The Quest for the Holy

“the darkness of God”

by

Frank G. Carver

“When the people saw the thunder and the lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid, God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.’ The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” Exodus 20:18-21 (NIV)

“I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.” T. S. Eliot

PERSONAL PREFACE

This is a personal study I have been working on off and on during the years 1979-1987, at first only in my mind, then on paper, and finally on computer. I was writing for myself only, as Wesley would say, “to save my own soul,” with no concern for public presentation or publication. It was motivated by my own agony and confusion about the essence of my own spiritual heritage, but more particularly, the “holiness’ heritage as it has taken shape in North America and come to distinctive expression in the Church of the Nazarene.

The confusion, probably not the best word, came about as I lived and worked in the midst of the behaviors of holiness institutions and their people during the years mentioned. I speak bluntly of the behaviors and perceived attitudes of the ecclesiastical power structures related to our institutional existence, the district superintendents, the College Board of Trustees, the College administration, the faculty of this great institution, my peers in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and not least my own attitudes, emotions, and conduct. Much of what I saw and felt did not convince me of the beauty of holiness.

So, inspired in the labors of the classroom by Exodus 20:18-21, I set out on a quest for the holy, on a quest for the bottom line of my own heritage as a professed “holiness” person. I was convinced that the four verses of Exodus 28:18-21, which followed the giving of the Ten Commandments in the midst of the theophany at Sinai, when examined in the literary—theological context of the Exodus narrative, would afford a credible clue to the core meaning of the “holy” as it relates to my heritage.

The genre of what follows is some kind of “dukes” mixture of a personal confession, a devotional essay, a study in biblical interpretation, and a treatise on apophatic theology. Perhaps there is a similarity to George McDonald’s novels—a frustrated preacher employing a literary (and academic!) framework in which to hide volumes of sermonizing!

May I suggest that those of you who do not come out of the Wesleyan heritage, by being here on this campus, you have indeed joined a tradition—you are caught up with us in the heritage. Furthermore, as we are all aware, the distinctives of any Christian tradition—Reform, Lutheran, Wesleyan, belong in a genuine sense to all traditions. The differences are only a matter of balance, emphasis and hair-splitting definitions!

I feel like the Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh, New College, whom I overheard talking with a friend. The topic was his dissertation research, “I know more than I understand!” “Darkness” is apt to be more than a religious metaphor in what follows!

THE QUEST

“the thick darkness where God was”

“God comes towards me from out of the darkness. To affirm this darkness, to submit oneself to it, can heal my life from within, give it strength and courage.”

I have a fascination. I have a concern. I am fascinated by “the darkness of God.” I am concerned about “the quest for the holy.”

I am fascinated by the use of the metaphor of darkness for the presence of God in the Old Testament. The classic and contemporary writers on spirituality use the darkness theme in provocatively similar ways. The early fathers of the church testified to the repeated experience of God as darkness. He came to them from out of the darkness.

I am concerned about the essence of a “holiness” people. What does it mean for us to hunger for the holy, we who make Scriptural holiness our ecclesiastical distinctive? How are we to define this quest for that spiritual uniqueness we have traditionally professed? What qualifies us as a “holy folk”?

Moses’ distinctiveness from the rest of the Israelites at Sinai was that he “approached the thick darkness where God was.” In Exodus 20:21 this Hebrew word for darkness, arafel, in eight of its fifteen Old Testament occurrences refers to the presence of the Holy God. Psalm 97:2 is representative:

Clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

Designated by “thick darkness,’ writes Samuel Terrien, is

A total darkness which is a symbol both of the divine presence and the divine hiddenness. . . . It was a symbol of divine power in both its danger and blessing, and it came to designate the complete blackness of the innermost room in the Jerusalem sanctuary.

When Solomon brought the ark to the newly constructed temple and “the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the LORD, . . . then Solomon said, ‘The LORD has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud!’”

Moses experienced “the darkness of God.” Darkness has been said to be “perhaps the most distinctive and existentially most significant of the ‘names of God.’ God lives ‘behind the clouds.’”

Saint Augustine in his Confessions addresses a God who is ”most hidden, yet most present.” Blaise Pascal in Pensees suggests that “every religion that fails to declare that God is hidden is not true; and every religion that fails to explain why is not instructive.” As we search for the holy among us we will seek (1) to affirm that God is hidden and (2) to illumine that hiddenness.

The key concept for our purposes is expressed by more contemporary writers as “the darkness of faith.” “God’s call is mysterious; it comes in the darkness of faith,” are the opening words of Carol Carretto’s Letters from the Desert. This call, he writes,

is so fine, so subtle, that it is only with the deepest silence within us that we can hear it.

He speaks of three calls—his call to conversion, his call to the ministry, and

then, when I was forty-four years old, there occurred the most serious call of my life: the call to the contemplative life. I experienced it deeply—in the depth which only faith can provide and where darkness is absolute—where human strength can no longer help.

This kind of language, frequent in Catholic spiritual writers from Saint John of the Cross to Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen and found as well in Protestant writers, I find promising as a kind of catalytic bridge for reflection on the biblical darkness of God in relation to our faith as a contemporary holiness people.

Exodus 20:18-21 confronts me inescapably with the darkness of God as it epitomizes the central witness of the book of Exodus. This Scripture talks to me about a pressing personal quest—my holiness heritage! What is it really? What is the indispensable essence of my own heritage? What is to characterize us if we are to be a holiness people—if the epithet “holiness” is to have any distinctive reference to us at all? What constitutes a holiness person?

The book of Exodus in recent years, in its structure and theology has been informing my heart concerning what it means to be part of a genuinely holiness heritage, or even better, a part of an authentically biblical heritage. I am discovering that it has to do with a Presence, the presence of the Holy One!

During the 1981 Pastor’s Leadership Conference held on the campus of Point Loma College, I was deeply moved by Paul Thomas’ re-creation of Phineas Bresee in his “The Sun Never Sets in the Morning.” As I listened my heart asked, has not Paul Thomas in his presentation grasped more clearly and profoundly the heart of our heritage than perhaps many of us who are its official priesthood, the ordained ministry of the holiness heritage?

Born and reared a Methodist, I was first attracted to the holiness movement by an overwhelming sense of the holy from which I found no escape. I met it in a godly mother, now ready to turn 90. I sensed it in an old-fashioned Methodist holiness preacher grandfather whose picture hangs on my office wall today. It found me in the interdenominational holiness camp meeting in the Sandhills of Nebraska. In a word, I encountered it at my mother’s knee, and often on it!

For this reason above all, I was led to cast my lot with a distinctively holiness people—the Church of the Nazarene. A pervading sense of the holy was unmistakable when merely walked through the door of that little make-shift white wooden building which was the Church of the Nazarene in Valentine, Nebraska. And can you guess who took me there? It was my Methodist mother!

But where now is that profound awareness of the holy? I do not often sense it deeply in the ongoing life of the institutions of the Church. Has something happened to us? Or, perhaps better, what has happened to me? How do I, how do we, discover again the sense of a transcendent Presence?

I wonder, could the problem be our hesitancy, even our unwillingness,

to walk into the darkness of God! that is, to plant one “faith-foot” on Mount Sinai, to set the other foot of faith on Mount Calvary, and to stand there empty, naked, and helpless before God in the world!

Could it be that God is only truly “known in the darkness of Sinai and of Calvary”?

Moses bore witness that Mount Sinai “blazed with fired to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness.” The Gospels testify that at the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion “darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.”

But instead of the darkness of God it is all too often the dark side of our heritage that we encounter in the life of our holiness community. We cross that thin, almost imperceptible line between the holy and the demonic. Flying with a friend to a California city a few years ago, we were discussing the tensions in our common community. “What we are experiencing,” I suggested,” is the dark side of our heritage.” A moment of silence intervened and then came the query, “What do you mean?” “We are more concerned to be right than to be reconciled,” was my reply. “But Frank, ‘what about the right?’” came the response.

The dark side of the holiness heritage comes most frequently into community life when our concern to live in the atmosphere of reconciliation, for example, is eclipsed by our demonic compulsion to be “right.” For then we are flirting with what Thomas Merton describes as “the moral theology of the devil” in which “the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.” Then the Cross becomes in fact “no longer a sign of mercy,” but “the sign that Law and Justice have utterly triumphed.” With this mind-set we “ have come to an agreement with the Law” and “no longer need any mercy.”

Therefore, I believe that the heart of my heritage is the holy, transcendent presence of the God who manifests Himself in the darkness, ultimately in the dark hiddenness of the cross. My language reflects that of Thomas Merton who speaks of “the darkness where God is hidden” and that of Martin Luther who in his theology of the cross writes of “having entered into darkness,” that is, “into the event revealed to us in Jesus Christ.” It is the unmistakable presence of the holy that puts our common lives unavoidably in the perspective of God, the vision of God in the midst of our common fallen, and historically limited humanities.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

How else dare we define ourselves as the people of God unless by the presence of God? After the disastrous moment of the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai Moses, in a debate with God, was bold to cry out,

If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people, on the face of the earth?

What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” What else, I ask? For whatever else the professed concern for Christ and holiness means, it has to be an almost desperate quest for the holy presence of the God with whom we are to live in acute awareness, the God whose numinous, yet hidden presence is felt by the world around us, both in attraction and repulsion, an unseen perhaps, yet inescapable witness!

I believe that the Holy Spirit of the holy God, the Spirit of the Christ of the cross, is saying to me that my heritage as the son of a Methodist mother, as heir of the holiness tradition, and as a member of the people called Nazarenes, is “the face of God,” that holy transcendent Presence without which

all our doctrinal formulas say nothing all our moralistic life-styles prove nothing all our humanistic enthusiasms accomplish nothing all our ecclesiastical systems protect nothing!

It take more than tidy boxes of orthodoxy, legalism, management theory, or institutionalism to preserve the essence of a holiness heritage and to transmit it to those who come after. It takes an anointing that comes only from a determined and consistent approaching of the darkness where God is, Sinai and Calvary, the priority of the holy in my life:

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.

So it is that Exodus 20:18-21 is penetrating my meditation from mind to heart as to who we are as children of a holiness heritage, as to who I am. But it also suggests some reasons why our heritage so often eludes our best efforts to capture and preserve it. Verse 21 informs us that “the people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” There is a haunting sense in which these are sad and tragic words. For they continue to live themselves out from that day to this in the history of the people of God, not least among us who are prone to distinguish ourselves as a holiness people.

Exodus is a fascinatingly significant document. It answers the question of who Israel is, of who are the people of God, by the story of their constitution as a holy nation. From the perspective of faith Exodus narrates the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery (1:1—18:27) and God’s covenant with them at Mound Sinai (19:1—40:38). Their freedom from slavery found its meaning in God:

You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you and eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

Exodus is wound around and expressive of the one great theme, the presence of Yahweh, the face of Elohim. It is

a presence hidden in a papyrus basket floating in a polluted river, a presence which an obscure man discovers on a lonely mountain side in an ordinary bush on fire, a presence concealed in the hardness of an Egyptian Pharaoh’s heart, a presence which comes to a thankless, fragmented people from a cloud-darkened mountain top, a presence which finds a way to embrace in grace the people of the golden calf, a presence which finally fills the tabernacle with its radiant glory.

It was God Himself with His covenant people in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Presence has created a people!

Exodus 20:18-21 is set in a very illuminating, somewhat numinous context, 19:1—40:38, the revelation at Sinai of the covenant presence, will, and worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel who has now brought a slavery-formed people to himself. God’s covenant promise as it comes through Moses to them at Sinai is

now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

The covenant, initiated by Presence, leads to Presence. Israel, an uncouth mass of slaves transformed into a united people of free men and women, will become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” whose vocation as a covenant people is to mediate the presence of Yahweh to the world.

“The theophany or appearance of God at Sinai” (19:1-25) is the setting for “the giving of the ten words” (20:11-17) which forms the constitution of God’s covenant with Israel. Our passage, describing the reaction of the people paralleling the entire theophany, is concerned with “the office of the covenant mediator” (20:18-21). Set forth next is “the Book of the Covenant” (20:22—23:33) which spells out the detailed covenant stipulations and is followed by “the ratification of the covenant” (241:1-18). Exodus brings its faith-story to a conclusion with “instructions for covenant worship” (25:1—31:18) and the narrative of “Israel’s rebellion and restoration” (32:1—40:38). Contained in this final section is “apostasy with the golden calf” (32:1-35), “the promise of the Presence” (33:1-23), “the covenant renewed” (34:1-35), and “the tabernacle instructions fulfilled” (35:1—40:38). The final scene is awe-inspiring:

Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. . . . So the cloud of the LORD was over the tabernacle by day, and the fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels.

Our scripture, 20:18-21, is a profound and awesome witness to the presence of God. In context it is inextricably bound up with the covenant will of Yahweh for a covenant people. It speaks of a covenant Presence. Israel is to hear a voice, obey a word: “the covenant has to be kept, observed, preserved, maintained.” We do not have to do here with some kind of religious emotion, a mystical experience alone, but with a quality of relationship to God, a holy Presence, that works itself out concretely in the every-day, all-day, issues of our common lives. Integral to that Presence was the covenant principles (20:1-17) and the covenant rules (20:22—23:33) which God gave directly to Israel for its day and culture. The covenant is down to earth, where we humans must live:

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not commit adultery.

Anyone who attacks his father or his mother must be put to death.

Do not spread false reports. Do not help a wicked man by being a malicious witness.

Defined is the holiness which belongs to a holiness people, accepted by the Israelites as their God-given obligation in the covenant sealing ceremony (24:1-18) which concludes the covenant event.

So out of an event from Israelite antiquity, leaping from the narrative of the Sinai theophany which climaxes in the report that “Moses approached the thick darkness where God was (Exodus 21:21), comes my quest for the holy, my search for an authentic heritage. Out of this literary and historical context Exodus 20:18-21 stirs up within me a threefold confession:

I hesitate before the holiness of God—20:18-19 I must have the presence of God—20:20 I dare to approach the darkness of God—20:21

I HESITATE BEFORE THE HOLY

“When the people saw the thunder and the lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die’” (20:18-19).

I view myself as a religious person. I live and work primarily within a religious community. My life conforms to the ethos of the people called Nazarenes, California version! I even long to be deeply spiritual. Yet I find I fear the Presence of the Holy! There is an aspect of my approach to Christian faith and life which is akin to the fear of the Israelites at Sinai, an aspect that resonates in their words to Moses: “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do have God speak to us or we will die.”

May I project my hesitation on the rest of us with a haunting question? Do we as a holiness people fear the genuinely holy? Do we not feel an inner discomfort when we come near the visible fire of Sinai and the invisible fire of Calvary? Are we bothered by the uniform biblical witness that “our God is a consuming fire”? Why do we draw back from the real presence of a holy God?

As I reflect seriously on my own religious life, when I open my day-to-day spiritual existence to the biblical witness to the Presence, I discover that . . .

I desire a mediated presence: “Speak to us yourself and we will listen.”--Following their traumatic deliverance from Egypt, Israel had an overwhelming experience of the presence of God. After three days of solemn preparations at Sinai, the senses of the assembled people were completely captured by the thunder, the lightning, the trumpet blasts, and a smoke-billowing, trembling mountain. Unforgettable for centuries was this witness to the Presence for “the LORD descended on [the mountain] . . . in fire.” In this setting, the covenant will of God is heard: “The LORD our God has shown us his glory and his majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire.” The Ten Commandments came, not “as the mere summation of the conscience of humanity, but . . . as the Word of God issuing from out of the mystery of the Godhead.”

As determined forever by the experience of Sinai, the faith of Israel was something more than a humanly mediated religion. “God has come” was Moses’ declaration to the fearing people, characterizing the immediate Sinai event including the giving of the Ten Words. The total Mosaic law, the torah of Israel, finds its divinely intended function in this constitution of the kingdom—“a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The Ten Words were a sign and expression of the covenant presence and will of God with is people. Exodus speaks of them as the two “tablets of the Testimony” consisting of “the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.” God gave them as a means of His grace and judgment—His presence. They partook totally of that covenant event which “remains a witness for all ages of the ultimate seriousness of God’s revelation of himself and his will to the world,” an event in which “God comes as an act of grace to join himself to a people,” and unveiling which “likewise brings with it a judgment.” In the torah of Israel then, epitomized in the Ten Words in their Sinai context, “the accent is that not of the legal mind but of the prophetic attunement to a living power which surrounds and penetrates the wholeness of human existence.” The Mosaic Law, the role of Moses as covenant mediator, was designed to bring them into the presence of God. The religion of Israel, in biblical intention, transcended the limits of human mediation.

“Speak to us yourself. . . .” But the Israelites had had enough of Sinai and its fiery, frightening Presence. They cried out for the human words of Moses in place of the Word of God. They decided that the mediating presence of a man was more to their soul-comfort than an immediate divine Presence. They wanted an articulated human system to work with, a creed they could believe and a code they could keep.

“. . . we will listen.” They desired a God-substitute, someone who could stand in for God, something or someone between them and a transcendent God who wills to be present with His people. They sought a humanly-formed creed and code structure on which they could depend, which they could trust to take care of the God-dimension imperatives of their now “liberated” existence. But were they dissipating their deliverance? Were they compromising their newly won freedom?

It is not that theology—our creeds, and our ethics—our codes, are unnecessary or even insignificant. They are indeed indispensable, yet secondary. Israel was entertaining the temptation to substitute them for the Presence rather than to use them as a means for the Presence, a means of grace! Their hesitation before the holy was seducing them to a misuse of the covenant torah which was so graciously given. And so it would fail them. Their presumptuous profession to “listen” in obedience of life was one with Peter’s brag that he would lay down his life for Jesus. In essence, they like him were looking to their own strength of will for the needed spiritual power. Israel, in the very event of Sinai, was denying who she was by Yahweh’s redemption, undercutting the very ground of the mountain of God her feet. At Sinai they were refusing Sinai! So it was not long until instead of a Presence, their lives centered around a golden calf. Their “we will listen” was a self-deceptive lie!

I am a lot like the Israelites of Exodus and Sinai. I am a frail and fallen human too. I all too often grumble my way through a wilderness of God’s gracious provision from Egypt to Sinai. And in sight of Sinai, I too grasp for a belief system to affirm, a rule structure to follow. I am attracted to a theology I can accept and an ethic I can adhere to as the substance of my acceptance with God. These construction of the human mid and will I can then pump full of fleshly emotionalism and stuff with a doctrinally infused moralism, both fired by intermittent blasts of ecclesiastical enthusiasm, and interpret the package as “the spirituality of holiness”! But the truth at the heart of it all is that in the interest of psychological comfort, perhaps even of ego-safety, I find myself settling for something less than God, a good but false dependency between myself and the real presence of God. My ability to sing heartily, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus" is only a thin cover for the absence of the truly holy in my Christian walk. To the spiritual successors of these “speak to us yourself” Israelites at Sinai, Someone once said, “for I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Put severely plain, I prefer a mediated presence, one at a distance from me, one that appears not as darkness, but as light. I want a religious presence that I can see and get my hands on, one that I can control, keep within bounds, one that is comfortable, manageable, and within my own system. I like my theology rationalistic and my ethics legalistic, or at best moralistic. My flesh cries out for a religious security, we could even call it a carnal “god security”! A box for the holy which no box can contain. Even the box called the ark of the covenant was simply a place for Yahweh to sit—the Mercy Seat! I abhor darkness, I want my religion earthly and concrete, within my categories of understanding, founded on my ability to conform; in a word, on my terms. So am I too far out when I suggest that . . . .

I am afraid of the darkness of God: “But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” Precisely! Who wants to die? Deuteronomy’s report of Israel’s reaction to the Sinai theophany reinforces our understanding of the situation. Their tribal leaders came to Moses and said

The LORD our God has shown us his glory and majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a man can live even if God speaks with him. But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any longer.

They fully realized they had experienced the presence of God. They had “heard his voice from the fire.” Further they knew they were still alive and knew from their known experience that “a man can live even if God speaks with him.” Sinai had brought them to an awesome privilege. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was making Himself known to them, even as to their fathers. The God of the burning bush had come to them in as direct a relationship to Himself as He did to Abraham and Moses. Open to them as a people was life in personal fellowship with a transforming Presence. But they were afraid even to hear the voice of God for themselves. The fire was too close: “Why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the LORD any longer.”

So to Moses they said, “God near and listen to all that the LORD our God says. Then tell us whatever the LORD our God tells you. We will listen and obey.” The Israelites wanted God, but they wanted him on their own turf. This man, Moses! A charismatic figure, a proven success as a military leader. He had led them out of Egypt. Now they were most willing to transform him into an authoritative rule-giver. Only that he would take responsibility for them in the presence of God. After all, there was no terror of the holy in him!

Or was there? Moses was more God’s man than they realized. For God made him the instrument not only of His liberating grace but also of His terrifying judgment. God made Moses as ‘elohim, as God, not only to Aaron and Pharaoh, but also to Israel. In the debacle of the golden calf, Moses interceded with God for the people because of their idolatry. He even went to far as to attempt atonement for their sin: “Please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written..” Yet, between his two prayers for the people, Moses became the means of God’s holy judgment as the instrument in the execution of about three thousand of the people. As a delivered people there was no escape from the “awful” demand of the holy, even in Moses. For when Moses ascended again the mountain of God to replace the shattered stone tablets on which were engraved the Ten Words, he returned to the people with a shining face: “When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him.” The risk of death implicit in the experience of the holy encountered them afresh in Moses, the servant of God!

Who wants to die? I too fear for God to come to me on His terms. I do not want to die either. The darkness of God is too contrary to my usual view of my own identity. It contradicts my understanding of who I am. To step into the darkness of God with Moses is to step out beyond my own perspectives of the right, especially of my own rightness! For crucially at stake is my religious “rightness,” that rightness which is defined in terms of my theological system and ethical structures. I believe the right truths. I have my understanding of God, man, and salvation down pat. I live in consistent obedience to the correct moral regulations: “All these I have kept since I was a boy.” I have my behavior under control. My religious life is conducted basically on my turf. Therefore, even the thought of the truly holy is severely threatening. This is the risk of death that I dread.

Mount Sinai is the pinnacle of the holy in the Old Testament. It is the climactic point of God’s revelation to Israel, the revelation on which the Hebrew people, God’s “treasured possession,” is forever founded. Mount Sinai looks ahead and finds its ultimate definition in the Mount called Calvary, where the supreme revelation of the holy indeed took place. The final revelation of the holy took place within our history on a Roman cross—“Jesus Christ and him crucified.” The holy is now forever defined by that infamous result of insecure political and religious institutions, a callous execution on a cross! It is before the darkness of that cross that all of my rightness dies—“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live.”

Jesus Christ alone is my rightness. Of His presence in the world as the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, Jesus said,

When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: . . . in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father.

I resist the persistent temptation to identify with Peter when Jesus asked to wash his feet, “No, . . . you shall never wash my feet?” In Jesus Christ is the darkness of God par excellence! In Him is the darkness of who we are and what we are, the essence of our spiritual existence defined in terms of His cross. We approach the darkness of Mount Calvary: “At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.”

But I remember the land of my youth, the ranch plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, when I enjoyed stepping out into the night alone after a strenuous day’s work in the fields. It was in the darkness, in the pitch black of the night that the stars began to appear and I could look into the heavens. So why do I hesitate before the holy? Why do I, like Herod, want to keep the holy safe in prison? For when Herodias wanted to kill John the Baptist Herod kept him in prison, “knowing him to be a righteous and holy man.”

The last words of Urban T. Holmes in his stimulating little book, A History of Christian Spirituality, as he warns us against reading the spiritual masters, challenge me:

It should be added that we need to beware, for if we listen to God we might hear him, and what he says may well make us uncomfortable. But it can make us whole.

If I listen to God I might hear him!

I MUST HAVE THE PRESENCE OF GOD

Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning” (20:20).

Israel at Sinai was struck with fear. They had no problem, or so they thought, with living in obedience to God’s revealed “rules” so long as they could hear them from Moses: “speak to us yourself and we will listen.” But they shrank back from living in daily dialogue with the God of radical judgment and grace. They lacked the spiritual courage to live in “the fear of God,” in the presence of the holy, Yet, Moses boldly insisted that into their now “liberated” history, revealing His covenant will and presence, “God has come” at Sinai (1) “to test” them, and (2) “to keep” them “from sinning.” How else could they live in obedience to the covenant will of God!

Like them, when I in my predilection for a mediated presence seek to divorce my understanding of the revealed will of god from my daily quest for His presence in my life, I falsify the revelation of God in the cross of Christ. I am seeking false gods, for truth detached from that to which it refers is untruth. My theological thinking and ethical living are true only in relation to Him who is the Truth. So God comes in Christ to me as well (1) in judgment and (2) in grace that I might live where He is and as He is in this world. For this purpose

God comes in judgment: “God has come to test you.” The Mosaic law, the Ten Words enfolded in the cloud of the Sinai theophany, was given to Israel in order that their lives might be proven by God’s covenant will and presence. In the granting of the torah, God was not only coming to His people, He was coming to “test” or “probe” them, to measure their lives by His revealed will for them. It was the fulfillment of what He had already been doing as He led them from Egypt through the wilderness to Sinai. Three days after they had escaped from Pharaoh’s army the Israelites “grumbled against Moses” because the first water they found at Marah was bitter and undrinkable. Moses cried out to the LORD and the LORD “showed him a piece of wood.” Moses threw it “into the water and the water became sweet.” We read then that

There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, “If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD who heals you.”

A strong case can be made from this account and its place in the Exodus narrative that the declaration, “I am the LORD who heals you,” is descriptive of the divinely intended function of the law or torah, properly perceived and received.

But hardly a month had gone by until “in the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. . . . ‘If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt.’” This time it was hunger: “You have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” And so the LORD said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions.”

God’s testing or probing of Israel, linked always with the expressed revelation of His will, was to reveal not only God but also the character of His people. He came to prove what kind of people they were in relation to the God who brought them out of Egypt. It was as we read of Hezekiah: “God left him to test [or ‘probe’] him and to know everything that was in his heart.” Yet God had not left them. It was ironic that in the midst of their grumbling, “they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the LORD appearing in the cloud.”

God tests in order to know. God’s people are those who live under His testing. By definition, they are those whom He measures constantly by the revelation of Himself, by His ever present call to covenant obedience. As His people, they live exposed daily to His penetrating judgment. The Psalmist knew this and cried out, “Test me, O LORD, and try me, examine my heart and mind.”

Beyond our comprehension, yet illustrative of Moses’ interpretation of the Sinai revelation to Israel as “God has come to test you,” is God’s testing of Abraham in Genesis 22:1-19, The quality of Abraham’s obedience was tested all the way to the point of his faith in the promise, to the mysterious depth—could we say of darkness?—of the contradiction of the promise as Abraham knew it. And God knew that Abraham was His friend: “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld your son from me, your only son.” The function of the Mosaic revelation in the giving of the torah on Mount Sinai was certainly at heart no less than that of the proving of Abraham on Mount Moriah.

The relation to Abraham to God in terms of Isaac, the child of the promise, is an illuminating parable of the relation of Israel to God in terms of Israel’s being children of the torah. What God has given has to be sacrificed in order to be possessed! Here we are led directly from law to grace, for a proper view of law makes one a seeker after grace: “A low view of law leads to legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.” As a searchlight of judgment, the law, although inadequate in isolation, leads the faithful in Israel to Him who gave it, who like Abraham can only really live by naked trust in His word. At Sinai, God came to prove His people by means of His word uttered in the Ten Words in order to drive them irrevocably to grace! The Psalmist was not far off when he prayed,

Keep me far from the way of deceit, grant me the grace of your law.

Such was the Israelite need of the Presence!

In a recent study of this verse by the Jewish Old Testament scholar, Moshe Greenberg, examining the Hebrew toot (nsh) of our word “to test” appears to make our point even more vivid. Although not exclusive of the meaning of “test” or “prove,’ the basic sense of the verb is “cause to have experience of.” So the primary meaning of Exodus 20:20 is that God has come in the giving of the torah that they may so experience Him that the fear of Him may be present with them to keep them from sinning. Such a Presence makes the need of grace absolute!

If grace was the intention of the revelation of the old covenant on Mount Sinai, how much more it is the intention of the climax of the coming of God in the new covenant revelation on Mount Calvary. Jesus said of His approaching death, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” At Sinai God’s presence was signified by fire. At Mount Zion, now in virtue of the resurrection of Jesus “the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God,” it is still true that “our God is a consuming fire.” The mode of His revelation may have changed from Sinai to Calvary, but God has not changed: “He remains a consuming fire.”

The writer to the Hebrews in 12:28-29 compares the establishment of the new covenant on Mount Zion with the founding of the old covenant on Mount Sinai in terms of judgment. If the ancient Israelite could not escape “when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven?” For now we “have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant.”

As the writer to the Hebrews continues, his comparison heightens:

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

The superiority of this coming of God in “Jesus the mediator of a new covenant” is set forth to us as such that “therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

So God comes to me at Mount Calvary even more radically in judgment than He came to Israel at Mount Sinai with its thunder lightening and violent trembling. The test, the proof, that is now revealed is no longer the Mosaic torah, but the new Torah that is in essence the self-offering of Jesus: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” God’s measure remains His mysterious self, but now that self is revealed in the crucified and resurrected Jesus, His only Son.

The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father full of grace and truth. . . . For the law came through Moses; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son who is at the Father’s side, had made him known.

Jesus is the Word I am to hear from God. He is my call to covenant obedience. In Jesus, God’s real presence has come that I may experience the probing of His presence. To His penetrating judgment of my life I am daily exposed. And like with Abraham, His probing is deep, the probing of His cross, until I too have to surrender my hope in the promise of the flesh. I must have that probing Presence. As with the Israelites, when they asked Moses to speak to God for them “and we will listen,” such moralism misses the point of God’s holy surgery. As a shield against the presence of God, “moralism is a sure sign of an obdurate conscience and a heart closed to God.”

Therefore I rejoice in this test of the new covenant, indeed I am to welcome it: “Test me, O LORD, and try me, examine my heart and mind.” As the apostle Paul understood the grace of the cross, “when we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.” We are those privileged to live ultimately and utterly out of forgiveness. At Calvary God has come to prove me. He has so uttered His Word in Jesus that I am driven inescapably and always to grace! That is, when I listen?

So the positive function of God’s self-revelation is that

God comes to me in grace. “God has come . . . so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” Israel’s trust in a mediated presence was a failure. Their intent to live out of the words of Moses was misguided. The law let them down. Moralism has the spiritual strength only of mere human resolve. They did not even have the ability to listen faithfully to Moses. So the torah became for the Israelites a ministry of death. Following Sinai they visibly demonstrated the insight of that unique child of their heritage, Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, who testified, “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.” They illustrated in animated color that law in itself is ineffective and without moral power. Rules and minute regulations cannot produce spirituality: “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the (flesh) God did. . . .” In the story of Exodus, after Moses had shared with the people the Book of the Covenant and led them in the covenant confirmation ceremony, he “entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain” to receive the instructions for the tabernacle. After he disappeared from their sight, the people soon fell into flagrant idolatry—the story of the golden calf whose “cutting edge is its penetrating insight that religion itself can be the means to disobedience.”.

Coupled with their frail human nature the quality of the Israelites’ faith was such that the only way the law could even begin to work was for it to be personified, or caught up in a charismatic authority figure to whom blind, unthinking, and absolute loyalty could be given. We too often place such figures on a deified pedestal and delegate our responsibility before God, and therefore our spiritual freedom, to their benevolent tyranny. We “listen” to them and they are to guarantee our relation to God. We are obeying a god-substitute.

But what took place in the covenant community of Israel when their authority figure, Moses, with his spell-binding charisma, was absent from them for forty days on the mountain with God? When “the people saw that Moses was too long in coming down from the mountain,” they confronted Aaron with the cry,

Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.

Then Aaron, whom God had appointed to speak for Moses due to Moses’ own reluctance to obey God’s call, made them a god in place of God. They had deified the now absent Moses so he had to be replaced quickly. Aaron’s character in the event is obvious. When called to account by Moses, he could think of no better excuse than “they gave me gold and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”

The result was a religious orgy, a worship that was highly sensual, for after they “sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings . . . they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge revelry.” “At this festival,” suggests one interpreter, “otherwise self-controlled men and women threw all restraints to the winds as at some kind of Mardi Gras, and indulged in alcohol, promiscuou8s sex, and probably in narcotics produced from plants that grew in the Sinai wilderness.” Their approach to law, dependent upon the charisma of a “present” authority figure, led them to ethical license. This incident took place “when Israel had no human security to fall back upon.”

In the worship of the golden calf, Israel was defying the only security they had, their covenant relationship with God. For the maintaining of this relationship the torah had been given. They were to prove their lives by the covenant will of God, to live under its judgment, and thus be drawn to rely on the God of the Exodus and Sinai—the God of all grace. But in their subsequent history, they turned their basically prophetic faith in to a law religion. This was personified in the legalism of the Pharisees in Jesus day, a use of the law that Paul saw as eventually demonic. Either way, for them, for the early church, and for us, the law, “holy, righteous and good,” has in itself no power to keep us from sin, from either license or legalism; that is, from sin as disobedience or from sin as unbelief, from self-indulgence. The line between legalism and license is subtle and dangerously thin, for both cater to the priority of the human over the presence of the divine. In Paul’s language both are a “flesh” rather than a “spirit” based approach to the issue of spiritual freedom and responsibility. They belong to the realm of law that leads to death in contrast to the realm of grace that leads to life.

So like Israel of old, I must have the presence of the holy to live in the realm of grace, in true spiritual freedom and ethical responsibility. “God has come to keep you from sinning”—a new covenant morality is possible only out of a new covenant Presence. How else can we recognize sin when we see it, or know what sin really is, and have the power to refuse it? Jesus spoke of His continuing presence in the world through the Holy Spirit the Counselor,

When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men to not believe in me.

It takes the vision of God to see our own lives in His perspective for “the eye is the lamp of the body.” Where else is the dynamic, the ability to meet the challenge of the covenant-will of God in Jesus except in the personal Presence of Jesus? The holy is now Jesus, His quality of life in the world before us, His grace as the ultimate foundation of our ethical existence.

Otherwise we are open to the demonic compromise of the holy, vulnerable to some form of golden-calf religion. It appears among us often in what I describe as “the dark side of our heritage,” the demonic necessity to be right, the irresistible impulse to save face. When ethics run to legalism, we have a pagan rather than a biblical spirituality. For when we are caught in the legalistic seduction of our heritage, we have to be “right” to be “spiritual”—we cannot be wrong! Some reflections from my devotional journal regarding an attempt to deal with a degree of alienation in a long-term relationship, regardless of their objective fairness to one who remains my friend, may help clarify the point:

But what bothers me is that in the whole dialogue there does not seem to be the slightest hint of personal failure or wrong on his part. Therefore I find it hard to take him seriously, to view him as a credible person. How ironic! Because to the legalistic mind-set credibility means being ”right” at all costs. The “rightness” of one has to be defended. And since obviously on is not always “right” its very vigorous defense destroys credibility. Such a person undercuts his highest values by a legalistic defense.

But I have a hard time continually being “wrong” while all around me insist on being “right.” How do grace and holiness meet? Is not holiness imply radical grace with its implications worked out?

We are reminded again of Thomas Merton’s characterization of the moral theology of the Devil of which he writes:

Another characteristic of the devil’s moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we all might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, patient understanding and love, and thus help one another to find the truth. On the contrary, in the devil’s theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right himself or to attach himself to another who is absolutely right. And in order to prove their rightness they have to punish and eliminate those who are wrong.

The satanic, biblically, is simply legalism personified. From the accuser to the seducer is an automatic movement!

But as Christians, we often live where the rules neither fit nor apply. We are faced with situations that are beyond all the regulations, beyond all the specific advices. We are put in dilemmas where we do not know how we are to act, except to be like Jesus, to the reflect the quality of the person.

Early in 1981, during a period of deep frustration, I wrote three personal affirmations in my devotional diary:

My only real calling is to be Christian in my world; I do not know how to be Christian, what the answers are concretely in my world. My only recourse is an utter daily dependence on Christ exposing myself consistently to His presence through the means of grace available to me.

A “rule” approach is hopelessly inadequate for a truly Christian walk. Moralism cannot make for spirituality, for it is dependent on my wisdom and my strength. Their motivating power can wane away. When I believe I succeed, my truly spiritual motivation fades. My temptation is hybris, self-righteousness with its accompanying sin of ethical insensitivity. When I fail, my truly spiritual motivation is dissipated in despair, an antinomian despair, “What is the use?”, and I give way to the sin of self-indulgence. Self-righteousness and self-indulgence are spiritual twins!

My need is a Presence, the new covenant Presence, an awesome presence:

The new covenant is not a substitution of a friendly God for the terror of Sinai, but rather a gracious message of an open access to the same God whose presence still calls forth awe and reverence.

“God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning”—a Presence of judgment and grace.

I must have the presence of God, a Presence that is ought daily, lived out continually!

I DARE TO APPROACH THE DARKNESS

“The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” (20:21).

Between 190 and 180 B.C.E., a thousand years after Moses’ death, a Jew whom we know as Ben Sira reflected on the role of Moses in their religious history and wrote that God

allowed him to hear his voice, and led him into the darkness.

Going back to the original report we read that “while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was, . . . the people remained at a distance.” The contrast is sharp between Moses as a truly spiritual leader and the Israelites who wanted their religion in a manageable package. Spiritual leadership dares to approach the darkness, it risks trust in the darkness of God. But the participants “at a distance” desired a safely mediated faith, one dependent on a visible human authority. They wanted a moralistic, a law-contained faith, not law as a means of grace.

They had experienced the holy presence of God at Sinai, God had come, but they wanted none of the terror of His dark presence. Although they were called to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” in their unholy fear they missed the point that the basis of all ministry in the world, as Henri Nouwen comments in Gracias!, “rests not in the moral life but in the mystical life. The issue is not to live as well as we can, but to let our life be one that finds its source in the Divine Life.”

As a holiness people whose primary warrant is the biblical testimony, we dare not remain “at a distance,” but must enter the thick darkness of God’s most holy presence now experience at the cross of Jesus and in His way in the world. When we fail to so enter His life in our worlds that we become authentically authoritative, our only recourse in Christian witness at best will be to a subtle and sophisticated authoritarianism that makes us a pain to be around. Saint Augustine in his Confessions addresses a God who is “most hidden, yet most present.” The truth is that the God of Sinai is most fully in our midst in the cross of Christ where He is also most hidden. As Karth Barth has declared, “one must know the darkness of Sinai and Calvary, and must have faith to know the God who is above us and his hidden nature.”

The eighth century prophet Isaiah, who out of his vision in the temple knew God supremely as holy, addresses the Holy One of Israel and declares:

Truly you are a God who hides himself.

So in line with Isaiah’s witness . . .

We dare the darkness of God. The mystics speak of “the creative darkness of entering into the mystery of God.” the language is suggestive of the Biblical testimony to God as holy, the One who in Rudolph Otto’s phrase, is the “Wholly Other.”

I am God and not man— the Holy One among you,

is the divine declaration to disobedient Israel in Hosea 11:9. The highest acknowledgment of God is to speak of Him as holy. The holy denotes the innermost secret and essence of God’s being: it designates his uniqueness as over against everything else—the Wholly Other One. For instance Rowen Williams identifies this understanding as the controlling theme of the writings of St. John of the Cross, “God is not the same as anything else.” God is ultimate beyondness. He is beyond our human understanding, for “a God comprehended is no God.” Karl Barth writes that

God’s revelation is precisely his revelation as the hidden God. And therefore faith in God’s revelation can only give a very humble answer to the question “Who is God?”, and it is faith which will confess God as the God of majesty, and therefore as the God unknown to us. It is faith in God’s revelation, which is deadly fear of God’s mystery, because it sees how God himself veils himself in mystery.

Merton suggests that “He who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds see Him as darkness.” Therefore, the nearer we get to God the greater can be the darkness. Merton elucidates:

If nothing that can be see can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. . . . And it is in the deepest darkness that we most fully possess God on earth, because it is then that our minds are most truly liberated from the weak, created lights that are darkness in comparison to Him; it is then that we are filled with His infinite Light which seems pure darkness to our reason.

St. John of the Cross, in whom Merton is deeply read, writes of God as “intolerable darkness to her when He is spiritually near, for the supernatural light darkens with its excess the natural light.” In Frederick W. Faber’s line, God as holy is

Darkness to the intellect, But sunshine to the heart.

Pascal writes famously,

That God has willed to hide Himself. If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest. . . . God being thus hidden, every religion that fails to declare that God is hidden is not true; and every religion that fails to explain why is not instructive. Our religion does all this: Vere tu es Deus absconditus.

Thus, contemplative prayer has been defined as “a sharing in the darkness of mystery, a darkness in which God reveals himself.” It is in a sense a “knowing through unknowing.”

If the Exodus narrative can be used in a paradigmatic way, I find it significant that out of this darkness of God’s Sinai presence comes the man with the shining face. It is the darkness of God that produces the shining face not only in the ancient narrative but also in contemporary faith and life. But the story of Moses having to veil his face is one we should come back to later, because it is beyond the golden calf, yonder side of Moses’ intercessory search for a gracious God for a faithless people.

Although the tradition of apophatic theology pushes the metaphor of darkness eventually beyond its Biblical use, yet these writers point up something important in the Biblical witness. The metaphor of darkness helps us to appreciate the meaning of God as holy, as hidden in His otherness, as experienced as absence or a far off God:

“Am I only a God nearby,” declares the LORD “and not a God far away?”

And yet, continues Jeremiah as the divine spokesman,

“Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?” declares the LORD. “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”

We need a sense of the transcendence of the Holy One. An eminent religious leader was asked. “What do you think is the most crucial issue facing us today?” Without hesitation the response was that ”we need to recover a sense of God as transcendent.” We must dare an unmediated presence, one that often appears as darkness, one that is ever beyond us, above the comprehension of our minds, above our carnal control, and even above our tenacious sense of the right. The insight of Carol Carretto, reflecting on “the friendly night of the North African desert” is true to the biblical metaphor in its full Sinai and Calvary content: “The darkness is necessary, the darkness of faith is necessary, for God’s light is too great. It wounds.” Paradoxically,” writes Williams of Martin Luther’s thoughy, “the real and absolute transcendence of God can only be understood in circumstances and experiences where there are no signs of transcendence, no religious clues.” So also . . .

We embrace the darkness of faith. The modern spiritual writers who identify with the tradition of apophatic theology make frequent use of the concept and phrase, “the darkness of faith.” Carlo Carretto opens his Letters from the Desert with the words, “God’s call is mysterious; it comes in the darkness of faith.” This call, he writes,

Is so fine, so subtle, that it is only with the deepest silence within us that we can hear it.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, who is presently being widely read across the Catholic-Protestant divide, cries out in a book of prayers from the Genesee,

Are you asking me to stay in the darkness of faith and surrender to you that feverish and impatient desire for a direct, sensible experience? Are you inviting me to live my life in simple faith, obedient to the witnesses who saw you after your death and who based their teaching on the fact that they indeed saw you alive?

Nouwen’s roots are deep in Thomas Merton, so much so that if you want to understand Merton, it helps to read Nouwen first. He is less a literary figure than Merton and writes for the common man. Thomas Merton, probably the most influential spiritual writer of the 20th century and “one of the greatest exponents of the apophatic tradition,” in his works on meditation and contemplation makes extensive use of the concept of darkness in relation to faith, particularly in his New Seeds of Contemplation. But only once in my reading have I come across the precise expression, “the darkness of faith”: “The darkness of faith bears fruit in the life of wisdom.” Our previous citations from Merton point the way to his meaning, but we will allow him to clarify his thought further:

The very obscurity of faith is an argument of its perfection. It is darkness to our minds because it so far transcends their weakness. The more perfect faith is, the darker it becomes. The closer we get to God, the less is our faith diluted with the half-light of created images and concepts. Our certainty increases with this obscurity, yet not without anguish and even material doubt, because we do not find it easy to subsist in a void in which our natural powers have nothing of their own to rely on. And it is in the deepest darkness that we most fully possess God on earth.

Thomas Merton’s own strain of apophatic mysticism was apparently strongly indebted to Saint John of the Cross. For example, in his The Ascent to Truth Merton’s exposition of the theology of Saint John of the Cross appears to be identical with his own views:

We have now returned to the central paradox of apophatic mysticism. Faith is a vision of God which is essentially obscure. The soul knows Him, not because it beholds Him faced to face, but because it is touched by Him in darkness. Now, as Saint John of the Cross has just said, the purer our faith, the more perfect is our union with God. But since faith is essentially obscure, the purity of faith is proportionate to its darkness. Therefore, as Saint John points out at the very beginning of the Ascent, pure faith is “as dark as night to the understanding.”

Later on in the Ascent, Saint John can write that this “road is faith, and for the intellect faith is also like a dark night.” Saint John of the Cross is the one through whom in a definitive way the long apophatic tradition has flowed into the stream of modern writing on the “darkness of faith.” All of them would no doubt identify with Thomas Merton when he writes,

In the vivid darkness of God within us there sometimes come deep movements of love that deliver us entirely, for a moment, from our old burden of selfishness, and number us among those little children of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.

We cannot identify the “darkness” of Moses’ approach to God one on one with the “darkness of faith” in the writings of those who are in the apophatic tradition. But the latter does contain an authentic element that is indispensable to biblical faith, both to the faith that centers in Sinai and the faith that rests in Calvary. As we go on to explore “darkness” in relation to the cross of the New Testament, another brief look at the faith of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-14 may be illustrative, or more appropriately, paradigmatic. We interpret this story of the testing or ‘probing’ of Abraham’s faith in the light of the contrast seen in Exodus 20:18-21, the contrast between the faith of Moses and the faith of the Israelites at Sinai, with our perspectives informed by our earlier discussion of “the darkness of God” and “the darkness of faith.”

Abraham is our paradigm of Moses’ “presence-faith.” Isaac is our paradigm of the Israelites’ “law-faith.” First Abraham knew where he was going and why (22:1-2), but Isaac did not really know where he was going or why.

Second, Abraham went with a humanly insecure faith, but with a holy security: God himself will provide” (22:8). Isaac, on the other hand, went with a religiously secure faith, one secure in the answer given by a mediator—his father who was responsible for him (22:6-8).

Third, Abraham’s was an unmediated walk with God, for all he knew was the divine promise and the instructions for the moment at hand, but now all he thought he knew of God’s promise to him was at stake. The divine instructions contradicted the divine promise. Isaac’s, however, was a mediated walk with God. No anxiety, no dread, for his trust was in a human authority.

As the story concludes in verses 9-14, Isaac had walked in a light that turned out to be darkness. He had no idea of the spiritual issues at stake. He had been obedient only to Abraham his father! But Abraham had walked in a darkness that turned out to be light. He had been obedient to a God whose ways were hidden from him! In his “darkness of faith,” the contradicted promise had been kept intact: “So Abraham called that place ‘The LORD will provide’” (22:14).

But the “darkness of faith” can take on truly Christian content and lead us to the very heart of the holy, to the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies, so . . .

We risk the darkness of the cross. To approach “the thick darkness” in the New Testament is to find God most of all in the cross of Jesus Christ. I find it more than symbolic that at the historic moment of Jesus’ death “darkness came over the whole land.” If the holy means the hiddenness of God, nowhere did He more hide Himself than in the cross of Christ. As Merton phrases it, in the cross “Christ manifested the holiness of God in apparent contradiction with itself.” He explains,

So God Himself was put to death on the cross because He did not measure up to man’s conception of His Holiness. . . . He was not holy enough, He was not Holy in the right way, He was not holy in the way they had been led to expects. Therefore He was not God at all.

Luther’s theology of the cross would say, “Only here, in what negates and mocks all human conceptions of God, can God be Himself.”

So God is most made known to us in the cross, in that which most appears to contradict Him. Therefore the “test of honesty,” comments Williams on the agreement between Luther and Saint John of the Cross concerning the implications for faith in the cross of Jesus,

is whether a man or woman has looked into the darkness in which Christianity has its roots, the darkness of God being killed by his creatures, of God himself breaking and reshaping all religious language by manifesting his activity in vulnerability, failure and contradiction.

Without such a theology of the cross, we “misuse the best in the worst manner,” wrote Luther in thesis 24, particularly the annihilating effect of the law, reminding us of our impotence, which “must never be softened by a legalism which treats law as a simple task to be performed.” Therefore, as Williams interprets Saint John of the Cross, “Christian experience . . . is drawn again and again to the central and fruitful darkness of the cross.” And that is what we are after, “the fruitful darkness of the cross”!

And where does the quest for the holy lead us but all the way to the radical grace of the cross, to the reality of forgiveness. The Psalmist saw the connection:

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.

Isaiah saw that there was an inherent connection between divine forgiveness and the uniqueness of God as holy:

Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”

When are we the most like God? Is it not when we dare the darkness of his kind of forgiveness and “go beyond justice?” No wonder Morton Kelsey wrote of divine love and grace “as a difficult tradition to convey to human beings.” It goes beyond all they normally consider to be human and to be right. It is “Wholly Other”!

It is Exodus itself that expresses “a theology of grace unsurpassed in the OT.” Its understanding of the faith of Israel is not merely of the faith formed by the experiences of the Exodus and Sinai, but of a faith formed just as much by the tragic religious apostasy of the golden calf episode in their history. The faith of Israel is in fact a faith formed yonder side of the golden calf divide. Here in Exodus chapter 32-34 is where we find most of all in the Old Testament a fully Biblical “holiness” faith. The first two stages of Moses’ intercession for an apostate Israel left the problem of God’s full forgiveness of Israel unsolved for Moses, for God has said,

I will send an angel before you, . . . But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.

So Moses from his stance of “favor” with God continues to intercede as he asks first to know God’s intention and character (33:12-13) and second as he insists on the assurance of God’s presence with him and with the Israelites (33:15). The presence is promised, but Moses is not yet fully convinced, for he asks to see God’s glory, he seeks to go beyond the darkness of faith to the unambiguous light of God’s person (33:18)! The form but perhaps not the substance of his request is denied, for from the cleft of the rock he is allowed a vision of the back of God, of the “goodness” of God which has now taken precedence over his judgment:

And he [the LORD] passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin."

Then, as Moses bows low and worships, the narrative comes to an astounding climax of grace,

“If now I have found favor in your eyes O Lord, let now the Lord go in our midst, because [or ‘although indeed’] they are a stiff-necked people, and forgive our iniquity and our sins, and take us as your inheritance”

The heart of the holy is now fully known by Moses, for the revelation of how the supremely holy God most of all relates to his people has reached the point where “the same factor, the sin of Israel, which caused Yahweh’s wrath, also brings about his mercy.” Only God’s own character, breaking through the mystery of divine holiness as the “goodness” of radical grace, can allow God to be intimately present, present with such a people as the Israelites, and with you and with me! In short, the whole of Exodus chapters 32-34, Israel’s experience of the holiness of God in radical judgment is met ultimately by the holiness of God revealed as radical grace, which, as the chapter continues, makes both possible and mandatory a holy obedience (34:10-28)! Perhaps the reason our obedience as a holy people is often so moralistically domesticated is that we have not yet fully experienced the holy as grace! We have not faced our apostasy!

Hosea 11:1-9 gives us another most fascinating “prism of the holy” with which to look at the “darkness of the cross.”

I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not man— the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath.

In this prophetic oracle God declares that he has every right to come in wrath upon Israel. The prophet begins with Yahweh’s complaint about Israel’s failure to be a grateful son:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who led them. I led them with the cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.

So God’s judgment appears inevitable:

Will they not return to Egypt and will not Assyrian rule over them because they refuse to repent? Swords will flash in their cities, will destroy the bars of their gates and put an end to their plans. My people are determined to turn from me. Even if they call to the Most High he will by no means exalt them.

Yet God’s compassion on them is changeless:

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not man— the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath.

Hosea expresses the formula of the holy as “the holy” equals “utterly different from man: equals “radical forgiveness.”—“the quite irrational power of love,” as Eichrodt calls it here. But sadly Israel would not receive it; they turned their back on the holy at its deepest level. So we can in turn say that the darkness of the holy is the darkness of radical forgiveness is the darkness of the cross is the darkness of God!

Therefore we approach the darkness of God, entering and living a forgiving life, which more often than not is darkness to the onlooker. For we are living beyond what is normally understood of human behavior, we have become a mystery, perhaps even a threat, but therefore most of all a witness.

And with that he breathed on them and said,

Receive the Holy Spirit, If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

Forgiveness is the aroma of the eternal presence of the holy, the principle at the very heart of its earthly manifestation. Forgiveness is the real presence of the holy, as near to it as we can concretely get in this life, and the real presence of the holy becomes in turn the only adequate resource for a forgiving life.

Is not worship best defined as the celebration of a radical forgiveness? Perhaps here is the clue as to why the Presence of the Holy One is not more manifest in our corporate gatherings. In our preaching, praying, attitudes, conversations, and behavior do we dissipate the vision of the holy with our evangelical moralism? Do we contradict the essence of the holy with our holiness legalism?

Our holy calling is to approach the thick darkness where God is in the cross of Jesus, first for our own drastic and continuing need of grace, and second in the threatening risk of our utter forgiveness of others. For we must be saved from “the unholiness of the holy” as Merton calls it:

the most striking thing about the Gospel is that in saving the adulteress Jesus was also saving Himself. Defending and delivering a sinner from the injustice of the legally “just” he was saving the Truth from defilement by the unholiness of the holy. For these ascetics were so holy that they hated Mercy and thus their holiness was sin.

We are too much seduced into the “unholiness of the holy,” therefore we remain “at a distance” from the darkness of grace. No wonder we hesitate before the Holy and thus miss the knowledge of that awesome Presence that is so necessary to keep us from sinning. With Moses, I want to approach the thick darkness where God is! For that is the essence of my heritage!

Now can our eyes spring free to see the night, And the darkness that is vibrant with our God.

MATERIAL FOR FUTURE USE

Blaise Pascal (1623-1650), Pense’es. Notes on Religion and Other Subjects. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Louis LaFuma, Translated by John Warrington. New York: Dutton, Everyman’s Library, 1960.

That God has willed to hide Himself. If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest. So also if there were no martyrs except in our religion. God being thus hidden, every religion that fails to declare that God is hidden is not true; and every religion that fails to explain why is not instructive. Our religion does all this: Vere tu es Deus absconditus. (p. 122) or (449 [143-585]) This is the original version of the shorter form of the study that was later published in the Wesleyan Theological Journal, Volume 23, Numbers 1 & 2 (Spring-Fall 1988), 7-32, as the Presidential Address at the Twenty-third Annual Meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, which convened at the Evangelical School of Theology, Myerstown, Pennsylvania, on November 6, 1987. Unless otherwise indicated all Scripture quotations are taken from the New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1973, 1978, 1984). Written for the partial presentation of this study to as a lecture to the faculty of Point Loma Nazarene College on April 29, 1987.

Laudilos Boros, Open Spirit, tran. Erika Young (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), 1974< pp. 59f. Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Denys the Areopagite, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, John of the Cross, Merton, Chapman, etc. See Rowen Williams, “Dark Night, Darkness,” The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Gordon S. Wakefield (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963), pp. 103-105, for a brief survey. A discriminating discussion of the differences in use of the “darkness” theme from Philo to John of the Cross is found in Andrew Louth, The Origins of Christian Mystical T4adition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 179-190. An even more recent survey can be found in Kenneth Leech, Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985), 162-198, in a chapter entitled “God of Cloud and Darkness” which concludes with remarks on “Darkness and Contemplation Today.” He has a shorter treatment of the use of the darkness metaphor in his Soul Friend, The Practice of Christian Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977), pp. 160-174. The tradition from which they all draw is that of apophatic spirituality or “negative: theology. Ladislaus Boros, Open Spirit, tran. Erika Young (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), pp. 59f. The eight are Exodus 20:21; Deuteronomy 4:11, 5:22; 2 Samuel 22:10; 1 Kings 8:12; 2 Chronicles 6:1; Psalms 18:9, 97:2. All Biblical quotations unless otherwise indicated are from The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1973, 1978). Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a new Biblical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row,Publishers, 1978), p. 128. 1 Kings 8:12; see 2 Chronicles 6:1. Boros, p. 60. The Confession of Saint Augustine (New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1969), Book I;. 4. Blaise Pascal (1623-1650), Pense’es. Notes on Religion and Other Subjects, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Louis LaFuma, translated by John Warrington (New York: Dutton, Everyman’s Library, 1960), p. 122. In the translation I first used that I cannot document the phrase was “the reason is not illuminating.” Carlo Carretto, Letters From the Desert, tr. Rose Mary Hancock (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1972), p. xv. Ibid. Ibid., p. xvii. Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, tr. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1959), p. 98” “in the darkness of my understanding and the constraint of my will, in affliction and anguish with respect to memory, remaining in the dark in pure faith.” A frequent image is the “dark night of contemplation” or “dark contemplation.” See pages 121, 92, 61. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1962), p. 141: “The darkness of faith bears fruit in the light of wisdom.” Henri J. M. Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1983), p. 142: “Are you asking me to stay in the darkness of faith and surrender to you that feverish and impatient desire for a direct, sensible experience?” Leech, Soul Friend, pp. 160-174, and Experiencing God, pp. 162-198. Leech, Soul Friend, p. 162. Deuteronomy 4:11. “Deep darkness” translates ‘arafel. Mark 15:33. Merton, p. 96. Ibid., pp. 91-92. Ibid., p. 219. Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976), p. 83, quoting from the Weimar edition of Luther’s Works, the Operationes in Psalmos, vol. v. 176, 16ff. Ibid., p. 84. Matthew 5:8. Exodus 32:1-35. Exodus 33:13-16. See Genesis 32:30; Exodus 33:11, 20, 23; Deuteronomy 5:4; 34:10, for the rendering of panim as God’s “face,” Exodus 33:14, 15 as His “presence.” Boxes have their usefulness, but they dare not have lids in the presence of the holy. Psalms 62:5. Exodus “represents the continuing faith of many generations of Israelites who persevered in reflecting upon the question: ‘What does it mean for us to be the people of God?’” Ronald E. Clements, Exodus, The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1972), p. 9. Exodus 19:4. Exodus 19:3-9 is the announcement of God’s covenant with Israel—conditions (verses 3-6), Israel’s response (verses 7-9), Moses’ role defined (verse 9). The covenant theme is prominent in chapters 19-24. Yahweh is a scholarly reconstruction on the basis of Greek texts of Israel’s unique name for their covenant God, usually translated “LORD” in our English Bibles. This name became so sacred they they ceased to pronounce it around 500 B.C.E. (substituting the title ‘adonai of “Lord” in speech), so its precise pronunciation was lost for the Hebrew written text did not contain the vowels until at least the fifth century A.D. “God” in our English Bibles translates ‘elohim, the generic or general word for god in the ancient Semitic world. See Exodus 13:21-22; 40:36-38; Psalms 78:14. Terrien, p. 124: “Presence is that which creates a people. Presence is the reality to which man must attune himself if he is to live at all, for there is no solitary life.” Exodus 19:4-6a. Terrien, pp. 124ff. Brevard Childs comments that “the section which follows the Decalogue is essential for an understanding of the whole. The initial participial form of the verb indicates that a circumstantial clause is intended. The people’s reaction which is described did not first emerge after the giving of the Decalogue, but runs parallel with the whole theophany.” The Book of Exodus, The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974), p. 371. Exodus 40:34, 38. Our immediate context is chapters 19-24 which are integrated about the making of the covenant at Sinai. Child’s analysis shows its unity: 19:1-2—Israel’s arrival at Sinai and encampment, 19:3-9—God’s covenant with Israel announced, 19:10-1`5—Preparations prior to the third day, 19:16-15—Preparations on the third day, 20:1-17—Proclamation of the Decalogue, 20:18-21—Establishment of Moses’ covenant office, 20:22—23:33—Further stipulations of the covenant, 24:1-18—Sealing of the covenant (p. 365): “The repetition by the people of the same response (19:8 and 24:3, 7) marks the beginning and end of the one great covenant event” (pp. 502fff). Terrien, p. 124. Exodus 20:3. Exodus 20:14. Exodus 21:17. Exodus 23:1. See Exodus 19:8: “The people all responded together, ‘We will do everything the LORD has said.’” See also Childs, p. 382ff. Hebrews 12:29; Deuteronomy 4:24. Exodus19:18. See 24:7. Deuteronomy 5:24. George A. F. Knight: Theology as Narration: A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976), p. 133. Exodus 20:20. Torah does not mean law in a legal sense, but “instruction,” “guidance,” “direction”: “Torah is that which points the way for the faithful Israelites and community of Israel. W. J. Harrelson, “Law in the OT.” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), K-Q, 77. James A. Sanders in a very illuminating discussion suggests “that the oldest and most common meaning is something approximate to what we mean by the word revelation.” He concludes that “the Torah par excellence, is basically a narrative, a story, rather than a code of laws.” Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), pp. 2f. Exodus 34:28, 29. Literally, “the ten words” (debarim).” Childs, p. 283. Terrien, p. 130: “the decalogue provides a key to the Hebraic understanding of the theological basis of ethics. The call for exclusive worship of Yahweh is explicitly made in terms of the overwhelming experience of his presence,” precedes our quote.” For discussions of the tensions, both literary and theological, which appear to be imbedded in the traditions which inform us of Moses’ office of covenant mediator, see Childs, pp. 340-384, and Terrien, pp. 106-160. The tension can be clearly seen by comparing Deuteronomy 3:4, which stresses the lack of mediation, with 5:5 in which Moses acts as mediator. We are attempting to work from the text as it stands, in canonical context, with the tension being itself an intended part of the Biblical revelation which we are to interpret. Exodus 32:1-35. Matthew 5:20. Exodus 23:22: “There, above the cover between the two cherubim hat are over the ark of the Testimony, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.” Deuteronomy 5:24-25. Exodus 3:6, 15. See Genesis 12:1-3, 15:1-19, 17:1-22, 18:1-33, 22:1-18 for Abraham; 26:23-25 for Isaac; and 28:10-22, 31:3, 32:22-32, 46:1-3 for Jacob. The reason given is the almost proverbial statement that the one who has seen God face to face must die: “For what mortal man has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have, and survived?” (Deuteronomy 5:26) See Exodus 33:20; Judges 6:22-23; Isaiah 6:5. The comparison of this account, Deuteronomy 5:22-32, with our Exodus passage, 20:18-21, reflects the apparent tension between Moses as the appointed intercessor and as an ad hoc delegate imbedded in Mosaic traditions which have been employed in the making of the Pentateuch. See Terrien, p. 128, and Gerhard von Rad, Deuteronomy, The Old Testament Library (London: SCM Press, 1966), p. 60. Deuteronomy 5:27. Terrien, p. 106, asserts, “the historical Moses was primarily a military leader of charismatic character.” Exodus 4:16; 7:1. Exodus 32:11-14. Exodus 32:32. See vv. 30-31. Exodus 32:25-29. See v. 35. Exodus 32:19. Exodus 34:30. Numbers 12:7-8; Deuteronomy 34:5; Joshua 1:2. Mark 10:20. This is to be understood, of course, in the context of the whole of the Exodus narrative, not just chapters 19-20. Also we need to remember that the last word on the holy in Exodus is spoken in chapters 32-34 with the final note in 40:34-38. 1 Corinthians 2:1. Galatians 2:20. John 16:8, 10. It is of the “rightness” of Jesus’ way of the cross among men that the Holy Spirit is sent to persuade men. John 13:8. Mark 15:33. Mark 6:20. Urban T. Holmes, III, A History of Christian Spirituality: An Analytical Introduction (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), p. 161. John 14:6. John 12:26; 1 John 4:17. Childs, p. 373: “The first reason focused on the critical testing of the revelation.” The Hebrew nsh as in Exodus 15:25, 16:4, and 17:7. Exodus 15:25, 16:4, Deuteronomy 8:16 and 33:8 all use the Hebrew verb, nsh (to test, try or prove), in similar contexts with God as the subject. The other Old Testament uses with God as the subject are in Genesis 22:1, 2 Chronicles 32:31, and Psalm 26:2. Exodus 25:25b-26. The word normally translated “law” in English is the Hebrew torah which is translated “instructions” I;n 16:4. The verbal root of torah, vra, is used in 25:25: “The LORD showed him.” The verb vra in the hiphi’l conjugation means ”to teach, instruct.” So the Israeli scholar Umberto Cassuto comments that “the realization of the need for instruction from the Lord prepares the people spiritually for the acceptance of the yoke of the Torah and precepts. A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1967), p. 184. Exodus 16:3. Exodus 16:4. 2 Chronicles 32:31: “To test him, that He might know . . .” (NASB). See Moshe Greenberg, “nsh in Exodus 20:20 and the Purpose of Sinaitic Theophany,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 79 (1960), 275. Exodus 16:10. Psalm 26:2. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 189, notes that “the problem of this narrative is to hold together and embrace the dark command of God and his high promise.” Genesis 22:12. For Abraham as the friend of God see also 2 Chronicles 20:7, Isaiah 41:8, and James 2:23. J. Gresham Machen, Origin of St. Paul’s Religion, n.v. Knight, p. 141: The Ten Words are “ a set of guidelines for a community that must now live together in an exalted fellowship where loyalty to one another is understood and expressed as the response to the loyalty of him who first loved his covenant people. This love Israel has now seen in an historical situation, that is, it is revealed love. That is why Israel now fears the Lord, v. 18; for God has come to prove his people by means of his Word uttered in the Decalogue.” Psalm 119:29, The New Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1985). Nsh appears only in the pi’el conjugation in the Hebrew Old Testament. Greenberg, p. 276. Mark 14:24. See Matthew 26:28, Luke 22:20, and 1 Corinthians 11:25-26. Terrien, p. 110, writing on the burning bush and the meaning of fire in the context of the theophany, suggests that “fire is a symbol of prompt becoming. It suggests the desire to change, to hasten time, to bring life to its beyondness. In the entire history of religions the contemplation of fire amplifies human destiny; it relates the minor to the major, the burning bush to the life of the world, and the desire for change to the vision of renewal.” He cites G. Bachelard, La psychanalyse du feu (Paris, 1947; reprinted 1949), p. 35. See E. M Good, “Fire,” IDB, E-J, pp. 268ff., and bibliography. Hebrews 12:22. Hebrews 12:29. Childs, p. 377. See 1 Corinthians 11:32; 1 Peter 4:17-19; and Hebrews 12:1-6, 9-10. Exodus 19:18f. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1967), p. 232, writes, “these details concerning the smoke and the fire and the quaking of the mountain belong to the literary tradition of theophany descriptions. . . . there is no reference here . . . to volcanic activity. . . . there are no volcanoes in the regions that merit consideration in our attempts to identify Mount Sinai.” He views the phenomenon as an electric storm accompanied by a howling wind: “the smoke is the mist rising from the mountains; the fire is that of lightning, which is regarded as accompanying God in His descent from heaven; and the trembling of the mountain (only the mountain is referred to, and not the ground on which the people stood) is not an earthquake, but a tremor due to the force of the crashing thunder. See Romans 7:1-6, 10:4. 1 John 3:16, see 2:6. John 1:14, 17-18. Urban T. Holmes, Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), p. 152. Psalm 26:2. 1 Corinthians 11:32. See John 16:;5-15. Romans 7:10. The Greek is sarx of “flesh” (NASB). NIV translates sinful nature” in passages where sarx is used ethically by Paul. This in my opinion does not improve “flesh” for it too gives the impression that sin is some kind of “substance” penetrating human nature. Romans 8:3. Exodus 20:22—23:33. Exodus 24:1-18. Exodus 25:1—31:18. Exodus 32:1-6. Childs, p. 580.s Exodus 32:1. Exodus 4:10-17. Exodus 32:24. Exodus 32:6. Knight, p. 186. Knight, p. 183. Moses is viewed in the Old Testament as essentially a prophetic figure (Deuteronomy 18:15, 18; 34:10-12). See Patrick Miller, Jr., “’Moses My Servant’: The Deuteronomic Portrait of Moses,” Interpretation XLI, No. 3 (July 1987), pp. 243-255, See Wayne G. Boulton, Is Legalism a Heresy? (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), who explores the legacy of the Pharisees in Christian ethics. Galatians 4:1-11. Romans 7:12. Romans 7:1—8:17; Galatians 2:1—5:26. John 16:8-9. Matthew 6:22a. Merton, p. 96 Childs, p. 384. Ecclesiasticus 45:4, NJB. Exodus 19:6. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal (San Francisco: Harper Row Publishers, 1983), p. 49. See John 20:22-23. The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1969), Book I. 4. Karl 0Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (London: Hodder, 1928), p. 28, quoted in Leech, Soul Friend, p. 191, who comments that this “darkness is not a description of a psychological condition. It is an integral part of the revelation.” Isaiah 43:13. Kenneth Leech, True Prayer, An Invitation to Christian Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 154l. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, translated by John W. Harvey from Das Heilige (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923a), p. 129. This phrase is a chapter title. Rowen Williams, Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St. John of the Cross (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979), p. 162. The quote continues: “Nothing can ‘substitute’ for God; once he is tasted by the soul, all earthly or creaturely beauties become tantalizingly inadequate hints and reflections.” “Ein begriffener Gott ist kein Gott” (Tersteegen) quoted in Otto, p. 39. Barth, p. 28. Quoted from Leech, Experiencing God, p. 190f. The quote continues as follows: “Skepticism, which thinks that it also knows that God is hidden, has not reached of point of such fear unto death. Skepticism has not been taught by God himself that he is hidden, but is a human answer to a human question. One must know the darkness of Sinai and of Calvary and must have faith to know the God who is above us, and his hidden nature.” Merton, New Seeds, p. 131. He quotes John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” Ibid., p. 131, 135. See also pp. 208f. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kiervan Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriquez, O.C.D. (Washington: ICS Publications, 1979), p. 457. Quoted from Mary Paul Cutri, O.C.D., “Desire Becoming Other,” Spiritual Life (Fall 1985), 167f. Quoted from A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p. 18. Isa. Xlv.15: Verily Thou art a hidden God. Pascal, p. 122. Leech, True Prayer, p. 177. Quoted from Pascal. This language reflects Denys the Aeropagite, often known Pseudo Dionysius, as well as others who followed him in the tradition of apophatic theology such as the famous Cloud of Unknowing. See Leech, Experiencing God, pp. 170ff. Exodus 34:29-35. Anthony Bloom in Living Prayer writes about a young woman with an incurable disease who after years of the awareness of God’s presence, “suddenly senses God’s absence—some sort of real absence—and she wrote to me saying, ‘Pray to God, please, that I should never yield to the temptation of building up an illusion of his presence, rather than accept his absence.’ Her faith was great. She was able to stand this temptation and God gave her this experience of his silent absence.” Quoted from Reuben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck, A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983), p. 241. Jeremiah 23:23. Jeremiah 23:24. David G. Trickett from a review in Christian Century (May 25, 1983), p. 531. Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, tr. Rose Mary Hancock (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1972), p. 140. Williams, Christian Spirituality, p. 146. Carretto, Letters, pp. Vii, xv, 140. See pp. 12, 57, 62, 145. George A. Maloney, S.J., Singers of a New Song: A Mystical Interpretation of the Song of Songs (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1985), p. 59 uses the phrase typically: “Your spouse, Christ, is calling you into a deeper darkness, the darkening of your own rational knowledge, to enter into a new way of receiving the communication of himself in the ‘luminous darkness’ of faith.” Carretto, p. xv. Ibid, p. xvii. Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy, p. 142. Leech, Experiencing God, p. 194. Merton, New Seeds, pp. 131-5, 141, 157, 187, 208-232, 256, 264, See also his Contemplative Prayer (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1969), pp. 68, 77f. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., pp. 134-135. The last half of the quotation documented by note 97 completes this paragraphs from Melon. Holmes, History, p. 134, characterizing Merton’s spirituality, writes that he “was generally kataphatic and speculative, although he advocated the apophatic approach.” Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1951, 1979), pp. 256-257. The metaphor of “darkness” or “night” would be found throughout this exposition of the apophatic theology of Saint John of the Cross. Definitive studies of Saint John include E. Allison Peers, Spirit of Flame: A Study of St. John of the Cross (Wilton, Connecticut: Morehouse-Barlow Co., Inc., 1946), and Karol Wojtyla, Faith According to Saint John of the Cross (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1981). This is the published form of Pope John Paul II’s doctoral thesis. Kavanaugh, The Collected Works, p. 74. Quoted from G. Gutierrez, Spiritual Journey, p. 85. Merton, New Seeds, pp. 231-232. Mark 15:33. Merton, New Seed, p. 62. Ibid., pp. 61-62. Williams, Christian Spirituality, p. 146. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 145, quoting Luther. Ibid. Ibid., p. 178. Psalm 130:3-4. Isaiah 55:7-8. Carreto, Letters, p. 126. Morton T. Kelsey, Companion on the Inner Way: The Art of Spiritual Guidance (New York: Crossroad, 1983), p. 57. R. W. L. Moberly, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus 32-34 (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1983), p. 90. See Exodus cc. 32-34. The confession of 34:7-8, at the heart of the divine reconciliation with apostate Israel, is central to the faith of Israel for it occurs in Psalm 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Numbers 14:18; Joel 2:13; Nehemiah 9:17; Jonah 4:2. Childs, p. 612, comments that “the community which treasured these traditions stood beyond the great divided cause by the sin of the golden calf.” See John I. Durham, Exodus, Volume 3, Word Biblical Commentary, ed. John D. W. Watts, (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987), p. 434. According to Cassuto, pp. 414-437, there are three distinct stages in Moses’ intercession for Israel focused in32:7-14; 32:30-33; and 33:12-34:9. Exodus 33:2-3. The appearance of the Hebrew noun chen (favor) in 33:12, 13 (2), 16, 17, and 34:9 as basic to Moses’ intercession is significant. He has “found favor” with God as his called servant to lead the Israelites out of Egypt in fulfillment of God’s covenant with the fathers (Exodus 2:24; 19:5; 24:7-8; 34:10) which contradicts God’s refusal to go up with the people (33:2-3). The success of Moses’ intercession is interestingly indicated in the narration in part by the appearance of the verb (twice in 33:19) and the adjective (34:6) now characterizing God’s attitude toward Israel! The chen Moses has experienced deepens in the passage until it can also belong to Israel! Exodus 34:6-7. Exodus 34:9 (my translation). The particle ci is usually translated as concessive (although), but Moberly, pp. 88-93, convincingly demonstrates that it should be seen either as causative (because) or as emphatic concessive (indeed although). Moberly, p. 89. Revealing to the understanding of the progress of the intercession is the fact that the Hebrew immanu (with us) does not appear with the halach (go) until verse 16. Hosea 11:1-4. Hosea 11:5-7. Hosea 11:8-9. Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Volume One, translated by J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1961), p. 251. 1 John 3:1. John 20:22-23. Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), p. 291. Sebastian Moore and Kevin Maguire, The Experience of Prayer (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), p. 85. Quoted from Leech, Experiencing God, p. 198. Isa. Xlv.15: Verily Thou art a hidden God.

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