I ended the last post (that is, the one before my apologies for bad blogging technique) with the following statement: "I think we should begin philosophy with the God of 'We' and the God of 'I am'; the God of the origin-myth Garden and the God of man's first grasping at the ultimate."
Of course I am describing God as either a conceptualized person within a context, or as a superintendent of all contexts. I can pursue either approach to the best of my ability (okay, that is, to the best of my ability to rouse my energies to give my best efforts) but I am bound to fall short. I know I am not saying anything novel here.
What I do mean to say--and what I think is crucial to properly understanding our relationship to God--is that it is not enough to admit to failure in viewing God within a context, or in viewing God outside of all contexts. What we must also admit is that we transgress in our relationship to God--or at least reveal our indolence--when we allow ourselves comfortable residence in those modes of thought that muse about God dealing with this or that, or that muse about God's ineffable, uncharacterizable traits.
To try to explain: First, there is the business of our "viewing God within a context." As an example, I am reminded of the modern complaint from much of Christianity about the fancied conflict between religion and science, shown as starkly as anywhere else in contentions about the age of the earth. Only some Christian Creationists are "young-earthers," taking issue with conventional geology itself. Many other Christians are comfortable with an old Earth, but object to the notion that the Bible has been shown therefore to be lacking, when it was always intended to present Deeper Truths, or some such.
What must be understood about any objection from Christians about a science-heavy modern predisposition is that Christianity has always been science-heavy. Science measures time and records the ostensible results of time's passing. Science also, quite logically, extrapolates--from observable experience and observable evidence--to notions about time as a fundamental dimension, whether plotted by itself as an infinitude back and forth, or conceptualized in some mind-wrenching interplay with other dimensions (or dimensions at least mind-wrenching to me.)
But what has any of this theorizing about time to do with our understanding (or not) of God? The notion expressed in the Book of Job ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4, KJV)) cuts no more against the atheist than the believer, if the believer is intent on theorizing about God's relationship to time as a dimension. Unfortunately, many Christian thinkers, even from the start, chose a "scientific" approach to the great questions of the universe, extrapolating from common human experiences to lay out a framework that--despite their utterances of regard for God--has served in reality to constrain God in their imaginings.
And then there is the other problematic stance: not viewing God within a context, but viewing God as the author of all contexts. It is easy enough for Christian philosophers to ascribe to God not only all estimable qualities, but also to credit him with having created all estimable qualities. The only art or skill involved would be shown in the inventiveness of such conceptualizations. But who is a person to be doing such conceptualizing, and upon what does that person stand?
A person who ascribes to God all estimable qualities--not as an outpouring of a moment of reverence, praise, or thanks--but as a philosophical stance, really is just ensnared in a tautology. What is it to God that some philosopher whirls about in this or that circle of, say, "God is all purity and all purity is God?"--and the same for all justice, all dimension, all physicality, etc,--everything considered substanceless without his will?
What I am stumbling toward is an assertion that another conceptualization of our relationship to God is necessary other than God viewed in the context of our philosophically-surveyed universe, or God viewed by us as the author of a universe that we ascribe to him even as we ascribe to ourselves the role of viewer. What would be a proper metaphor?
I could throw out the modern-ish (and I grant rather childish) metaphor of a cosmic railroad train--for the sake of argument one traveled not merely by us as individuals but by us as succeeding, overlapping generations. What can be conceptualized by us is mostly viewed outside of the windows, unavailable for our further inspection. We cannot see where the train is going and--in the train's cosmic, age-old manifestation of my fancy--we can neither see where it has been nor rely on accounts of where it has been. Nor do we know how the cosmos cradling the cosmic train had its beginning or is supported in its existence.
Rather silly, I will admit, but it will suffice, I believe, to tie in with this blog's insistence on the "roused, readied, reaped" theme. We do not possess certainty about the dimensions of existence, and we do not possess certainty about any entity superintending over existence (if I might be forgiven such a clumsy allusion to the divine.) More importantly, our conceptualizations of existence are dependent on the circumstances of our lives. We are roused to existence in an ultimately unknowable and unplottable journey, we are formed and molded (our "readyings"), and we come to be reaped in our ends.
And so I come to this blog's focus on Jesus. Jesus said, "Ye must be born again" (John 3:7, KJV). Modern translations often read "born from above." Whichever; the Christian fascination with this important phrase (I say "fascination" to characterize an over-blown response) is a fascination not with the phrase itself, but with the seductive possibilities it presents when an interpreter sees the believer being "born" in some fashion into an endlessly-discussable framework of a "salvation economy."
To the denominations the being "born" is plottable against a carefully-surveyed universe of revelation; to the denominations the being "born" is understandable in revelation's teachings about the God who created not merely the universe, but also created the means by which such miserable inhabitants of the universe as we could be raised of a moment to son-ship or daughter-ship to God.
All well and good, I should say; one could make a rather fine religion from such notions. Only one real problem exists: Jesus did not subscribe to such notions. Jesus did not show a man how to gain son-ship to God; he showed him how to transfer his acknowledged son-ship from his earthly father to his heavenly father, and to recognize thereby that the heavenly father is now and always was the only one. "Our Father, who art in heaven" is not merely addressed to a person's "heavenly Father"; it is an assertion that a human being has no other father. The believer is to hate his earthly father and refuse to address him as such--though his erstwhile father is as deserving of love and regard as any other person.
What then was Jesus describing with the language of being "born"? His further description explains: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (3:8). One of the first things learned by most amateur theologians is that the word translated "wind" and the word translated "Spirit" are one and the same (and that the conversation was almost certainly not in Greek.) Indeed, the Greek word is only rarely translated "wind" in the New Testament, but Jesus' further words make that translation effectively mandatory: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (3:12).
What Jesus is doing (and I know I am flirting with impertinence) is throwing the believer into the first-century version of the cosmic railroad train. We do not know the beginning or the ending of the world (or our personal worlds, in case anyone is counting on living in a structured anticipation of the End Times.) We do not know the beginning or the ending of the spiritual realm. And we do not know where one realm ends and the other begins (which makes them, in terms of what faces us, one and the same.) Jesus uses better language: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth."
What we are "born" to in Jesus' formulation is an identification with God as our father and the realm of God as the place in which we live. We live in a place in which mountains will leap into the sea at our command--geology be damned. If we do not believe this, then we do not believe Jesus. (It is not Jesus' fault if we lack the faith to move mountains.)
We do not change, other than in the fact of our new attachment to God as our father (with the concomitant staggering prospects of what might be required of us.) The world then is different to us, yet still it roars past our fleeting lives, as ultimately unknowable as ever. We as a species have seen this before. Adam was a sinner before and after The Fall, and there was strife in the natural world before The Fall as after--yet Adam's orientation to God was changed. Noah, despite initially enjoying God's favor, was a sinner before the flood and a sinner after. The world did not change--not in the things of substance.
We can think of God as a great worker within the universe. We can think of God as the great worker who made and sustains the universe. None of that will save us.
We worship God when we trust him as a loving parent, who fashioned for us a fitting realm in which we work through our pains, fears, and sorrows. That is how we are saved.
No comments:
Post a Comment