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John Wesley’S Theology of the Kingdom of God Leon O Wesleyan Theological Journal Volume 23, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring-Fall, 1988 The Quest for the Holy: “The Darkness of God” Frank G. Carver 7 The Kingdom of God Mortimer Arias 33 John Wesley’s Theology of the Kingdom of God Leon O. Hynson 46 The Theology of the Kingdom of God in E. Stanley Jones David Bundy 58 A Wesleyan Reading of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Theology W. Stanley Johnson 81 The Holiness Witness in the Ecumenical Church Donald W. Dayton 92 John Wesley’s Concept of the Ministerial Office Kenneth J. Collins 107 John Wesley — Practical Theologian? Randy Maddox 122 John Wesley, Spiritual Director: Spiritual Guidance in John Wesley’s Letters Wesley D. Tracy 148 Essential Doctrines and Real Religion: Theological Method in Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions John R. Tyson 163 John Wesley and the Enthusiasts Lowell O. Ferrel 180 “The Witness of the Spirit”: Questions for Clarification for Wesley’s Doctrine of Assurance Michael E. Lodahl 188 Phoebe Palmer and the Development of Pentecostal Pneumatology Charles Edward White 198 6 THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY: “The Darkness of God” “„Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.‟“ 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, “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 Introduction This presentation comes out of a study(1) concerned with the spiritual heart of my own heritage, the Wesleyan 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. As I have lived and worked in the midst of the behaviors of holiness institutions and their people, I have at times agonizingly asked, What is it really, that we are all about? So I have a concern. Inspired in the labors of the classroom by Exodus 20:8- 21, I set out on a personal quest for the holy, or a quest for the bottom line of my own heritage as a professed “holiness” person. I was convinced that the four verses of Exodus 20:18-21, which follow 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. My quest is for the essence of a “holiness people.” What does it mean for 7 us to hunger for the holy, we who make Scriptural holiness our ecclesiastical distinctive? In this quest I have acquired a fascination, a fascination for “the darkness of God.” I have been profoundly moved by the use of the metaphor de of darkness for the presence of God in the Old Testament. At the same time I discovered that classic and contemporary writers on spirituality use the darkness theme in provocatively similar ways.(2) The early fathers of the the church testified to their repeated experience of God as darkness. God came to them from out of the darkness.(3) Reflecting on this experience of the ancient in Fathers Ladislaus Boros wrote in the 70s that 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.(4) This darkness language, frequent in Catholic spiritual writers from Saint John of the Cross(5) to Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen(6) and found as well u in Protestant writers,(7) 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. In Exodus 20:18-21 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. (8) Designated by “thick darkness,” writes Samuel Terrien, is a total darkness which is a symbol both of the divine presence to and the divine hiddenness. It was a symbol of divine power in both its danger and its blessing, and it came to designate the complete blackness of the innermost room in the Jerusalem sanctuary.(9) 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!‟ (10) 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.‟ (11) 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! For 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. I am discovering that it has to do with a Presence, the presence of the Holy One! Born and reared a Methodist, I was first attracted to the holiness movement by an overwhelming sense of the holy. I met it in a godly mother, now 8 90 years old and still teaching an adult Sunday school class. I sensed it in an old-fashioned Methodist holiness preacher grandfather whose picture hangs on my campus 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. A pervading sense of the holy was unmistakable when I 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 Church. Has something happened to us? Or, what has happened to me? How do I, how do we, discover again that absolutely necessary sense of a transcendent Presence? I am moved to wonder, could our 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”?(12) Moses bore witness that Mount Sinai “blazed with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness.”(13) The Gospels testify that at the moment of Jesus‟ crucifixion “darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.”(14) 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 communities. We cross that thin, almost imperceptible line between the holy and the demonic. The dark side of the holiness heritage comes most frequently into community life when our Christian 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.”(15) 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.”(16) Therefore I am coming to 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”(17) and that of Martin Luther who in his theology of the cross writes of “having entered into darkness,”(18) that is, “into the event revealed to us in Jesus Christ.”(19) It is the unmistakable presence of the holy that puts our common lives unavoidably in the perspective of God, the vision of God penetrating our historically limited and fallen humanities. 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(20) 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.
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