The majesty of God

I've begun the second volume of Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics, "God and Creation." Bavinck begins by discussing the incomprehensibility of God, the teaching that we can never have an exhaustive knowledge of God. He is infinite, we are finite. He is eternal, we are time-bound. He is the Creator, we are the creatures. By virtue of God's transcendence and radical distinctness from all that we are and know as finite creatures (i.e., his divine majesty), complete comprehension of him is impossible. Yet, because God has revealed himself to us, we can still have genuine (but not total) knowledge of him. Though Scripture says, "Behold, God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable" (Job 36:16), we also read, "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3).

After showing how Christian theology, including that of the Reformation, had always maintained this doctrine of God's ineffable majesty, Bavinck notes that over time the stress fell more on knowing the will of God rather than on the knowledge of God himself. He writes, "It is as if people had lost all sense of the majesty and grandeur of God. Disregarding all so-called metaphysical questions, people rushed on to the will of God in order to know and to do it" (pg. 41).

This made me think that perhaps there is a profound theological problem that is common both to liberal Christianity and to much of today's evangelical Christianity. In many ways the two are far apart. But could it be that both movements spring from an impulse to stress the knowing and doing of the will of God, at the expense of focusing on the glory and majesty of God (and making God's glory central to the life and worship of the church)? Liberal Christianity long ago jettisoned serious consideration of the holy character of God in favor of social activism. Modern evangelicalism, on the other hand, while adhering to the basic tenets of orthodoxy, seems far too preoccupied with knowing the "how to's" of Christianity (how to have a good marriage, how to be good parents, how to have less anxiety, etc.). Both tendencies seem to share at least this in common, in Bavinck's words: it is as if people have lost all sense of the majesty and grandeur of God.