Who is ‘God’? I am Trinitarian – the ‘Father’ is God; the ‘Son’ is God; the ‘Spirit’ is God… but the Father is not the Son and is not the Spirit; the Son is not the Father and is not the Spirit; the Spirit is not the Father and is not the Son. (And very open to an open discussion on what on earth do we mean by the three ‘titles’ of Father, Son and Spirit… they are titles not the final defining description.) I take great encouragement that although I could never write a book on Trinitarian theology (ecomomic, ontological, or social trinitarianism!!!) I am convinced that I have nailed something very central – God has to be defined in ‘Jesus’ terms. Any belief in God that contradicts that has to be severely put in the dock and interrogated. Maybe does not make me very smart but gives me an anchor. I might have my own way of approaching the seemingly endless spilling of blood (animals and all those enemies of God – should I write god at this point?) that seem to pop up too often in the OT, and on some of them have no clarity of resolving the tensions, but I have to subject them all to a Jesus lens. Jesus is my God does not mean I am Unitarian, but there is no ‘god’ manifestation that can conflict with the revelation in Jesus. Mr Barth was always too ‘orthodox’ for me (read for orthodox – too reformed) but he certainly hit it on the head when he insisted that Jesus is the word of God, and the Bible is secondarily the word of God as it witnesses to the revelation of God that was in Jesus. The Bible without Jesus does not reveal God, but the Bible read with a Jesus-lens enables us to see who God is.
I am deeply influenced by the Anabaptist tradition that came through in the Reformation period (and for those who have read some of the history do not read Anabaptist as Munster). The priority of the Gospels does not mean that the letters etc., are any lesser Scripture, but where we read a conflict between (say) Paul and the Gospels it simply means we have misunderstood what Paul is saying – he is not the founder of ‘Christianity’ in the sense of something new, but is building on what Jesus released as the one in whom the entire OT story had come into focus.
Jesus as the one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who embodies God (the fullness of God was pleased to dwell there) does make for some difficult reading of some passages. Jesus never addressed the Scriptural assessment of the Flood (almost certainly not universal but local with very widespread results) but I suspect he would have given us a different lens to look at it. Sacrifices? Well we even read that ‘God does not desire sacrifices’ in the pages of the Hebrew Bible… maybe it is an allowance, for after all the text ‘when you sacrifice’ could indicate that the cultural expectation is that they are going to do this anyway so the question is how can the understanding me modified.
The Jesus lens gives me permission, or I think even stronger, demands that I question some of what I read. It pushes me to read it as an unfolding story, rather than as eternal revelation that determines everything for ever. In that sense (and please understand that I mean in that sense) we will have to go beyond Scripture while living within the biblical story.
I have more questions today than before, but my understanding of ‘God’ cannot contradict what I see in Jesus.
And my final comment on Jesus is that I am pretty sure that I would not be totally comfortable around Jesus, so I have to resist making Jesus into my image (and acknowledge I am not too successful in that!).
What a relief though that Jesus is the lens. Imagine only having the OT Scriptures, or the Quran or some other ‘holy’ book. God would be for me (if I was religious enough) and definitely against my enemies – sometimes that seems to be where many Christians land. My challenge is that Jesus is ‘against’ me as he is so for me… and for my enemies, and that if I truly follow where the journey takes me I will need my ‘enemies’ also to help shape me. Jesus, the image of God, and therefore the human as intended – the one and only truly human one.
I think whether we want to admit it or not, we are ALL negotiating with the text.
When I go to the text there are arguments for and against a trinity and if I’m HONEST I admit that, but my theology often does not let me be honest because it depends on me being comfortable with the negotiations I have already made and assumed about what it says.
There is more than one passage in the OT that suggest YHWH was a regional god, one of many in the council…David complained that Saul was forcing him to worship other gods because he was excluded from a piece of land during his fugitive years…can’t worship Adonai in a different spot of dirt…so we negotiate that David meant something else other than a geographic boundary…(we even have one guy bringing two oxcarts of dirt to a foreign land so he can worship).
So we really only have 2 options, what the text says and what we have negotiated to make it mean…Paul of course raises a bridge between the two by including a third category of “revelation”…and it seems perhaps God wants to inhabit all three…and this is where it gets messy…because God is not really interested in defending any of those categories…
It’s sort of like getting into a cab where God is the driver and rather than getting caught up in all the pronouns of “Are you a he/she/they/how do you identify?” God simply says:
“Where to, love?”