God and Our Stories

Malcolm Guite often tells the story of an encounter between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson essentially started the abolitionist movement in England. William Wilberforce is better known since he led the charge against abolition in Parliament, but we often forget that Clarkson recruited Wilberforce and did much of the legwork that fueled Wilberforce’s arguments. He deserves to be better known.

The abolitionist cause took decades to come to fruition. Along the way, after years of work and no signs of progress, Clarkson was burned out and had a nervous breakdown. He retired from the abolitionist campaign and moved to the Lakes District to rest and recuperate. It was there that he met Coleridge. Coleridge was an ardent supporter of the abolitionist cause, and he looked up to Clarkson as something of a hero. After they met, Clarkson wrote a letter to Coleridge saying that he wasn’t just losing faith in the campaign, he was losing faith. He confessed that he “no longer had any idea of the Divine.”

Coleridge wrote back, saying “My dear Clarkson, do not worry that you have no idea of the Divine, but never forget that you are a divine idea.” God loved Clarkson and had him in mind since before the creation of the world; He waited millennia until the time was right to speak him into existence. Coleridge said that we are all logoi of the Logos, that is, little words spoken by the divine Word, and added that God wasn’t finished saying to the world what he wanted to say through Thomas Clarkson. And then Coleridge ends the letter, “Try not to be an impediment to the speech of Christ.”

I love that last line.

This is a great, maybe even an inspiring story, but is it good theology? I got a question about this in my last post about Coleridge when I referenced his idea about God continuing to speak the world into existence. After all, we know that in the beginning God created the world by His word, but then we are told that He rested from His labors. So isn’t He finished speaking the world?

The short answer is yes, He has finished speaking the initial creation of the universe, but no, He isn’t finished speaking the world into continuing existence. Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Christ, the Logos, “uphold[s] all things by His powerful word.” Apart from the Son’s speaking, the universe blinks out of existence. The mind-boggling thing about this is that it even applies while Jesus was on earth, as Athanasius points out in On the Incarnation. Even while Jesus was an infant (a word coming from the Latin meaning unable to speak), His divine nature was still upholding the world by His word.

We also get a hint of this in John’s Gospel. When attacked for healing on the Sabbath, Jesus answers, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” This points to the fact that God’s rest does not mean the cessation of all activity since God continues His work of sustaining the world, His work of redemption, and other kinds of work as well. Jesus’ healing was an extension of the work the Father was doing, but in light of Hebrews 1:3, we can see additional implications to His working as well.

The notion that God spoke the world into existence and then stopped speaking sounds good on the surface, but it is a fundamentally Deistic way of seeing the world, as if the creation could function or even exist without God being actively involved in sustaining it.

If Jesus is upholding all things with His powerful word, then He is upholding us as well. And this means that our lives are stories God is telling, with our decisions and choices working into God’s story. But if our lives are a story told God, how can our decisions and actions have any significance? Aren’t we just working from the script He’s written without us knowing the ending or even the next scene?

I like the way Tolkien deals with this in The Silmarillion. The first section of the book, “The Music of the Ainur,” is Tolkien’s creation story. Eru Ilúvatar, Tolkien’s name for God, creates from His thought the Ainur, essentially the angelic hosts. He then begins making the Great Music, with each of the Ainur contributing his or her own part out of the nature given them by Ilúvatar. But Melkor, one of the most powerful of the Ainur, decided he wanted to glorify himself and so began singing a discordant theme that through the Ainur around him into confusion. Ilúvatar raised his hand, and a new theme arose that absorbed Melkor’s into a richer, more complex harmony. Melkor tried again with a still more discordant theme, and Ilúvatar raised His other hand and introduced a third theme, more somber and complex than the others. When the music reached its climax, Ilúvatar raised both hands, and the music comes to an end with a powerful chord.

Here’s the key: Ilúvatar tells Melkor that no one can alter the Music against His will. Melkor can stubbornly go his own way in rebellion against what he perceives of Ilúvatar’s music, but in the end Ilúvatar will incorporate Melkor’s themes into a richer, deeper Music that is His own. Melkor’s free choices, even made in opposition to Ilúvatar, will in the end nonetheless serve His Maker’s purposes.

In the same way, our individual decisions, choices, even sins are worked into God’s purposes for the world. A biblical example would be Joseph’s brothers, who sinned grievously in selling him into slavery and lying to Jacob about what happened to his favorite son. And yet that was itself woven into God’s plan when Joseph rose to become second to Pharaoh in Egypt and so was in a position to save his family and thus the line of promise. What does Joseph tell his brothers? “What you intended for evil, God intended for good.”

An even bigger example is the Crucifixion. This was the greatest sin ever perpetrated, yet it is turned by God into the means of our redemption.

Returning to Thomas Clarkson, his work on abolition seemed fruitless. The cause that he had dedicated his life to seemed a failure. In Martin Shaw’s terminology, he was in the Underworld at this point in his life. Coleridge’s letter gave him some hope, however, and he gradually recovered his physical and mental health. After some years, he returned to the fight for abolition with renewed vigor. He continued his anti-slavery efforts even after slavery was abolished in the British Empire.

The lesson here is that even in our apparent failures, even in our depression, even in our physical and emotional collapse, and yes, even in our sin, God is writing our story, and we don’t know the ending—but He promises that He will work all things, even these things, for good.

What’s more, because Christians are united to Christ, we are at the center of things. We are part of God’s great work of redemption and restoration of our fallen and damaged world. Our story matters because it is a part of God’s Great Story. Like Clarkson, we are a divine idea, and God has begun revealing our part of His story in our own time and place. And He hasn’t finished saying to the world what He wants to say through us.

You might think that God will be finished with our story when we die, but I don’t think so. What He is saying in us will carry on in all the people we leave behind and in everyone that we influence. And directly or indirectly, that influence can span generations. We will not know fully the impact of our lives, what God is telling the world through us, until we see it in eternity.

The rabbis say God made man because He loves stories. Your life is a story God is telling the world. Our goal in life is to try not to be an impediment to His speech.

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