And yet the OED is not the only big book. At the “Job” tab, one finds a meandering account of a particularly poor and troubled man, who—sitting on the ash heap, alone but for the company of dogs, aching, burning, and with every new upset tempted to curse God and die—turns his two wide eyes to the open sky and with a passion that rips apart the fabric of space-time and its God cries, “Violence!” (Job 19:7) and as if encountering something new on the far side of the sun, prophesies, “I know my redeemer lives” (Job 19:25; cf. Eccl 1:9). And I read that with him on the ash heap—in a maelstrom so fierce that even Job’s immeasurable suffering seems a shadow cast from what is for him yet to come—another poor and lonely man, hanging, dying, gasping for air, opens his throat and cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34); and when “the curtain of the temple [is] torn in two . . . [as if encountering something new on the far side of death and damnation], Jesus, crying with a load voice, [prophesies], ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’” (Luke 23:45–46). It strikes me that there is uttered in these narratives a word that no sequence of letters, however small or large, can contain. And I strain to say this new word when I stand before a classroom full of the children of good people, I strain to say it in such a way that no good person could ever say or hear it. And likely, were I just able to find a really good therapist, I’d put this obsession behind me and get on with my life.
The question for me then is “why, why do I see and hear this way?” Most of my colleagues these past decades have seen and heard differently. They seem much calmer about it all, speaking as they do of the good, the true, and the beautiful and of how God fits so well into a system of values, goals, and ideals, i.e., a worldview; of how the story of Job and of Jesus and of God is a story that resolves questions, not complicates and ruptures them. They have told me that it is all about absolutes and universals and all I seem ever to see and hear are contextualized particulars, the life-stories of people with particular faces and voices, of a God with particularly elusive faces and voices. Of course, it may just be that I have been beguiled by Protestant nominalism, that I have fallen prey to that most modern of all perversions, postmodernism, that I am a child of my age. Indeed, I suppose this is all true. How could I honestly say anything else, even as I strain to say something else than the banal or high-born talk of my age?
My journey has been a particular one, too, of course. Everyone’s is. I don’t understand much of it. It is not over, after all. Yet I would venture to say that it is the way I have been given and made time, the way I have come to let time go, the timely way I have begun to be named. Whatever that tiny English pronoun—I—might signify in this case, the thinking and speaking and working attached to it happen here, in this story. And it isn’t just my story.91 I’m not even sure I qualify for a best supporting actor nomination.
It is not insignificant that my hard Scots-Irish ancestors92 cut their way across an ocean and the rivers and forests of a forbidding New World to reach for the promises they’d heard were hidden under the cruel Appalachian Mountains of eighteenth-century Virginia, or the cruel Ozark Mountains of mid-nineteenth-century Arkansas, or the cruel hills of late nineteenth-century Oklahoma; that both my parents were raised in abject poverty by single mothers93 just to the southeast of the official borders of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl; that I am an only child; that I attended nine schools before I went away to college; that I was eighteen in 1968; that in the summer of that year, while reading the book of Acts in the Desert Southwest, I became a pacifist; that the theologians I first threw myself into were Søren Kierkegaard and John Wesley—no theologians at all, the Hollywood Foreign Press would tell us; that I have spent my life among Holiness people; that I still think about the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; that I am an ordained deacon and not an elder; that I have been married over forty years, have three children and six grandchildren; that my parents, now in their nineties, live with us; that I have had already a long career as a professor in four private, self-consciously evangelical universities; and that I know how to be alone.
Perhaps it is all of that which inclines me on a brisk spring morning—obligated to stay put, though these days I am—to make my way to a tall, broad, clear window and there to dream of the open road.94 Perhaps it is all of that which inclines me to make my way to an icon—written with bright pigments across a salvaged plank of wood or in the interplay of the black and white on a printer’s acid-free rice paper or between the lines and words and along the margins of the credos of saints and sinners or upon the tales of liturgically martyred mothers and fathers or in, with, and under the playful work of the eating and drinking of bread and wine—and there to dream of God.95
And yet a dream of God—this God—is no ordinary dream, nor night terror, as Daniel and John the Revelator teach us. It is an apocalyptic vision. As such it makes manifest what good people do not want to see, perhaps cannot see. It manifests above all that there is a tomorrow that no yesterday can dictate.96 But it does so with the ambiguity that accompanies every call to revolution. “The Reign of God is coming,” it says, “and it is coming for you!” As a member of one of the world’s more comfortable socioeconomic classes, I should recoil with horror from this word. “Woe to you rich!” Jesus, the apocalypse of St. Luke, declares (Luke 6:24). And yet, perhaps stupidly, I find myself drawn to the apocalyptic literature of God. It is bewildering, a terrifying mystery story; but somehow fascinating.97
Not all mysteries are fascinating, of course, especially if like this one, they are irresolvable. The exact numeric value of pi is a mystery to which is attached neither tremendum nor fascinans. Those mysteries that most commonly fascinate us are those that we expect with some effort to resolve. They are intellectual challenges—mountains that we set out to conquer, even if only because they are there. They remain fascinating only so long as they simultaneously resist and yield to us. Once they are conquered, we move on to something else. We might wax proudly nostalgic, as we recount the thrills of our victories, but to remember a former mystery is not to face a mystery.
Those of us who have been struck by this apocalyptic vision of God would tell a different story. To be thus God-struck is to face what Kierke-gaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, points to, when he tells us that the passion of the thinker is to think what cannot be thought.98 This apocalyptic God is an irresolvable, engaging mystery that won’t let us go, that won’t ever let us rest in peace (cf. Ps 139:8 and 1 Pet 3:19). God revealed is God hidden and “how unrestingly active God is in all his creatures, allowing none of them to take a holiday.”99 The engagement of this mystery is absolute. It calls for each of us to stand up to it with her whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, as Wesley never tires of reminding us.100
I am a theologian. The work I do is largely academic and intellectual, the work of words. Just about every day I face the challenge of gathering my thoughts before a