A quarter-century ago I got a letter from someone who, having read my book, The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World, posed some Big Questions to me. I’ve recently come across my response, and I think I was on to something.
On the Incarnation. The best clue I've ever had to the meaning of the claim that Jesus is God is in an exam-answer sentence from one of my students: "If God had wanted to appeal directly to our minds, Mary would have written a book instead of bearing a child." Yes, the doctrine of the Incarnation doesn't make sense in any usual way, and there have been plenty of times when I felt its unbelievability overwhelming. But other times, and increasingly as I've gotten older, I've found the doctrine pointing to dimensions of reality and meaning that the usual ways of making sense don't cover. If time and eternity were to intersect, what would we find there? The Christian story tells us it's a baby, and the only way we can know about it is through a story, told by people, so the story is going to be full of incongruities and inconsistencies, and there is not even a theoretical possibility that it could all be wrapped up conclusively in a Q.E.D.
The life of the world to come. I have no idea what is on "the other side," and there are certainly periods when I'm not sure there is one. For me, the significance of Jesus's cry of dereliction from the cross is its assurance that despair is not a deterrent to getting to whatever/wherever there might be after our years are done. Some people might say that to imagine God despairing is to abandon all hope, but for me it works just the other way: a God who knows despair is a God I can trust to the end. A guide is Jonathan Edwards.
Here are two entries from Edwards’s “Resolutions.” They were written three days apart, when he was nineteen, in the year that he received his M.A. from Yale.
“50. Resolved, That I will act so, as I think I shall judge would have been best, and most prudent, when I come into the future world. July 5, 1723.
“51. Resolved, That I will act so, in every respect, as I think I shall wish I had done, if I should at last be damned. July 8, 1723.”
These two resolutions come to exactly the same thing. How Edwards would try to live was quite without regard for whether he would be spending eternity in heaven or hell. His trust in God, his commitment and loyalty, lay far deeper than the question “What happens when I die?” It was grounded in a pledge, expressed in another of his “Resolutions”: “6. Resolved, To live with all my might, while I do live.”
I don't think Edwards had any doubts about the other side, though he could have been obsessed by the question whether it would be heaven or hell for him. But the miracle of his Christian sensibility is his recognizing that his eventual fate did not determine what he should do now. He knew what some loud-mouth Christians in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre (April 1999) didn't know, when they said God must have needed those young people so called them to heaven. They denied the most basic implication of the Incarnation, that God has need of us where we are, here in this world where God is.