Not the God of Traditionalists or Progressives
April
15, 2015 by Kenneth
Tanner 1
Comment
In
Jesus Christ, God is not an abstraction, concept, or idea but a
Person. The Unknowable is made known. The Invisible is made material.
All mysticism is now grounded, and all agnosticism now countered, in
this particular Person; there is now, paradoxically, a Measure within
Measurelessness.
“For
in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body.” (Col.
2:9) “For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ.”
(Col. 1:19) Conversely, whatever is not revealed in Jesus is not the
Triune God.
Contemporary
Christians (of all sorts of persuasions) tend to de-couple God from
Jesus.
Traditionalists
and progressives alike construct complicated (often confusing)
systems of conceptual theology which collapse when confronted with
the reality of Jesus, God enfleshed; the reality of Jesus, the
crucified God; the reality of Jesus, the resurrected, ascended,
yet-flesh-bearing–inescapably material–Lord
of the finite and infinite.
Jesus
makes it hard to claim that we don’t really know who God is and
can’t really say much for certain about him, which is the
temptation of many progressives.
He
also makes it hard to press Classical Greek (pagan) attributes for
the divine that no longer make entire sense when we encounter God’s
arrival in time, space, and matter, which is the temptation of many
traditionalists.
We
can say a great deal about God because of Jesus Christ. We can also
rule out a lot about God because of Jesus Christ.
Many
skeptics and cynics are actually opposing not Jesus but the
systematic God of the ancient philosophers or the soft “Otherness”
God (who can be whatever we want God to be). Christians worship
neither
of these gods.
We
follow the flesh-and-blood manifestation of the Creator we have in
Jesus Christ, revealed in the New Testament and in the worship of the
Church as the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world for
the sins of the whole world.
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