7. Sovereignty of God

7. Sovereignty of God

"And from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be"
(George Matheson, 1842-1906)

How I long to see among dawn flowers the face of God.
 (Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694)

There is a ready acceptance of given concrete situations in Zen which seems not to fall victim (contrary to expectation) to a despondent fatalism. It is more robust and more positive in tone than that. Curiously, as we have noticed, one almost catches a whiff reminiscent of the aroma-therapeutic Calvinist flower of the absolute sovereignty of God, a blossom which quietly adorns the hospital bedside of our smitten universe. A blossom which intimates the imminent all-healing of both cosmic and personal pain: "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (Rev 22:2). A Calvinist flower whose petals gentle the mind with the (however unlikely) rightness of Now: "everything beautiful in its time","A time to live and a time to die". This biblical "content-in-all-circumstances" trait is, as we have seen above, echoed in Zen. Is this a kind of "Common Grace" wisdom?

Lest the foregoing be still misunderstood as fatalistic and as offensively oblivious of life's horrors, we should stress anew two points of clarification. Firstly, commitment to the sovereignty of God is not in  the least incompatible with the most intense of struggles to overturn adverse circumstances. Secondly, it is of course to be understood rather as a personal credo of fortitude than as promiscuously proferred counsel. When Job's friends sat silently and wept with him in compassionate solidarity they were indeed his "comforters". When they began to theorize over the supposed metaphysics of his plight, they became obnoxious. They grievously added to Job's woes by, as it were, sacrificing him on the altar of abstraction. And should anyone complain that there is a paradox between submission to the sovereign will of God and any endeavour to better current circumstance, I would point out that this so-called "paradox" is apparent even in the prayer Christ taught His disciples. On the one hand there is the confession: "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory". On the other hand, there is the supplication: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".

So we can thus perhaps begin to appreciate that simply mouthing the words "sovereignty of God" does not magically grant serene composure to the Calvinist facing a meltdown level of stress. Far from it. While certainly for the Calvinist the sovereignty of God remains the only possible deliverance from blank loss, that very sovereignty can also provoke crushing perpexities. In his commentary on the Book of Job, Francis I. Andersen has the following to say:

The intense faith of Job immediately sees the hand of God in every 'natural' event. There are no 'accidents' in a universe ruled by the one sovereign Lord. Hence Job's problem. Such mishaps are not a problem for the polytheist, the dualist, the atheist, the naturalist, the fatalist, the materialist, the agnostic. An annoyance, a tragedy even, but not a problem. Suffering caused by human wickedness or by the forces of nature is ultimately a problem only for a believer in the one Creator who is both good and almighty; so this problem can arise only within the Bible with its distinctive moral monotheism... 

Job sees only the hand of God in these events. It never occurs to him to curse the desert brigands, to curse the frontier guards, to curse his own stupid servants, now lying dead for their watchlessness. All secondary causes vanish. It was the Lord who gave; it was the Lord who removed; and in the Lord alone must the explanation for these strange happenings be sought... 

Job's faith does not relieve his agony; it causes it. 

(Francis I Andersen, Job: Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, IVP, pp 86, 88, 89)

And here is a pertinent Zen consideration of such matters (quoted by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith in his online article "Zen: A Trinitarian Critique":

Now we shall consider the case of a hungry lion. He is a ferocious wild animal. He has no scruples against attacking a pack of deer peacefully grazing in the field. He will choose a ground of vantage and suddenly rushing into the group pounce upon one which happens to be not quick enough to avoid the enemy. . . . In this he has no vain desire to prove his prowess against the weaker. His biological urge makes him act in the way he naturally displays. He has neither pride nor remorse nor the feeling of anything that he ought not to have done. He is perfectly innocent of all these human feelings. He has absolutely no repentance, as he has no sense of duty and responsibility. He has simply executed what his nature demands. . . . As long as the world is so constituted and one life subsists on another, it is like a gale passing over a garden, everything in its passage has to give itself to the raging force of Nature. There is here no killer, no killing, and no killed. The lion is just as innocent as the atmospheric commotion. If there is anyone who is responsible for all this carnage, the Creator is the one and nobody else.  

[Daisetz T. Suzuki, "Zen and Parapsychology" in Philosophy and Culture -- East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), pp. 740-41] 

As we meet the first-person narrator at the start of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, we quickly discover that he has recovered (or has he?) from a major mental breakdown (perhaps insanity). The central philosophical strand of the book is a gradual unfolding, epiphany even, of what the narrator can piece together of his former self's insight into "Quality". "Quality" (as presented in the book) transcends "subjective" and "objective". It transcends also the western world's intractable struggle between "romantic" and "classical" mindsets.

Despite its title, the book carries a disclaimer which says (in part) that "it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice".  However, Zen does come in for mention, and moreover it is clear that Pirsig sees major affinities, if not complete consonance, between "Quality" and the "Tao". Pirsig's pre-breakdown self (who he calls  Phaedrus) is reading Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching:

"He had broken the code. He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything." 

(Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Vintage, 1999, p 254)

A key part of the complex storyline of this exceptional book centres on Pirsig's estranged yet poignant relationship with Chris, his teenage son, who rides pillion during Pirsig's trans-American motorcycle journey. The book was first published in 1974. In an afterword (written around 1984?), Pirsig shares the shocking news that in 1979 his son, then aged 23, was brutally stabbed to death in San Francisco as he left the Zen Center where he (Chris) was a student. Pirsig's first comment surely touches the common humanity of all who have shared, or come near to sharing, such grief:

"I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else." (Ibid p 415)

He then describes his need to find some shape for it all:

I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the question became obsessive: "Where did he go?" (Ibid p 416)

Such resolution as Pirsig arrives at, or at least shares, begins with talk of "pattern", which sounds vaguely scientific, but in this context (to me at least) disagreeably impersonal. The language register then transposes to bring to mind reincarnation (though the term as such is not used). So Pirsig at this point anyway, would seem to be finding his deepest solace in a Buddhist framework, though his overall terminology is somewhat prevaricating, as if he is allowing different ways of conceptualizing (or maybe he is simply and honestly unresolved): 

"What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of. Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything.....If you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it the "spirit" of Chris or the "ghost" of Chris, then you can say without further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter....In any event it was not many months later that my wife conceived, unexpectedly.... So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he's a little girl named Nell and our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is being mended. (Ibid, p 417)

Despite the huge common ground emotionally and existentially in such matters, the Calvinist would not of course countenance any talk of reincarnation. Rebirth, yes. As Christ explains to Nicodemus:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."  In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."  "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"  Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."  "How can this be?" Nicodemus asked.  "You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to  you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (John 3:1-18 NIV)

It is in this context, of course, that Calvinism faces the most extreme outrage and censure. For if God is absolutely sovereign, is it not a sick joke to imply that we have any real choice whether to "believe" or to "disbelieve"? The Calvinist answer is that God's sovereignty is absolute. And humans are responsible for their choices. Zen lives with paradox. So do we. Not that I accept for a moment that the Calvinist position is incoherent. On the contrary. Coherence requires the sovereignty of God. Human responsibility requires the sovereignty of God. Without that sovereignty we instantaneously plummet through the metaphysics of white noise into the absolute silence of not even nothing.

So if God is both good and sovereign, why is the world in such dire straits? Precisely because human choices are real choices with real repercussions. The Apostle Paul certainly considered those who reject God to be responsible, and therefore culpable -

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1: 18-20 NIV)

As discussed elsewhere in this essay, the meaning of the cosmos flows from God via Man. The first man, Adam, was the Root of mankind. When he rejected the Creator's explanation of reality in favour of his own, the cosmos was automatically blighted. This was the Fall. Christ, the Second Man, the Last Adam, is the new Root of mankind. In him mankind chooses anew God's explanation of reality. Thus it is the cosmos (not just the human "soul") that is being redeemed in Christ.

Spiritual rebirth. Physical resurrection. With Christ, by the sovereignty of God, as guarantor. That is the Calvinist worldview. If I might repeat my earlier quote from Dooyeweerd:

Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.(Herman Dooyeweerd, "A New Critique of Theoretical Thought" Vol II, p 34)

The wind blows wherever it pleases:

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. When, then, do you fan yourself?" "Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere." "What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. (Written by Dōgen in 1233. Translated by Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi) http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/GenjoKoan_Aitken.htm

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