Michael Card, writing on Incarnation, said: “While we struggle with our many ‘clumsy words,’ God needs only one Word to perfectly communicate the depth and mystery, the passion and the overwhelming grace of who He is.” If this is true, and most Christians believe it is, then the gospel accounts of Jesus validate the claim that God is relative.
If Jesus is God’s full and final word that God has to speak to us, we learn who God is by keeping an eye on Jesus as we follow him through the gospel stories. What does he do and say, and in what manner? Let’s follow him through The Gospel according to Mark, where the elemental narrative is traced, and see what we find.
_______________
When we first meet him, he is coming into Galilee, “preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.” Those who first saw him in action, knowing nothing about any subsequent understandings of Jesus, would have identified him as an itinerant preacher.
Almost immediately he begins gathering about him a select group of followers (disciples/those who follow because they are drawn to someone, with learning as their intent). These will comprise the group that later will be known as The Twelve disciples. He is not only a preacher, he can now be seen as a leader.
He saw two fishermen, Simon and Andrew, and told them to follow him and he would “make them fishers of men.” If we note this, we will find that--apparently--he never spoke of making fishers of men to anyone else. Next, he summons another pair of brothers, James and John who also are fishermen. It would be fair to assume he told them he would make them “fishers of men,” but the text doesn’t mention it. It would only be an assumption on our part.
The next selection we read of is a tax man named Levi; Jesus did not tell him that he would make him a collector of God’s taxes. It is not long before many other disciples join Jesus. They elect to follow him. Out of this group, Jesus will choose only a few. We are not far into the narrative before we learn who they are. For the present purpose, I mention only one, another Simon. He, we are told, is a member of the paramilitary group called the Zealots. Jesus says nothing to him about making him a gospel soldier.
We know none of the specifics of Jesus’ calling of any of the twelve, except the five noted above. From those, however, we see that the words of his calling varied from person to person.
We also note that he could be identified as a preacher, a not unusual type in the world of Judaism. He might be known to others as a leader, the leader of a small group that he may have been organizing for some special purpose. We might watch to see if he might be recognized as an organizer. Preacher, leader, organizer–all might be appropriate titles by which he could be known.
Shortly after the choosing of the four fishermen, Jesus appears in a Jewish meeting house on the Sabbath and astonished the congregation with the authority of his teaching. From this point in the story, we will see teaching as one of the two or three of his most prominent activities. We can add teacher to our list of possible titles that might be used to identify him.
After leaving the synagogue, he went directly to the home of Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed, sick. When they told Jesus about her, he took her by the hand. Immediately she was healed. No mention is made of a request for healing, no mention of the faith of Simon, his mother-in-law, or anyone else. The significance of faith, relative to the work of Jesus, is not as clear as later generations have made it.
If you are reading this with a copy of Mark open before you, you may find interesting to watch for the place of faith in Jesus’ healing ministry. As in this case, it is not always mentioned at all. We will see faith often given great prominence, leaving us to wonder about those occasions when it is not mentioned in Mark’s story.
Healing by Jesus follows no set procedure. Watch to see if it does not vary from one individual to another; see if he deals with each occasion in its own singularity, seemingly dependent on the situation.
I mentioned that teaching would prove to be one of the two or three activities that dominate the story of Jesus’ activities. Healing will emerge as one of the others.
The story has yet to lead us out of Mark’s first chapter, and already we can notice that he deals differently with each situation. Whether some of us are prepared to talk about situation ethics, we do begin to observe in Jesus a situational approach to life. What he does is done relative to the situation. He takes whatever the appropriate action to bring the Kingdom of God, the power of the Gospel to bear on the needs of the occasion.
If, as Michael Card has suggested, God needs only one Word to make himself and his ways known to us, and if Jesus is the Word of God, then, among other things, we see that God’s action is apparently relative to human need. God relates to us where we are, wherever that might be---each of us in each of our specific situations. In God’s eyes we are individuals, and every situation is different. We cannot discern any simple formula by which God always performs his work.
Moreover, we have at least a hint that Jesus might be legitimately known by titles other than Savior, Lord, or Messiah. Even these titles are relative. To those in trouble, he is their Savior; to those who commit their lives into his trust, he is their Lord, their Master; to the Jew, he is their hoped for and anticipated Messiah, the one anointed by God to redeem them. We will find that Jesus is given many titles, and that each is understood relatively. No one of them is absolute.
____________________
Since we are still in the first chapter of Mark’s story, told with God’s one Word, we will follow the story for at least another day or two–probably no more than that unless you ask for more. The major point I want to make will have been well-established by that time.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Monday, June 25, 2007
If I believe God is relative, how did I come up with the idea, and what makes me so sure of it that I am publicing it as a definitive truth?
The idea never occurred to me before I was fifty-years-old, but it came about as a result of fifty years of church attendance and thirty-some years of Bible reading. It gradually emerged from nearly thirty years of formal study of theology. No teacher or preacher ever suggested the idea, neither intentionally nor directly. It came to me full-blown, plain and clear out of my entire experience with the things of God.
_______________________
I am such a logical thinker that most friends and acquaintances assume that logic is my primary mode of thought. I am a logician, but have not always been. I am not by nature a logical person. It is a method of thinking that I learned only in my late thirties. I have since, taught logic in universities for more than thirty years. It is now so imbedded in my mind that it is second nature for me to think logically.
My primary thought, however, comes from my sense of the whole. I am by nature a gestalt thinker. I somehow sense meaning before I understand or can explain. It might seem to be intuitive knowledge, but it comes not from intuition but from observation of the “big picture.”
Ordinarily my perception of the gestalt of a thing is somewhat vague or fuzzy; it is definite without sharp definitions. That first impression generally proves to be correct, but not always. I am keenly aware that I could be wrong, so usually I turn to logic to check it out.
Gestalt: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. From Middle High German: “form, configuration, appearance.”
After half a century of living with God and the things of God, I saw divine relativity as the gestalt of the Bible, not seen in its parts but in the whole. I came to see it first neither in the details of any particular verses of scripture nor in any specific part of the Bible. Rather, it arose in my consciousness as the dominant biblical theme. All else found its meaning only as it contributed to this overall picture.
All of this is, I realize, somewhat vague and subjective. Neither evidence nor proof has been offered. Thus, as is my habit, I turned to logic to see if the idea of a relative God stood up under the careful scrutiny of reason.
In psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for something that was decided on the ground of some mental process other than logic. Ordinarily, rationalization is seen as a logical coverup for flawed beliefs.
In what follows, I have carefully avoided any improper use of reason to rationalize my theological position. I leave it to you to decide whether I am reasoning or rationalizing.
One of the more useful logical forms is called the Reduction ad Absurdum, “a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable.”
In the following, I present numerous theological reductios, to prove that it is absurd to deny the notion that God is relative. The blog is long, so if you get the point early on, you might want to just skip down and see how it is ended.
________________________
If God is immutable, then he cannot change (by definition).
God does change (as I will establish in the next paragraph).
Therefore, God is not immutable.
In 1 Samuel 8, the story is told of Israel’s plea to Samuel to provide them a king, like other nations. When Samuel speaks to God about this, the Lord tells him to listen to the people, but to warn them of what life under a human king would be like. He lets Samuel off the hook, telling him that the people have rejected God as their king, not Samuel as their respected leader.
The people ignore God’s warning about the nature of a kingship, and in chapter 10 the story is told of Saul as God’s choice for their king. See in particular, 10:24.
A reading of the first ten chapters of 1 Samuel makes it apparent that God is their king and has no desire to be replaced. However, in response to the insistence of his covenant people, God has Samuel anoint Saul king over Israel. God changed his plan of action, in response to his people.
Later, in 1 Samuel 13:13-14, the text indicates that Saul and his descendants would have ruled over Israel forever if Saul had been obedient. Since, however, he had not, God rejected whom earlier he had chosen. In chapter 16:12-14, God explicitly takes his Spirit from Saul, his chosen, and an evil spirit now enters Saul.
In this passage, God’s Spirit now comes upon David, God’s new choice. God’s earlier choice failed, so he makes a new choice. In doing so, God has changed his course of action, not his purpose, not his character, only the means of accomplishing that purpose. Nonetheless, in some sense, he changed.
We could have adverted to the story of Noah, Moses, or later, to Solomon, Jonah, or a multitude of other instances. If God is immutable--and this is a cardinal feature of traditional Christian doctrine--then, by definition, he cannot change. He does, in certain definable senses, often change in the course of the biblical story, therefore God is not immutable. Thus, the cardinal doctrine of divine immutability misrepresents the God revealed in the Christian scriptures, and therefore must be rejected.
An interesting question about the supposed divine immutability can be seen in a particular contrast between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God is found regularly warring against and defeating the enemies of his people, Israel. In the New Testament, Rome has invaded and now occupies and rules over Israel, but there is no indication that God is going to war against and defeat this Roman enemy (except, perhaps, depending on how you interpret the book of Revelation, he may intend to do this in some future–a future distant from the present).
In the past he has defeated the Egyptian, the Amalekite, the Canaanite, the Midianite, the Philistine, . . . the Syrian, and numerous other enemies of his people. In the present, New Testament, situation, God takes no military initiative against the Roman. In fact, when God-with-Us (Immanuel), Jesus is arrested by the Romans and Peter draws his sword against them, Jesus not only attempts no self-defense, he denounces the use of the sword.
It would appear that in the New Testament, God has changed his modus operandus from using violence as a common way of dealing with his opponents to the use of suffering as a means of transformation.
___________________________
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, he knows how to make his people obey.
In Hosea 6:4, God says he doesn’t know what to do.
Therefore, God is not omniscient.
God has richly blessed Israel, he has punished/disciplined them, he has sent prophets to warn them, he has pleaded with them--all efforts to persuade them to obey and thus live out God’s purpose for them. But in Hosea’s time, after much pleading, a frustrated God finally says: “O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?”
Nothing God has done has worked. He has done all he knows how to do to correct them, to bring about an attitude adjustment, but Israel, for the most part, has ignored him. Now God, seemingly at his wit’s end, doesn’t know what to do.
Many of us have heard such words from our frustrated parents, or perhaps as frustrated parents, spoken them to our children. After teaching them the right, correcting them, punishing them, praising them, taking them into our arms and pleading with them, they have still rebelled. Finally the day came, seems always to come, when the parents throw up their hands and ask, “What is it going to take? Your father and I have done everything we know how.” In desperation the parent often adds, “You tell us. You tell us what it is going to take.”
The supposedly omniscient (all-knowing) God here appears not to know how to change his people. So, later, in Jeremiah and ultimately in Jesus, God lays aside his Plan A and sets forth Plan B, a New Covenant (New Testament).
If God knows everything (and if he has all power, can do anything he wants to do), why doesn’t he know how to make his special people do right?
The fact remains that if God is omniscient, he knows how to induce obedience. Hosea 6:4 documents at least one instance in which God confesses that he does not know how to do this. Therefore, God is not omniscient, at least not in some so-called absolute or comprehensive sense.
_________________________
If God is impassible, he will neither grieve, be pleased, nor be angry.
He is on occasion grieved, pleased, and angry.
Therefore, God is not impassible.
For at least seven centuries, the divine impassibility has been a common feature of Christian theology. Impassibility refers to the inability to experience emotion, especially suffering.
In very early Christian discussions of God as Father, Son, Spirit–Trinity–Jesus, the Son of God, was seen as so distinct from God the Father, that while it was affirmed that Jesus suffered on the cross, God did not suffer because God the Father (pater) was impassible. Those who differed were called patripassionists, and patripassionism was declared a heresy.
So, let’s suppose that God cannot experience emotion, and then examine God’s written story as inspired by the Spirit of God. I’ll not devote space to detail the references, but repeatedly the Bible speaks of God as: being well-pleased, being not-pleased, angry, loving, having compassion, hating, patient, long-suffering, frustrated, indeed having a rich emotional life.
Whatever this might mean upon further investigation, it does show that God experiences emotion. And it demonstrates that what we do or don’t do affects how God feels. God has affections, and God’s emotions are somewhat dependant on us.
If God is impassive, he has no feelings. But the written record gives irrefutable evidence of God’s feelings. So, it cannot be true that God is impassive.
__________________________
If God’s actions are not relative, then he will give no case-specific commands.
Most, if not all, of God’s commands are case-specific.
Therefore, God ‘s actions are relative.
God gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, not to Finland, Brazil, Zambia, and not to any other nation or people. God commanded the Israelites to march around Jericho for seven days. He did not tell them to use this maneuver against any other city. Jesus’ commands/teachings in the Sermon on the Mount were not addressed to the world, but to his followers.
Jesus told only one person, a rich man, to sell all he had, then follow him. He told only one woman to go call her husband. He did not tell everyone to wipe the dust from off their feet. He gave this order only to his apostles. Examples could be multiplied. You can check the book for yourself.
Another way of making the same point is to note that almost everything God says, almost everything that God Incarnate says, is directed to a specific person or group on a specific occasion.
It all depends on the situation. Just an example or two will suffice. Each prophet was addressing a particular historical occasion in Israel’s history. They were not standing on some high hill speaking God’s universal word for the entire world to heed. Jesus told only one person he needed to be born again, he offered living water only to one, he healed some because of their faith, others because of the faith of the faith of someone else. It all depended in the need of the situation; it was all occasion appropriate. God does not operate by some single inflexible plan.
If God’s actions are not relative, he will use the same approach in every situation, but he does not use just a single method. We may conclude then, that God’s actions are relative.
_______________
If God is not relative, then Father/Spirit/Son do not relate.
Father/Spirit/Son do relate.
Therefore, God is relative.
This blog has gotten far too long today, so I will abbreviate some things that are obvious. The Father affirms his love of the Son; the Son prays to the Father; The Spirit validates the Son.
God is love. Love is not some kind of substance or principle. It is a relation between persons. God is love. God is trinitarian eternally. God is one God: Spirit Father, Son, in eternal relation, a singular community of love. Christians are not mere monotheists, they are trinitarian monotheists.
If God is not relative, there is no relation between the Son, the Spirit, and the Father. However, God is an eternal center of loving relation. God is relative.
______________________
Many more reductios are possible. It is absurd to question the divine relativity. It is understandable historically that it is questioned, but in the light of the written and the living Word of God, it is an absurd question or challenge.
God is love. That is the eternal fundamental. All else we know of God is a partial of that love.
The idea never occurred to me before I was fifty-years-old, but it came about as a result of fifty years of church attendance and thirty-some years of Bible reading. It gradually emerged from nearly thirty years of formal study of theology. No teacher or preacher ever suggested the idea, neither intentionally nor directly. It came to me full-blown, plain and clear out of my entire experience with the things of God.
_______________________
I am such a logical thinker that most friends and acquaintances assume that logic is my primary mode of thought. I am a logician, but have not always been. I am not by nature a logical person. It is a method of thinking that I learned only in my late thirties. I have since, taught logic in universities for more than thirty years. It is now so imbedded in my mind that it is second nature for me to think logically.
My primary thought, however, comes from my sense of the whole. I am by nature a gestalt thinker. I somehow sense meaning before I understand or can explain. It might seem to be intuitive knowledge, but it comes not from intuition but from observation of the “big picture.”
Ordinarily my perception of the gestalt of a thing is somewhat vague or fuzzy; it is definite without sharp definitions. That first impression generally proves to be correct, but not always. I am keenly aware that I could be wrong, so usually I turn to logic to check it out.
Gestalt: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. From Middle High German: “form, configuration, appearance.”
After half a century of living with God and the things of God, I saw divine relativity as the gestalt of the Bible, not seen in its parts but in the whole. I came to see it first neither in the details of any particular verses of scripture nor in any specific part of the Bible. Rather, it arose in my consciousness as the dominant biblical theme. All else found its meaning only as it contributed to this overall picture.
All of this is, I realize, somewhat vague and subjective. Neither evidence nor proof has been offered. Thus, as is my habit, I turned to logic to see if the idea of a relative God stood up under the careful scrutiny of reason.
In psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for something that was decided on the ground of some mental process other than logic. Ordinarily, rationalization is seen as a logical coverup for flawed beliefs.
In what follows, I have carefully avoided any improper use of reason to rationalize my theological position. I leave it to you to decide whether I am reasoning or rationalizing.
One of the more useful logical forms is called the Reduction ad Absurdum, “a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable.”
In the following, I present numerous theological reductios, to prove that it is absurd to deny the notion that God is relative. The blog is long, so if you get the point early on, you might want to just skip down and see how it is ended.
________________________
If God is immutable, then he cannot change (by definition).
God does change (as I will establish in the next paragraph).
Therefore, God is not immutable.
In 1 Samuel 8, the story is told of Israel’s plea to Samuel to provide them a king, like other nations. When Samuel speaks to God about this, the Lord tells him to listen to the people, but to warn them of what life under a human king would be like. He lets Samuel off the hook, telling him that the people have rejected God as their king, not Samuel as their respected leader.
The people ignore God’s warning about the nature of a kingship, and in chapter 10 the story is told of Saul as God’s choice for their king. See in particular, 10:24.
A reading of the first ten chapters of 1 Samuel makes it apparent that God is their king and has no desire to be replaced. However, in response to the insistence of his covenant people, God has Samuel anoint Saul king over Israel. God changed his plan of action, in response to his people.
Later, in 1 Samuel 13:13-14, the text indicates that Saul and his descendants would have ruled over Israel forever if Saul had been obedient. Since, however, he had not, God rejected whom earlier he had chosen. In chapter 16:12-14, God explicitly takes his Spirit from Saul, his chosen, and an evil spirit now enters Saul.
In this passage, God’s Spirit now comes upon David, God’s new choice. God’s earlier choice failed, so he makes a new choice. In doing so, God has changed his course of action, not his purpose, not his character, only the means of accomplishing that purpose. Nonetheless, in some sense, he changed.
We could have adverted to the story of Noah, Moses, or later, to Solomon, Jonah, or a multitude of other instances. If God is immutable--and this is a cardinal feature of traditional Christian doctrine--then, by definition, he cannot change. He does, in certain definable senses, often change in the course of the biblical story, therefore God is not immutable. Thus, the cardinal doctrine of divine immutability misrepresents the God revealed in the Christian scriptures, and therefore must be rejected.
An interesting question about the supposed divine immutability can be seen in a particular contrast between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God is found regularly warring against and defeating the enemies of his people, Israel. In the New Testament, Rome has invaded and now occupies and rules over Israel, but there is no indication that God is going to war against and defeat this Roman enemy (except, perhaps, depending on how you interpret the book of Revelation, he may intend to do this in some future–a future distant from the present).
In the past he has defeated the Egyptian, the Amalekite, the Canaanite, the Midianite, the Philistine, . . . the Syrian, and numerous other enemies of his people. In the present, New Testament, situation, God takes no military initiative against the Roman. In fact, when God-with-Us (Immanuel), Jesus is arrested by the Romans and Peter draws his sword against them, Jesus not only attempts no self-defense, he denounces the use of the sword.
It would appear that in the New Testament, God has changed his modus operandus from using violence as a common way of dealing with his opponents to the use of suffering as a means of transformation.
___________________________
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, he knows how to make his people obey.
In Hosea 6:4, God says he doesn’t know what to do.
Therefore, God is not omniscient.
God has richly blessed Israel, he has punished/disciplined them, he has sent prophets to warn them, he has pleaded with them--all efforts to persuade them to obey and thus live out God’s purpose for them. But in Hosea’s time, after much pleading, a frustrated God finally says: “O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?”
Nothing God has done has worked. He has done all he knows how to do to correct them, to bring about an attitude adjustment, but Israel, for the most part, has ignored him. Now God, seemingly at his wit’s end, doesn’t know what to do.
Many of us have heard such words from our frustrated parents, or perhaps as frustrated parents, spoken them to our children. After teaching them the right, correcting them, punishing them, praising them, taking them into our arms and pleading with them, they have still rebelled. Finally the day came, seems always to come, when the parents throw up their hands and ask, “What is it going to take? Your father and I have done everything we know how.” In desperation the parent often adds, “You tell us. You tell us what it is going to take.”
The supposedly omniscient (all-knowing) God here appears not to know how to change his people. So, later, in Jeremiah and ultimately in Jesus, God lays aside his Plan A and sets forth Plan B, a New Covenant (New Testament).
If God knows everything (and if he has all power, can do anything he wants to do), why doesn’t he know how to make his special people do right?
The fact remains that if God is omniscient, he knows how to induce obedience. Hosea 6:4 documents at least one instance in which God confesses that he does not know how to do this. Therefore, God is not omniscient, at least not in some so-called absolute or comprehensive sense.
_________________________
If God is impassible, he will neither grieve, be pleased, nor be angry.
He is on occasion grieved, pleased, and angry.
Therefore, God is not impassible.
For at least seven centuries, the divine impassibility has been a common feature of Christian theology. Impassibility refers to the inability to experience emotion, especially suffering.
In very early Christian discussions of God as Father, Son, Spirit–Trinity–Jesus, the Son of God, was seen as so distinct from God the Father, that while it was affirmed that Jesus suffered on the cross, God did not suffer because God the Father (pater) was impassible. Those who differed were called patripassionists, and patripassionism was declared a heresy.
So, let’s suppose that God cannot experience emotion, and then examine God’s written story as inspired by the Spirit of God. I’ll not devote space to detail the references, but repeatedly the Bible speaks of God as: being well-pleased, being not-pleased, angry, loving, having compassion, hating, patient, long-suffering, frustrated, indeed having a rich emotional life.
Whatever this might mean upon further investigation, it does show that God experiences emotion. And it demonstrates that what we do or don’t do affects how God feels. God has affections, and God’s emotions are somewhat dependant on us.
If God is impassive, he has no feelings. But the written record gives irrefutable evidence of God’s feelings. So, it cannot be true that God is impassive.
__________________________
If God’s actions are not relative, then he will give no case-specific commands.
Most, if not all, of God’s commands are case-specific.
Therefore, God ‘s actions are relative.
God gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, not to Finland, Brazil, Zambia, and not to any other nation or people. God commanded the Israelites to march around Jericho for seven days. He did not tell them to use this maneuver against any other city. Jesus’ commands/teachings in the Sermon on the Mount were not addressed to the world, but to his followers.
Jesus told only one person, a rich man, to sell all he had, then follow him. He told only one woman to go call her husband. He did not tell everyone to wipe the dust from off their feet. He gave this order only to his apostles. Examples could be multiplied. You can check the book for yourself.
Another way of making the same point is to note that almost everything God says, almost everything that God Incarnate says, is directed to a specific person or group on a specific occasion.
It all depends on the situation. Just an example or two will suffice. Each prophet was addressing a particular historical occasion in Israel’s history. They were not standing on some high hill speaking God’s universal word for the entire world to heed. Jesus told only one person he needed to be born again, he offered living water only to one, he healed some because of their faith, others because of the faith of the faith of someone else. It all depended in the need of the situation; it was all occasion appropriate. God does not operate by some single inflexible plan.
If God’s actions are not relative, he will use the same approach in every situation, but he does not use just a single method. We may conclude then, that God’s actions are relative.
_______________
If God is not relative, then Father/Spirit/Son do not relate.
Father/Spirit/Son do relate.
Therefore, God is relative.
This blog has gotten far too long today, so I will abbreviate some things that are obvious. The Father affirms his love of the Son; the Son prays to the Father; The Spirit validates the Son.
God is love. Love is not some kind of substance or principle. It is a relation between persons. God is love. God is trinitarian eternally. God is one God: Spirit Father, Son, in eternal relation, a singular community of love. Christians are not mere monotheists, they are trinitarian monotheists.
If God is not relative, there is no relation between the Son, the Spirit, and the Father. However, God is an eternal center of loving relation. God is relative.
______________________
Many more reductios are possible. It is absurd to question the divine relativity. It is understandable historically that it is questioned, but in the light of the written and the living Word of God, it is an absurd question or challenge.
God is love. That is the eternal fundamental. All else we know of God is a partial of that love.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Church Good and Bad
I’ve been in church since I was about two-years-old, and it has tormented my mind most of those years. The rest of the story is that almost everything good in my life has come through the church. But unlike me, many of my childhood friends with church-tormented minds didn’t stay. With a variety of emotions they left the church and went off in every direction.
Some who have been long gone don’t seem to miss anything about their church experience: hymns, sermons, Sunday School, Bible, Jesus, they’ve shed it all. Others continue searching incessantly for alternatives. They’ve tried other churches, different denominations, Zen, Buddha, Transcendental Meditation, Shirley Maclaine, and anything else that offers any hint of sustenance to the human spirit. Another large group, although they have completely rejected the religious establishments, continues, in some sense to believe in Jesus, pray, and live an approximation of a Christian ethic. Often they dismiss the Bible along with the church. They may accept and appreciate parts of it, but they owe it no authority. I understand them, know how they feel, what they think, and am their near kinsman.
Unlike them, some of us uncomfortably have stayed with the church because even with all of its perversions we still believe that deep within its shell we can hear the heartbeat of life, truth, and hope. We are waiting for, and some of us are working at the restoration of this frail, limping institution that too often mocks any idea of the “body of Christ,” God’s agent of hope for his broken world. We remain more or less marginal members of an eccentric, disturbed, and stagnant social institution. To our friends we look like fools, and within the church we seem rather powerless, losers all the way around.
Where does God, relative or absolute, fit into this picture? Ultimately the whole thing is a God issue. Although those who left have many reasons, and likewise those who remain are variously motivated, at heart it has all developed out of our understanding of who God is. This is the great divide: who is God, and what is God about?
Christians live with contradictory answers to the God question, and for at least sixteen centuries they have made their uneasy peace with the resultant tensions. They have lived with the contradictions for so long that these mental and emotional conflicts are submerged in the unconscious. Thus Christians rarely realize the contradictions that keep them from attaining integrity. Two different ways of talking about God, each working counter to the other, repeatedly lead to the disintegration Christian efforts to bring God’s healing the a world that sees only too clearly the lack of integrity.
Both ways of understanding God are rooted in the Bible. One is nourished by the Spirit who is the source of life; the other grows out of and is maintained by the human quest for certainty and security. The contrast between them matured in the fourth century, and continues vigorously. Two different readings of the Bible, two different ideas of God, lead to two contrasting but often intertwined ways of life: one destroys, the other heals and enhances; one closes, the other opens. One gives power the primacy in the heart of God with love being at best secondary, and often only one of many attributes that are under the control of God’s power. The other knows that in God the primacy goes to love, with the divine power in the service of the divine love. One typically deals in abstract statements about God, the other deals in concrete relationships with God.
Look at the Christian churches in your own community or anywhere around the world and you will see the contrast. Listen to Christians speak and read what they write; you will hear two different ways struggling for attention. Read Christian history and discover the ongoing demonstration of the dissonance. But if you hear only one, either one, of these voices it can seem so clear and convincing that the other way is completely blocked out. If one of them is dominant, it often leads to immediate rebellion, atheism, or secularism. If the other is dominant, it often brings faith, hope, and love to those who hear it.
I’ve been in church since I was about two-years-old, and it has tormented my mind most of those years. The rest of the story is that almost everything good in my life has come through the church. But unlike me, many of my childhood friends with church-tormented minds didn’t stay. With a variety of emotions they left the church and went off in every direction.
Some who have been long gone don’t seem to miss anything about their church experience: hymns, sermons, Sunday School, Bible, Jesus, they’ve shed it all. Others continue searching incessantly for alternatives. They’ve tried other churches, different denominations, Zen, Buddha, Transcendental Meditation, Shirley Maclaine, and anything else that offers any hint of sustenance to the human spirit. Another large group, although they have completely rejected the religious establishments, continues, in some sense to believe in Jesus, pray, and live an approximation of a Christian ethic. Often they dismiss the Bible along with the church. They may accept and appreciate parts of it, but they owe it no authority. I understand them, know how they feel, what they think, and am their near kinsman.
Unlike them, some of us uncomfortably have stayed with the church because even with all of its perversions we still believe that deep within its shell we can hear the heartbeat of life, truth, and hope. We are waiting for, and some of us are working at the restoration of this frail, limping institution that too often mocks any idea of the “body of Christ,” God’s agent of hope for his broken world. We remain more or less marginal members of an eccentric, disturbed, and stagnant social institution. To our friends we look like fools, and within the church we seem rather powerless, losers all the way around.
Where does God, relative or absolute, fit into this picture? Ultimately the whole thing is a God issue. Although those who left have many reasons, and likewise those who remain are variously motivated, at heart it has all developed out of our understanding of who God is. This is the great divide: who is God, and what is God about?
Christians live with contradictory answers to the God question, and for at least sixteen centuries they have made their uneasy peace with the resultant tensions. They have lived with the contradictions for so long that these mental and emotional conflicts are submerged in the unconscious. Thus Christians rarely realize the contradictions that keep them from attaining integrity. Two different ways of talking about God, each working counter to the other, repeatedly lead to the disintegration Christian efforts to bring God’s healing the a world that sees only too clearly the lack of integrity.
Both ways of understanding God are rooted in the Bible. One is nourished by the Spirit who is the source of life; the other grows out of and is maintained by the human quest for certainty and security. The contrast between them matured in the fourth century, and continues vigorously. Two different readings of the Bible, two different ideas of God, lead to two contrasting but often intertwined ways of life: one destroys, the other heals and enhances; one closes, the other opens. One gives power the primacy in the heart of God with love being at best secondary, and often only one of many attributes that are under the control of God’s power. The other knows that in God the primacy goes to love, with the divine power in the service of the divine love. One typically deals in abstract statements about God, the other deals in concrete relationships with God.
Look at the Christian churches in your own community or anywhere around the world and you will see the contrast. Listen to Christians speak and read what they write; you will hear two different ways struggling for attention. Read Christian history and discover the ongoing demonstration of the dissonance. But if you hear only one, either one, of these voices it can seem so clear and convincing that the other way is completely blocked out. If one of them is dominant, it often leads to immediate rebellion, atheism, or secularism. If the other is dominant, it often brings faith, hope, and love to those who hear it.
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