The Citadel of Doctrine

The Knights of Fallacy didn’t charge. Inquirer had expected them to. But as the three pilgrims came up the long slope toward the Citadel the knights stayed where they were, sitting their horses in ranks on both sides of the road like a guard of honor, visors down, lances up, the strange devices on their shields glinting in the sun.

Only when the pilgrims were halfway up did a knight ride out into the road and bar the way.

He was tall, on a grey horse, in armor painted in two halves, black down the left side and white down the right, and on his shield was a road that split in two with no third way between. He lowered his lance until the point was level with Inquirer’s chest.

“Halt.” His voice was cold and clear. “No pilgrim enters the Citadel without answering the Knights. I am Sir Either-Or. Answer my question, or turn back.”

Inquirer looked at the others. Analogy nodded, and so did Plain-Sense.

“Ask.”

“Is God sovereign over all things, so that nothing happens unless He decrees it? Or is man responsible for what he does, so that he is truly guilty when he sins? Choose. It must be one or the other. If God decrees all, man is a puppet and not to blame. If man is to blame, God cannot have decreed it. Choose.”

Inquirer felt the old tug of that question. He had heard it argued round and round in the parlous back home for years, and it always ended in a row.

This time he didn’t try to argue. He opened the Book. He’d learned by now that it generally answered a question better than he could.

“Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” He looked up. “That’s Peter at Pentecost, about the cross. In one sentence. God determined it, and they did it with wicked hands, and they’re guilty. Peter doesn’t choose. He says both.”

He turned a few pages. “And here. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Both. Work, because God’s working in you. Not one or the other.”

He shut the Book.

“Sir, your question gives me two roads and says there isn’t a third. But the Book walks a road you’ve left off your shield. I don’t know how God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility fit together all the way down. I don’t think anybody does. But the Book teaches both, plainly and often, side by side, so I have to believe both, even where I can’t see the join. That isn’t a contradiction. It’s a mystery. Your either-or is a false choice.”

There was a crack like a branch snapping. Sir Either-Or’s lance had split from tip to grip, and the two halves dropped into the dust. The knight looked down at them, then wheeled his horse and rode back into the ranks without a word.

The other knights stirred, and a murmur ran through them, metal on metal.

The second was already riding out. His armor was gold, and on his shield was a pair of scales, except that the painter had only done one of the pans. The other just wasn’t there, as if it had been cut off.

“Sir Half-Scale,” he announced, in a rich, confident voice. He didn’t challenge Inquirer. He turned his horse toward Plain-Sense. “You, plain reader. I hear you take the Book as it stands. Then answer me. Does God love all men?”

“Yes. God so loved the world.”

“Then,” said Sir Half-Scale, smiling, “you must agree that God hates no one. That He’ll never condemn anyone. That all shall be saved. Love doesn’t condemn.” He pulled a scroll out of his saddlebag and unrolled it. It was covered in beautifully lettered verses. God is love. The Lord is good to all. Not willing that any should perish. God our Saviour, who will have all men to be saved. The Lord is merciful and gracious. “Thirty verses on God’s love. Thirty! Weigh them. Can you deny them?”

“No. I don’t deny any of them. They’re all in the Book.” Plain-Sense got out the plain Book his mother had given him at the river. “But you’ve only brought one pan of the scales. Where’s the other?”

He turned the pages. “The wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. These shall go away into everlasting punishment. He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I could find thirty of those as well. They’re in the same Book, sir, a good many of them from the same mouth that spoke of love. You can’t build a doctrine of God out of half the scales. You’ve got to weigh everything He says about Himself and believe all of it, even where you’d rather not.”

“But they contradict each other!”

“They would, if love in the Book meant what it means on a greeting card. But the God who is love is holy and just as well. He sent His Son to bear the wrath, so that He could be just and the justifier of him that believeth. Love and justice meet at the cross. You’ve cut off the half of the scales that makes the cross necessary, and without it the love you’re weighing doesn’t weigh anything.”

The golden lance cracked and broke. Sir Half-Scale stared at the pieces with his mouth open. Then he too turned and rode off.

After that they came faster. It seemed the knights had decided one at a time wasn’t enough. They rode out in twos and threes, each with a question and a device on his shield, and the three pilgrims answered them as best they could, standing back to back in the middle of the road.

There was Sir Broken-Chain, whose shield showed a chain with a link missing. “God is love,” he said. “Love never punishes. Therefore God never punishes.” Analogy answered him. “Your second link’s false. Love does punish. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. Any father who loves his son disciplines him. Your chain breaks in the middle and the end of it’s lying on the ground.” The lance broke.

There was Sir Truth-Precision, who said: “The Lord said the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. But there are smaller seeds, orchid seeds for one. So the Lord was mistaken, and the Book isn’t true.” Plain-Sense answered him. “He was talking to farmers in Galilee about the seeds they sowed in their gardens. Among those, the mustard seed was the smallest, and a byword for smallness. Talking in ordinary terms isn’t talking falsely. When you say the sun’s coming up, are you lying about the earth going round? You’ve mixed up truth with scientific precision. The Book’s always true. It isn’t always technical.” That lance broke too.

There was Sir Simple-Authority on a great tall horse, with a professor’s hood on his shield. “The most learned scholar of our age has written that Paul did not write Ephesians. Will you set yourself against the most learned scholar of our age?” Inquirer answered him. “I don’t set myself against any scholar. I set myself under the evidence. If he’s got reasons, show me the reasons and I’ll weigh them. But his name isn’t a reason. There are learned men who disagree with him too. If I’m going to follow a man just because he’s learned, I’ll have to follow the whole lot of them at once, in fifty directions.” And that lance broke.

There was a strange knight on a black horse, weeping inside his helmet. His name was Sir Pathos. He didn’t say anything at all, only wept, louder and louder, holding up pictures of suffering children and grieving widows and crying, “How can you believe in such a God? How can you hold such doctrines? Have you no heart?” Analogy answered him gently. “I have a heart, sir. And the things you’re weeping over are real. The Book weeps over them too. Read Job. Read Lamentations. Read the Lord at Lazarus’s grave. But tears aren’t an argument. They can move a man, and they ought to. They can’t tell him what’s true. You’re asking me to decide what God’s like by how I feel about it, and that’s the road back to Mine-Own-Meaning. I’ve walked it.” Sir Pathos’s lance broke very softly, and he rode off still weeping. Inquirer felt sorry for him.

It was the next knight who gave them the hardest time, and it was Inquirer he gave it to.

He was thin and quick, in silver armor, with a shield that showed a mouth with a finger laid across it. Sir Not-Said. He rode up close and raised his visor a crack so that Inquirer could see his eyes.

“You’re a Reformed man, I think. From the Lighthouse road. I know your sort. Then answer me this. Your people teach that Christ died for His elect, His sheep, and they quote the Lord: I lay down my life for the sheep. Then they say, there, you see, He died for the sheep; so He didn’t die for anybody else. Is that good reasoning?”

Inquirer opened his mouth to say yes, and stopped.

Because it wasn’t good reasoning, and he saw it straight away. I lay down my life for the sheep doesn’t, on its own, say and for nobody else. A man who says I love my wife hasn’t said I love nobody else. Reasoning from what a sentence says to what it doesn’t say, and treating the silence as a denial, was exactly what the Woodward had warned them about. It was a negative inference.

Sir Not-Said saw his face and laughed. “You see? Your own side does it. You’d hold your doctrine up with a broken argument.”

Inquirer stood very still in the road. He felt the ground move under him. If the argument was bad, was the doctrine bad? Had he been wrong the whole way along?

Then he felt Analogy’s hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t throw the doctrine out because one argument for it is weak,” the old bookbinder said quietly. “That’s the same mistake from the other side. Sir Not-Said’s right that the single verse, read that way, doesn’t prove it. But no careful Reformed man ever rested the doctrine there. It rests on the whole of what the Book says the cross was meant to do, and did. Listen.”

He opened his great Book of cross-references, with the red notes running down the margins like veins.

“First, the cross saves. It doesn’t just make salvation possible. Thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins. Not try to save. Not make them saveable. Save. And by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. Obtained. Secured. Done.

“Second, the Trinity has one purpose, not three. You saw it in the Quarry, in the long sentence in Ephesians one. The Father chose a people in Christ before the foundation of the world. The Son redeemed them by His blood. The Spirit sealed them. To the praise of His glory, three times over, for the same people. Would the Son die to redeem some other company than the one the Father chose and the Spirit seals? The Persons don’t work at cross-purposes.

“Third, the Son drew the line Himself, in His own prayer, the night before He died. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. Will He refuse to pray for the very ones He’s about to die for?

“Fourth, His death is the very ground on which no charge can stand against His people. Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died. If Christ died for every man alike, His death is no bar to anybody’s condemnation, because many are condemned. But Paul makes it the bar. For whom Christ died, there’s no condemnation left.

“And fifth, it’s a purchase. The church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. Not every man of every nation. A people out of every nation. A ransom paid isn’t wasted. Every one He bought, He has.”

He shut the Book. “That’s why the old confession puts it so flatly: To all those for whom Christ hath purchased redemption, he doth certainly and effectually apply and communicate the same. And the fathers at Dort said His death is of infinite worth, enough for the sins of the whole world, so the Gospel’s to be offered freely to every creature, and every man who comes will find Christ enough. But it was the Father’s will that it should effectually redeem those, and those only, whom He had chosen and given to the Son. That’s what Sir Not-Said couldn’t get out of one verse. He’d have found it in twenty if he’d looked.”

Inquirer took a breath and turned back to the silver knight.

“You’re right. That argument, from one verse on its own, is a bad one. I won’t use it. Thank you for showing me.” Sir Not-Said blinked behind his visor. “But you’ve gone from my bad argument to my doctrine being false, and that’s the same fallacy turned round. Catching a weak argument doesn’t make its conclusion false. You’ve heard the doctrine’s real grounds now, from the whole Book. Answer those.”

The silver knight said nothing.

“And let me ask you something back. If Christ paid for the sins of every man without exception, why does any man still pay for his own? Either the debt was paid or it wasn’t. If it was paid, justice can’t demand it twice. If you say because they didn’t believe, well, isn’t unbelief a sin? Did He pay for that one or not? If He did, why does it condemn them? If He didn’t, then He didn’t die for all their sins after all. And then you’ve got a cross that saves nobody in particular, a cross that just waits to see who’ll make it work. That’s not the cross in the Book. The cross in the Book finishes things. It is finished.”

There was a crack in the road like ice splitting. Sir Not-Said’s silver lance had broken clean across.

He looked down at the broken pieces for a long moment. Then he lifted the stump of his lance in a salute.

“Fairly answered. Most of your sort get angry. You owned it.” And he rode back into the ranks.

Inquirer stood in the road shaking.

“That’s the one I’ll remember,” he said to Analogy. “I think it’s the most important one.”

“It is. The others go after the Book. That one went after you. It’s a great deal easier to spot an error in somebody else’s reasoning than in your own.”

The last knight came out alone.

He was bigger than any of the others, on a huge black horse, in black armor polished so bright it shone like a mirror. His shield was blank and his visor shut. He carried no lance. Instead, strapped across his back, he had a great book bound in black leather and chained shut.

The other knights drew back as he came through, and even the horses shied.

He stopped in front of the three of them and spoke, and his voice was oddly familiar.

“I am the Knight of the Closed System. I have read the whole Book, every word. I have fitted all its teaching into one perfect system, every doctrine joined to every other. There is no question I cannot answer and no mystery I have not solved. Every tension is resolved, every difficulty explained, every loose end tied.” He laid a gauntleted hand on the chained book on his back. “Here it is. Complete. I guard the Citadel’s own gate, and I tell you this: you may not enter until you accept my system whole. Every part of it. Without question.”

Inquirer looked at the shining black armor. He could see his own face in the breastplate, small and bent out of shape, and something cold went through him.

“Show me your face.”

The Knight didn’t move.

“Show me your face,” said Inquirer again, and without quite knowing why he reached up and lifted the black visor.

There was no face behind it. There was a mirror, polished and silvered, the finest finish Inquirer had ever seen, and looking back at him out of it, smiling and kind and familiar, was his own face.

He told me he’d have known that finish anywhere. It was his own work. It was the brightest finish in Mine-Own-Meaning.

He let the visor drop and stepped back, and found his hands were shaking again.

“It’s me. It’s… it’s what I’d make. If I could.”

“It’s what every reader would make,” said Analogy softly. “Every one of us who loves doctrine. A system where we’re never wrong. Where every question’s answered and every mystery solved. Where the Book fits perfectly inside our heads.”

The Knight of the Closed System sat his black horse and waited. Inquirer could see he was very strong. He wasn’t going to break like the others at one right answer. He wasn’t made of one fallacy but of all of them at once, polished together: the false choice and the half-weighed evidence, the argument from silence and the broken chain and the borrowed authority, all built into one system, and the system shut.

“How do I answer him?”

It was Plain-Sense who answered. “You don’t. Not with an argument. He’s got an answer for every argument; that’s what he’s made of. You answer him with what he’s left out.”

“What’s he left out?”

Plain-Sense opened his Book and read, slowly and clearly, so the Knight could hear.

“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever.” He turned pages. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part.” And again. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

He shut the Book.

“Paul wrote the most careful theology anybody ever wrote. Eleven chapters of it in Romans, the deepest teaching in the whole Book. And at the end of it what does he do? He doesn’t close the system. He falls on his face and worships. He says God’s ways are past finding out. That’s what you’ve left out, Sir Knight. Not a doctrine. A doxology. We know in part. A system that’s got no room for that isn’t the Book’s system. It’s a mirror.”

The Knight of the Closed System didn’t move. But the chains on the black book at his back began to rattle.

Inquirer stepped forward again. He took the little grey pebble from the spring under the Cross out of his pocket and held it up in front of the mirror where the Knight’s face should have been.

“I want to believe everything the Book teaches. All of it, as clearly as it says it. I’ll spend my life learning it. And I’ll fit it together as well as I can, because God isn’t the author of confusion and the Book doesn’t contradict itself. But I’ll leave room for what it doesn’t say. And I’ll leave room for being wrong. I’ve been wrong all along this road. I was wrong at the Exchange, and in the Forest, and a minute ago with Sir Not-Said, and every time, the Book put me right. If I close the system, it can’t put me right any more.” He held the pebble closer. “And then I’m back where I started. Polishing.”

The chains on the black book broke.

They fell away with a jangle of iron, and the book opened by itself on the Knight’s back. Its pages weren’t covered in writing. They were covered in silver, page after page of mirror, every page showing Inquirer’s own face. Then the pages started to crack one after another, and the silver flaked off them and blew away on the wind. Underneath there was nothing. Blank paper.

The black armor fell in on itself, empty. There had never been anybody inside it. It clattered into a heap in the road. The great black horse snorted, wheeled round, and galloped off down the slope toward the Mirage.

All down the ranks of the Knights of Fallacy lances were coming down. One by one the knights turned their horses and rode away from the road. They didn’t run. They just went off into the hills as if they had business somewhere else. Inquirer didn’t doubt they’d be back for the next pilgrim.

The road to the Citadel gate lay open.

The gate was opened by a tall, broad-shouldered woman in a plain grey gown with keys at her belt and a ledger under her arm. She had a strong, square, thoughtful face and grey eyes that didn’t miss much.

“Well done. Very well done. Especially the last one. Most who beat the lesser knights fall to that one. They put his armor on themselves and walk in here wearing it.” She looked at the empty black heap in the road. “We’ve got a good many of them inside, and they’re very hard to live with. I’m Dame Whole-Counsel. Come in.”

She took them in through the gate.

Inside it wasn’t so much a fortress as a vast library, built in rings like the rings of a tree. The outermost ring was long halls lined with shelves, each given over to one great subject of the Book’s teaching, with its name carved over the door: Of Holy Scripture. Of God And The Holy Trinity. Of Creation. Of Providence. Of The Fall Of Man, Of Sin. Of God’S Covenant With Man. Of Christ The Mediator. Of Effectual Calling. Of Justification. Of Adoption. Of Sanctification. Of Saving Faith. Of The Church. Of The Sacraments. Of The Last Judgment.

“These are the doctrines,” said Dame Whole-Counsel. “Each hall gathers up everything the Book teaches on one subject. Not from one verse or one book, but from all of them, read rightly, each in its context and in its place on the Highway. Then we fit them together. Every hall’s joined to every other. You can’t understand justification without understanding sin, and you can’t understand sin without understanding God. The scholars call it systematic theology. I call it the whole counsel of God. That’s Paul’s phrase. I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God.”

“And how does it help me read a passage? I thought the road was about reading.”

“It is. And this is the last ring of reading. You read a passage. You find its words, its grammar, its main point, its place in the story, its neighbors across the Book. Then you bring it here and ask, how does this fit with everything else the Book teaches? If your reading of one passage makes it contradict what the whole Book plainly teaches somewhere else, your reading’s wrong, and you go back and read it again. That’s the analogy of faith. You saw it in the Lighthouse, the single stone back in its place in the cathedral. This is the cathedral.”

She stopped at a window looking down into the innermost courtyard.

“But mind, it runs both ways. The doctrine guards the reading, and the reading has to feed the doctrine. If we ever stop going back to the passages and only read them through our system, we’ve built the Knight of the Closed System from the inside. Every generation has to test the halls again by the Book. The halls are servants. The Book is the master.”

Down in the courtyard Inquirer saw a man building a tower.

He was a big, earnest, hardworking man in a mason’s smock, and his tower was very tall and very thin, and it leaned. It stood on a single small stone set in the middle of the courtyard, and he had built the whole thing up from that one stone, course on course and story on story, until it reached higher than the Citadel walls.

Inquirer could just make out the words on the stone at its base. Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead.

“That’s Mr. Isolated-Text,” said Dame Whole-Counsel with a sigh. “He’s been building that tower twenty years. Every doctrine he holds rests on that verse, or on others like it: dark verses, lone verses, verses nobody else can make sense of. He likes them because they’re hard to argue with. Nobody can say for certain what they mean, so nobody can say for certain he’s wrong.”

“Clear-Light showed us that one,” said Plain-Sense. “On the Watchtower. She said never build on a dark verse what the plain ones don’t teach.”

“She’s right. Every doctrine in these halls rests on a great many stones, and the plainest ones at that. Not one rests on a single verse alone, and certainly not on a dark one. In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. That’s a good rule for doctrine as well as for courts.”

As they watched, the tall thin tower creaked and swayed in the wind, and Mr. Isolated-Text, high up on his scaffolding, hung on to it with both arms.

“Will it fall?”

“One day. They always do. I’ve begged him to come down and build in the halls with the rest of us. He says the halls are too crowded. He wants something of his own.”

They stayed three nights in the Citadel, and Dame Whole-Counsel let them read in any hall they liked. Inquirer spent most of his time in the hall of Justification and Plain-Sense in the hall of Holy Scripture. Analogy, to nobody’s surprise, spent his in the passages between the halls, studying how they were joined.

On the last night Inquirer went up on the walls by himself and looked out east past the Citadel. The road went on. Beyond the Citadel the land dropped into a valley, and in the valley, lit by a thousand candles, stood a building like an enormous hall with stained-glass windows.

Dame Whole-Counsel came up beside him.

“The Hall of the Fathers. That’s your next stop. Everything I keep here, the doctrine of the whole Book, I didn’t make up myself. The church has been reading the Book for two thousand years. Good men and women in every age, wrestling with the same passages you’ve wrestled with. Some of them got it badly wrong. A great many got it wonderfully right. And they wrote it down: the creeds, the councils, the confessions, the commentaries. You’ll go down there and meet them, and you’ll learn that you aren’t the first pilgrim on this road, or the cleverest.”

“Will they be like the Knights? Trying to make me take them whole?”

Dame Whole-Counsel smiled.

“Two of them will. There are two tyrants in that valley, and they hate each other, and they’d both like to have you. But the Fathers themselves won’t. The best of them never wanted that. They only ever wanted to point you to the Book, the way they’d been pointed.” She looked out at the candlelit hall. “You’ll like them. They’re the best company on the road, after the Author.”

Inquirer stood on the wall a long time after she’d gone. He thought about the black armor lying empty in the road, and the mirror where its face ought to have been. Then he took the little grey pebble out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers, and was grateful.