It is mutely instructive that when God set about to reveal his full grace to men, he did not send a shipment of systematic theology textbooks.  Nor did he send instructional videos, nor philosophy Ph.D.s, nor notebooks full of syllogisms.  Rather, the Word was made flesh.  When men needed to behold God in all his grace and truth and glory, the Word was made flesh.

THAT’S NOT SPIRITUAL

We moderns find that somewhat odd, even offensive.  God, after all, is a spirit, and well-mannered spirits have no business taking on flesh.  It’s too, well, too fleshly.  Too unspiritual.  We prefer to think about God in comfortable abstractions -–ideas without flesh, and a comfortable distance.

It doesn’t stop there, of course.  “The heavens declared the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork.  Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.  There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.  (Psalm 19:1-3).  And what do all these fleshly details of creation speak of?  “From the creation of the world the invisible things of him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.”  (Romans 1:20)

PLATO:   HANDY, BUT UNTRUE

It is inevitable that men think sometimes in abstractions.  They offer a handy shorthand when we want to talk or think about characteristics things might share.  We strip away the details of men or trees or organisation or life so that we can talk about what they all have in common.

That’s useful, as long as we realise that by their nature abstractions falsify reality, because they don’t exist by themselves.  They are a sort of half-lie – useful, but still less than the whole truth.  If we forget that, abstractions can cripple us.  Never mind Plato, no one has ever seen Truth, or Beauty, or Justice, or Reason.  When God does Justice, he doesn’t go visit “Justice’ someplace for a consultation beforehand.  Outside the character of God, no justice exists.  His work is just because it is his work and because all justice resides in him, not because his work measures up to some abstract standard of justice outside him. If justice exists at all, anywhere, in any relation, it exists there only because it exists first in the character of God.

Beauty, truth, love, justice, reason, every virtue, every reality – find their only being and fountain in the wellspring of God’s character.  They are not beings separate from him by which he can be judged or measured.

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH

So when the time was right for God to reveal himself fully, in greater detail even than creation, he did not send us correspondence courses in systematic theology.  He sent his Son, in whose fullness of detail we beheld everything we could possibly understand and comprehend about God.  It was not in unseen, unparticular, general abstractions that God sent his Son, but in all the glorious particular details of his flesh and his glory.  But we are too proud to accept such humiliation.  We want to take refuge in God’s “incomprehensible divinity,” to keep him safely at a distance.[1]  Abstraction (masquerading as the piously spiritual) erects a comfortable barrier against the uncomfortable details of God.

GOD LIVES IN THE DETAILS

But the only way we know anything is through the details.  I might have guessed at glory, but until I saw the lightning flash and the black thunderheads roll and felt the pelting rain in my face, I did not suspect how beautiful and terrible it might be.  Until I felt the stings of contemptuous injustice in a hundred courtroom experiences, I could not learn justice.  I thought I knew beauty, but met it in fact when I held my first baby in my arms.  I might have had some vague notion of what love was, but until I met love in all its details and particulars in Susan, I never knew love.  But even that knowledge was utterly shallow compared to the depth of love I find in the particulars of Christ.  As the proverb says, “God lives in the details.”

WHAT THE ABSTRACT OVERLOOKS

On the other hand, our modern “scientific” way of thought wants to think and learn everything just the opposite way.  We want to strip away all the details of real, particular things, to abstract (to draw out, to distil) all the “essence” from all the annoying details.  Imagine cutting down a thousand trees, stripping off all their limbs and leaves and bark, and then proclaiming of the bare trunk that’s left, “Now that is a tree.”  On the contrary, it remains only part of a tree, and a non-functioning part at that.

Modernism approaches disease the same way, as if it were a simple reaction in inorganic chemistry.  When the dried leaves of a plant cure cancer in mice, we want to isolate and abstract the active principle and treat cancer with that.  We forget the details.  We forget that, like a puzzle piece, the part fits into the whole, and their details work together.  When the puzzle is biological, the details approach practical infinity and demand both humility and reverence.

TWO WAYS OF THINKING

There are two ways of thinking, induction  and deduction.  Modernism prefers deduction, reasoning from the general to the specific, from the abstract to the detailed, arriving at abstract principles and then applying them to reality.  Induction, on the other hand,  reasons from the specific to the general, from the common details to the common abstract principle.  Both methods, I suppose, have their virtues, but we hardly get a chance to find out because modernism relies exclusively on deduction.

Modernism thinks exclusively in abstractions, and so it must reduce and equalise everything to abstracts without details. Inevitably, this method of thinking transforms itself into action. The city planner plans the city, and then the humans must be made to fit –like Procrustes fitting his guests to his bed.

Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice (If you’re looking for a monument, look around you.)  Stand before any subdivision, any strip mall, or at any interstate exchange.  Tell me where you are. Bangor, Maine or San Diego, California?  DeKalb, Illinois, or Little Rock, Arkansas?  Dallas or Detroit?  For modernism, wedded as it is to abstracts, any place or person is just as good as, and an equal substitute for, any other.  Men are cut off from their details -- land and family and place, everything that defines and distinguishes. Under modernism’s homogenising hand we are smoothed out into perfectly interchangeable parts in the great machinery of modern commerce.

But since abstractions are a half-lie to begin with, how can they arrive at the whole truth, or build a humane or godly society?  Year after year we go farther and farther astray, trying to suppress all the unsuppressible details.  But like the honeysuckle we root out year after year, they keep coming back in the same place.

THE ANSWER

If thinking in abstractions is the problem, what is the world-changing solution?  Maybe it is to refuse to think about ‘world-changing solutions,” and instead limit ourselves to tending the details of the world God has given us.  How many people have you known who energetically promote the conversion of the (unknown to them) heathen in darkest Africa, but lose their own children?  They serve the Great Abstraction (saving the world), but lose their own soul (their children).  We claim America is the guardian of liberty world-wide, but at home we build a police state. 

All this abstract thinking may not merely make us the opposite of what we profess to believe.  It may make what we believe altogether impossible. Rather, we ought to rejoice, as God does, in all the luxuriant, riotous, details – and be instructed.

-- F. Sanders