The 2010 Resolved Conference. How do I even begin to describe what a blessing it was? I’m overflowing with potential topics for blog posts (and SO excited to start blogging again), and no doubt I’ll have several forthcoming. But, for now, I’ll start with just one thing that’s been coming to mind since the conference. It’s admittedly odd; see, I keep thinking about Moby Dick.
Now, the theme of this year’s Resolved Conference was neither whales nor classic literature. (Shocking, I know.) Actually, the theme was “Jesus Christ.” So…why Moby Dick?
Well, let me try to explain:
Before Resolved, I was reading Moby Dick for the first time and was surprised to find it much more than a story about a man hunting a whale. The book is weighty, not just in size, but in subject matter; it grapples with questions of truth, morality, the soul, free will, reality, etc. The man-chasing-whale plot gives the book its skeleton, but the author (Herman Melville), is constantly using characters, events, and descriptions of whales, whaling, and the sea as springboards into these deeper waters (yes, pun somewhat intended).
You know the basic gist of the story: Captain Ahab has been maimed by the great white whale Moby Dick and now is on an all-consuming, monomaniacal quest for vengeance. Pretty simple. But that, like I said, is just the skeleton, and the book is fleshed out with a multitude of tangents, allusions, and symbolisms—Moby Dick himself being one of the most glaring symbols.
You see, to Ahab, Moby Dick isn’t just a whale. Ishmael explains:
"[Ahab] at last came to identify with him [the whale], not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. [A]ll the subtle demonisms of life and thought: all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable, in Moby Dick" (226).
Now, the theme of this year’s Resolved Conference was neither whales nor classic literature. (Shocking, I know.) Actually, the theme was “Jesus Christ.” So…why Moby Dick?
Well, let me try to explain:
Before Resolved, I was reading Moby Dick for the first time and was surprised to find it much more than a story about a man hunting a whale. The book is weighty, not just in size, but in subject matter; it grapples with questions of truth, morality, the soul, free will, reality, etc. The man-chasing-whale plot gives the book its skeleton, but the author (Herman Melville), is constantly using characters, events, and descriptions of whales, whaling, and the sea as springboards into these deeper waters (yes, pun somewhat intended).
You know the basic gist of the story: Captain Ahab has been maimed by the great white whale Moby Dick and now is on an all-consuming, monomaniacal quest for vengeance. Pretty simple. But that, like I said, is just the skeleton, and the book is fleshed out with a multitude of tangents, allusions, and symbolisms—Moby Dick himself being one of the most glaring symbols.
You see, to Ahab, Moby Dick isn’t just a whale. Ishmael explains:
"[Ahab] at last came to identify with him [the whale], not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. [A]ll the subtle demonisms of life and thought: all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable, in Moby Dick" (226).
And Ahab isn’t just venting frustrations on an animal; his rage is intentionally directed at something he sees at work in/behind the whale. He tells Starbuck, his first mate:
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (203; italics mine).
What is that “unknown but still reasoning thing” showing itself through the “mask” or “wall” of the whale? Throughout the book, this is alternately referred/alluded to as fate, chance, the gods, and, ultimately, God Himself. Ahab, in effect, has transferred onto the white whale all his angst and anger regarding a divine Power that he sees as impersonal, inscrutable, and cruel—an “intelligent malignity” (225).
A great part of Ahab’s hatred for the whale/Power lies in its combined power and inscrutability. An entire chapter, actually, is spent discussing the whiteness of the whale and how this color-that-is-the-absence-of-color stirs panic and fear in human hearts, because it is the color of inscrutability and indefiniteness. Ahab says: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him” (203).
In another place, at the end of a seemingly surface-level discussion about a whale tail, and its overwhelming incomprehensibility, Ishmael (the book’s narrator) says this:
"Dissect him [a whale] how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he may about his face, I say again he has no face" (441; italics mine).
Do you catch the allusion to Moses here? God passing before him and showing him only the tail end of His glory, not His face?
This is where I can’t help but make connections, and the Resolved Conference comes bursting in on the scene by way of incredible contrast.
Rick Holland’s first sermon during the conference was from the book of Job. The book of Job, Rick advised, is NOT primarily about chapters 1 and 2 (the story we’re all familiar with). That portion of the book actually is relatively small; the majority of the book is Job grappling with this question: how do you deal with a God who is both transcendent and imminent—“so far you can’t get to Him but so near you can’t outrun Him”?
It climaxes in chapter 9. Here’s some of what Job says:
11Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not;
he moves on, but I do not perceive him.
12Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back?
Who will say to him, 'What are you doing?'
15Though I am in the right, I cannot answer him;
I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.
16If I summoned him and he answered me,
I would not believe that he was listening to my voice.
17For he crushes me with a tempest
and multiplies my wounds without cause;
18he will not let me get my breath,
but fills me with bitterness.
19If it is a contest of strength, behold, he is mighty!
If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?
32For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him,
that we should come to trial together.
33There is no arbiter between us,
who might lay his hand on us both.
His angst is almost palpable. And do you see why this made/makes me think of Moby Dick? This is what fictional Captain Ahab wrestled with—the very thing Job wrestled with. And it is man’s greatest problem. What do you do with a God who is both inscrutable (unfathomably, unreachably beyond us) but also all-powerful (inescapably involved in all the details of life)? Or, to recast it, how do you deal with a God so transcendent that you can’t touch Him but also so near that you can’t escape His power?
Job lamented this difficulty: God is not a man, and there is such a wide gap between God and man, who could ever umpire between them? There is no one who can stand as advocate and represent each party rightly—no mediator between them.
Ah…and there it is. You know where this is headed, don’t you? Here is the amazing truth:
Job aside, and Ahab aside, and everything else aside, THIS is the answer, and THIS is what overwhelms me with wonder and gratitude. Jesus Christ—He is the Mediator. This is the beautiful mystery of His incarnation and the hypostatic union. In Him we have what Job longed for: a Mediator, an Umpire—the one who can perfectly represent man to God and God to man, because He IS both God and man. He has explained and shown God to us, and He is the Mediator between us, the one who reconciles us to God. Imminence and transcendence meet perfectly in Him.
Astounding.
In Moby Dick, God is inscrutable, and has no face. But that is fiction. The reality is that in Christ, God is made known—and we see His glory in the face of Christ. He is the image of the invisible God. He is “God with Us.” It’s astonishing truth that brings me to my knees.
If I could rewrite the ending to Moby Dick, I’d have Ahab speak as Job spoke at the end of his encounter with God: “I lay my hand on my mouth” (40:4) and “I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6).
I’m incredibly thankful for this reminder.
“For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor. 4:6).
