Even in the wake of Christmas and the Epiphany, the days are still dark in the winter. And so it seems timely to reflect on how Christians talk about God in relation to the darkness. This can mean a number of circumstances poetically, rarely pleasant, but it is one of the most difficult and consequential acts we are called to do. A person comes to church on the Sunday after a death, diagnosis, or panic attack, listens for a word from the Sunday school teacher, preacher, Scripture, and hymns, and often finds them wanting. We keep darkness and God on two different planes of existence and, if we mention them at all, we set them as enemies of one another.
In biblical tradition, especially in the beginning, darkness and God are not enemies (as they are in other ancient Near Eastern creation narratives) but they are neighbors, and the darkness is often an agent of God’s will, on behalf of and against his people. For example, in Genesis 1:2 we read this doublet: “darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.” Though the two short phrases seem easy enough to understand, when they are examined further, they lose interpretive certainty. Is “the deep” the same as “the waters”? What is darkness? Is the “Spirit of God” the Holy Spirit, wind from God, or “an exceedingly great wind”? And what is the relationship between darkness and the Spirit?
Lest you think these questions over-complicate the matter, Christians have debated their meaning for centuries. Interpreters, ranging from Jerome in the fourth century to Hermann Gunkel in the 19th, have proposed the theory of “the deep” (abyssi, for Jerome) as a “cosmic world-egg” upon which the spirt of God rests until the world is ready to be birthed. Gunkel takes it further, saying the “Spirit of God” in 1:2 has no relation to God in 1:1 because of its proximity to the chaos. God, according to Gunkel, would not abide such chaos.
Karl Barth, in his somewhat whimsical reading of Genesis 1:1-2, builds on Gunkel, saying the “spirit of God” is the god of this world, whose attempts at creation only produce darkness over the deep. Augustine also recognizes the discrepancy between a chaotic, primordial reality and a creative, orderly God, but says God’s presence “hovering” over the waters is due to God’s joy over the orderly world soon to come.
Brevard Childs, observing that extant uses of “Spirit of God” or “Spirit of the Lord” in the Old Testament always introduce divine interference, claimed that the Spirit of God is the force out of which order is being imposed on chaos. The “darkness,” “deep,” and “waters” are a “chaotic condition existing independently of God’s creative activity” and the “Spirit of God” is the continuation of God’s work contrary to the chaos introduced in Genesis 1:1. In his magisterial commentary on Genesis, Claus Westermann called this verse “very difficult and very controversial” — I’d say — and lands on translating Genesis 1:2 as (something like) “the wind of God shook the waters,” similar to Egyptian, Phoenician, and Ugaritic cosmologies, thus removing the presence of God from the scene altogether.
Irrespective of scholarly debates, the authorized English translation for over 400 years still leaves us with several questions. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” If in the King James Version the deep and the waters refer to the same phenomenon, the darkness and the Spirit of God are at least coexistent, if not synonymous.
Darkness is a major character in both testaments. God separates the darkness and the light, darkness is the penultimate plague of Egypt, darkness covers the earth, to him dark and light are both alike, thick darkness is his covering, he calls his people out of darkness, in him is no darkness at all, etc. Notice even in these nascent examples that darkness is both a force for evil, death, and pain, and yet also has a close connection with God, a creature under his authority and, furthermore, an agent of his will. If this reality allays any fear of the darkness, it also heightens our fear of God. What manner of man is this, we might ask, that the wind and the waves obey him as he hovers over the waters in darkness?
The discrepancy between our speech and the Bible lies in modern Christians’ association of evil, death, and pain with the Devil and not God. While our modern instinct is both understandable and somewhat precedented, the overwhelming biblical witness is that these things — the darkness, and not just the light — are under God’s sovereign permission, and often active agents of his will. Flannery O’Connor remarked to a friend that her subject was “acts of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” We might do well to think of the acts of grace as gifts from the God who has every ability, right, and custom to give us darkness, too. The Spirit of God, the darkness, the waters, and the deep are all — in some way — tied up with each other and objects of the same active subject: God.
An important key for the interpretation of Genesis 1:2 is the rest of the chapter. God gives darkness its place in the created order. The waters are gathered into one place. The deep later breaks forth in the flood, becomes the pathway for God in Job, and calls to itself at the sound of God’s waterfalls, winds, and waves. All has its place, and God saw all that he had made, and lo, it was very good.
What we perceive as God-forsaken tends to be God’s favorite places: the dark abyss, the valley of the shadow of death, the cross. The panic attack, the failure, the harm done by us and to us, might therefore be not the sign of abandonment, but the means of our salvation. The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give light, the powers will be shaken, but somewhere within the chaos lies our redemption.
Though my point is somewhat harsh, it is also not for the sake of sullen defeatism. The gospel to those living in darkness is not to ignore the pain of their reality, but perhaps to recognize that God is neither absent nor impotent in the face of the darkness. In fact God hovers upon the face of the abyss and does not destroy it, but calls it to order.
Jesus tells us to fast (to enter the darkness) and anoint our head, wash our face, and look up, because even the dark chaos is not outside the steady grip of God’s unchanging hand. Do not fear the darkness, which is a creature like you. Rather fear God, the creator and destroyer, the one who gives and takes away, who controls darkness and light, the deep and the firmament, the one who holds all things together and works all things — light and dark — for the good of those he calls.
Chase Benefiel is a Guest Writer. He serves on the ministry staff of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Murfreesboro, TN and is a graduate of Duke University Divinity School.