I am the youngest of three boys.  My grandfather was a Baptist minister, and my father was a businessman.  My home was Christian and Baptist.  At 15 I internalised my faith and made a deliberate commitment to Christ.  Later, I felt a sense of call to the Christian ministry.  

The church I was brought up in was in an industrial area of Adelaide - in its heyday it had been very large.  In my growing years it still met in a large building but with a small congregation, in which everybody played a part.  

Its theology was conservative - very conservative - evangelical.  It's probably true to say that it was fundamentalist in doctrine, but not in spirit.  They were warm, enthusiastic and wonderful people.  They were full of evangelistic fervour and deeply committed.  To Christ and to each other.  

 Today, I would reject its theology.  But over the years I have learned several things.  

1.      That, thank God, most people are better than their theology; and  

2.      That God works in spite of his church more than he works through it.  He can and does use very limited understanding and perceptions of him.  His spirit always goes beyond what we are and what we think.

Paul, "Some proclaim Christ out of envy and rivalry, out of selfish ambition, even insincerely.  What does it matter?  Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, and in that I rejoice".  

But Hindmarsh did not proclaim Christ out of envy and rivalry or ambition.  Their proclamation was thoroughly sincere and it was out of love.

We were certainly brought up with rules and laws.  We were surrounded by do's and don'ts.  Prayer, Bible-reading, witnessing, behaviour were all circumscribed and regulated.  Sermons were about getting converted, consecrated, witnessing, the epitome of service was 'the mission field'.  Life was intense and we were constantly warned about worldliness and backsliding.  The universal dimension of the gospel was evangelism.  Social action was almost totally about temperance, sexual purity and anti-gambling.  I can't ever remember a sermon on human rights, human justice or poverty.

Still, it was in that atmosphere that I found Christ, and I found love.  It was the foundation of my life and my ministry.

We were not encouraged to think.  On the contrary.  The Word preached was unarguable.  Most questions you asked were given stock and predictable answers.  The revelation of God in the Bible dispelled mystery.  As I grew, I became dissatisfied with easy answers to complex questions.  When I began basic theological studies and met with Biblical criticism it opened my eyes, although I was sternly warned against it.

And when I was confronted with the harsh realities of life, I found huge gaps and inconsistencies in what I had been taught, especially about the will of God, injustice and human suffering.  After my ordination, when I was pastor of an Adelaide suburban church, I was challenged by a question that turned my thinking upside down.  

We had a particular family in the church.  The husband was a school-teacher, who now never came to church.  He was embittered by what had happened in his life.  The wife, a remarkable woman, retained her faith and church connection.  Their eldest daughter in her mid-teens was a deeply committed young Christian and a bright, intelligent girl.  Before I knew them, they'd had a son about 7.  The boy had contracted a particularly virulent form of cancer which raced through his young body.  Everybody prayed for a miracle, the church and other churches prayed.  And they believed.  But the boy died.  Some time after, they had another daughter - Jenny.  Jenny was born with a severe case of cerebral palsy (known then as being spastic).

With Jenny's birth, the family had to orient their program around the care of this child.  Jenny was a bout 6 or 7 when I knew her.  Dad, who could no longer believe in a God of love, gave up coming to church.  The challenge came for me one day about 4 o'clock.  The father was coming home from school on his bike, and I waved to him.  He called me over.  He said, "Did you read this morning's paper?"  I must have missed the bit he meant.  It was how a young mother who suffered from mild epilepsy, had been bathing her baby, when she suffered a seizure.  In the few minutes she was unconscious, the baby drowned.  He looked at me and said, "Where was God when that baby drowned?"  

Where indeed?  Where is God in all human suffering?  It opened up for me the whole issue, and we all wrestle with it still.  From that moment on, my faith had to confront the hard questions with some agnosticism and hard thinking.  Teilhard de Charadin wrote, "Faith has need of the whole truth".  I became a critical and reflective Christian.  I am not an academic, but I hope, an honest seeker after truth, wherever it is found.  

I think faith is composed of three elements.  The first is MYSTERY.  The second is REVELATION.  And the third is COMMITMENT.

The being and activity of God is enshrouded in mystery.  Rudolf Otto describes the sacred as "MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM ET FASCINANS", that is, the awe-inspiring mystery which fascinates us.  We are overawed by the indescribable vastness of God, and are tempted to hide from him, but we are held, and drawn to gaze in wonder at his love and beauty.  Mystery is at the heart of every description of God, in the Bible, the ordinances, and in every form of worship.  And the mystery we explore isn't only in the nature and being of God.  It's in the unreachable depths of what it means to be human, human potential for greatness and glory and human potential for evil more savage and calculating than the beasts.  And mystery in the nature of life and the universe, natural disasters like Congo, and human violence like the world trade centre.

However, the mystery invites us.  From the mystery of God comes shafts of light.  Mystery calls us, not to despair and frustration, but to invitation and hope.  A beckoning finger invites us to come.

Out of the mystery comes God's self-disclosure.  The writer of Hebrews wrote, "God has spoken.  In former times when he spoke to our forefathers, he spoke in a fragmentary and varied fashion through the prophets.  But now he has spoken in his son who is the radiance of God's splendour, and the flawless expression of the nature of God".  "Revelation," wrote John Henry Newman, "is religious truth viewed on its illuminated side.  Mystery is the self-same truth viewed on the side un-illuminated".

So we stand between mystery and revelation.  On the one hand, God is a God of mystery, and we can never presume, nor trivialise him.  And on the other hand, he is a God of revelation so that we are never orphans in the universe, or blind travellers in the darkness, journeying an uncharted road.  

As Bunyan's pilgrim found when he asked Evangelist urgently, "How can I find the way?  Where can I go?"  "Do you see ahead, a gate?" asked Evangelist.  The man said, "No".  "Then do you see a light?" he asked, "I think I do".  "So", said Evangelist, "keep that light in your eye.  Travel towards it.  You will find a gate.  When you reach it, knock on it!'."

  Let me give you three propositions,

  (1)        Christianity is primarily a religion of Grace.  "The first and most important thing we know about God is that we know nothing about him except what he himself makes known". (Brunner).  Grace tells us that the initiative is always God's.  God is in the act of revelation, as well as in our response.  From beginning to end, the Bible is not about man's search for God, but God's search for man.  "Be comforted," he says, "You would not be seeking me, if I had not already found you".  

 (2)      What God reveals isn't sacred knowledge, secret information for the initiated.  It isn't doctrine, a book, not even the Bible.  God's revelation is nothing less than he himself.  Evelyn Underhill said, "Here, the invisible God, by the most wonderful of his condescensions, discloses his beauty and attraction, the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, in a way that is mercifully adapted to our limitations, and meets us on our own ground".

  (3)       While we may walk in the light we may never presume that the mystery is banished.  We can never claim to know the mind of God. Niebuhr said, "A genuine faith recognises that it is through a dark glass that we see; though, by faith, we penetrate sufficiently the heart of the mystery, not to be overwhelmed by it.  Testimonies are confused by both those who claim to know too much about the mystery, as well as those who claim to know too little".  

So, if faith doesn't banish mystery, and give us certainty, if it doesn't mean our questions are answered then, of what use is it?  If we can't be certain of the rightness of our journey, how can we make any commitment?  Why should we make a commitment?  We don't gamble unless the odds are more than favourable!  Are we asked to commit our whole lives to uncertainty and mystery?  

The non-thinker doesn't have this problem.  When everything is black and white, we know where we are and where we're going.  Dogmatism produces commitment.  The fundamentalist is a committed person. Jehovah's Witnesses and others like them, make deep and unselfish commitments of time, resources and even life.  Unreflective people are frequently the most zealous.  They are the crusaders for truth, those most determined to change the world.  Doesn't a thoughtful, questioning approach, by its very nature, destroy the passion for commitment and weaken the resolve for action?

There are two ways to travel easily and comfortably.  One is to swallow everything without question.  The other is to doubt everything, thus providing an excuse to avoid commitment, sacrifice and involvement.  Both ways save us from having to use our brains.  We can't side with the fundamentalist, who has dogmatic answers to all his questions.  Nor with the cynic, who ends every discussion with another question.  He never has to make a decision.

The answer lies in distinguishing between faithless doubt and creative doubt.  Faithless doubt, as Kahlil Gibran said, "is a pain too lonely to realise that faith is his twin brother".  Faithless doubt is a cop-out to save us from being committed to anything. Its accomplice is neutrality.

Creative doubt is not needing all the answers and all the light, but acting on the light you have.  For Christians this means staking your life on Jesus Christ, and affirming, as Muggeridge did, that "If his light has gone out, then as far as I am concerned there IS no light!"  I stand with Southern Baptist, Daniel Taylor, author of 'The Myth of Certainty', who wrote:

"Thinking Christians are those who have found in God and in Jesus Christ a proposed solution to the human dilemma, and have made a commitment.  And they are those who have been blessed (or cursed) with minds that never rest.  They will always be dissatisfied with superficial answers to difficult questions.  They are willing to defend faith, but not its misuse.  They cannot, nor wish to, shake off the claim that Jesus Christ has upon their lives.  Their lives are built on that commitment.  But they are people who ask questions, because mystery remains.  People in whose minds and hearts a fire has been ignited, the fire of the intellect, which is not easily extinguished, nor should it be".

The greatest temptation of the thinking Christian is the temptation to use unanswered questions as an excuse to avoid commitment.  Not to act at all because there will always be uncertainty.  If we give in to that temptation, we become paralysed sceptics.  And scepticism, born of nihilism, is the ruling methodology of our day. Peter Elbow calls it "the doubting game".  Intellectual integrity and honesty before the mystery of God and of life, doesn't mean inaction or indecision.  One can still hold faith with both passion and humility.

The one thing the Christian can't be in this world is neutral.  All around us, the violence, oppression, hunger, devaluation of human life, exploitation of children, the corrosion of society by materialism, power and selfishness, demands that Christians become redemptively involved.

We are right to ask questions.  But we are wrong to hide behind them.  The antidote to neutrality and cynicism is not arrogant dogmatism.  It is commitment to Christ at the deepest level.  Kierkegaard said, "The highest of all, is not to understand the highest, but to act upon it".

Helmut Thielicke organised discussion groups for young enquiring German university students because he was encouraged by their searching minds and probing questions.  But then he began to realise that the discussion was turning in upon itself, and failing to lead to commitment.  He wrote:

"Cannot discussions be, by their very nature, endless?  Do they not go on spawning new discussions?  Do they not frequently come out where they began, and arrive not at a full stop, but at a colon?  We are moving in a circle, a curved line that never ends.  And the circle is ultimately the symbol of non-commitment'.  
   
"The conversations of Jesus invite questions, but they always end in an arrest, in a sudden termination of the circular.  Without exception they end in 'hic rhodus, hic salta'. (Here you must either leap or retreat!)  They come to an escarpment in the message which cannot be avoided by a detour".

Kierkegaard again, "The thing is to understand myself, to find what God wants me to do.  To find truth which is true for me; to find an idea for which I can live and die".  Christ alone is that idea.  Contrary to the belief that the committed should have no questions, it is only the committed who have the right to ask the questions.  The reason is that it is only they who use questions to probe the truth deeply, and who will not allow their lack of answers to paralyse their actions.  

So the journey of true faith begins by standing in awe before the mystery of God.  Of receiving gratefully that which God has revealed of himself.  That his nature is pure love, justice and creative power.  That Jesus Christ is the expression of God made flesh and dwelling amongst us, the focussed image of the invisible God.  That his revelation is also a call, an invitation and a summons, and that it leads inexorably to an ultimatum, what will you do with Jesus?  What are our answers when he says, not "debate me", "consider me", or "patronise me" but "follow me."

Be assured, God will never let us down, never let us go and never let us off.

   
NEIL ADCOCK  
17 February 2002