There is no passable route from us to God. We cannot climb the ladder of mysticism, speculation, or merit. In pride, we try to rise to heaven through reason, but God descends to us in humility and self-sacrificial generosity. We seek the truth within ourselves or in universal laws derived from our moral intuition, but God surprises us””and his name is Jesus.
This is partly why the gospel is scandalous: not because it’s irrational and subjective, but precisely because here, faith refuses to remain on the Alcatraz of private opinion. The gospel is also a scandal because of what it announces: a radical rescue operation amid a radical problem (God’s wrath). The gospel exposes that our claim to be defenders of reason is based on an irrational decision to ignore history and to stand in defiance of our own intuition that we are shipwrecked and need rescue. Left to ourselves, we use reason so irrationally that we determine that God cannot enter history, even before we examine whether he has done so. Again, it’s not “neutral reason” running the show here, but a blind faith in naturalism.
While we were looking for “God” in the glorious splendor of our inner lights and universal morality, the Son became the most scandalously particular yet historically accessible revelation of God.
Read it all.
(Christianity Today) Michael Horton–Why We Need the Incarnation
There is no passable route from us to God. We cannot climb the ladder of mysticism, speculation, or merit. In pride, we try to rise to heaven through reason, but God descends to us in humility and self-sacrificial generosity. We seek the truth within ourselves or in universal laws derived from our moral intuition, but God surprises us””and his name is Jesus.
This is partly why the gospel is scandalous: not because it’s irrational and subjective, but precisely because here, faith refuses to remain on the Alcatraz of private opinion. The gospel is also a scandal because of what it announces: a radical rescue operation amid a radical problem (God’s wrath). The gospel exposes that our claim to be defenders of reason is based on an irrational decision to ignore history and to stand in defiance of our own intuition that we are shipwrecked and need rescue. Left to ourselves, we use reason so irrationally that we determine that God cannot enter history, even before we examine whether he has done so. Again, it’s not “neutral reason” running the show here, but a blind faith in naturalism.
While we were looking for “God” in the glorious splendor of our inner lights and universal morality, the Son became the most scandalously particular yet historically accessible revelation of God.
Read it all.