Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 29 2009

I remember with fondness my Jr. High Sunday School teacher. He put up with a lot of nonsense from me and my friends. We were the ultimate tangent-takers, attempting to derail his teaching down any number of speculative spurs. Usually we tried to steer the conversation around to the fate of people who never have an opportunity to hear the gospel preached to them. Will God condemn them?

The tables were turned on me the other night when, at the last minute, I was called to teach a class of 5th graders at the church. Improvising, I turned it into an “ask the pastor” type of event, encouraging the children to ask me anything they ever wanted to know about the Christian faith. For some reason, the questions always found their way back to dinosaurs. How do they fit in the bible?

Christians, it seems, have a perpetual desire to speculate. We enjoy taking the tangents, especially on matters where we don’t have all the answers. One of the things I have come to appreciate about John Calvin, the forerunner of Presbyterian thinking, is how cautious he was when it came to matters that were not clearly defined in the bible. He was continually criticizing the speculators.

In a passage early in the Institutes, Calvin writes that God is shown to us “not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation.” Calvin believes that God can be known. He has made the case that God is known ultimately in the bible. But he also makes the case that the bible doesn’t give us exhaustive knowledge of God. We do not know God “as he is in himself.”

To put this another way, God reserves the right to be God. We are finite. We like to speculate about questions that are on the fringes of the bible, yet if we go too far in our speculation, we take the risk of overstepping the boundaries between creator and creature. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8)

Instead, Christians would do well to discipline their minds around the core truths of the gospel—the things that are clear and well-attested in scripture. The Apostle’s Creed gives us a good indicator of the core message that should permeate our thinking. Paul encouraged Timothy to rebuke the speculators of his day, those who devoted themselves to “myths and endless genealogies.” (1 Tim 1:4) Paul reminded us that “these promote controversies rather than God’s work.”