Patient Whispers Of A Noble Mind

Bruce Charlton has become one of my regular daily stops, ever since I realized that the good doctor can be relied upon to provide original and provocative observations on a number of topics. It’s about time I added his blog to my blogroll.

Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking quite a bit about Bruce’s musings on Mormonism. This came about rather indirectly, after Bookslinger, a regular commenter at the Charlton blog recommended to me an LDS video about spiritual migration. After watching this video several times and subsequently watching/listening to several talks by Dieter Uchtdorf, I delved into Bruce’s archives and began reading some of his older writings on the CJCLDS.

This evening, while reading a post from 2013, one of Bruce’s responses to a comment brought me up short. The comment was related to God’s incomprehensibility, and Bruce noted:

I think the incomprehensibility stuff can be and is often very overdone – you don’t often hear children going on that way about their Fathers. Of course a child does not understand his Father’s reasons, but this is rendered unimportant by his confidence and trust in the Father’s love.

I was instantly carried back to my years in the Presbyterian/Reformed world, where talk of God’s incomprehensibility and distinctness from His creation were hammered and tong’ed at every worship service, Sunday School class, fellowship meal, prayer meeting, and backyard barbecue. Van Til’s circle diagrams would be mentioned, and all the men would stare at their knees, shaking their heads in that so-wise-and-so-grave manner I came to know so well.

And it never really clicked with me. Not at all. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth and frankly a suspicious view of God. Incomprehensibility. Absolute sovereignty. Complete omniscience. I would listen to these little chats and think about how little they made me feel love towards God the Father. The same with Jesus. The way He was discussed gave me no flavor of His being the compassionate Son of man, but rather a nerdy hair-splitter with Anointed Asperger’s who just kept insisting “You’ve got your syllogisms wrong, wrong, wrong...”

My exploration of traditional Roman Catholicism showed me a different perspective, one in which I’m still thrashing about and unsure. But Bruce, with those few taut sentences, burned away so much of the dross and left me staring, unseeing, at my screen and nodding for several minutes. Children do not talk about their fathers in such murky, tax-code ways. Children do show trust in and reliance upon their fathers’ love for them. For them. 

For me, Bruce’s take on these issues represents the patient whispers of a noble mind, as does his brave willingness to discuss ideas and theologies at which too many people sneer and smirk.

~ S.K. Orr