Further Up and Further In
Exploring the beauty of theology - or, knowing God-as-a-Person
(A five-minute read.)
There’s a fascinating scene toward the end of The Last Battle, which is C. S. Lewis’s last book in his Chronicles of Narnia series, that has garnered a lot of attention and debate. An enemy of the Narnians, named Emeth, unexpectedly finds himself face-to-face with Aslan, the lion who represents Christ throughout the series, and surprisingly hears Aslan affirm his actions and give him eternal life, despite the fact that Emeth had consciously rejected Aslan and instead served a rival god named Tash.
I won’t go into all the details and implications of this particular point. As I said, it’s a bit controversial in Christian circles. For my part, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I have no problem with the idea that, as C. S. Lewis explained elsewhere in response to questions about this concept, “Christ saves many who do not think they know him.”
For my purposes here, what I’m particularly interested in and inspired by is what Aslan tells Emeth after this. “Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs,” Emeth explains, “and caused me to stand upon my feet. And after that, he said not much but that we should meet again, and I must go further up and further in.”
“Further up and further in.” I love that!
Actually, it’s a line that’s repeated throughout the last pages of The Last Battle, as each of Aslan’s followers is told again and again to go “further up and further in.” When they explore the remade Narnia, with all its beauty and glory, they are told this over and over again. And as they explore Narnia, and all the wonders and amazement there, they are thrilled to discover that everything is bigger, better, and more beautiful than they had thought.
“The further up and the further in you go,” one of the characters explains, “the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”
I am no expert in C. S. Lewis, but I think his “further up and further in” idea was in relation to the heart of God. That, I would propose, is what the whole field of “theology” is all about.
That big, intimidating word “theology” is simply an invitation to explore the truth about God more. It’s an invitation to recognize that God possesses personhood and any exploration of the Bible is, at its heart, an invitation to understand who God is and what God’s heart is all about.
According to the biblical writer John, Jesus proposed this idea during his last prayer before his death. “Now this is eternal life,” Jesus declared, “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3, NIV).
In defining “eternal life,” Jesus didn’t define it in terms of duration—that is, living forever (though certainly that will be true, I’d propose). He defined it in terms of relationship—of knowing God and knowing God’s Son, Jesus.
This “knowledge,” I’d submit, is two-field: it involves knowing God on an intimate, personal level. It means being connected to God in a sort of “mystical” way—the same way a person knows his or her spouse. That involves two-way communication, just as my wife and I have at night when we have “pillow talk.” We share with each other about our day—share our fears and hopes and doubts and joys and experiences. It’s both of us sharing these things, not just one or the other (though sometimes, depending on what’s happened, it might be one more than the other).
The other type of knowledge is knowing information about God, which is not necessarily exclusive from the first type of knowledge. It’s becoming familiar with God’s character, understanding God’s historic actions, knowing God’s ways.
The crucial point here is that theology and doctrine are not dry, impersonal, lifeless bits of information. So many times people detach theology from the personhood of God. They may thus possess a large body of trivia and biblical facts, but they do not know how they relate to a deeper understanding of God’s character and personhood. They don’t recognize that every facet of biblical information is for the purpose of helping us understand the personal nature of God more fully.
Perhaps as a result of this impersonal approach to theology, others go in the opposite direction. Religion becomes simply an ethical pursuit, as we seek to order our lives around living a good, moral life (which has both “conservative” and “liberal” versions). Because doctrine and theology have been made rote and dry and lifeless, and many times even the basis for condemnation and exclusion, we throw the whole enterprise out altogether and focus on simply trying to perform good, moral actions.
But I’d submit that God continues to invite us to go “further up and further in.” Religion is not about living an ethical life, though it certainly includes that. It’s not about knowing biblical facts, though it certainly includes that.
At the end of the day, and reducing it to its most basic form, religion is about knowing a Person—that is, knowing God-as-a-Person.
I’m not at all saying we all need to get a PhD in theology. But it seems to me that we should all have at least some desire to want to go “further up and further in” with knowing God-as-a-Person, the same way we naturally want to know everything about that “significant other” who first catches our eye.
And the amazing thing is, the “further up and further in” we go in exploring God’s heart, the bigger and more beautiful we discover it gets. We will never exhaust our knowledge of and connection to the infinite God. Indeed, in Lewis’s words, “the inside is larger than the outside.” And it’s more beautiful than we could ever imagine.
So how do we do this?
I’d say start here: with sincerity and humbleness of heart, ask God to make his heart known to you. Start a prayer journal and pour your heart out to him, and then wait for him to pour out his heart to you. Then pick up a Bible and, perhaps for starters, read the book of Luke or John. Read it in a modern translation—like The Message—and then slowly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully listen to how God is revealing his love to you.
And then just keeping going “further up and further in.”
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.