In a church ministry career that has spanned more than five decades, Rev. Dr. Tony Plomp has given the church many gifts. Or, as I suspect he would prefer I phrase it, the Spirit has used him to accomplish many wonderful things.
In this issue, he has given us all yet another extraordinary gift. It’s an incredibly vulnerable gift—an essay on death and his own dying.
Tony’s essay not only gives us an opportunity to talk about death—which senior editor Andrew Faiz does in a companion piece to our cover story—but about the nature of God.
One of the important concepts he raises is thinking of God as mystery. This is language that has been largely lost or ignored in Western Christianity, especially in Protestantism.
The historical and philosophical underpinnings of the Reformation emphasized describing God in “positive” terms—saying what God is: such as God is good, God is light, etc.
What was lost in that development was another ancient thread in Christianity that speaks of God in “negative” terms—what God is not: such as God is not-good, God is not-light.
Initially, this seems strange to us. But what it is getting at is that language is inadequate to describe God. God is indeed good—but God is also so far beyond any concept of good that we have that it limits God to say “God is good.”
This way of speaking about God leads to the understanding that despite all we know about God through the lives of people, especially as recorded in the stories of the Bible, God is still beyond limited human understanding.
Initially, this idea can cause great anxiety. Ultimately, it has the ability to bring about the opposite effect. There is a letting go of all anxiety.
Tony addresses this with respect to the end of life. “What does it mean to embrace the Christian hope of life eternal? Some folk have told me they know exactly what that future will be like based on their reading of scripture. I confess that I do not know.”
That is a humble statement from a man who not only knows his scriptures deeply but has lived and prayed them in a life of reflective faith.
But what he says is this: “It is a mystery as deep and profound as is the mystery of faith and the God in whom we place our trust. All I know is that God is at the centre of that mystery and so here, too, I confess that I believe ‘He does all things well.'”
That is true confidence—not the confidence that presumes to understand everything about faith or scriptures—but the confidence that God surrounds us and loves us no matter what.
It is the confidence of Saint Paul, who said he was “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That love grounds us no matter how difficult things are. The world and the institutional church will always present us with anxieties and concerns. The current refugee crisis, building for several years now, is a major concern for us all. How will we care for all these displaced people?
(Andrew Faiz is in Eastern Europe as I am writing this and will be bringing back stories from the front line of the crisis there and how churches are helping.)
Like death itself, we will be able to face these challenges far better if we can join Tony and say that we place our trust in a God who “does all things well.”
