Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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Light of Light

Jonal entry 1090 | February 19 2009

The Nicene Creed, Christendom's most universal creed (389 A.D.) begins:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all worlds; Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Light of Light? Where does that come from and what does it mean? Christians by definition confess that Jesus is "very God of very God, of one substance with the Father," but where does the "light" come in?

The New Testament contains almost a hundred references to light, most of which have a more metaphorical or double-edged meaning rather than a literal meaning like the light of day, a light (not heavy) burden, or the light from a lamp or candle. (You can see most of them, here.) And many of those metaphorical and ambiguous uses of the term are alluding to God, as an attribute or characteristic of God, or something believers share with or reflect from God.

It's not until the fourth Gospel, that of John, Jesus' beloved disciple, that the doctrine of light begins taking shape, and in all of John's writings, his epistles as well as the Apocalypse or Revelation, each reference adds more richness and depth to this portrait of God in Christ. St. James the Lord's brother also uses light metaphors in his general epistle, as does St. Paul in his writings. (Note that virtually all biblical scholars believe that Paul's writings were put down and circulated before the gospels were, though they come after the gospels logically and in the New Testament ordering.)

The fourth and fifth verses of the first chapter of John's Gospel introduce light as an aspect of Jesus' divinity: "In him was life; and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness comprehends it not." Paul refers, in quotations recorded by Luke in the Acts, to his conversion as being the result of a great light, brighter than the noonday sun, that interrupted his journey from Jerusalem to Damascus, and that he heard a voice identifying itself as the voice of God in the light and that although his traveling companions did not hear the voice, they also saw the blinding light. Jesus is referred to in Scripture as the "day star" and the sun (s-u-n) of righteousness. John describes the heavenly city foursquare in Revelation as being lit by a light "like a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal" (Rev.21:11) "...and the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof" (Rev.21:23).

And of course in the Old Testament Moses is described as spending time in close proximity of the eternal God at the top of Mount Sinai, and descending the mountain "glowing" not only the way angelic halos are said to glow, but also as a sunburn can be referred to as "glowing." Though God hid himself from Moses's eyes behind a thick cloud, the glow of his light both illumined and "roasted" Israel's patriarch. Observations like these have been used to support the hypothesis that some church fathers (teachers whose insights can be described as "begetting" many children of the church) have proposed: that not only is God an energy source of light and heat, but that in this He is both heaven itself to those who seek and bow to him and hell to those who run from and disdain him. Last week I provided a reference to a website (here) that discusses this hypothesis. Its inclusion last week was inspired by something I quoted from Thomas Merton that was making a similar allusion, that God is light and fire.

This hypothesis also leads to a similar suggestion in C. S. Lewis's fiction, where he proposes that what some perceive as heaven or paradise, others perceive as a place of eternal torment or hell. In The Great Divorce, his novel about a field trip from purgatory (or it might be hell, or it might be London during the great fogs at the nadir of the industrial revolution) to heaven, the people who get off the bus to have a closer look feel that everything in heaven is too, as we might say in this time, "in their face." Heaven's colors were too bright after the universal greyness of purgatory/London/hell. Even the blades of grass on their feet, some of them complained, were almost like blades of knives, too sharp and unyielding to walk on. In that book, one of the tourguides from heaven tries to persuade the visitors that they will get accustomed to the differences and come to realize it is the most beautiful place they've ever been. But all but one of them cannot be convinced...they all can't wait to get back in the bus and make their retreat from this place of extreme light and textures. Though the "places" of heaven and of estrangement from God are geographically separated in The Great Divorce, in a later Lewis novel, The Last Battle, the same geographical "place" is two radically different "places" depending on how they are perceived.

In a sermon, the Rev. G. Bradford Hall summarizes the passage discussing this:

In this chronicle, the evil characters are Narnian dwarfs. They are dark and gloomy folk, with sneering grins, who distrust the whole world. The basic issue is that they have chosen to live in darkness, refusing to see the good around them, refusing to believe that Aslan [the "Christ figure" in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia] can bring God's light into their lives and world. So, they live in misery, squalor, and self-imposed darkness.

Near the end of the story, some of the children who follow Aslan go out into a field where the dwarfs live. They want to make friends; they want to help them see the light and the beauty of the world which surrounds them.

When they arrived, they noticed that the dwarfs have a very odd look and were huddled together in a circle facing inward, paying attention to nothing. As the children drew near, they were aware that the dwarfs couldn't see them. "Where are you?" asks one of the children. "We're in here you bone-head," said Diggle the dwarf, "in this pitch-black, poky, smelly little hole of a stable."

"Are you blind?" asks another child. "No," respond the dwarfs, "we're here in the dark where no one can see."

"But it isn't dark, you poor dwarfs," says Lucy, "look up, look round, can't you see the sky and flowers - can't you see me?" Then Lucy bends over, picks some wild violets, and says, "perhaps you can smell these." But the dwarf jumps back into his darkness and yells, "How dare you shove that filthy stable litter in my face." He cannot even smell the beauty which surrounds him.

Suddenly the earth trembles. The sweet air of the field grows sweeter and a brightness flashes behind them. The children turn and see that Aslan, the great lion himself, has appeared. They greet him warmly and then Lucy, through her tears, asks, "Aslan, can you do something for these poor dwarfs?"

Aslan approaches the dwarfs who are huddled in their darkness and he growls. They think it is someone in the stables trying to frighten them. Then Aslan shakes his mane and sets before the dwarfs a magnificent feast of food. The dwarfs grab the food in the darkness, greedily consuming it, but they cannot taste its goodness. One thinks he is eating hay, another an old rotten turnip. In a moment, they are fighting and quarreling among themselves as usual. Aslan turns and leaves them in their misery.

The children are dismayed. Even the great Aslan cannot bring them out of their self-imposed darkness. "They will not let us help them," says Aslan. Their prison is only in their minds and they are so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. "But come now children," says Aslan, "we have other work to do," and they leave the dwarfs alone in their miserable world.

Lewis repeatedly said and wrote that he believed no one who didn't want to be there would end up in hell, but he also believed, as both of these stories illustrate, that many people would rather use their "free will" to reject God, to believe in darkness and be blinded, rather than enlightened, by the Light. To put it another way, they would rather be gods themselves than believe in any other as God. If we have a game, someone has to lose, Lewis also said. And:

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it."

Someone raised the question after last week's mention of the Light and Heat of whether this is a less-than-literal belief in Hell. But what is literal where spirits and "resurrection bodies" are concerned? So with that qualification, the answer is no. This does not at all suggest there is no "literal" hell if by "literal" you mean "real."

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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