Well, first of all, pray for my computer screen to stop blinking wildly. My whole life is on this precious machine. I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to cope if anything happens to it. Here’s how I hope you are devoting yourself to prayer:
French; Book of Hours; Manuscript leaf; Manuscripts and Illuminations, Jean Bourdichon
Second of all, I am caught between too many opinions. Protestia posted some great clips that I think I will have to get to as the week goes on. And then Peachy posted this astonishing video. But, I think, because of the general mood enveloping me on this gray, icy morning I should just say all the things about this brilliant tweet that I knew would soon appear as a gift delivered as of first importance into my feed/inbox:
The main thing to remember is that a progressive view of reality renders the Scriptures incomprehensible—you think you’re making sense of them, but you’re straining a gnat and swallowing an absurdity, like that God borrowed Mary’s womb for nine months as if he were an interloper or a cad. But because Jesus loves sinners and I love talking about Jesus, let’s just work through the logic.
First of all, it’s important to remember that God is the creator of the universe, the world, and all the inhabitants of the world. He made it all. Some people like to dispute this point, and say that God didn’t really make it all, but only made part of it, and then allowed natural processes to occur, that he set it in motion and then let it go apace, or that he didn’t even set it in motion, but that there was some sort of accidental moment where life of some kind came into being and then, after a while, here we were, but the God in the Bible rejects both of those ideas. He takes responsibility for the whole ball of clay.
He created the world and then he created a man and a woman and set the two in his creation and told them to obey him which, you might remember, they did not do. After a while, when God has been talking to his disobedient creatures for a long while, he says, “You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?” I feel, in some crucial way, that God is speaking to Dr. Kevin M. Young here but I may be mistaken.
It’s important to point out that God is the creator even of Mary. She was born as a baby to parents who didn’t ask her if she’d like to be born, by the will of God who didn’t ask any of us anything about how we’d like it. Mary isn’t unique, which is kind of the point. She is a creature and God is her creator. When the angel sent from God comes to her, she is sensible enough to know this, and unlike that bad clay above, she says, “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
The strange thing about Mary, though, is that she is unique. God, in his divine will, out of all the people whom he had ever created, chose her to bear his Son. He thought about it—or however it is that God takes the decisions he makes—and determined both the moment and the person, according to his inscrutable will. The strangest thing of all, though, is that he didn’t just plant a baby in her womb, hand a PIN to access all the cash, and then check back in nine months later, hoping to get the product he bought. No, by the mysteries of the incarnation, Jesus, her Son, is both the Son of God and the Son of Mary. He is her human Son, and he is the Son of God the Father. God joined himself to us in our humanity by taking up residence in Mary, by taking her flesh and making it part of his own.
It’s sort of interesting, actually, to think of how surrogacy is a fake out, or a mimicry of this curious action of God to stoop so low to come to us as someone we could recognize, as part of the creation he brought forth. Joseph is asked to come and be the earthly father, a task I’m sure he didn’t feel equipped for. He has the presence of mind to say, “I am the clay, you are the potter.” He isn’t so foolish as to try to organize any part of what happened according to his own calculations or sense of what ought to happen. He doesn’t have any money. It isn’t his child. And yet he bows his head and submits to the will of his creator. Surrogacy goes in the opposite direction. Someone who wants a child, but who can’t have one, barters and buys someone else to do it. Two men can’t have a child—did you know? A man and a woman can have one, but two men can’t. So that’s disappointing for them. Giving a woman a lot of money to carry the child and then give the baby over is the opposite of what God did. God gave Mary a child, indeed, he gave himself to her, he lived with her. She was his tabernacle for a while.
I think the problem, for people like Dr. Kevin M. Young, is that they don’t want to be with God as he is. They don’t want him to come so close and yet be so perfect and so strong. They want to set the terms of the relationship. They want some sort of mail-order God who can be molded according to what is acceptable today or tomorrow. They don’t want to give themselves over, abjectly, utterly, like a lump of clay, to be done with as God might will, to be someone in whom God will make his home.
Eventually, after Jesus died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, Mary, and all the church, again became the place where God dwells. When you have the Holy Spirit, you are the habitation of the Almighty—individually, but also corporately when the church gathers together. Mary was a sort of first fruits for us—someone we can look at to see what we ought to say and how we ought to feel. We ought to ponder all these things, we ought to say yes quickly, we ought to be willing to let the sword of Christ’s suffering pierce us also.
If you think about it, it’s quite blasphemous for Dr. Kevin M. Young to liken the salvific act of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to the work of two gay men to pay a woman to have a baby and then take the baby from her so that the child has no mother but only two insolent, selfish men playing at being fathers. It’s a sort of anti-godhead. Instead of the Holy Trinity, One God, drawing us up into his life to be with him forever, you swap it out for an abundance of loss, pretense, grief, and recriminations.
So anyway, have a nice day!
This seems to be the crux of the problem:
"The main thing to remember is that a progressive view of reality renders the Scriptures incomprehensible—you think you’re making sense of them, but you’re straining a gnat (and) swallowing an absurdity ..."
Unredeemed, sinful minds will always begin reasoning from their own experience and being which, let's face it, are usually blasphemous.
I heard some other blaspheming commentator speak on the Incarnation as a model for strong men to impregnate the wives of weaker men, and then force the weaker men to raise their offspring in their stead.
As you say, "swallowing an absurdity."
Love your comments about Mary as the example of how we ought to respond to God! Regarding Young—just when you think it can’t get any worse…