Thought for the Week

In my reading, there are times when reading in centuries past, I read something and do a mental fist pump – read with a big ‘yes!’ in my mind. The perspective matches my perspective now or is an insight I don’t recall having and I quite like it … the joys of reading. So here is something I read last week … from Philip Melanchthon …

“Just as there are some subjects … that are completely incomprehensible, so there are some that Christ wants every Christian to know most intimately. We should adore the mysteries of divinity, not investigate them. In fact, as many saints have experienced for themselves, great danger necessarily accompanies the inspection of these mysteries. God Almighty clothed his Son in flesh to draw us away from contemplating his majesty and toward contemplating our flesh, and thus our weakness. So also Paul writes to the Corinthians that God wanted to be known in a new way – through the foolishness of preaching, since in his wisdom he could not be known through wisdom.

Moreover, there is no reason for me to exert much effort on those majestic topics about God: his unity, his Trinity, the mystery of creation, or the manner of his incarnation. I ask you, what have these Scholastic theologians accomplished over so many centuries as they concentrated only on these topics? Have they not become vain in their disputes, as Paul says, while they talk nonsense their whole lives through about universals, formalities, connotations, and other vacuous terms? And their foolishness could be forgiven if those stupid arguments had not meanwhile obscured the gospel and the benefits of Christ. Now if I wanted to display my genius unnecessarily, I could easily destroy the arguments that they offer in support of their teachings and show how many of them seem better to support various heresies than catholic doctrine.

But whoever is ignorant of the other topics – the power of sin, the Law, grace – I do not know how I can call him Christian. For through these topics Christ is properly known, if it is true that to know Christ is to know his benefits and not, as *they* [emphasis in original] teach, to contemplate his natures and modes of his incarnation.” – Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes, 1521 (CPH, 2014): 24 cited in Forum Letter, August 2024.

Melanchthon is not talking about dumbing down Christianity at all. We engage with the world and its science, politics, and social theories and learn from them but we are not blind slaves of them. Just as we are not blind to the dangers of biblical literalism nor to human hubris. We engage with the Word of God and recognise that it declares truth that are not necessarily demonstrable for us but rather reflect mysteries that guide and help us through life. Sometimes in my teaching I have to ‘play’ the ‘mystery card’ and explain the Christian ‘landscape’ and how we understand reality and how God mysteriously ‘fits in’. I can’t explain everything. We don’t know everything. (Otherwise we’d be divine!) But I can declare truths about people and our sins and about God and his grace. And just as there are mysteries in our human relationships – why does this person really love me or forgive me? – and we can come to believe and rely on the simple truth “I don’t fully know why she/he does love me but I live in that love and rely on it and grow in it” so that is how many people live with a faith and trust in certain people (spouse, trusted friend, and so on) and our relationships with them. In a similar way, it is the same in Christianity and the relationship we have with God – it exists because we have met a person, yes, a person Jesus Christ. In meeting Jesus we also discover more. God loves me! What a mystery! What a wonder! What a life we can have!

GS