again of one remarkable coincidence:  In what does that constant initiative on the part of God consist?  It consists in His free movement of bending down.  And in what does His character as the Loving One consist?  It consists in that same bending down!

                This is the practical way things infallibly work with God.  And every time the outcome is bound to strike, with utter astonishment, those theoretical experts in this little world of ours who have made it their speciality to observe "how gods generally behave".  The God of the Bible inevitably dumbfounds them.  He scandalizes them, for this is not at all the way gods "are supposed to behave"!

                Yahweh does not only turn to "the other one".  He even turns wholeheartedly to the smallest of the small among His millions of other ones.  The incredible marvel of this divine alterocentricity is not just in its going out.  It is in its going down!  This is humility, if ever there was one.  And what philosopher-theologian, I wonder, could ever refrain from being scandalized when some non-philosophical or non-theological layman speaks about his "humble God"?  Where else, except in the Bible, did men ever read such "laughable stuff" as the story about God's divine humility"!

                Still, the Lord of Life, and the Lord of the Sabbath, the One without whom nothing was made of all that was made, Jesus Christ, tells us just exactly this incredible story about Himself.  He speaks about His own Person as the great Exemplar worthy of being imitated by all men.  But that is not vain-glory.  It is an offer of realistic help to the desperately helpless ones.  And let us notice one thing particularly.  It constitutes an appealing call to the restless ones--calling them to the only haven of realistic rest.

                A more beautiful or a more illuminating Sabbath scripture could hardly ever be found that this:

                "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart:  and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."  (Matt. 11:28-30) Emphasis supplied.

                When were ever words spoken about law and grace in a more holistic way?  Every dimension and depth of the full Agape is here plumbed, to reach the bottom.

                But there is none.  So even God's freedom, in the sense of His perfect autonomy, should never be understood in terms of some hard, vainglorious self-dependence or a total in-dependence of those helpless creaturely other ones.

                Please include in your conscious knowledge this tremendous fact:  There is a tender considerateness in God's heart, a matchless delicacy in His mind, that strictly forbids Him to force His will in any way upon the life of one single human creature.  This obliges Him to wait and wait, so patiently and so watchfully, at the door of the human heart-- that curiously constructed "door", having its knob on the inside only.

                Once He has been admitted, He works effectively, although still at every moment with the same delicate considerateness for man's own freedom and divinely granted liberty of choice--the incomparable wonder of His majestic creation in man.  God completely transforms the heart of that man.  This is the creative power of heavenly grace.

                So there is the most delicate process of a mutual interplay between the freedom of God and the freedom of man in that whole work of sanctification, of which Sabbath rest is not just an abstract symbol, but a concrete medium and an active intervention.

                We should not be misled by an apparent harshness in theological formulations such as the one previously quoted:  "It is God, not man, who is the hero of the Sabbath."  Before we get to know what the terms employed really stand for, we may be equally rebuffed by some rather "egocentric-looking" statements in the Bible, as well.

                For instance:  "The Lord hath made all things for Himself" (Prov. 16:4).  Without hesitation you might be tempted to interpolate here:  for "His own benefit", "His own honor".  Even the gospel prophet quotes the Eternal One as saying, "For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it:  for how should my name be polluted?  and I will not give my glory unto another."  (Isa. 48:11).

                In view of those formulations, what weight can we ascribe to the highly alterocentric statement from the lips of the same Yahweh to some Jewish legalist:

                "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.  Therefore, the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath."  (Mark 2:27,28).

                In a way, those last two verses, taken together, may perhaps represent the apparently opposite viewpoints meeting each other in great harmony, after all.  For, on the one hand, the purpose for which God has made the Sabbath is a perfectly alterocentric one.  It is definitely for the sake of man, His beloved creature, so urgently in need of true rest.  On the other hand, Christ insists on making it crystal clear that He is the Lord of the Sabbath.  This Lordship which He so insistingly claims as His own, is a most glorious one.  It possesses a glory He will never, never, "give unto another" (Isa. 48:11).  Thus we have an apparently "egocentric" determination on the part of the Almighty One, the Only One, the everlasting God, to remain unique.

                We now come to the salient point:  Precisely in what does that unique and inalienable "glory" of the Godhead consist?  This must be important to know because the entire Bible refers so emphatically to it.  Before one has made the most elementary effort to find out what the Biblical concept of God's "glory" really is, it would be not only unrealistic and unscholarly, but outrageously unfair to assume that God's "glory-seeking" gives evidence of downright self-centeredness.

                So far we have done nothing more than touch the fringes of the marvels which God had in store for man, from the moment that He invited him to have his historic encounter with the mystery of the Seventh Day.

                Little has it been realized, however, even today, what a drama was here going to be triggered at the end of the aeons, actually turning the Sabbath into a veritable "time-bomb", destined to explode every sophisticated argument that human ethics proponents have been forgoing during 6000 years.  That explosion cannot fail to shake the lives of realistic men anywhere, as the Sabbath is finally seen to interfere crucially with the basic structure of all ethics.

                P.S.  As soon as we can afford to publish the second volume of this book about the Day of Destiny, you will finally have the satisfaction-- or the exasperation--of a still closer encounter with the drama already taking definite shape, in terms of a life-and-death battle over the Sabbath issue, -- within the Church, as well as in the world at large.

Note- I am sorry to report that he was never able to publish Part II.

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