It’s amazing how easy it is for us to not see God in everything. The reason is because secularization has squeezed the divine out of life. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes our secular age as disenchanted, or the loss of the transcendent, what is over and above and beyond this material world. Life in the secular age becomes entirely horizontal. All that matters to secular man is the immanent, what he can see and hear and taste and touch. Described differently, we tend to see life as atoms and events colliding willy nilly, sometimes benefiting us, most times annoying and often harming us. These purposeless (secular) circumstances mostly get in our way and keep us from getting what we want. This focus on the here and the now, the mundane, the every day, primarily focused on us, strips the wonder we should have in the magical mystery tour that is life. And unlike with the Beatles, we don’t need a reservation. The magic is laid out on a platter for us every day right before our eyes. We merely have to break through the secular and learn how to see the divine. As the Apostle Paul says, it is everywhere (Rom. 1):
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.
The “they” Paul is referring to are those “who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” In other words, they have no incentive to see God’s invisible qualities in the visible because they prefer their sin. They like being their own god, thank you very much. We are all given to this temptation, but we can learn to see God’s creation in the material world, His “eternal power and divine nature,” thus see God in everything. We can start the process learning from the ancient pagan Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, who said philosophy, or the love of wisdom, begins in wonder. We have to be taught to wonder, to learn how not to be secular, which is a challenge in a secular age. But we can be encouraged knowing it gets easier, that it is matter of obedience. If we want to please God and be blessed by him, we will see his invisible qualities in everything.
How Not to Be Secular
How exactly do we do this? First, we must realize how secularism blinds us to the truth of God, and in all the ways it happens. It’s rarely a brick in the face; the subtle ways we are programmed into secularism are often difficult to spot. As we develop our skills and a wary eye, in due course we will see the secular “agenda” everywhere. I put the quotation marks around agenda because this is not planned by a cabal of nefarious God haters to suck us into their illusions of a God-less universe. Rather, it is simply people’s secular worldview expressed culturally in all they do, be it in their art, or scholarship, or news, or how they see and do law and government, architecture, everything. An obviously not obvious example is TV and movies. Again, this is mostly subtle by treating God as persona non grata, i.e., a person who is unacceptable, unwelcome, or ignored, mostly ignored. God haters don’t sell well to Americans, but an invisible God doesn’t have to be sold.
Any show or movie that isn’t obviously Christian could be given as an example. One we recently watched and enjoyed very much was a documentary series on Netflix about British soccer star David Beckam. The only time the divine makes a showing is when Beckam utters the name and title Jesus Christ in frustration, and the word God makes an appearance or two. Like most art through film, there is no anti-God animas—He’s simply irrelevant. I realized some years ago as I became aware of the insidious nature of secularism that the irrelevant God is probably the most powerful weapon against faith (i.e., trust) in God in the modern world. This secular mindset can easily develop in us if we’re not careful, and a certain kind of God unawareness becomes how we start viewing the world. Almost in a moment, a world of a missing God seems more plausible than one with an omnipresent God.
The Power of Plausibility Structures
I learned about this sociological concept a long time ago, but was reintroduced to its power when I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. Put simply, societies develop the mechanisms (i.e., structures like a building we live in) that make certain things seem true and other things not true. Whether they are true or not isn’t the point, only if they seem true, or seem plausible, to us. This concept is why Taylor wrote his book with the title, A Secular Age. In the Western world today, secularism is the dominant, and often oppressive, plausibility structure, and it appears to many people Fort Knox strong. For example, most people who do not think critically or carefully about things, and from a very specifically intentional Christian worldview (i.e., seeing God in everything) will look at a show like the Beckham documentary and never ask, “Where is God?” God is just as irrelevant to their lives as he is to the Beckham’s.
The easiest way to grasp this concept is to think of it in regard to a movie or TV show or a novel. If they are done well, the story will grip you with its realness, its verisimilitude. You won’t be distracted knowing there is a camera following the character, and likely dozens of people in the room doing the work to make the scene seem plausible. If you yourself were in the room watching it being shot, it would appear to you exactly like what it is, one scene being shot in a movie or TV show. If you’re reading a good novel you won’t think about the person who wrote it making this all up; it will have the plausibility structure to move you; it will seem real. This brings me to the reason I wrote this post.
The Elements of Style and The Revelation of God
I recently read a book called, The Elements of Style. For that past eight years I’ve been on a journey to become a “writer.” Like everything else in my life, I was not naturally good at it, and for a while insecure and doubtful I could master the skills necessary to communicate clearly through written words. I have improved considerably, I think, and continue my journey to improve my craft daily. I had read Elements years ago and thought a re-read of this classic was in order. I was pleasantly surprised I’ve adopted many of the rules laid out as necessary for effective writing, but it was the last chapter on the intangible thing called style that made me shout out, God! I’ve always known words are spiritually profound because our Savior is called the Word, or logos-λόγος in Greek. Also, God created the heavens and the earth using words; God said, and it was. That is power! And we are made in God’s image, so our words have power as well, although in our case for good and ill. Words are primarily and ultimately spiritual in nature, and in some sense communicate He who is the Word.
As I read the following passage introducing the concept of style, I could not help thinking of Romans 1, and God’s invisible qualities:
Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
What the author is trying to describe can only be known when we see or hear it. It is magic, or more accurately, the divine, be it in music or words. What these do to us goes beyond sound waves and ink on a page, and he gives a wonderfully simple example. In the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine penned these immortal words to start a series of essays called, The American Crisis:
These are the times that try men’s souls.
He then gives the same or similar words rearranged to show how it is only these eight simple words arranged exactly this way that exhibit the “high mysteries” of language:
- Times like these try men’s souls.
- How trying it is to live in these times!
- These are trying times for men’s souls.
- Soulwise, these are trying times.
These are all grammatically correct and the meaning is clear and the same as Paine’s, but they would have been “marked for oblivion” the moment they were written. We can all see the power and superiority of Paine’s version, but none of us could say why exactly it has that quality. We just know that it does, that it moves us, and says something profound we cannot forget.
Music is the same way. I often think of this with my favorite bands and artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What was it, for example, about the four young men who made up the Beatles that made their music so magical to so many millions of people all over the world? Listening to their catalog it seemed almost impossible for them to make a bad song. For me, Led Zeppelin was the same. The 1970s version of Stevie Wonder as well. Or take Frank Sinatra. He could sing a song and bring out the magic in the notes and words, while other singers of the same song make me yawn. Nat King Cole had that magic too. Everyone’s taste is different, but this extends beyond taste. I’ll never forget at a function my wife and I attended in the 1990s where I experienced this. I heard a group perform the song Crazy by Patsy Cline, and even though the music wasn’t my “style,” I couldn’t get over how heavy the song was. It had that undefinable magic, and we became Patsy Cline fans instantly. The same happened for me when I learned about singer-songwriter Martin Sexton and his album, The American. In fact, when I first played the CD for my family, my daughter said, “Dad, this is not your kind of music.” I knew there was magic in a bottle in that album, and my family soon agreed with me.
The question is what explains the magic. What is it that gives one combination of notes or words appealing and enduring staying power? That thing we can’t really explain or put our finger on, but everyone knows it when they see or hear it. The other question is does it even require an explanation. The unequivocal answer is that it compels us to ask the question because we know that something like this doesn’t explain itself, any more than does the beauty of a sunset or full moon. Every work of art speaks to the nature of the one who created or performs it, and creation is God’s canvas.
One of my favorite apologetics concepts gets us to the answer. It is worth remembering because it will help you see God in everything: Explanatory power. It simply means what is the best, most plausible, reasonable, rational explanation for something. That which explains something better than any alternative has explanatory power, and we must always consider the alternative. When I read the pages explaining the mystery of style, I got chills because I was clearly seeing “God’s eternal power and divine nature.” I knew the only explanation for it is God, and He became even more real for me in that moment. His fingerprints are powerfully obvious in every square inch of reality for those with eyes to see. The alternative is atheistic materialism, which explains absolutely nothing as I argued in a recent post. We all know matter plus time plus chance cannot explain the “high mysteries” and the magic. We are encountering something deep, something profound, which are “God’s invisible qualities.”
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