This is a version of what I said to our School of Ministry Studies and Seminary grads: As you get out into ministry far from the warm nest of our Grace community you will have days when you wonder where is God? We tend to think about finding God in our time-and-space universe. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, mocked God when he looked out his capsule window and did not see him. Would it not be much better to think about God (plus heaven and the resurrected Jesus) not as living somewhere ‘out there’ but in an entirely different dimension? C.S. Lewis has this idea of a ‘Door in the Air’ from Prince Caspian, where the Pevensie children simply walked through a door in a Narnian field and were immediately in the London subway. We know that God has “set eternity in our hearts,” but we must not think of eternity as just a very long time. Rather, eternity is a new dimension from which angels can appear, as at the birth of Jesus. So, where is God? He’s very near. He could step out of eternity at any moment. He’s that close, but in the midst of issues, pain, and our challenges, we struggle to imagine him so close.
We even forget to wonder about that dimension because we stand on this side of the Enlightenment. From the 1600s, Western thinkers have wanted to have all the benefits of a world ordered by God but without God. Like a Jenga tower, the Enlightenment thinkers imagined they could pull out some blocks without making our very humanity or an orderly society collapse. At first, they rightly pulled out superstition and the abuse of power (think Crusades), but they also pulled out Jesus and the authority of the word of God. Over time, they replaced every major Christian doctrine with a secular idea so that instead of ‘covenants’ we have ‘contracts’ and instead of a ‘soul’ we have a mere ’self.
We could think of it this way: the Enlightenment eliminated all Flat Earth thinking so we could have a robust physical world, but we gave up a robust human soul for the Flat Self that we see today. In the Middle Ages, people died of plagues, public executions, wars, and childhood diseases, which (with Ukraine and Covid as major exceptions) are nearly gone. But today our flat-souled friends are dying of suicide and suffer from severe anxiety, depression, and ignorance deluded by various postmodern narratives.
Long ago E.A. Abbott wrote a fiction called Flatland. It concerned two-dimensional people living in a two-dimensional world, like a sheet of paper. They were visited by a sphere from Sphereland, who tried to explain to the flatlanders the robust nature of a three-dimensional world. The sphere just looked like a circle to the flatlanders, who could not begin to comprehend what the sphere was talking about. That is our world today, very two-dimensional; we find a robust three-dimensional universe (with God as creator, sustainer, and savior) to be an absurd idea. Absurd? Yet we still suffer from anxiety and depression and find nowhere to turn. What if God were really close by?
When I started at Princeton, I was fearful and sought help by attending the on-campus Presbyterian Church. I heard a speaker say that Jesus was the son of God, born of the Virgin Mary. He lived a perfect life, he taught and healed people. He was betrayed and died on the cross to pay for our sins and then rose from the dead. He empowers the church and will return. The speaker followed that by saying, “We all believed that nonsense until the Enlightenment.” That Enlightenment man, who intended not to preach the gospel, communicated it to me for my first time. It changed my life even though I ran away from God for well over a year.
During that time, I was distressed by the philosophy course I took. While philosophers are brilliant, their ideas are exquisite contortions based on their assumptions. If there is no God in their assumptions, there will be no God in their conclusions. The main philosopher we studied was A. J. Ayer, a logical positivist, who held that no statement can be true unless it can be experientially demonstrated. This very statement cannot be experientially demonstrated and yet positivists insist that is true. I learned later that in his 80s, Ayers had a near-death experience and thought he saw God. When he revived, he said he would have to rethink his views. Hearing the gospel, I had to rethink my ideas as well, and a year later, I trusted Christ.
So, where is God? We need to rethink our Enlightenment assumptions and let our spiritual imagination, rather than our materialist thinking, guide us to the robust life where we realize that Jesus is not only the Lord of life out there who died and rose long ago, but that he is close to us. Do not pull blocks out of our spiritual Jenga tower and become a flat-souled self. Eph 2:8-9 reminds us that the grace of God in Jesus alone made this all possible. God is very near.