Mystery: The Vital Element

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Monday, May 24, 2004
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You don't have to be right about everything. Once you realize this, it will be a weight off your shoulders. You'll realize that it is not up to you to prove that everyone else is wrong. Herman Bavinck's classic The Doctrine of God begins with the famous sentence, "Mystery is the vital element of Dogmatics." He might as well have written that mystery is the vital element of everything. Nothing, no matter how brilliantly it was first conceived, retains a drop of value once the mystery has been distilled. Every truth becomes a kind of lie, an inadvertant piece of disinformation, when it is considered without reference to the mystery that infuses existence. There are things we know for certain. There are things we have good reason to believe. But there are also things we do not and cannot know. The way to deal with these lacunae is not to invent inadequate doctrines to explain them away. Pretending they are not there is another blind alley. Instead, we must come to terms with the limits God has placed on us.

The apologist's confidence should not rest, in the case of Christianity, in evidence and arguments. These may prove insufficient, and sometimes our unwillingness to question them or interpret them in a different light can bring discredit not just on ourselves but on our faith. The proper object of our confidence is not a thing, but a person: namely Christ. The thing we seek to encourage in others is not acceptance of propositions or doctrinal statements, but reliance on Christ. This is not to say that propositions and doctrinal statements are not important; they are essential. But to live, these formulae must be moist with the dew of mystery, embraced by a believer who knows that they are not exhaustive.

As important as culture is, we are not called to the trenches of a cultural war. The weapons of our warfare are not cultural, but spiritual.