Guest Post: Isaiah

January 27, 2020

In this guest post, All Souls Langham Place Student worker Ollie Lansdowne explores how Isaiah's view of God has helped him think through issues of evangelical identity and abuse.

In recent years, numerous revelations about physical, emotional and spiritual abuse have rocked the evangelical church around the world.

With the breaking of each story, one nagging thought has kept coming to mind: “we need Isaiah.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Rewind with me, to when I found myself saying this: “I don’t want to study Isaiah. But at this point it would basically be a sin if I didn’t.”

That was me, chatting to my supervisor over a flat white in August 2014 (back when milk coffees were still cool). I’d just begun 10 months in Oxford as a ‘Relay worker’─UCCF’s mission and discipleship training programme in which you work alongside university Christian Unions in their mission to students. As part of the programme, you get half a day a week to study whatever you want. It’s a unique and rare opportunity, and I didn’t want to study Isaiah.

Spoiler alert: I ended up studying Isaiah.

Being an introvert who studied Maths, I like to have a couple of oven-ready questions which I can pop out in the social situations I so fear; the ones where you’ve already asked them their name, and then they look at you like it’s still your turn. “I have 4 hours a week to study anything I want to this year. What would you do if you were me?” …was a question I asked in about 75% of my conversations that summer. In at least ⅔ of those conversations, the person replied: “I’d love to dig into Isaiah” without missing a beat. I pretty much started mouthing along with them.

That was 6 years ago, which makes this my sixth year of sitting in Isaiah like a tourist who’d only planned a day trip. Isaiah has started to feel like home. The architecture is familiar. I can walk around it in the dark, and I remember where I left my thoughts. Isaiah has been a place where I can pace the corridors with my fingers running along the walls, before curling up in a corner to let familiar words settle me down. Whichever book that might be for you, I commend the practice of picking a book of the Bible to make your home in. Where my thinking was small, Isaiah forced me to think bigger. Where my heart was hard, Isaiah roughed me around a bit. Where my love of the Bible had become thin, Isaiah was the granite I needed.

Maybe I’m the product of overexposure, but at this point I’m willing to argue it out with anyone: Isaiah is the greatest piece of literature that has ever been written.

More pointedly, Isaiah has what British evangelicalism needs: a thoroughly classical doctrine of God, which undergirds a vision of salvation that’s as sweeping as creation and would stop us putting our faith in powerful men.

Unique By His Very Nature

Isaiah’s doctrine of God is breathtaking, presenting us with a God who is genuinely incomparable. Here’s an example: “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” ─Isaiah 40v25.

This isn’t just an attack on the number of gods in paganism, it’s an attack on the nature of the gods in paganism. The gods of paganism are many, but that isn’t the deepest problem that Isaiah identifies. The deepest problem with the gods of paganism is that it’s possible to compare them with one another: they are relative. Pagan gods are comparable and relative because these ‘gods’ can exist in varieties: you could tweak and change any of them─add some grace and power, remove some wisdom─and they’d become different gods, but they’d still be ‘gods’. No pagan god exists in a category uniquely its own, truly and totally independent from everything else, absolute and unchangeable by definition.

Here’s where the rubber hits the road: if no pagan god is truly and totally independent, that means that no pagan god could ever be truly and totally dependable. If you throw the weight of your life at one of these gods, you’ll quickly find that they are themselves leaning on something else: whoever or whatever has been determining how much grace and power and wisdom they have.

Not so the God of Isaiah.

Isaiah’s God is unique by his very nature.

There are two categories: God, and everything that God created. He isn’t relative, a variation on a theme. As Steven J. Duby puts it in God In Himself, “There is no impersonal form of life, wisdom, or love “out there” from which God must draw in order to be what he is.” If it was even possible for this God to change, He would cease to be God. He isn’t ‘the most’, He is ‘the only’. Isaiah’s doctrine of God isn’t that “the most powerful” also─fortunately─happens to be “the most gracious”. It’s that God is incomparable and unchanging, truly and totally independent and therefore truly and totally dependable.

Whether or not God is dependable is a big theme in Isaiah. The people of Judah face an existential threat from outside their borders, so the question for them is: does their God reign beyond their borders? In its fullest form: is the God of Israel also the Lord of history? That question takes on a whole new urgency in chapter 40; when Isaiah turns to speak prophetically into the future, to the people of God living as exiles in Babylon. This is a situation devoid of hope, in which it seems that God’s purposes have been defeated by His people’s sin.

To prove that God is dependable, Isaiah appeals to the doctrine of creation ‘out of nothing’, ‘ex nihilo’.

How does that prove that God is dependable?

If God made everything out of nothing, that means He achieved His plans without depending on anyone or anything else for support. He didn’t need to use anyone else’s efforts as a starting point for his own. He created everything without depending on anyone else’s works, and that means he can save the world without depending on anyone else’s works—‘sola gratia’, ‘by grace alone’. If you make an idol, you’ll need to keep on sustaining it with your works; only the God who made the world ex nihilo can save the world sola gratia. His salvation is dependable because he acts independently. God is the gospel: unchangeable and incomparable, and therefore dependable and gracious. It’s not that we call God incomparable because he’s the most gracious. It’s that God is utterly gracious because he alone is incomparable, acting independently. Duby again: “[God] is not served by human hands as though he needed anything. He will never be inclined to use us in order to become something greater than he already is.”

How A Man Can Sound Like A God

We need Isaiah’s doctrine of God in British evangelicalism.

Isaiah gave this vision of God to the people of Judah when they were making three related mistakes: they had shrunk their horizons to match their borders, and as they shrank their horizons they shrank their understanding of God, turning instead to put their trust in the powerful men around them.

For evangelicals, those mistakes may sound eerily familiar.

If God is ‘the most’ not ‘the only’, relative, not incomparable, then trusting in powerful men is essentially comparable with trusting in God: God is worthy of the most trust, because he’s the most powerful, but other quite powerful people are worth quite a lot of trust too. When those people start to look more powerful─and perhaps even the most powerful─our trust will inevitably follow.

How could a man ever look or sound like a god?

When your horizons shrink to match your borders.

A robust admiration for creation in all of its glory will see off any challenge to God’s incomparablity─‘who created music and colour, logic and poetry?’─but the more our concerns narrow and our horizons shrink, the more powerful people will begin to look and sound like gods that are beyond questioning and worthy of total loyalty, especially when even our narrowed horizons face existential threats. God wrote two ‘books’: the book of nature, and the book of scripture.

It’s worth noting that in recent years, Evangelicals have tended to downplay the book of nature, the one that didn’t have a human author, and have tended to limit the meaning of the scriptures to only what the human author intended. Our God has begun to sound merely human, and consequently powerful men have sounded more and more like gods. During the 6 years that I’ve been studying Isaiah, numerous revelations about physical, emotional and spiritual abuse have rocked the evangelical church around the world. Those evils have been compounded as justice has been denied to the brave victims that spoke out, and instead sweeping institutional cover-ups have protected the reputations of abusers and the organisations they’ve been involved with. The causes of each evil may have been different, but the cover-ups have shown again and again one horrifying truth: us evangelicals are as quick to trust powerful men as the people of Judah were in the time of Isaiah.

What we’re only just starting to realise is that idols─as powerful as they may be─can never save us, because they were made by us and continue to depend on us. A cover-up is a works based gospel. Having made idols out of powerful men, they now demand our protection. As with the idols of old, that protection has a human cost. Isaiah’s solution is as needed now as it was then: a robust commitment to God’s absolute incomparability. He is unique by His very nature, and that shouldn’t just inform how we treat him, it should inform how we treat everyone else.

To dig deeper into Isaiah and this awesome vision of God, we'd like to recommend the resources below. Pete Sanlon's 'Simply God' is a more readable introduction to the themes of Steven Duby's book.