One of my favorite novels is the story of Alice in Wonderland.
The story of a young girl’s adventures in a land where reality is turned upside down and nothing makes any sense appeals to us because sometimes in our lives things DON’T make sense.
The author of the novel, Lewis Carroll, was a professor of logic and some of the conversations that take place in the story are examples of sound logical conversations while others consist of logic run amuck.
Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire Cat is an example of good logic.
As she is walking along a path she comes to a place where the path divides into three different paths that head in three different directions.
At this point the Cheshire Cat appears in a tree and Alice asks it which path she should take.
“Where are you going?” asks the Cat.
“I don’t know,” replies Alice.
“Well, if you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will get you there,” declares the Cat.
Not very helpful, but completely logical.
Like the story about two men in a hot air balloon who get lost and seeing a man out in his field they yell down: “Can you tell us where we are?”
To which the man yells back: “You’re in a hot air balloon!”
One man turns to the other and says: “He must be a lawyer. His advice is absolutely accurate and absolutely useless!”
An example of logic run amuck is the mad tea party, where the March Hare says to Alice: “Everybody is crazy here.”
“I’m not,” Alice responds.
“Yes you are,” replies the March Hare.
“Why?” asks Alice.
“Because you’re here,” says the March Hare, “and everybody here is crazy.”
You get the idea.
In logic that’s called a tautology: a circular argument that has NO logical content whatsoever.
Time and again, Alice tries to make sense out of nonsense and ends up frustrated because in Wonderland things just don’t make sense.
This need to make sense out of things is very powerful in us.
We feel comfortable when things make sense, and we feel uncomfortable when they don’t.
We even feel this way about religion.
We want our religion to makes sense to us.
That’s one reason that pagan religions appeal to people: they were created by human beings rather than by God, and so they make sense.
All pagan religions are based upon the very sensible premise that if there is a god in heaven and if you want him to do something for you, you need to offer up something to him.
That’s the way the world is supposed to work, so that’s the way religion should work.
You do nice things for God and God will do nice things for you.
Give God good things and he’ll give you good things.
Tit for tat; quid pro quo.
When this kind of thinking is pursued to its logical conclusion, if you want something really valuable from God, you have to offer him something that’s really valuable to you.
That kind of reasoning led the ancient Canaanites to sacrifice their children to their gods, Baal, and Ashtoreth and it led the Aztecs to offer massive numbers of human lives to their god Queztalcoatl.
Such are the extremes to which man’s power of reason will lead him when he creates religions out of his own imagination.
But the urge to make sense out religion runs into a brick wall in Christianity.
The very foundation of Christianity consists of mysteries which defy rational explanation.
The doctrines of divine election or predestination, the two natures of Christ and the Trinity itself are mysteries that cannot be explained.
If we’re saved by God’s grace alone, where is there a place for human choice or free will?
How can Jesus be both completely God and completely man”
It’s like saying that someone can be completely wet and completely dry at the same time.
How do we explain the physics of that?
How can God be One God and Three Persons at the same time?
Explain the mathematics of that!
Even Jesus said and did things that didn’t make sense.
Things like “Blessed are the poor,” and “The meek will inherit the earth,” and “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
(Even Luther had a problem with that one!)
And if some things Jesus said didn’t make sense, some of the things he did made even less sense.
He consorted with tax-collectors and prostitutes and made no apologies—we would say he “ran with the wrong crowd.”
He allowed himself to be humiliated, tortured and killed without lifting a finger to save himself or speaking one word in his own defense.
These are not the actions of a reasonable man.
That’s why in First Corinthians, Paul describes the Gospel Jesus preached as “…foolishness to the Greeks.”
To the Greeks, who invented logic, the Gospel seemed like foolishness because it didn’t make sense that a Jewish carpenter from the backwoods of Palestine could be God.
It made even less sense that after he had been crucified he had risen from the dead.
And it was downright preposterous to think that people who believed that would be raised from the dead as well.
None of it made any sense!
So after Jesus’ ascended into heaven, some of the leaders of the early church felt the need to make the Scriptures seem more reasonable.
Where there were mysteries, they tried to make sense of them by force-fitting them into logical propositions and arguments which replaced the teachings of Scripture.
These arguments were widely taught and came to be believed by large numbers of Christians.
They were called heresies: lies which seemed reasonable but contradicted the clear teachings of the Scriptures.
One heresy came to be called Donatism: the argument that since it was impossible for Jesus to have been both God and man at the same time he must have been only God and not man.
Another heresy was called Arianism and it was the teaching that Jesus was created by God like all other creatures and not begotten, born of God.
Most of these heresies were condemned by the church and died out but the desire to make sense out of the Bible never went away.
That desire re-emerged almost a millenium later in the work of the scholastic theologian, Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas was a philosopher as well as a theologian and he believed that God’s gift to man of the power of reason to man was co-equivalent to the gift of faith.
He believed and taught that God was just as understandable through reason as he was through faith.
You might say that he was a logician as well as a theologian.
His greatest work, Summa Teologica (the “highest theology,” as he modestly called it) became the foundation of Roman Catholic doctrine and remains so to this very day.
Being a logician, Thomas made extensive use of the Latin word, “ergo,” which meant “therefore” and was used in logical arguments to state a logical conclusion.
It worked like this: A:“I am a man; B: all men are sinners ERGO C: “I am a sinner.”
A:“The universe consists of matter and energy; B: matter and energy can’t create themselves, ERGO C: the universe had to have been created.
ERGO simply meant “therefore.”
Under the onslaught of Thomas’s logic, many teachings were added to the Scriptures and proclaimed by the Church which made Christianity seem more reasonable.
For example, it seemed reasonable that if God wanted Christians to do good works, He would require them to do good works in order to be saved.
It seemed reasonable that if people wanted to atone for their own sins God would let them atone for their sins by doing things that came to be called “penances”–things like fasting and going on pilgrimages.
If confession was good for the soul the church should require its members to go to confession.
All these practices not only made sense, they provided incentives for people to take their religion seriously.
And that made sense too.
And then a coarse, rather vulgar German monk showed up two centuries later like a skunk at a garden party and said, “Naaaa!”
To begin with, Luther said, God doesn’t speak Latin, He speaks German.
(That was intended to be humorous.)
And when He speaks German, He doesn’t always say, “ergo.”
Sometimes He says “dennoch.”
And “dennoch” means the opposite of “therefore”; “dennoch” means nevertheless.
“Your sins are as scarlet; NEVERTHELESS they will be as white as snow.”
“You put Jesus to death on the cross; NEVERTHE LESS/DENNOCH! God raised him from the dead.”
“We are all sinners and enemies of God; NEVERTHELESS/DENNOCH! God will save us if we believe in Jesus Christ.
You put “therefore” in any of those sentences and you won’t like the outcome!
“Your sins are as scarlet, therefore….”
You put My Son to death on the cross, therefore….”
“We are all sinners and enemies of God, therefore….”
If God treated us reasonably, he’d give us exactly what we deserve, and if He gave us what we deserve, we would all be dead and burn in hell.
“The wages of sin is death” is a perfectly reasonable statement, but, praise the Lord, He works by “dennoch” rather than by “ergo” so that instead of the eternal misery we deserve, He offers us eternal life, which we don’t deserve.
“The wages of sin is death, DENNOCH/NEVERTHELESS, the gift of God is eternal life.”
Can there be more comforting words than these?
Words that assure us that although we are sinners who love our sins more than we love God, NEVERTHELESS He forgives us again and again?
If attaining eternal life depended on what we thought or said or did, we would be lost, because everything we think and say and do is tainted with sin: NEVERTHELESS/DENNOCH! God forgives us by grace through the death of His Son.
We are saved by God’s “dennoch” love or we are not saved at all.
This is why Isaiah said that all his righteous works were as “filthy rags” before God and Paul called all of his acts of piety—his keeping of the Law, his zeal for God, his good works, his religious observances, his personal righteousness—skubalon– a Greek word which we politely translate as “rubbish”—compared with God’s gift of grace through Jesus Christ.
Each and every day God practices dennoch love upon us, and each and every day he gives us opportunities to practice dennoch love upon our neighbor whether our neighbor deserves it or not.
The opportunity for husbands to sacrifice their own needs and desires for the sake of their wives, even when their wives don’t seem to appreciate all that they do for their family.
The opportunity for wives to offer respect to their husbands as a gift even when they don’t deserve it—perhaps especially when they don’t deserve it.
In short, God gives us the opportunity to love other people in truth and action day by day, not because they deserve it but because we are Christians, and “They will know we are Christians by our love.”
If God worked by “ergo,” we would be in a world of hurt, but because he works by “dennoch,” we can rejoice.
“Ergo” is the door to misery; “dennoch” is the door to eternal life!
Back in the 1970’s, some engineering students at Stanford University decided that for their senior engineering project, they would build a small submarine and pilot it across San Francisco Bay.
They drew up blueprints and submitted their proposal to the Chairman of the Department of Engineering.
He suggested they secure the advice of maritime engineers who knew a lot more about submarine construction than they did.
The maritime engineers strongly advised them against doing it.
They told them that what they were attempting to do was extremely dangerous for amateurs.
That submarine construction and navigation poses many daunting problems: maintaining proper pressure levels, regulating oxygen supply, coping with strong currents, and so forth.
They said that failure in any of these areas could easily lead to serious injuries or even death.
But the students were committed to doing it, so they bought a used propane tank from a farmer and modified it into a crude submarine.
Against everyone’s advice, they took it down to San Francisco Bay on a Sunday morning and launched it.
Then they successfully sailed it underwater from the Oakland Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge: a distance of about twelve miles.
That submarine now sits in a maritime museum in San Francisco.
It’s name: The Dennoch.
Thank you, Father, for being an unreasonable God.