Parable of the Speedy Arrest

A man seated in a glass case is not put to such embarrassment as is a man in his transparency before God. This is the factor of conscience.

By the aid of conscience things are so arranged that the judicial report follows at once upon every fault, and that the guilty one himself must write it. But it is written with sympathetic ink and only becomes thoroughly clear when in eternity it is held up to the light, while eternity holds audit over the consciences.

Substantially everyone arrives in eternity bringing with him and delivering the most accurate account of every least insignificance which he has committed or has left undone. Therefore to hold judgment in eternity is a thing a child could manage; there is really nothing for a third person to do, everything, even to the most insignificant word is counted and in order.

The case of the guilty man who journeys through life to eternity is like that of the murderer who with the speed of the railway train fled from the place where he perpetrated his crime. Alas, just under the railway coach where he sat ran the electric telegraph with its signal and the order for his apprehension at the next station. When he reached the station and alighted from the coach he was arrested. In a way he had himself brought the denunciation with him.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. p. 255
Parables of Kierkegaard. p. 37

This passage has been on my mind lately. A number of people are having intellectual difficulty accepting the existence of a literal hell.

I have no interest in defending the doctrines of hell, or citing evidence to confirm it, or discussing (philosophically) what hell is. I think my behavior before knowing Christ has suffeciently demonstrated the existence of a literal hell.

I am drawn to this passage in Kierkegaard particularly because modernity has no understanding of what inner anguish is. And it has no interest in it. It just understands physical suffering regardless of who deserves it, and it is totally indifferent to the quality of their faith.

The difficulty for the critics of hell is that every person holds sway over an invisible court with which they are continually condemned over and over. They didn't learn this from the noisy Baptist preachers or any "third person" as Kierkegaard says.

The matter is just that many, many people carry the weight of their imperfect actions on their shoulders and it is slowly killing them. The reality of this weight has nothing to do with what can be shown on the outside (microscopes, reporters, opinion polls). It has everything to do with what is going on inside.

Jesus once said everyone who sins is a slave to sin. A man can live his entire life on the surface and never breath a word of his hidden guilt, but this does nothing to negate the guilt inside the man. This does not make his suffering any less real, for he is truly a slave.

The Curse of Apollo

In university anthropology classes religion is often described as an activity thought up by humans in order to frame certain social practices or perhaps to keep everyone from going crazy.

These classes tend to view the desires and intentions of dieties as extensions of human desires and intentions. I am relectant to believe everything has such a quick and easy explanation.

But let Freud have his say. He has a wealth of examples in the mythologies of the Greeks.

For example, the professor who taught my class on the Republic once noted that if an ancient Greek were to hear the message: "God loves you," He would take it as a warning or possibly a curse.

Greek love -which we may loosely refer to as that physical desire discussed in the Symposium, eros- is a very, very human love. Consider how the average man or woman would pursue someone if they had unrestrained power and you have a glimpse of the gods' eros.

In the Greek stories there were many who were "loved" by the gods, and one such person was that legendary prophetess, Cassandra.

Cassandra had the unfortunate fate of crossing into the eyes of Apollo. Apollo, the shining, favored son of Zeus loved Cassandra. Or perhaps we should say that -physically speaking- he loved Cassandra.

When Apollo learned that Cassandra did not share this same love for him he became angry. Indeed, what creature would fail to respond to the eros of a god?

So Apollo placed on Cassandra what was considered by the Greeks to be a tremendous curse. Cassandra was given the ability to foretell the future, but no one would ever believe her. In some versions of the Cassandra narrative the Trojans mistook her for a mad woman and locked up.

At this point some discussion on Greek culture would be well in order. To the Greeks a person's worth was largely in the eyes of their polis -or perhaps we could say the general public of their city-state.

Individuality was often considered a trait of the barbarians. For indeed the barbarians spoke a strange tongue ... to the Greeks it sounded like "Bar bar bar bar ..." And who would want to live with someone who could not communicate themselves to others?

Well, Cassandra certainly did not.

Cassandra's homeland, Illium, fell into the hands of the Achians. She was taken to Greece as the concubine of Agamemnon. It was revealed to Cassandra that his wife, Clytemnestra, would soon kill both Agamemnon as well as Cassandra.

Cassandra tried to warn Agamemnon, but her warnings fell upon deaf ears. Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and then Cassandra.

Here we see that the height of Greek tragedy is to be misunderstood. No one can appreciate the misunderstood person except for that person alone and perhaps the gods (who are usually hard to find and quiet). A misunderstood person is an alien to his peers -an outsider without honor.

And how did this compare to the method of the God of Israel?

Like Apollo, Jehovah wanted those he favored to be set apart. He gave his people ten ways they were to be set apart, and he gave them the sign of circumcision. Why would someone want to obey the ten commandments? Why would they want to be circumcized?

The gentiles had difficulty understanding the Israelites.

When Israel turned against God, he sent prophets to them who were even more set apart. They had unusual practices: sometimes tearing the clothes off their backs, rebuking kings, one poured water on a dead bull and expected it to catch on fire, one went naked for a time, and another sat for an extended time in dung.

In Ezekiel's case he was told by God to preach to a people who would never understand him.

And they were told that 'to be loved by the world was hatred toward God'.

Then God sent Jesus. Jesus was a man who lived a different life. The public had mixed views of the itinerate carpenter's son. Eventually they coopted the Romans into having him put to death.

But Jesus was different from everything in the Greek mythology.

From the begininng of his ministry he taught the people saying:

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The word "blessed" is the Greek word "makarios" which can be translated as "happy". Jesus is saying the followers who were insulted, persecuted, and lied about because of the truth were truly the happy ones.

As for myself I have little difficulty believing the cult of Apollo had its origin in the human mind. But who could have conceived that to be insulted, persecuted, and falsely accused was a wonderful happiness? Someone with a very different view of the world.

The Greek gods often gave their followers spectacular misfortunes. One wonders if they would have been willing to live under the same curses they issued to the people.

Jesus, on the other hand, not only told the people they were blessed when they were insulted, persecuted, and falsely testified about -he lived out the blessing in his own life.

One of the greatest curses of Apollo's love was to be affected by the gods and misunderstood by the people. One of the greatest blessing of Christ's love is to be affected by God and misunderstood by the people.

What about you? Is there something different about you that God has done in your life? Do you consider it to be a blessing? Does it bring you happiness?

Indirect Faith

I am a fan of Calvin's writings. Though I am not a Calvinist myself, I am drawn to his style and the way he subtly zeros in on the spiritual truth. He is a much stronger writer than many who consider him to be an ally.

Although Calvin is making doctrinal points in this passage, he is not without attention to the task of edification. Consider the following passage:

We grant, indeed, that so long as we are pilgrims in the world faith is implicit, not only because as yet many things are hidden from us, but because, involved in the mists of error, we attain not to all.

The highest wisdom, even of him who has attained the greatest perfection, is to go forward, and endeavour in a calm and teachable spirit to make further progress. Hence Paul exhorts believers to wait for further illumination in any matter in which they differ from each other (Phil. 3:15). And certainly experience teaches, that so long as we are in the flesh our attainments are less than is to be desired.

In our daily reading we fall in with many obscure passages which convict us of ignorance. With this curb God keeps us modest, assigning to each a measure of faith, that every teacher, however excellent, may still be disposed to learn. Striking examples of this implicit faith may be observed in the disciples of Christ before they were fully illuminated.

We see with what difficulty they take in the first rudiments, how they hesitate in the minutest matters, how, though hanging on the lips of their Master, they make no great progress; nay, even after running to the sepulchre on the report of the women, the ressurection of their Master appears to them a dream.

As Christ previously bore testimony to their faith, we cannot say that they were altogether devoid of it; nay, had they not been persuaded that Christ would rise again, all their zeal would have been extinguished. Nor was it superstition that led the women to prepare spices to embalm a dead body of whose revivial they had no expectation; but although they gave credit to the words of one whom they knew to be true, yet the ignorance which still possessed their minds involved their faith in darkness, and left them in amazement.

Hence they are said to have believed only when, by the reality, they perceive the truth of what Christ had spoken, and not that they then began to believe, but the seed of a hidden faith, which lay as it were dead in their hearts, then burst forth in vigour.

They had, therefore, a true but implicit faith, having reverently embraced Christ as the only teacher. Then, being taught by him, they felt assured that he was the author of salvation: in fine, believed that he had come from heaven to gather disciples, and take them thither through the grace of the Father. There cannot be a more familiar proof of this, than that in all men faith is always mingled with incredulity.

The Institutes. Book III. Chapter II.

Here are some aspects of this passage that caught my attention.

First, Calvin writes: "In our daily reading we fall in with many obscure passages which convict us of ignorance." A key phrase here is "fall in". This phrase accurately expresses the gravity of the word and how it desires to pull us into it. Calvin is telling us the Bible should be read daily and we should pay attention to the way it intends to speak to us personally. An honest heart reads the Bible saying, "Hey, that sounds like my life."

This is in direct contrast to his opponents, the scholastics, who held the Bible at arm's length. They did this so they could pass it around easily in the form of rhetoric and ideas without needing to bother with the details of examining how to relate to it. They made it easy to look down on the disciples for their shortcomings while forgetting their own.

Second, consider this enigmatic sentence: "... Faith is implicit, not only because as yet many things are hidden from us, but because, involved in the mists of error, we attain not to all."

The word implicit means 'implied' or 'indirectly expressed'. When Calvin calls faith 'implicit' he means that it doesn't happen as a direct result of outward events. It is rather an inward thing that we cannot see in another person directly.

Calvin asks, 'Why doesn't faith happen directly? Well it's not just because we don't know everything. It's also because we live by pathetic expectations.'

Jesus explicitly told the disciples he would be handed over to sinners and die and he would later be brought back to life again. When Jesus died (and even as early as his capture) the disciples seemed to give up on Christianity.

What's important here is Calvin isn't shaking his head saying, "Those selfish turkeys." And he's not saying, "If only they had been more educated like those scholastics ...". He's saying, "Those guys had trouble accepting the beautiful message of the gospel ... just like all of us."

Thirdly Calvin notes at the end of the chapter: "In all men faith is always mingled with incredulity."

In other words Calvin is saying, 'Show me a person who faithfully trusts God and I will show you an unfaithful person living with doubt.' Faith is not a trite thing to be easily won over. As one Danish writer once put it, it is not a thing easy to gain and surpass but a task for a lifetime.

In conclusion -and I do believe Calvin is with me on this one- the command to have faith is so foreign, so alien to our human understanding that we need God to come into our hearts and win us over to the life of faith. Although I do not believe God forces His faith upon us, it is something we need to be on board with Him about.

Also faith is not something we can 'show off' and boast about. No one else really knows how much faith we have (and how much we don't have) except God. So we should strive to trust God in the way that is pleasing to him and to often examine our hearts.