Beautiful & Supernatural

He gave me one of his long, considering looks—and to be honest, I squirmed under it, expecting the inevitable ‘deep’ question that always followed these ponderous looks of his. He made me wait a moment longer than was comfortable, and then came out with it.

  “Do you believe,” he asked, “in the supernatural.”

  I smiled. I’d been worried this was going to be another conversation about free will and election. Or worse, another one-sided chat about Boethius.

  “You mean ghosts and monsters and all that?” I said. “No, of course not.”

   He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

   “And what about angels and devils and all that?”

I shook a finger at him. “Trick question,” I said. “As a Christian, I naturally believe in the supernatural.”

  For a moment he was silent. I thought he’d lost interest in the conversation. He steepled his fingers over his paunch and gazed into the distance. Then, in a voice that was hardly more than an exhalation, he said, “I believe that God is supernatural.”

  I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, so I took the opportunity to add that while I acknowledged the reality of angels, I didn’t approve of the kitschy sentimental angel fad.

“The angels and devils I believe in are the ones in the Bible, not the ones in the gift shop.”

He interrupted me with a lifted hand. “Listen to what you just said. ‘As a Christian, I naturally believe…’ I wonder if that’s true. In my experience, it is usual for Christians to say they believe in a supernatural God. It is rare for them to act like it.”

“Act like it?”

“What does it imply, this word ‘supernatural’? A God that stands outside the limits of Nature. A God who commands the winds and waves. A God whom the rocks would cry out to praise if men were to keep silent. If nothing else, a God who must be obeyed.”

“We’re not wind and waves,” I said. “We’re human. We have free will.”

He winced at the last two words, as I knew he would. Free choice or free agency he could stomach but to say ‘free will’ within a mile of him was tantamount to waving a blood red flag under Toro’s nose. But this time, he didn’t take the bait.

“But if we really believed in the supernatural, wouldn’t we want to obey? Look at David. He believed in a supernatural God. He didn’t obey perfectly, but he wanted to. He’s caught red-handed and he knows implicitly that murdering Uriah was a sin against God. He knows that man cannot justify sin before God.”

I shrugged. “Sure he does. Don’t we all?”

“As I said, we claim to know. But how do our actions measure up? The things Christians expect to justify before God surprise me. They stab each other in the back and expect to stand guiltless before the throne of judgment. Paul had it right: we sin and tell ourselves grace will abound.”

By this time I was rubbing the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, staving off a theologically induced headache. I’d rather spend my evenings talking about the problem with them—i.e., the world—than what’s wrong with us. But the tone of his voice suddenly grew light, as if a curtain in his mind had just been drawn and light was pouring in.

“The thing that first attracted me to theology,” he said, “was this simple realization: God is supernatural. I was a Christian for years before Christian theology seemed like anything more to me than an inadequate attempt to provide alternative explanations for things like evolution and Freudian psychology. You know what the problem was?”

I shook my head.

“The people I was listening to were Christians, but their theology was based on what they felt was the biblical view of man. Man is free, man is fallen, man is whatever man happens to be. When I saw it was possible—no, necessary—to build my theology around the biblical view not of man but God, that was my Damascus road.”

“And what is God?” I asked rhetorically. “All-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving….”

He smiled. “God is supernatural.”

“….unchanging, Almighty….”

He lifted his hand to silence me again. “You can’t start with God’s characteristics. Start with His essential difference. God is supernatural.”

“OK,” I said. “But that only gets us so far.”

“If you really believe it, it gets you as far as it is possible to go.”

Now this I had to think about. As always, I sensed there was more to what he was saying that I could readily fathom.

“I’ll have to sleep on that,” I said.

He rose to his feet and, towering over me, tapped the table for emphasis. “Sleep on this: God is supernatural, and when I first realized it, the thing that struck me wasn’t His power, His knowledge, His love or anything like that.”

Our eyes met. I blinked. “So, what was it? What struck you when you realized God was supernatural?”

But he was already making his way to the door. I thought I’d have to catch him next time for the answer, but he turned suddenly and mouthed the words silently. I had to replay the film of his moving lips several times over in my mind until I figured out the words.

I’d asked, what struck you when you realized God was supernatural.

His beauty.