Holding on to Reality
Andy Crouch
January 1, 2002
If you want to be on the side of the angels in the debates of every age, you would do well to choose the side of the real rather than the ideal. The most fundamental controversies in Christendom have come down to a battle between idealism and reality. The doctrine of the Incarnation-the idea that God really was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth-has been resisted from the very beginning in favor of notions more congenial to an idealism that cannot imagine infinity taking up residence in stuff. The related doctrine of the Trinity arose out of a desire to do justice to three intertwined realities: Jesus' constant, passionate, intimate relationship with the Father, his followers' incontrovertible experience of God in the man with whom they broke bread, and the ongoing presence and power of the Spirit of Christ in their daily life as a community. The church has never been satisfied that anything but the language of Trinity can do justice to that evidence. The Trinity is not our most abstract doctrine; it is our most concrete. All this began to dawn on me a few years ago when I was studying the letter to the Ephesians. I began to see that the lofty language that Paul was using-which at first seemed inaccessibly grand and religious-was in fact the apostle's attempt to speak concretely of the most real thing in the world. When Paul talked about "power," he was referring to a resurrection that had happened in the living memory of hundreds of witnesses. When Paul talked about God's "grace," he was not invoking a mystical concept that needed to be explained with a phrase like "God's Riches At Christ's Expense"-he was speaking of his own rescue from a literal as well as spiritual blindness and of his deliverance into a life of arduous mission. ...
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