Prayer for a Proper Reticence, and Doxology Leading to Contemplative Worship.

O God Beyond me, you dwell in unapproachable light. Teach me that even my highest thoughts of you are but a dim and distant shadow of your transcendent glory.

Teach me that if you are in nature you are still greater than nature.

Teach me that if you are in my heart, you are still greater than my heart.

Let my soul rejoice in your mysterious greatness.

Let me take refuge in the fact that you are utterly beyond me, beyond the sweep of my imagination, beyond the comprehension of my mind.

Your judgments are unsearchable and your ways past finding out.

O Lord, hallowed be your name.

(Diary of Private Prayer, John Baillie, Day 17 Morning Prayer)

In a world fixated on explanation, obsessed with transparency and 'the right to know', curious beyond reasonable limits to know the private details and revealing gossip of what makes up others' lives, this prayer is a request for humility of mind, proper reticence and reserve about what we need to know, and a contentment that comes from glad resignation to the mystery of the One who is beyond our knowing, and who refuses to 'put it all out there'. Except for one explicit and specific statement, God's final and definitive revealing of God's own truth, "He has spoken in his Son." 

Or as T F Torrance never tired of reminding people, "There is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ." The full quotation reads like this:

"What God is in eternity, Jesus Christ is in space and time, and what Jesus Christ is in space and time, God is in his eternity. There is an unbroken relation of Being and Action between the Son and the Father, and in Jesus Christ that relation has been embodied in our human existence once and for all. There is thus no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, but only this God whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus." (Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 243-244)

Baillie and Torrance were not contradicting each other. Baillie's prayer bows the heart before the mystery of Love Eternal that is beyond knowledge; Torrance's doxological theology lifts the heart to gaze on the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

 

Comments

[John Rackley]

If the Prayer of Baillie and the quotation from Torrance is about the transcendent depth of our approach to God why has the liturgy and song of the Church persisted in altogether too humanistic language such as Father/Son, King/Saviour and Lord/ Master down to this time?

[Jim Gordon]

Hello John, and thank you for your question, and for taking time to read and write about the post. I think the transcendent depth Baillie addresses is in God, not in our approach. Both Bailie and Torrance are aware of the need for what calvin called 'accommodation', hence the use of anthropomorphism.While Torrance argued there is no God behind Jesus, he also took immense pains to write and explore the mystery of the Trinity, and the unfathomable depths of love revealed in the incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord. As for the Church's liturgy and song, they too are not reducible to 'humanistic language'. Charles Wesley as one example wrote hymns that celebrated the transcendent mystery, indeed the ineffability of divine love. For myself, I do not see a dichotomy between the language of biblical terminology and the limits of language to capture or encapsulate the full reality of God.