Seven FAQ's About Christian Faith (and Seven More for Good Luck) 01
(A new series of posts)
Ch.1:
Is God Mad at Me?
What
Are We Made For?
We are made to be loved and
love.
Love is what God is and God
made us to be like him.[1]
Love is the energy that
moves us. The soil in which we bloom. What makes us who we are meant to be. The
necessary and sufficient condition for full humanity. It is God’s glory and
ours too.
More
to the point – this is the point! The only one that matters. Without a deep
awareness and assurance of our Creator’s love is both disposition and action
our lives becomes desperate and distorted searches for it. Surrogates abound:
family, children, job, stuff, status, wealth, achievement, sports, health, and
other deities we create to fill the god-shaped hole inside us. The 17 century
French mathematician and philosopher Pascal says it well:
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness,
proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now
remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with
everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot
find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be
filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God
himself.”[2]
Every
human beings needs to know in heart and mind that their Creator is love, made
them from that love, for that love, to be lover themselves of him supremely and
every other human being as well.
We
knew that at the creation. The picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is
of creatures well-loved, lavishly provided for, and given an identity and
vocation far more than adequate to secure their sense of significance and
security.
Whatever
exactly we parse the significance of Adam and Eve’s breaking relationship with
God to mean, it at least means that we know this originary divine love now by
default. It’s absence. Or better, our inability to sense and live out of it.
For the Creator’s love and care for us never wavered. Indeed, it only intensified
or solidified (if I may use such terms) with God’s absolute unwillingness to
acquiesce in our rebellion.
Some
religions and spiritual philosophies present human beings as part of or an
expression of their deity him-, her-, or its- self. Divine love here is simply
the self-love the deity.
Others
allot but a bit role to humanity. We do the grunt work the gods have tired of
and want relief from.
Yet
others value humanity highly. So high, in fact, that we are very nearly aliens
in our bodies and earth-boundedness. If we can find and practice the proper
spiritual insight and protocols we may make our way toward the blessed state of
union with the deity (personally or impersonally considered) when death finally
frees us to “shuffle off this mortal coil” (Shakespeare) and we may rejoin the
“spiritual” from which we came.
Nowhere,
however, do we find creatures begot by the Creator’s love alone, beloved for no
reason but that love alone, trusted with the immeasurable privilege of being
God’s royal children and priests in the temple of his creation, destined for
life with him forever in communication, communion, and community, asked only to
love and trust the Creator’s love for us and mature into the full stature of
humanity God designed for us. St. Irenaeus, the great 2nd century
theologian said it well: “The glory of God is humanity fully alive and life is
beholding God.”[3]
Life
as gift and grace. As love and latitude. Freedom and fealty. The unfathomable
reality of living God’s life in a human key!
Nothing
but love and God’s provision for human well-being, goodness, and eventual
maturity at the beginning. And, as we will see, nothing but that at the end and
at every moment in between.
No “God With a
Scowl”
Flash
forward to our world today. Sadly, this biblical picture of God as the
ever-loving Creator and Redeemer, ever-seeking, ever-welcoming Parent of
wayward children, ever-patient care-taker of his wondrous creation unwilling
that it or its creatures fail to reach their intended glory, this view of God
has been often hidden, obscured, or even contradicted by his own followers, of
all people!
Too
many people today, maybe even you, dear reader, think of God a the aloof,
demanding, vengeful, deity who must be assuaged and persuaded to accept his
human followers only after he requires Jesus to die for us, taking his Father’s
wrath on himself and protecting us from it.
Even
then, after Jesus’ death and resurrection, God seems, to hear many of his
followers tell it, obsessively concerned with his rules and our following them.
A regimen of what the late Dallas Willard called “sin-management.” Both the
left and the right have versions of this deformity of the gospel.
“On the Right, the gospel is
“vampire faith” (they want Jesus for his blood), it is shaped by atonement
theology and obsessed with atonement theology, and it is about “relief from the
intrapsychic terrors of fundamentalist versions of hell.”
On the Left, the gospel is about
“good acts” and activism and “self-determined acts of righteousness.” So the
Right is about proper beliefs and the Left about proper behaviors.”[4]
From
either direction, then, much American Christianity leaves us bereft of the
Bible’s God who far from being distant and demanding has shown himself in Jesus
to have drawn near and consider us dear, arms open as wide as possible to
welcome us ungrateful and undeserving creatures home again, wide enough with
love enough that even without the nails his arms would remain bound to the
cross in divine welcome.
This
ersatz surrogate deity, the one I call the “God with a Scowl,” rules with an
iron fist. We live in fear of failing this God. Moral failure, social or
political “backwardness,” arrogant self-righteousness, doctrinal aberrations,
all place of on God’s “bad side” liable to and worthy of a good old-fashioned
jolt of divine wrath. One or a combination of these things (depending, of
course, on one’s theological outlook) inevitably turns our view of God into
that of God “with a scowl.” Obsessively concerned with our performance and
ever-ready to avenge any misstep, the burden of maintaining our relationship
with God falls squarely on us.
When
an author like Philip Pullman writes a trilogy of children stories (His Dark Materials) which portray God as
a moral iron fist (the God “with a scowl”) who terrorizes humanity and the
church as his earthly authoritarian representative, and when the church
promotes boycotting his movies as anti-Christian because Pullman kills off this
deity, we see this distortion of the gospel revealed in all its ugliness. We
ought to cheer for the demise of this deity whether Pullman believes it to be
Christian God or not. This God needs to die!
Jesus
God
“has shown himself in Jesus.” Ah, there’s the magic word. Jesus of Nazareth,
Israel’s Messiah, shows us who God is in the fullest measure possible. In fact,
the most radical thing Christian faith says about God is that he is Jesus-like!
We can’t say Jesus is godlike unless we mean the deity he has shown God to be.
We can’t try to fit him into views of God we have gotten from somewhere else.
Because we don’t know who or what God is apart from him!
Jesus’
birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension brings to a climax the long
story of God with Israel in pursuit of his eternal purpose for his creatures
and creation (see the next chapter for more on this). In him
-the God who desired to draw near to
his people draws as near as possible by becoming one of us (Matthew 1);
-the God who rescued his people from
slavery in Egypt rescued all humanity from slavery to the devil by dying for
and God raising him from the dead (Hebrews 2:14-18);
-the God whose established his
presence in the midst of his people in the temple physically, now indwells his
people personally and in Jesus they become his new temple (John 2:22; Ephesians
3:19ff.);
-the God who wants to be the center of
his people’s life makes Jesus the center point of the whole cosmos (Ephesians
1:10); and
-the God who always
wanted to be at home with his people, finally is (Revelation 21:3).
From
the uttermost to the innermost, the smallest to the largest, the best to the
worst, Jesus makes it clear that God has loved his people and his world
lavishly, abundantly, generously with no regard to the cost to himself and for
the benefit and well-being of all he has created. He reveals the God “with a
scowl” to be a fraud, a massive and destructive hoax perpetrated by powers of evil
that oppose God[5]
and seek to undo his work in the world (more on this (d)evil figure in a later
chapter).
Jesus
is the face of God’s faithfulness to all he has promised his creatures and
creation. And that faithfulness means love, compassion, justice, forgiveness,
welcome, and a good future for us.
His
heart is God’s heart, his hands and feet God’s embrace of and action for us,
his words God’s wisdom, his death the extremity of God’s compassion, his
resurrection the enormity of God’s power and resolve – in short, God’s utter
faithfulness to be with us, in us, as us, an economy of gift and grace,
friendship and fealty, abundance and adoration throughout the ages.
Jesus
– we know God is not mad at us, you and me, because of him. And because of him
we know God is not mad at the world, vengeful, or out to get us for our sins.
In fact, God does not even treat us sinners or allow sin to color his
relationship with us! Karl Barth says it beautifully:
"[Man's] legal
status as a sinner is rejected in every form. Man is no longer seriously
regarded by God as a sinner. Whatever he may be, whatever there is to be said
of him, whatever he has to reproach himself with, God no longer takes him
seriously as a sinner. He has died to sin; there on the Cross of Golgotha...We
are no longer addressed and regarded by God as sinners...We are acquitted
gratis, sola gratia, by God's own entering in for us."[6]
“We are no addressed and regarded by God as sinners” – that’s
the grace of God in nutshell! Is God mad at and vengeful toward us? Perish the
thought! Such a blasphemous idea is a lie of the enemy. No matter how loudly
shouted or often repeated it is a lie! If you’re feeling unloved or under
condemnation by God boldly grab the truth and throw it back in the face of the
accuser (the (d)evil). The glory of the gospel is that “in
Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses
against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Did you hear
that? “Not counting their trespasses against them.” That means your trespasses
and mine – everyone’s.
God
is not made at or vengeful toward us. Never has been! Brokenhearted, yes. Had
to practice tough love toward us, yes. But love it was and love it remains. As
the God character in “The Shack” repeatedly intones, “I’m especially fond of
you.”
And
God is!
[1] I know God is not
male. But English unfortunately does not have generic pronouns so we have to
make a choice. My choice, and it’s not the only way to go, is to go ahead and
work with the “improper” pronoun that the biblical text gives us. And use the
full variety of images, male and female, scripture offers to craft a view of
God that is neither male nor female but grounds both in God’s being. Like I
said, this is my choice of a way to go. If another person chooses to do
differently, like use “Godself” in place of pronouns, that is fine with me. I
find that cumbersome but it is another way to go.
[2]Pascal,
1966, 75.
[5]
Whether or not we personify this evil as a “devil” figure or not, the crucial
thing is to recognize that there is some intentional organized opposition to
God in his universe. The evil we face is more than the sum total of humanity’s
misdeeds and failures.
[6] Barth, 1949, 120-121.
Comments
Post a Comment