Progressive, corporate, mild-mannered Minneapolis is an unlikely evangelical mecca, but the popularity of a particular leaky-shoed denizen has made it so for his many young, restless, and Reformed(ish) fans. Joe Rigney was just such a fan-turned-pilgrim when he made the trek from Texas to the Minnesotan tundra to study at his master’s feet; now he is assistant professor of theology and Christian worldview at Bethlehem College and Seminary. This is important context that enters into The Things of Earth through many autobiographical passages.
As you most likely know, the master’John Piper’has spent the bulk of his public ministry urging bland evangelical epicures to become maximally hedonistic in a distinctly Edwardsian sense. Not that Piper was being clever, but telling hedonists they are not hedonistic enough was sure to resonate, at least among the more earnestly restless set. And indeed, many believers wasting their lives, as he puts it, pursuing the lesser pleasures of the American dream, found his spiritual, God-centered sensuality revolutionary. He validated their pursuit of pleasure, gave voice to their disappointments with the world, and convinced them their sybaritic passions could only be satisfied in God, who is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. This rendered an otherwise clunky and ill-fitting faith viable for many evangelicals.
But some, such as Rigney, who found themselves living their faith in fresh and lively ways, also came away convinced that the pursuit of higher, spiritual pleasures’the cultivation of a pure and potent delight in God’was incompatible with an easy enjoyment of the mundane blessings of life. You will never yearn to make sandcastles by the sea, the thinking goes, till you despise making mud patties by the puddle. If all the pleasures of this world are mere mud patties and puddles compared to the pleasures of God, then we must learn to despise the things of earth, stripping our lives of lesser pleasures in order to delight undividedly in the greatest of all pleasures. For his part, Rigney lived on ramen noodles seasoned with the ‘smugness’ of a self-righteous ascetic (203).
A good case can be made that the less mature Rigney misunderstood his master’s teachings, but Piper acknowledges a ‘strong ascetic tendency’ to his brand of Christian hedonism and appeals to a parallel tendency in Scripture (11). Rigney agrees that the gospel calls and equips believers to pursue lives of self-denial. His primary target is not the ascetic cast of life in Christ but asceticism, which denies the goodness of created gifts and counts abstaining from the pleasure of earthly things a spiritual good. A form of the latter is what Piper probably never taught (though he admits to a certain imbalance of emphasis in rhetoric and life) but what Rigney and others took from his teachings. The Things of Earth is Rigney’s attempt to give the pleasure of created things back to those who had those things slapped from their hands or struggled to freely and gladly receive them in the first place.
But Rigney’s particular proposal for how we might treasure God by enjoying his gifts (unnecessarily) rides on a panentheistic doctrine of God with distinctly occasionalist and idealist accents. ‘Panentheism’ is not my characterization but Rigney’s confession, inspired by Jonathan Edwards’s unfinished and posthumously published dissertation, The End for Which God Created the World.
Edwards’s dissertation is surely the most celebrated and cited text, after Scripture, in Christian hedonist circles. This is not the place to inspect Edwards’s argument, and exactly what version of these three positions he embraced is hotly contested in the secondary literature. What is not much debated is that Edwards held some version of each one and all three are departures from the classical theism of the Reformed tradition to that point. In this book, Rigney binds Christian hedonism to this controversial Edwardsian legacy, arguing a panentheistic doctrine of God is not only required by Scripture but the key to shamelessly enjoying a hamburger and fries and all the other things of earth.
Rigney asserts that ‘God is an author. This world is his story. We are the characters’ (51). This world, he continues, is ‘a dramatic rendering of [God’s] epic poem that is so potent that his words actually take on flesh’ (52). As he conceives it, God is the one performing the ‘dramatic rendering,’ and his creatures are the words he speaks. Quoting N. D. Wilson, he claims ‘we are made of ‘words. Magic words’¦words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us” (53).
As such, we are characters in a story that resides in the divine author’s mind with the consequence that ‘the intentions of the [divine] author and the intentions of the characters mutually indwell each other.’ Although ‘God remains God, and the creatures remain creatures’¦the characters and all their thoughts, intentions, and actions are the content and product of the author’s creative will’ (54). Quoting Edwards, Rigney reasons that ‘it is because God is in us that our blood runs, our pulse beats, our lungs play, our food digests, and our organs of sense perform their operation,’ and he follows this occasionalist arc to its conclusion of continuous creation:
The same power that made things to be the first moment that they ever were is now exercised to make them to be this moment, and is continually exercised to make them to be every moment that they are’¦.God’s preservation of the world is nothing but a continued act of creation. (49)
Anticipating the objection that actual human beings ‘are more real than characters in a fairy tale,’ Rigney pushes back. We may indeed be more real than fictional characters, but relative to the divine author, he argues, we are much ‘less real’ than fairy-tale creatures are relative to their human author’so much so that ‘the distance between fictional characters and real persons [is] largely irrelevant’ (52’53).
That conclusion strongly suggests a kind of idealism’that we are just ideas in the divine mind or, in this case, characters in the story God is telling himself. Rigney confirms this in an endnote: ‘Creation exists in God in the same way that an author’s story exists in his mind. The story is not to be identified with the author, but the story is, in some real sense, in the author’ (243 n.16).
As with much of what Rigney (and Edwards) says about God and creation, there are non-occasionalist, non-idealist, and perhaps even non-panentheistic ways to understand many of his claims. The drift of his argument, however, is consistently in these directions. Consider his discussion of divine glory: ‘God’s glory is his Trinitarian fullness,’ and this fullness is ‘flowing out from himself, emanating and overflowing to creatures’ (41). In this way, ‘creation is a reflection of the divine nature, and the divine nature is fundamentally triune.’ Therefore, ‘we ought to be able to recognize aspects of the Trinity in what God has made’ (36).
The overflow of God’s Trinitarian fullness to creation has a corresponding return: creatures are ‘drawn in so that we come to share in divine knowledge, love, and joy, or, as Peter says, we become ‘partakers of the divine nature” (41’42). He describes this return to God as the ‘promise of perichoretic participation’ in which ‘the triune glory of the Father, Son, and Spirit is being extended to us so that we participate in their knowledge, love, and joy. We are being invited into the fellowship of the Godhead,’ he continues, ‘so that we have the same union with God that the Father and Son have with each other’ (44).
Here, as in several other places, Rigney hedges somewhat. While our ‘perichoretic participation’ in the divine nature ‘will approach such a union of knowledge, love, and joy’¦with ever-increasing speed,’ we will never catch up because God has an infinite head start on us (44; emphasis original). Still, ‘the glory and fullness of God includes’¦our knowledge of his perfections and our love for his perfections, and all the thoughts and affections and actions that flow out of that knowledge and love.’ This is because ‘our knowledge of God is simply God’s knowledge of himself in us‘ and our ‘love for God is simply God’s love for God in us‘ and so on. ‘This,’ he explains, ‘is the origin and’¦end’ of all things, ‘the Alpha and Omega,’¦the supreme harmony of all’ (46; emphasis original).
Traditionally, perichoresis refers to the unique way the three divine persons mutually indwell or interpenetrate one another such that the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father and the Spirit likewise. After Jürgen Moltmann, however, Trinitarian panentheistic doctrines of God have tended to open up and extend perichoresis to creation, as Rigney does here. It is not surprising, then, to find Rigney arguing along panentheistic lines that ‘God’s love for God pushes him into creation’ and that ‘creation is God’s self-expression, the free overflow of his triune personality and life’¦that makes invisible realities visible’ (61’62). Rigney writes:
In creation, God gives himself. And giving himself means that he does his deeds and in some sense is himself through the things he has made. This is not pantheism, the idea that God is everything and everything is God. But it is the notion that God is in everything, that creation really is the bearer of divine life and glory, so that (to quote Lewis again), when we look at any aspect of creation, we can say ‘This also is Thou: neither is this Thou.’ (68; emphasis original)
This ‘is one of the fundamental arguments of this book,’ he insists, precisely because it is the key to how we can treasure God by enjoying the things of earth: ‘The divine presence is truly in the created stuff’really in the pizza and the wife and the music and the sunset’ (62, 68).
While Rigney’s doctrine of God is not pantheistic’God is not merely identical with creation’it is panentheistic, since the divine being comprehends creation and in some way exists in and through creation. Rigney affirms the importance of maintaining some sort of distinction between the infinite Creator and finite creation in order to guard against pantheism. Yet he also suggests that ‘the distinction’ itself ‘almost disappears’ when viewed in the proper way, concluding that ‘God creates the world ex nihilo in order to wear it as a beautiful garment, a glory-robe fit for the King of kings’ (72’73). Again, ‘God’s relationship to creation is perichoretic: creation exists in God, and God exists in some sense in it’ (74). Finally, he makes his commitment explicit: ‘While I want to carefully guard against errors, I do believe that some sort of panentheism is exegetically demanded by passages such as Acts 17:26’¦and Col 1:16’ (243 n.16).
In the foreword, Piper praises Rigney for being ‘so devoted to Scripture that he is unafraid to face whatever it says’ (13). Perhaps so, but it should be noted that hardly any Reformed exegete, Edwards excepted, argues that Scripture permits, much less demands, panentheism or its occasionalist and idealist traveling companions, as Rigney does. It should also be noted that it is not necessary to suppose panentheism in order to recognize or speak effusively about the glory of God and the unimaginably intimate and delightful communion we enjoy with him through Jesus Christ, or his concurrence in things actual or the wide liberty he grants us in creation and in Christ. There is hard-won wisdom on tap in every chapter, but readers seeking a modern reformation will need to reckon with the influence of Jonathan Edwards’s legacy in these pages.’
