The Majesty of Mystery

Strong Qualifications

Coaching trees are often the explanation for why leaders in professional sports have certain abilities and tendencies. Often, the legacy of the mentor’s character and lessons continue down multiple generations. It seems too that this maple maxim extends to theologians as well. Cornelius Van Til was the personal mentor of Dr. Oliphint later in his life. Certainly any coaching tree that begins with Herman Bavinck and runs through Van Til results in a person more than qualified to write what is essentially a brief systematic theology through the lens of the preeminent and majestic mystery of the Trinitarian God.

Further, this is a book with pages that brim with idealistic humility about how believers are shaped by the majestic mystery of God. Dr. Oliphint has authenticated the tone of this particular book in the way he has handled the more recent controversy surrounding his book, God With Us. The content of the controversy aside, a respected theologian who is willing to offer clarity to doctrinal charges in the form of written denials and affirmations matches the tone of idealistic humility found in this book. It brings an extra measure of meaning to this book when the author displays in his life the fruit of the method in which he writes

Summary of Contents

Christian theology is full of seemingly irrational contradictions. The God we worship is eternal and yet He operates in time and space. He is sovereign and yet holds people responsible for their choices. From the foundations of the world He chose those who would be holy and blameless and still announces that whosoever believes in Him will have eternal life.  There are doctrinal tensions that Scripture would have believers affirm. What one might say is that Christian theology is full of mystery. This is a good thing, as Dr. K Scott Oliphint argues in his book, The Majesty of Mystery: Celebrating the Glory of an Incomprehensible God. Mystery, he argues, is both the necessary foundation and necessary fuel for genuine worship.

Christian worship, and Christian theology, begins in mystery. Far from simply being the unanswerable leftovers after rigorous attempts to reconcile theological tensions presented in Scripture, Oliphint posits that actually beginning with an understanding that God is incomprehensible will not only lead to proper worship but also motivate ongoing worship.

This is because mystery is what Herman Bavinck called the “lifeblood of dogmatics.” Mystery is what makes thinking about God an endless pursuit and worshipping God a limitless joy. It reminds us, as Oliphint puts it, that God is God and we are not. Therefore, without the wonder of mystery, Christianity is “bloodless” and without life; because “[t]hings that we understand, that we can wrap our minds around, are rarely objects of our worship.”

Embracing mystery however is not synonymous with a lack of understanding, as Dr. Oliphint argues. Rather, it is knowing what God has revealed in the teaching of Scripture that makes everything we do not know about Him all the more mystifying. To put it another way, in order to worship God for being unfathomable, we must seek to understand what we can actually fathom about God within Scripture. Therefore, again mystery is the lifeblood of Christianity that is necessarily foundational and fueling for believers as it propels them to deeper and greater worship of God.

In chapter two, Oliphint begins to demonstrate how this functions in Scripture by exploring how the Apostle Paul paired rich theological truth with deep doxological praise in Romans 11:33-36. What we see is the apostle marveling at the truth of the known and the mysteries of the unknowable. These two aspects of Scripture are linked with a balanced tension and together they produce genuine Christian worship. 

Having established what mystery is and why it is necessary, Oliphint spends the remainder of the book exploring complex doctrines through the lens of his thesis. He takes a sample of doctrines that have a certain flavor of mystery (Trinity, the Incarnation, the relationship between Providence and Prayer, eternal joy) and works through them applying a functional pattern of biblical development, doctrine and distinctions while concluding each fittingly with biblical doxology. He concludes his exploration of these doctrinal mysteries admitting that genuine Christian worship comes not necessarily by explaining how they work or how even they can be. Rather, it is the fact that these particular mysteries simply are which evokes genuine Christian worship. For when believers begin and continue their pursuit of God with mystery, Oliphint states that, “[They are] affirming that the Triune God is intimately and exhaustively involved in each and every aspect of His creation and of our lives” This is a mystery to be marveled. For it is the “lifeblood” of Christianity that leads believers to genuine worship by faith this side of eternity and by sight on the other.

A Systematic Theology for the Hard Topics

One of the strengths of this book is how particular areas of complex doctrine are presented through the lens of mystery. Oliphint does not simply assert that mystery is foundational and fuel in the pursuit of God and position the book as a theoretical work. Rather, Oliphint walks the reader through personal and pastoral implications by exploring how it is that a healthy understanding of mystery informs our understanding of theology.

Further, what is even more helpful is that the book is set up almost like a concise systematic theology, beginning with the doctrine of God and concluding with eschatological joy. In this way, the book could serve as a reference guide for anyone interested or even troubled by seemingly irrational contradictions within Christianity while pointing toward an embrace of mystery as the lifeblood and driver of theology.

Comprehending the Incomprehensible

What is remarkable about this book is that in each chapter, Oliphint demonstrates the mystery of the particular doctrine as well as its practical and personal use in ministry situations.

Chapter 7, which is about the Providence of God and our choices is a particular standout chapter that both exemplifies and applies the tension of knowing and the unknowable. In the chapter, he traces the biblical development and doctrine of the tension between Providence and human choices, walking the reader through Adam and Eve’s choice in Eden to Saul’s forfeiture of his kingship to Jesus’ decision not to call down legions of angels in Gethsemane. This line of explanation illustrated that indeed God has decreed each and every choice, controlling every choice made. However, at the same time they are the choices of human, responsible for every choice made. Scripture affirms Providence as well as human responsibility so both must be affirmed.

Oliphint wades through dense theological territory in his writings on Providence and human choices to be sure, but in doing so simply illustrates and applies the thesis of the book that embracing and pursuing the depths of mystery lead to genuine Christian worship. Further, in a time where many believers have been falsely taught that God’s plan was something of a treasure map to be discovered, this particular chapter when properly synthesized and parsed, could be of great pastoral aid to those struggling to make decisions, both great and small. As Kevin DeYoung puts it in a more popular-level complement, this particular chapter can help us “[s]top pleading with God to show us the future, and start living and obeying like we are confident that He holds the future.”

One Critique: The Concept of the Book Leaves One Wanting More

Now speaking of the more popular-level, that is possibly one critique for this book. It would have been interesting, and perhaps beneficial, if Oliphint explored the implications of how mystery accounts in creation or ecclesiology. Delving into the mystery of God’s incomprehensibility in the creation of the cosmos or the church’s attempts at right doctrine through denominational differences sounds quite fascinating.

Granted, this is most likely asking too much of the book because its systematic structure necessitates grander, more encompassing areas of doctrine to be addressed. Obviously more could be written through the lens of mystery as being the necessary foundation and fuel for Christian theology and in a world of more pages, it would have been intriguing to see this lens applied to the more specific topics that were mentioned.

However, readers should not begrudge Oliphint his doctrinal selections. Each doctrine within each chapter served to not only educate the reader but accomplish what the book set out to do which was to demonstrate the primacy of mystery in Christian theology and worship.

An Evangelistic Tool for a Misunderstood Generation

What this book accomplishes in its theological message, it equally accomplishes in its potential for use in evangelism. The primacy of mystery has long been central to Christian theology and worship, certainly in Scripture as Oliphint points out but also with Augustine. Mystery as foundational and fuel then is nothing new. However, Oliphint seems to be advocating for something of a recovery of mystery within the faith. Interestingly, and someone of his influence probably accounted for this, but according to research, a return to the primacy of mystery is what millennials and Generation Z desires.

In his book The New Copernicans, John David Seel asserts that those belonging to the aforementioned generations, “[a]re open to the possibility of transcendence, to an “inter-cosmic mystery.” They are haunted by the possibility of something more.” This desire for something greater is true it seems for the unchurched and the de-churched alike. Many are the millennials who grew up in a youth ministry built on observant legalism and manufactured spiritual experiences only to abandon the church altogether after realizing the thinness of their experiences.

Seel even reminds his own readers that many today are retracing the spiritual journey of CS Lewis as he moved from bloodless faith in his early Anglicanism to closed atheism in his teen years, to an open viewpoint under the influence of Yeats while in graduate school, and then finally to accepting the lifeblood mystery of Christianity through the guidance of Tolkien and Dyson. As it has beens stated before, this book that Oliphint has written has good value for believers desiring to properly refocus and reform their worship of God.

However, this book also has a certain significance for any believer in need of an accessible tool that speaks the language of younger generations and provides a pathway toward what is satisfying and inexhaustible worship of an incomprehensible God.

Conclusion: A Hard Book that is Worth Your Time

Tozer is probably more quoted in reviews of this book than any other theologian and for good reason. If it is true that the “[g]ravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.” If it is true that “[w]e tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God,” then it is of vital importance that the intellectual rigor toward comprehending the majestic mysteries of the incomprehensible God is emphasized in our own pursuit of God as well as for the church.

As Oliphint and Tozer both seem to suggest, the degree to which we know God as incomprehensible is inextricably tied to our worship as inexhaustible — more mystery means more worship. Christian theology is full of mystery, which is a good thing. For mystery is both the necessary foundation and necessary fuel for genuine Christian worship.

The Majesty of Mystery: Celebrating the Glory of an Incomprehensible God, by its content and literary structure, provides a practical and liberating path forward for anyone searching for meaning and purpose in their faith.