The Shape of Our Beliefs

There is an extremely important linkage between the end of John (from which, as I have said, we must read backwards to understand its connection to Genesis) and the beginning of John (with its language of cosmic timelessness and omnipotence.)  This linkage has to do with the very nature of belief.  The belief that Jesus describes and holds to be worthwhile is not an intellectual thing--nor even an intellectual thing that the believer admits is hard for him or her to keep in view.  Belief that matters is that which is organic to the person--that which inhabits the person's life-arc of being roused, readied, and reaped.

This crucial aspect of that which truly constitutes belief rests upon what should not be a very controversial contention--the contention that we are not gods.  And yet how--when we are engaged in theological conjecturing--can we be said to be not gods?  When we theologize we stand apart from our existence and imagine that we can understand our existence.  We can project humility, and we can humble ourselves, if we wish, before whatever ineffable deity we credit with ruling the existence we inhabit, but none of that changes the fact that we have arrogated to ourselves the role of appraising ourselves in terms that we cannot claim to grasp.  We are acting as godlings.  When we say that God exists, we are godlings.  When we say that God does not exist, we are godlings.

This realization is important if we are to understand John's gospel, and particularly the progressions of thought in John's gospel.  We cannot understand the belief we are to possess unless we understand ourselves who are to possess it.  This brings us to Chapter Ten and its references to humans as "gods".  Jesus says to "the Jews," "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" (10:34, KJV).

What must not be missed is what Jesus says next: "If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came. . . ."(10:35).  Jesus (referencing surely Psalm 82) is referring to people who were provided (God only knows why) with instructions from God.  They were instructed to provide judgments among people, in accordance with the will of God.  Poor godlings as we all are, they were miserable failures.

Those "gods" would have done better to have just tried to be good people, good people who had the jobs of being judges.  If their failings had resembled those of the first-century officials who Jesus decried, they would have been the failings of those who put themselves in the place of God.

Yet is not Jesus merely leveraging his claim to be "Son of God" on the fulcrum of the psalmist's long-ago judges' god-ness, against his accusers' claims of blasphemy?  That would be difficult to sell to Jesus or to his accusers, since Jesus links his claim to the judges' god-ness with his own claim to have been divinely "sanctified, and sent into the world"--which latter claim would have been enough in itself to condemn him.

No, the whole business of Jesus quoting, "Ye are gods" is not the searing argument that the apologists would like it to be, nor is it some sort of New-Age sentiment.  Jesus is talking about what belief ought to be.  As regarding Jesus' immediate circumstances, it would be worth noting that belief that "ought to be" would not involve nailing living bodies to wooden crossbars.

As regarding a broader view, Jesus then goes on to say, "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.  But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him" (10:37-38).

Belief is life, not theology.  Belief is not what we think, or worse yet, what we rally ourselves to think.  Belief is what we are, in all our aspects, and we are simultaneously molded by our circumstances and  beaten by our wills into the shape of our real beliefs.