I am rereading Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living by Neal Plantinga. This is one of my favorite little books, and one I keep coming back to for inspiration and encouragement.

I thought it might be useful for others to gather and distribute some quotes as I go, so that you might get a taste for the small wonder that is this book and read it yourself. Here is what I wrote about it in my Theology of Work annotated bibliography a couple of years back:

This wonderful popular-level – yet deep – book deserves wide reading. It lays out a Reformed theology of creation-fall-redemption as the context for thinking about learning, vocation and our purpose in life. Particularly good for college students.

And here are some quotes from the preface.

On the need to seek truth wherever it may be found:

Calvin understood that God created human beings to hunt and gather truth, and that, as a matter of fact, the capacity for doing so amounts to one feature of the image of God in them (Col. 3:10). So Calvin fed on knowledge as gladly as a deer on sweet corn.

The Holy Spirit authors all truth, as Calvin wrote, and we should therefore embrace it no matter where it shows up.

On being discerning in this effort:

Well-instructed Christians try not to offend the Holy Spirit by scorning truth in non-Christian authors over whom the Spirit has been brooding, but this does not mean that Christians can afford to read these authors uncritically.

On learning being a spiritual calling.

Thoughtful Christians know that if we obey the Bible’s great commandment to love God with our whole mind, as well as with everything else, then we will study the splendor of God’s creation in the hope of grasping part of the ingenuity and grace that form it. One way to love God is to know and love God’s work. Learning is therefore a spiritual calling: properly done, it attaches us to God. In addition, the learned person has, so to speak, more to be Christian with.

The book reference is:

Plantinga Jr., Cornelius. Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Matthew 6:11 says, “Give us today our daily bread.” So simple. So profound. But how does God answer that prayer? He answers that simple prayer through the work of others. Martin Luther taught that God is at work answering that prayer through the vocations of the many people that work to produce the bread. Today, this would include the farmer, truck driver, grainery employees, bakery staff, quality control people, packaging workers, and many unknown others long before we even pray that prayer. If you asked any of these people, they would say they are just doing their job. And maybe just because they are trying to make ends meet. But the reality is that God is at work, because by working we are participating in God’s ongoing providence for the human race.¹ It is clear that:

The Bible affirms the value of ordinary work, of sharing in the pursuit of the common good, a common and shared prosperity. This is not about selfish gain – it is the practical equivalent of praying. “Give us this day our daily bread.” If you pray that, then you work it too, if you can. And it’s “Give us” because it’s bread for sharing, not just bread for me.²

Through the ordinary work that is done by people who may not even profess faith in him, God is at work to provide our needs. Secularists typically see this vast interconnected network of interchange as the economy, which it is, but theologically it is the providential interaction of vocations.³ God is hidden behind everyday things, and ordinary people.

Work is not the result of sin, though our sin sometimes makes work, or school, or whatever we do, harsh and unproductive and unfulfilling. According to Genesis 3, our first parents broke the harmony of paradise, and ever since then we have been alienated from our creator and the rest of His creation. The shalom that was present at the beginning was lost, and the good and fruitful earth became their foe (Gen. 3:17-18; cf. 4:12-14).¹ But the image of God is still in people. And creation, despite being corrupted by sin, is still good. One day God will, through the resurrected Christ, complete the healing and restoration of what he has made. Romans 8:21 says that, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage of decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

When we are in Christ, which we are as believers, then all of life is spiritual and sacred because it all belongs to him. Colossians 3:23-24 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Michael Wilkins emphasizes that since all of our service in the kingdom is inherently valuable, our responsibility is to plan for the long haul and use our giftedness to advance to kingdom of God.²

In Richard Mouw’s book When the Kings Come Marching In³, he considers why, in the vision of the Holy City in Isaiah 60, many of the people and objects from Isaiah’s own day appear within the walls of the future Holy City but have assumed different roles and perform new functions. The reason Mouw gives is that God will strip cultural items of their formerly idolatrous function (as tools of human rebellion and idolatrous trust) and instead make them vessels for ministry in the transformed City. For example, the ships of Tarshish and the lumber of Lebanon represent significant pagan instruments and products of culture in Isaiah’s time. So when Isaiah speaks of the ships of Tarshish being “shattered” (2:7) and “brought low” (2:12-17) he is referring to God’s purifying judgment on how they are being used (i.e., as a means of rebellion), not their destruction per se. Cultural items such as these comprise the “filling” that human activity has added to creation. Mouw argues that God will reclaim this currently perverse and rebellious cultural “filling” (since it all belongs to him – Psalm 24:1) and transform it into the kind of “filling” that he originally intended for his creation. This is not true for all pagan cultural items, some are not redeemable as they are (such as the weapons of war mentioned in Isaiah 2:4) and will thus need to have their identities, their basic functions, transformed to be suitable for a place of ministry in the Holy City.

Work is a vital part of our larger cultural engagement with the patterns of life that we navigate through as deeply cultural beings. We make culture – usually without even thinking about it – in all that we do, but our work is one of the major means through which this is accomplished. As Mouw notes, we must engage in the difficult business of finding patterns of cultural involvement which are consistent with the confession of God’s ownership and eventual transformation of human culture.⁴

God created the universe good, and made humanity to be stewards over it (Gen. 1:1-2:2). In the very beginning, in Genesis 1:28, the first man and woman are together commanded by God to work creatively in relationship with each other to fill the earth and subdue it. They are to rule over God’s creation and shape it as they see fit. It says just after this in verse 31 that “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The creation of humanity as imitators of God in creating new relationships and cultures and work environments was a good thing. According to Martin Luther, God fashioned this good world with resources and potentials, choosing “to continue his creative activity in this world through the work of human hands” so that our work, humble though it may be, is an intrinsic part of God’s providential care and a conduit for his common grace and love for his creation.¹

In response to that providential care, we – in return – are able to worship God through our work. In Genesis 2:15 we read that, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” God’s original intent was for his stewards to work on creation and care for it, bringing out its latent potential by fashioning it into new cultural artifacts and using it to create new ways of ministering to one another in loving service. When we imitate the creativity and excellence of God, we are most truly what God made us to be. As Nancy Ortberg said, “Work is…another way in which you and I can work out the image of God that resides in us.”²

We must always be mindful that the basic biblical distinction is not between sacred and secular but between God and his creation.³ We are not to worship our work, ourselves or any other created thing; this kind of idolatry – so prevalent today – is often expressed through workaholism, refusal to “blow the whistle” on injustices in the workplace, and other work-related disfunctions and sinful patterns. God alone is worthy of our worship. Our work must be kept in its proper place as part of directing our lives toward Him in praise and thankfulness. Let us remember, as the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, recently proclaimed, that the workplace is also God’s place: “… all of life is religious and there is a desperate need to reconnect the sacred and the secular. There is no more urgent time than now to break down the compartmentalised thinking that separates trust in God from the world of work.”⁴

We bear his image as creative, rational, loving beings designed to live and work in community with each other (Gen. 1:27; 2:4-25). Work is an intrinsic good; it is part of our stewardship of God’s creation as we exercise our creative capacities by shaping and forming this creation in new and innovative ways in imitation of God’s creative activity. We have been given a “cultural mandate (or blessing) to multiply and to fill the earth, to care for it, to work with it.”⁵ So by working “we affirm our uniquely human position as God’s representatives on this earth, as cultivators and stewards of the good gifts of his creation, which are destined for the benefit of all.”⁶ The question we must ask is ‘how does my daily work fit into God’s purposes for good in the world?‘

God is revealed from the beginning as a worker. He creates. He makes. He places. He gathers together. He blesses. He separates. It is hard to escape the rhythm of the first chapter of Genesis as God systematically makes and arranges his creation, bringing new things into joyful being and calling the results of each workday “good.” And, after surveying all he has made, and adding the final touch with the insertion of his immanent image in the form of two little humans, he pronounces the final result of the week’s work “very good” (Gen. 1:31). But that is not the climax of the creation story. It does not end with work.

The climax of the creation story is when God rests from his work. This Sabbath rest pattern is something we are to emulate; it was given for our benefit. Genesis 2:2-3 says, “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”¹ In our observance of a Sabbath rest, we, like God, deliberately choose to refrain from working; we stop from our doing and experience our being.² For the Christian, work must be set within the larger context of who God is and our place in God’s story as revealed in Scripture. And this means, “work and Sabbath are part of the integrated whole of our lives, in keeping with the life of God as we encounter it from the very beginning.”³

Abandonment. A word of devastation. A word of pain. A word of rejection. Forsaken, despised by others, we all know something of the sting and terror of that kind of abandonment. No one wants to be abandoned by someone.

Psalm 13 is a psalm of abandonment. It is the desperate cry of someone that has no one left, and apparently not even God, to help him. The first part says:

How long, O LORD Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

When someone abandons us, when we are the object of abandonment, then devastation, desolation, desertion, renunciation and rejection are all appropriate synonyms, and valid expressions of what we might feel. Like the psalmist, when many think of God, they immediately think of abandonment in that sense of the word.

Jesus knew what it was like to be the object of abandonment by those he loved. In his last hours he was abandoned by his closest followers, denied vehemently and publicly by one of his closest friends Peter, and rejected by the people who had hoped that he might save them. Matthew 27:39-41 records that:

Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!”

In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ ” In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

Finally, when there was nothing left, no more humiliation that could be inflicted, no one to turn to, and after three hours of the excruciating pain and humiliation of public crucifixion we read that Jesus in agony cried out to God the words of the devasted psalmist from Psalm 22:1:

46 About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

When we Christians disrespect others, forsake them, withhold forgiveness and refuse to listen to their stories of pain and devastation, then we only serve to confirm their suspicion that God has abandoned us, that he has abandoned them. May God forgive our sins, as we forgive the sins of others.

Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

There is a big difference between abandonment by someone, and abandonment to someone. Changing that one small word transforms pain into joy, fear into love, and despair into hope.

Abandonment to someone is different. In abandonment to someone we are the subject of abandonment, not the object. This abandonment is voluntary. Abandonment to someone involves an act of trust, an act of the will, a decision to make. It takes courage and faith in the fidelity and integrity of another to abandon oneself to them. We have a sense of how this works in everyday life in friendship, in causes, and even more so in marriage. We abandon ourselves to someone out of love and affection for the other person.

This is not abandonment in the sense of desolation, desertion, or forsakenness. Rather, in a positive sense, it refers to the notion of surrender or committment to someone or something greater than oneself – to someone worthy of our trust and commitment.

When a person abandons themself to a worthy cause, or commits themself in marriage to the love of their life, it involves a resolution to abandon themself unreservedly to that cause or person. You can’t hold back out of fear of being abandoned. In that act, in that commitment, the whole heart and imagination is captured by the object of its affection and desire. In the same way, abandoning oneself to our eternal, infinite, personal Creator is to open ourself up to his presence in our lives and recognize his work in the lives of those around us. This is the positive side of abandonment to someone.

However, there is a negative sense to abandoning ourselves to others and to God. Not “negative” in terms of disadvantage, but rather in terms of arranging our priorities and desires correctly, which leads to focusing on some things at the expense of others.

We know this to be true in all of life. At times we must abandon some things, the lesser things, in order to attain the greater. We save money, giving up buying now that we might purchase something better in the future. We vacation and rest, giving up working that we might live fuller lives and be more effective when we return to work.

We fast, and realize that food is not our life. We seek solitude, and return to richer friendships as a result. We pray and meditate, forsaking other activities and other people momentarily for time alone with God, and return with a deeper awareness of living in a world charged with his grandeur as Gerard Manly Hopkins so beautifully stated.

This type of abandonment means joyfully choosing to be released from the burden of other lesser commitments, such as when a person commits to a life of “forsaking all others” so that they might be completely single-minded towards their spouse. The husband does not retreat from life to do abandon himself to his wife, but rather embraces the joyful reality and expectation of their new life together.

In all of life we recognize and affirm the good, but at the same time give our greater allegiance to the greater. Abandonment to God is a renunciation of other, lesser loves for the greater prize of loving God above all others, unreservedly relinquishing our hold on these lesser things. We relinquish the lesser that we might attain to the greater. Augustine, with his neoplatonic understanding of a hierarchy of goodness, understood this and tried to teach his readers:

…through reflection on his own experience, that we must think about what we love and how we love the things we love. In his view, it is better to love some things than others. Augustine suggested that our desires, our loves, can only be satisfied in God… Speaking to God [in The Confessions], he prays, “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

From p. 82 of Christian Love, by Bernard Vincent Brady [emphasis mine].

Therefore, in abandonment to God we reorient our focus around God and his loving, governing (i.e. providential) presence (what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God”) in the world. That is why the prayer Jesus taught his disciples begins in this way (Matthew 6:9-10):

⁹“This, then, is how you should pray:
   ” ‘Our Father in heaven,
   hallowed be your name,
¹⁰your kingdom come,
   your will be done
      on earth as it is in heaven.

The emphasis in the Lord’s prayer is very much on abandoning oneself to God’s loving parental care in all things. Jesus lived this type of abandonment to God. In the darkest moment of his death, in the moment when the powers of evil triumphed over this invincible man, his words proclaimed his complete trust in God. The Gospel of John states in 19:30 that Jesus said, “It is finished.” This meant that his mission was now accomplished, and he was announcing it to the world for all to hear.

But he said something else too. Something else, not to the bystanders, but to God. According to Luke (Luke 23:46), his last words from the cross immediately before he died went like this:

46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.

As his followers, we are to follow Jesus’ example of abandonment to God. The writer of Hebrews highlights this sense of following Jesus’ example of abandonment to God and letting go of lessor loves and priorities to achieve the greater in Hebrews 12:1-2:

1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

The beauty of approaching God in this way, is that opening and expanding our hearts in receiving and giving love to God increases our capacity to do the same with those around us. Loving God enables us to better love our neigbor. This seems contrary to reason, but is a common theme in historical Christian writing.

I am very aware as I write this of the uncertainty that life and our many failures present, and of the fear that such uncertainty about the future can bring. My friends with Cancer, with a loved one suffering from Parkinson’s, with chronic fatigue, without employment, or suffering in untold other ways feel this uncertainty much more keenly than I ever could, but in the end, it is our hope that sustains us all – our hope that even through tragedy we can triumph in life. This is our sure hope because we have the example of Jesus demonstrating how it is done. It is his example which enables us to cast our hopes, fears and very lives every moment into God’s care.

When we live in the light of this hope, the cry of desperation in Psalm 13 given above does not have to be the final word. We, like the psalmist, can persevere by proclaiming with confidence our abandonment to the loving embrace of our Father in heaven:

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

Perhaps it is fitting and best to end this meditation with a prayer from Celtic Daily Prayer (Meditation day 4, p. 49).

PRAYER OF ABANDONMENT TO GOD
Father, I abandon myself
   into Your hands.
Do with me what You will,
whatever You do, I will thank You.
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only Your will be done in me,
  as in all Your creatures,
and I’ll ask nothing else, my Lord.

Into Your hands I commend my spirit;
I give it all to You
   with all the love of my heart,
for I love You, Lord,
   and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into Your hands
   with a trust beyond all measure,
   because you are my Father.

Charles de Foucault.

Join with me, however hesitantly and fearfully, in acknowledging our shared dependence on the Good and Loving One greater than ourselves, the One who rewards our trust by giving us more of Himself.

Matthew 6:9-13

From Jesus’ model prayer we learn a great deal about not only how to pray, but also what kind of world we live and work in, how we are to view that world, and what God expects of us as we work our way through it. It speaks of who God is and how we are to acknowledge his transcendence and Fatherly care. It says to pray for his kingdom, his rule, to come – to be made complete in the soon-future, but also to be manifested in tangible ways in our lives, our work, and world today. Then the prayer expresses this profound hope again, but in different words this time, by seeking the realization of God’s loving will in our everyday experience. And, lest we grow proud and callous towards God’s providential care, we are expected every day to ask anew for his provision over our most basic needs. Do we ever stop to think how God answers that request? Because in his providence he does, every day.

Since we are in community with our neighbors, this prayer forces us to recognize that in our work and other aspects of our life we often offend and poison others through sins of commission and omission. We must bring those large and small debts to God, and deal with them so they do not accrue on our balance sheets and poison our relationship with our loving Father. But we humans are not the only active agents in this world; there are principalities and powers that are set against us and the purposes of God. We need protection and deliverance from them. We need strength to stand. We are to resist the forces of darkness that seek to destroy our potential and our future, that work to create “structures of sin” in human organizations – corporate, political and otherwise – and encourage the development of work environments that seem designed to destroy our humanity: our body, and our spirit.

Our modern world is organized around work. This may seem obvious, but try to imagine a world without work. Is that even possible? Maybe you can, but then try to think carefully about how such a world could be a meaningful one for human beings. It is by no means an easy task.[2] Part of the reason for this is that God has designed us to work, to fill his creation with the “fruits of our labors” as we shape it and tend it.

Work may be viewed as little more than a means of providing for our needs and wants. Or maybe we find it – at least some of the time – to be an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding activity in itself. For many, work is a dehumanizing drudgery that eviscerates and enervates the worker even as it provides the means to live another day. Working is part of what we are intended to do as God’s creatures, and yet this very statement seems difficult to accept because of the many struggles and frustrations we encounter in our work, and what we can observe about the alienating nature of work for much of the world’s population.

The final line of the prayer reminds us that this present world – as it is now with all its often dehumanizing and alienating work – is not the end. The story has not yet reached the final chapter. God is still in control and active in the renewal and redemption of all things in his good creation in Christ; his kingdom will come, and is coming. His power will accomplish this, and He will be glorified. He will be glorified in our work. He will restore his creation and transform the fruits of our work into things fitting for life and ministry after heaven and earth have joined and the Lamb is the light of the eternal city.

[1] Author’s translation.

[2] Kory Schaff, ed., Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 1.

Image sourced from http://hr.ucsb.edu/icons/work_life.jpg.

Thomas à Kempis

Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace each of us may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your  justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.†

From The Divine Hours.

Create and make in me a new and contrite heart, that I,
worthily lamenting my sins and acknowledging my wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. †

From The Divine Hours – Prayers for Springtime.

I thought that I might include a few quotes here to give a feel for the types of issues that Frankfurt is dealing with and the approach that he takes. In this book he presents a compelling argument against the postmodern tendency to deny the reality of objective truth. I would recommend the book to anyone who would like a counterpoint to antirealist and relativistic notions of truth.

On the incoherence of denying the three classic laws of thought as applied to truth both epistemically and metaphysically:

“…even those who profess to deny the validity or the objective reality of the true-false distinction continue to maintain without apparent embaressment that this denial is a position that they do truly endorse. The statement that they reject the distinction between true and false is, they insist, an unqualifiedly true statement about their beliefs, not a false one. This prima facie incoherence in the articulation of their doctrine makes it uncertain precisely how to construe what it is that they propose to deny. It is also enough to make us wonder just how seriously we need to take their claim that there is no objectively meaningful or worthwhile distinction to be made between what is true and what is false.” (p. 9)

On the idea that normative (i.e. evaluative) judgements cannot properly be regarded is being either true or false:

“…societies cannot afford to tolerate anyone or anything that fosters a slovenly indifference to the distinction between true and false. Much less can they indulge the shabby, narcissistic pretense that being true to the facts is less important than being “true to oneself.” If there is any attitude that is inherently antithetical to a decent and orderly social life, that is it.” (p. 33)

So is the question of truth as an objective reality something that actually matters?

“Our success or failure in whatever we undertake, and therefore in life altogether, depends on whether we are guided by truth or whether we proceed in ignorance or on the basis of falsehood. It also depends critically, of course, on what we do with the truth. Without truth, however, we are out of luck before we even start…

We really cannot live without truth. We need truth not only in order to understand how to live well, but in order to know how to survive at all… truth is not a feature of belief to which we can permit ourselves to be indifferent. Indifference would be a matter not just of negligent imprudence. It would quickly prove fatal.” (pp. 36-7)

Frankfurt spends a whole chapter discussing some of Spinoza’s insights on truth and joy, and ends the chapter with this thought:

“Practically all of us do love truth, whether or not we are aware that we do so. And, to the extent that we recognize what dealing effectively with the problems of life entails, we cannot help loving truth.” (pp. 47-8)

So why do truths possess instrumental value (i.e. are useful in a pragmatic fashion for getting by in the world)?

“Insofar as truths possess instrumental value, they do so because they capture and convey the nature of these realities. Truths have practical utility because they consist of, and because they can therefore provide us with, accurate accounts of the properties (including, especially, the causal powers and potentialities) of the real objects and events with which we must deal when we act.” (p. 52)

On the nature of factuality:

“Now, the relevant facts are what they are regardless of what we may happen to believe about them, and regardless of what we may wish them to be. This is, indeed, the essence and the defining character of factuality, of being real: the properties of reality, and accordingly the truths about its properties, are what they are, independent of any direct or immediate control of our will…

The facts – the true nature of reality – are the final and incontrovertible recourse of inquiry. They dictate and support an ultimately decisive resolution and rebuttal of all uncertainties and doubts.” (pp. 54-55)

And, to end this with an obligatory SG-1 reference…