The Loss of Divine Transcendence
Part one of a series of challenges and encouragements from Rev. Dr. Rayburn to the church’s next generation.
I have been invited to contribute a few articles to this newsletter offering reflections on current Christian thought and practice. I was asked, I gather, because I represent the generation of the church that is now passing away. Whether you agree with me, whether you share my concerns, the editors thought it might be useful for you to know what one of our ministers of long experience, now in his later years, thinks will be the challenges of the future and what the church will need to be on her mettle to preserve or restore if she is to continue to adorn the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. The past often has something useful to say to the future, perhaps even more in a revolutionary age such as ours, when so much, once taken for granted, is now in dispute or positively rejected.
The first subject that sprang to my mind was the triumph of immanence over transcendence in evangelical thought and worship. By “immanence” I mean what it means as a term in theological discourse. Immanence refers to God’s nearness to us and involvement with us, to Christ’s likeness to us as a man thoroughly familiar with the challenges of human life, to our family relationship with God as our loving Father and Christ as our Savior and our brother, and to God as with us in the struggles of life. He weeps with us in our sorrows and mourns our sins. He longs for us to believe and to obey. As our Father he wants the best for his children and grieves when we fail to obtain it. All of that is profoundly and wonderfully true, the promise of the gospel, and the experience of the saints. Let no one take our crown in emphasizing the presence of God and his loving fellowship with his people. He is engaged with us. But immanence is only part of the biblical picture of the Triune God.
The counterpoise of immanence is transcendence. God is with us, to be sure, but he is at the same time far above us and past our finding out. He inhabits eternity and dwells in unapproachable light. He has determined beforehand everything that comes to pass, tragedy and triumph alike. He is possessed of an implacable, immutable, and holy will. He is the judge of all the earth who keeps an exact record of every human life. Accordingly, he will, on the Great Day, conduct a thorough examination of each life in keeping with that record and dispense reward and punishment accordingly. The living God in all three of his persons is the Creator of heaven and earth, the author and Lord of human history, the destroyer of his enemies, and the Sovereign Judge who will cast the wicked and impenitent into hell.
“God is with us, to be sure, but he is at the same time far above us and past our finding out.”
That side of the biblical revelation of God is in eclipse in the American church today—one might almost say in total eclipse. Immanence is in; transcendence is out. Virtually every development in the liturgical life of American evangelicalism (including that of the Reformed and Presbyterian type) expresses a triumphant immanence at the expense of the biblical and historically Christian emphasis on the majesty of Almighty God. Surely you are witnesses of this.
The informality of contemporary worship, now a commonplace, represents, in fact, a dramatic change from past practice. It does not in any way convey the sense that worshippers know themselves to be entering the presence, even the throne room, of the King of Kings (Psalm 22:3).
Take our dress for example. The producers of sports commentary programs dress their panelists in suits. Why? Because they want the audience to take them seriously, no matter that the subjects they discuss are so remarkably trivial. The dress of our ministers, in contravention of 2,000 years of biblical and Christian practice, is the dress of the street, perhaps even the backyard; not of the sanctuary. It does not convey, as do the many other uniforms worn in modern American life, a calling and an authority. Is the minister simply one of us, there to share his insights? Or is he a man appointed by God to declare his Word to the world and to his people? And would anyone observing a congregation coming to worship on the Lord’s Day morning conclude that these people know themselves to be approaching an audience with the Most High? Dress and deportment always say something. We didn’t change our dress in divine worship because we had learned something from the Bible that we had not known before. We have simply absorbed the customs of our culture, a youth culture whose foundation is the virtually total absence of the living God from thought or life.
“Virtually every development in the liturgical life of American evangelicalism…expresses a triumphant immanence at the expense of the biblical and historically Christian emphasis on the majesty of Almighty God.”
That informality before God—where do we in today’s church ever express solemnity, reverential fear, or even deep respect?—is communicated in many other ways as well. Our architecture used to make obvious that the space in which the church gathers on the Lord’s Day was designed explicitly for divine worship. Nowadays, it is more likely to look like any number of other spaces for other uses. Architecture conveys meaning—always has, always will. And our architecture conveys the importance of our convenience, or perhaps our comfort, more than anything else.
The same is true of our music. The music sung in worship is the music of immanence. Soft rock, pop, and folk, the genres of contemporary Christian praise, do not naturally convey transcendence, nor do the lyrics usually even make the effort. The texts of contemporary Christian praise almost invariably trade in the language of immanence, if not familiarity. Even the direct expressions of the worship of God lack attention to his otherness, still less to what defines that otherness: his infinity, his impenetrable mystery, his holiness, justice, and wrath. They are nothing like the Te Deum, with its one declaration after another of God’s almost insupportable majesty
There have been other changes in our public Christian behavior and in the style and subjects of the preaching we hear on the Lord’s Day, but all of them have moved us away from transcendence toward immanence, away from the outward confession of and reverence for the King of Kings and toward a comfortable, even casual meeting with Father and Elder Brother. And nothing has taken its place in our public life and testimony forcefully to remind either the watching world or ourselves that God is a consuming fire.
“We were made to lift our eyes far above ourselves.”
We must ask what all this will mean for the next generation of Christians. That we have adopted the custom of such a culture is bad enough, and dangerous enough. But what will become of our children if we do not, by our actions, communicate reverence for, even the fear of the God we also love? No one is likely to take the living God seriously if it doesn’t appear that his own people take him seriously!
We were made for immanence, for a family relationship with God who is present with us in our daily life, but we were also made for transcendence and need just as much that dimension of our faith and experience. We were made to feel awestruck before the glory of God. We were made to wonder at his infinity. We were made to tremble before the majesty of his justice, his power that beggars the imagination, the unfettered sovereignty of his rule, and, indeed, his implacable wrath. His saving work is intended to make us people who tremble at his Word and fall on our faces before him. It is our deepest privilege to be known and loved by the Almighty and to love and revere him in return. We were made to lift our eyes far above ourselves. One without the other denatures each dimension. Immanence without transcendence cheapens God’s grace. Transcendence without immanence leaves us at a distance from the God who loved us and gave himself for us.
Of course we will never turn away a worshiper, no matter what he is wearing. Of course you can worship God in a bark hut. Of course the singing of the church sounds very different from culture to culture and from age to age. Of course churches cannot always afford a fine sanctuary or have the musicians necessary to enable a congregation to sing the finest of the Church’s historic praise, whether grand anthems or songs of faith. But don’t mistake the importance of the collective influence of these changes in the church’s behavior. We live in a culture that perfectly conforms to the biblical description: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” The great danger of this is that, without an effective counterpoise, without all that effectively bears witness to the transcendence of the living God, very soon much of Christian truth is going to seem simply incomprehensible to more and more people, Christians included. Indeed, all indications are that it already is. Without the fear of God, the reality of divine judgment, and the unconditional requirement that all nations submit to the Lord Christ, there can be no gospel.
