Chapter 05, God the Holy Spirit, The Spirit of Christ, Union with Christ, Gifts of the Spirit

The Gifts of the Spirit

            We come now to what might be the most controversial point in any discussion of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit (especially those described in 1 Corinthians 12) and their role in the church today.  In general terms, we can speak of two major factions with opposing views on this topic.  On the one side, there are those who affirm the unbroken continuance of the gifts of the Spirit within the church, emphasizing that they were not instituted only for a particular time and that the lack of their operation in most modern churches (especially in the mainline) is a testament to a lack of faith in those churches. 

            Against these views are those who claim that the gifts of the Spirit were intended for the apostolic age and the first few centuries.  The argument has classically been put this way:  In the early days, when the church was persecuted and people needed signs in order to believe, God poured out the Spirit upon the church in a special way in order to empower them and to win people to Christian faith.  Ever since Constantine made Christianity legal (and indeed privileged), these gifts have been unnecessary, so they were withdrawn.  Any kind of talk about miraculous gifts of the Spirit (especially the gift of tongues) will make such people squirm or speak of heresy and error in the church.

            It is very likely that neither side will be entirely satisfied with this treatment of the gifts of the Spirit.  It affirms them far too much for those who want to be rid of them and it does not emphasize them sufficiently or universally enough for those who want to bring them to the forefront.  However, it is hoped that it will bring some fresh insight and reliable counsel to both sides.

            It is important to begin this discussion by highlighting the fully Trinitarian nature of these gifts.  At the beginning of the most frequently cited passage on the gifts of the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:4-11, Paul says, “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit.  And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.  There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons.”  Though these statements are often read and often cited, their clear Trinitarian implications are not always appreciated.  In Paul’s three statements, he is not speaking of three different realities that can be separated from one another, but is rather describing the same reality from three different angles.  The gifts of the Spirit are not only the work of the Spirit, as if the Father and Son are not involved.  These gifts of the Spirit are the same as the ministries of the same Lord Jesus Christ.  They are also the same as the effects of God the Father.

            What does this mean for our interpretation of these gifts?  Just as, when we considered the fruit of the Spirit, we needed to hold them up next to the life of Christ, we must do the same with the gifts of the Spirit.  The gifts of the Spirit are listed as follows.  “For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit; and to another the effecting of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the distinguishing of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues.”

When we hold this list of gifts up to the life of Christ as borne witness to in the Bible, what do we find?  We find that seven out of the nine gifts are perfectly evident in Christ’s ministry.  The only two we do not see are speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues.  However, this is not necessarily a strike against these two gifts as speaking in tongues has often been interpreted as something done in personal prayer or in public worship, neither of which is chronicled in the Gospels.  We know that Jesus went off by himself to pray, but we are not given access to what that prayer time looked like, nor was there a community to worship in a distinctly Christian way where interpreting tongues would be required.

What is important to notice is that Christ manifests each of the gifts of the Spirit in his High Priestly ministry.  It is Christ, first and foremost, who delivers the word of knowledge or the word of wisdom, it is Christ who has faith in the fullest sense of the word (and our faith is a participation in that faith).  It is Christ who heals, works miracles, prophesies, discerns spirits, speaks in tongues and interprets tongues.  These gifts are, once again, not arbitrary inventions from Paul’s mind, or even just from his experience planting churches.  The gifts that the Spirit gives to believers are indeed the means by which the church, called throughout the New Testament “the body of Christ” (not least in the following passage in 1 Corinthians), come to manifest the one priesthood of Christ.  It is important to notice that, while Christ manifested each of the nine gifts of the Spirit, no single believer does, but each shares in one or more of them.  The important thing is not that every person has every gift, but that, as a body, all of us together have all the gifts.

So, with the exception of speaking in tongues and interpreting tongues (which, it must be granted, are the most controversial of the nine), we must look to the example of Christ to understand the gifts, just as we did the attributes of God and the fruit of the Spirit.  Any way to understand the gifts of the Spirit that does not lean on God’s actual revelation in Christ is necessarily built, to one degree or another, on a human foundation, which is something short of what is intended by the New Testament.  We must not allow the gifts of the Spirit to be separated off into their own compartment, cut off from Christ, or else we will be implying that what Christ has done is not enough and that the Spirit needs to work some new miracle in order for us to be complete.

            This leads us to the question of the baptism of the Spirit.  In some circles, the baptism of the Spirit is distinguished from saving faith.  The argument is more or less based on a single text, Acts 19:1-7.  In this passage, Paul is in Ephesus and encounters seven men who had not yet received the Holy Spirit.  When they were asked whose baptism they received, they responded, “John’s baptism.”  Then, they baptized them in the name of Jesus and they received the Spirit with the laying on of hands.  It has been claimed that one can become a Christian and yet not receive the Spirit and that it needs to be given at a later time.

            This is problematic because at every other point in the New Testament, a person being a Christian and a person having the Spirit are absolutely united.  Paul the apostle even goes so far as to say (Romans 8:9), “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.”  Even if we do not deny that a person can have a second climatic moment in their Christian life, where they are empowered for a particular task or experience power to live more fully according to the will of God, it is problematic to refer to it as a “baptism of the Spirit” as such a baptism is intimately connected to all real Christian faith throughout the length and breadth of the New Testament.  Another term that is not nearly so difficult, yet can have more or less the same meaning (unless the goal is truly to maintain that one can be a Christian without the Spirit) is “evangelical awakening.”  This term is just one other option that does not violate one’s previous faith and yet emphasizes the fact that one might not have been as explicitly aware of the work of the Gospel in their life previously.

            If this discussion has frustrated those who want to emphasize the Spirit in a way that strongly differentiates it from the Father and the Son, the time has come to frustrate those who wish to maintain the cessation of the gifts of the Spirit.  If indeed the gifts of the Spirit are the high priestly ministry of Christ being worked out in the body of Christ, the Church, then we are not free to say that the gifts have ceased.  To say that the gifts are no longer active in the church would be to say that the body of Christ no longer participates in the priestly ministry of Christ.  To say this would be to say that the Spirit has ceased to unite the church to Christ in a way that truly impacts every facet of life.  Indeed, this is not what has happened.  We must rather affirm that the gifts are indeed still present in the church, even if we do not see them all the time.  However, we must not try to manufacture their existence or attempt to operate in them by an act of willpower, but rather we should pray that God would manifest them or open our eyes to see where they are already at work, for it is only when God does the work that is done well.

Chapter 05, God the Holy Spirit, The Spirit of Christ, Union with Christ, Fruit of the Spirit

Union With Christ

            The reason why it is important to think about the activity of the Holy Spirit in a fully Trinitarian way is because the Spirit does not draw attention to itself but is largely invisible in its own personal existence.  We know there is a Spirit and that this Spirit is personally distinct from the Father and the Son but we cannot come up with sharp distinctions between them (with the exception of the Son, who took on flesh).  This cannot surprise us, though, because, after all, we are dealing with three Persons who are indeed only one God.  How can we sharply divide the Spirit from the Father and Son and still be speaking of the one God of Israel?  We can’t, so we must remain faithful to both the “threeness” and the “oneness” of God as portrayed in the Bible.

            The reason to emphasize this again at this point is because there has been a tendency within certain Christian groups to separate the Spirit out from the rest of the Trinity and treat it differently.  This either takes the form of ignoring the Spirit, living as if God has acted in the past, throughout Israel’s long history and in Christ and even during the days of the apostles, but that God does not do amazing things today.  What often takes place, though, is that the Holy Spirit is separated from the Father and Son and treated as if, in the Spirit, God is doing something totally different than what God has done in Christ.  This, perhaps most often, takes the form, “The work of Christ is to forgive us, the work of the Spirit is to regenerate us.”  The problem with this is that it implies that the Spirit has no role in our forgiveness and that Christ has no role in our regeneration or sanctification.

            However, this cannot be the case.  We have seen above that it is only in and through the Spirit that we can even come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, so we cannot imagine that the Son and the Son alone is responsible for our forgiveness.  As we will see, our being made holy is not something that is utterly separate from Christ, but is intimately bound up with his vicarious humanity, which we discussed in the chapter on Christ.  Whatever the Spirit does, it cannot be thought as being separate from Christ.  People have often cautioned against allowing a so-called reliance on the Spirit to degenerate into mere self-will by saying, “The Spirit will never say or do anything that contradicts the Bible.”  This is good as far as it goes, but I think that it would be better and more accurate to say, “The Spirit will never say or do anything that contradicts what God has done in Christ.”  This way, we appropriately bind the work of God, not to a book, but to God himself.  We no longer judge what the living God can or cannot do by a text, but by what God has actually done (though the text does indeed bear witness to this.)

            I want to spend the rest of this chapter discussing the work of the Spirit by exploring what it means to be united to Christ by the Spirit.  Paul constantly speaks of believers as being “in Christ,” and speaks of this as being something that is brought about by the Holy Spirit.  Perhaps the most marvelous description of believers being united to Christ is in the famous image of the vine and branches in John 15.  “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”  Jesus is speaking here of such a close and intimate relationship between him and his disciples that they are sharing in his life, allowing the life of Christ to flow through them, to have his blood pumping through their veins, so to speak.  The question remains, “How does this actually play itself out in the Christian life?”  We will explore this idea by using two major passages where Paul speaks of the work of the Spirit.

The Fruit of the Spirit

            In Galatians 5:22-24, Paul speaks of what he calls “fruit of the Spirit.”  “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”  Many sermon series’ have been preached and many books written about how these fruit are to manifest themselves in the life of a believer, so it will not be our purpose to explore each of them in detail.  Indeed, the main concern here is to speak of the fruit of the Spirit in a way that is consistent with the actual work of the Spirit.  That is, the goal is to think out the fruit of the Spirit in light of God’s revelation in Christ.

            Too often, the fruit of the Spirit are attempted to be lived out as if there were no real standard by which to understand them.  It is assumed that the words that are used to describe the fruit of the Spirit are easy to understand and are self-evident.  The problem with this is that, when we do not carefully allow God’s revelation to define our terms (as we discovered in the last chapter) we tend to incorporate all kinds of baggage into them that are not necessarily compatible with the Gospel.  So, if we want to understand the fruit of the Spirit in a way that our terms will be redefined in light of who God is, we must think them out in terms of Christ.

            When we speak of love, to use one as an example for all, we are not, again, speaking of simple human love that is judged in light of contemporary society, but of the very love of God as revealed in Christ.  If, in Christ, we see the very love of God worked out in and through our humanity, what else can we expect the love that the Spirit works in us to be?  The only conclusion that we can possibly draw is that the Spirit takes the love that is in Christ and grows it in us.  It is not something that we work really hard for and achieve on our own.  We see that the love that empowers us to lay ourselves down for others, even those who hate us, is utterly beyond us.  If we ever come to love in that way, it is not because of our ability to love, but because of God’s ability to manifest the love of Christ in our lives.

            When we look at the nine fruit of the Spirit and we hold them up next to the life of Christ as portrayed in the Gospel accounts, we find that Paul is not just choosing some random adjectives, but is saying that, when the Spirit dwells inside of us, its fruit will be the very life of Christ being lived in us and through us.  The same can be said for every one of the nine fruit.  This has the effect of amplifying the significance of each of them beyond what we might otherwise think.  For some of them (I am thinking at this point particularly of self-control) to think them out in light of the actual life of Christ makes them perhaps more than a little frightening (because we realize how different than our normal way of living it is) and yet exciting (because we realize that God can and will grow these fruit in our lives).

            Another way to think of this way of being united to Christ is Galatians 2:20.  “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.”  Paul is saying that, because he has been united to Christ by the Spirit, the life that he is living is no longer his own, but Christ’s life being lived in and through him.  This does not mean that Paul is completely set aside as if he has been taken over and is now nothing more than a machine.  No; Paul is indeed not factored out.  Christ is living in him but he is still the one in whom that life is being lived.  We should think of our regeneration or sanctification, not in terms of us getting better, which will almost certainly lead to pride (if we think we have been advancing quickly) or depression (if we think we have advanced quickly enough), but rather in terms of us participating in Christ through the Spirit, through whom we are united to Christ.  When we think of it this way, as Christ living in and through us in the Spirit, we will be more prepared to let God work, we will be expecting God to do amazing things in and through us, and we will be less likely to think about the work of the Spirit as something separate from the work of Christ.

            When we think of our Christian life primarily in terms of active participation in the life of God through Christ and in the Spirit, we do not so much think about our growth in grace as something “extra” to add on after we have been forgiven, but rather the main point of our relationship with God.  We think about our response to God’s grace less in terms of specific vices we avoid and specific virtues we cultivate and more in terms of our whole lives being impacted at every level.  Additionally, we cement the fact in our minds that it is truly not our righteousness or sanctification, but Christ’s being worked out, not just within humanity in general as it was in Christ, but in our humanity and that we really do become partakers of the righteousness of Christ.

Chapter 05, God the Holy Spirit, The Spirit of Christ, Mutual Mediation of Christ and the Spirit, The Holy Spirit and Revelation

The Spirit of Christ

            Jesus always made it clear that the Spirit would not speak on his own but that he would say what he heard from the Father and the Son.  There are several important things to note when we think about the Spirit.

Mutual Mediation of Christ and the Spirit

            We read in the New Testament that Jesus is the one who mediates the Holy Spirit to us.  This takes the form of the dramatic outpouring of the Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, but it is also evident in Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, where he received the Spirit into our humanity in a way it had never indwelt it before.  The only access that we have to the Spirit is in and through Christ.  The Spirit was not poured out upon a group of people who were not already bound to Christ, nor do we speak of the Spirit working in other religions and cultures in the same powerful way that we see in the book of Acts (we do not deny that the Spirit is indeed at work in non-Christian situations, but that the work is not a penetrating indwelling as is described and depicted in the New Testament).  We cannot seek the Spirit by bypassing Christ.  We are bound to the actual historical event that the Holy Spirit was not given independently of Christ, but in and through him.  We cannot have the Spirit without Christ.

            However, though the New Testament speaks quite clearly about Christ mediating the Spirit to us, it is less clear about the fact that it is the Spirit that mediates Christ to us.  It is less clear, but it is still there and very important.  Perhaps the most convincing evidence that it is the Spirit that mediates Christ to us lies in the fact that those who followed Christ during his earthly ministry did not truly understand him until Pentecost.  Even at the times when it seemed that his followers understood him, Christ showed them that they really did not know what they were talking about.  A prime example is when Jesus rebukes Peter for calling him the Christ (Mark 8:29-30).  Peter is indeed correct, for Jesus is the Christ, but when Peter uses the word, he means a secular ruler who will overthrow the Romans, rather than what the Christ really is, the suffering servant who dies so that others might live.

            What is amazing is that, even after Jesus is raised from the dead and the disciples can stand in his resurrected presence, not everyone was able to really believe.  Matthew 28:17, which occurs right before the Great Commission, reads, “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some were doubtful.”  We cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like to stand in the presence of Christ, resurrected in glory, and yet, it seems that unbelief can still reign, even then.  The story of the walk to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35 also shows that people can walk with Jesus, even having their hearts burning within them, and still not really understand.

            However, all of that changed at Pentecost.  Disciples who were timid and afraid of persecution were transformed to the point where they would lay their lives down for the Gospel.  Peter, who had denied Christ so many times, who had proven his impulsiveness, is transformed into the rock he was prophesied to be and became a leader among his peers.  They were truly transformed from disciples to apostles (those who are sent).  Christ only really made sense to them after they had received the Spirit.  It was this mediation of Christ by the Spirit that made all the difference in the world.  Without it, they would have remained a weak-willed, frightened band who were afraid to go into the world.  We cannot have Christ without the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and Revelation

            In ancient Israel, the Holy Spirit came upon prophets and teachers, revealing God and shaping their culture.  We can see that Israel needed to receive some things first and then, once they had learned more fully who God is, could receive further instruction.  This further instruction was not contrary to, but in addition to, what was revealed before.  This pattern of progressive revelation continued with the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  Now, instead of having a revelation being delivered by a prophet who is not God, God came among us and revealed himself in an unprecedented way, calling into question certain interpretations of Old Testament revelation, but not doing away with it.

            There is a sense that it would stand to reason that this pattern of progressive revelation would continue in the ages after Jesus walked the earth.  It would seem logical that, as time went on, the Spirit of God would continue to mediate more of the truth of God and new revelation would crop up time and time again until God institutes his eschatological kingdom, that is, the kingdom of God at the end of time.  This indeed has been the opinion of several groups throughout history.  However, it is extremely problematic.

            The reason why new revelation should cease is not something that can be the result of an arbitrary decision of church leaders, either in history or today.  Rather, it is because of the final character of the incarnation.  To say that there is more of God than was revealed in and through the Incarnation, that we need to be taught by the Spirit, is to say that, in Jesus, we do not have an incarnation of God, but rather an incarnation of something less than God, whose revelatory significance is limited and needs to be supplemented by the work of the Spirit.

            This is the reason why the Christian canon is closed.  No new books of utterly new revelation can be written because God has revealed himself fully to us in Christ.  This is not to mean that our understanding of Christ is exhaustive and does not need to be aided and furthered by the Spirit, but only that nothing that is true of God but is not true of Jesus can be or will be revealed by the Spirit.  This is the reason why the apostolic writings are so important.  Not only do the gospels tell us about Jesus, about what he said and did and how he interpreted his own ministry, but the epistles give us insight into the theological endeavors of the early church, where those first followers of Christ began to unpack the significance of Christ in particular times and places for the first Christians.

            However, it must be stressed that the work of the apostles and the work of later thinkers is not, strictly speaking, revelation, but rather is theology.  God has revealed himself to us in Christ; our task is to unpack it and apply it to every new circumstance.  If it is faithful to the revelation of God as borne witness to in the Scripture, it will be guided by the Spirit, who takes what is Christ’s and discloses it to us.  The Spirit is not a source of revelation independent of (or behind the back of) Christ, but is the light which illuminates what Christ has done on our behalf and in our place and mediates Christ to us.

Chapter 05, God the Holy Spirit, The Problem of the Holy Spirit, The Spirit of the Father

The Problem of the Holy Spirit

            There is a problem that arises as soon as one attempts to write about the Holy Spirit.  It is similar to the problems we have when writing about the Father, but they are somewhat more pronounced.  The problem is that there just isn’t all that much information about the Spirit in his personal distinction from the Father and the Son.  When we wrote about the Father, we found that we are simply not able to speculate about who God is because, when the eternal Son of God became a human being, we found that God was somewhat different than our abstract speculation would generate.  If Jesus is indeed God, then we cannot invent a God the Father that is utterly different than the God revealed in Christ, but, as Athanasius asserted, we must “name God through the Son and call him Father.”  It may have been noted that there was not much reflection on the Father as distinct from the Son, but much reflection on what we can say about the Father in light of the incarnate Son.  The discussion of creation was included under the discussion of the Father, not because the Father and not the Son or the Spirit is Creator, but because the classic creeds associate creation with the Father.

            The problem we have in identifying the distinctions between the Persons of God is because they are not finally different Gods.  The Father, Son and Holy Spirit each share a common being.  Because of this incredible unity, it is simply not possible to identify rigid distinctions between then.  It is easy to distinguish between the Son and the Father or between the Son and the Spirit because it is the Son and not the Father or the Spirit who took on flesh and lived among us.  However, the line between the Father and the Spirit is and must remain blurry, though we affirm a distinction because the Scriptures do.

            To give some more concrete reflection on the problem of understanding the Holy Spirit, let us consider some of the information we find in the New Testament.  Christ is continually telling us that he does not do what he does on his own authority but points to his Father in heaven and claims to do nothing other than what the Father is doing.  The Father, at various points (like the baptism of Christ and the transfiguration), speaks from heaven and declares that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed his Son and that we must listen to him.  Even in those moments of direct self-revelation of the Father, we are directed to Christ as our point of contact with the Divine.  We have the Father’s direct command to come to know him through his Son.

            When we come to how the Spirit is related to the others, we find that the Father sends the Spirit, but the Father sends the Spirit through and with Christ (this is one of the key reasons why we must maintain a personal distinction between the Father and the Spirit, even though the line between them in our understanding is blurry).  We are told that the Spirit will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears from the Father and the Son.  He will take the things of Jesus and disclose them to us (John 16:13-14).  However, though the New Testament often speaks of the Spirit and does so in lofty terms (Paul comes closest to providing a definition of a Christian when he says, “But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” (Romans 8:9)), the Spirit is not often, if ever, spoken of as doing something fundamentally different than Christ.

            What we do know is that the Spirit is the same God as the Father and the Son, though personally distinct from each of them.  The New Testament speaks of the Holy Spirit as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, and this reality will provide the structure for the rest of this chapter, which will be, admittedly and for the reasons already discussed, shorter than the chapters on the Father and Son.

The Spirit of the Father

            While this section will be far shorter than the next on, focusing on the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, it provides us the opportunity to reflect on some key ideas.  The early church used the language “of one being with the Father” (ομουσιος τω Πατρι) to stress the bond of being between the Father and the Son.  Once this language was in place and proved to be an incredibly helpful way to understand the interrelationships within the being of God, it quickly became clear that the same had to be said about the Spirit, that it too was of one being (ομουσιος) with the Father.

            This is a helpful corrective for us.  Even though the Son of God (who is of one being with the Father) has taken on flesh, this does not mean that we can read the fleshliness of Jesus back into God.  After all, Jesus has fingernails and hair, but it seems inappropriate to say that those things belong to the divine nature as such.  When we remember that the Spirit is also of one being with the Father, we see that, though God has chosen to be imaged to us in human flesh as the man Jesus, the Spirit images God but does so, not as a human being.  Indeed, the Holy Spirit images God, but does so in an imageless way. 

It is because of this imageless imaging of God that all our preconceived notions and conclusions about God not based on God’s actual self-revelation are ruled out of bounds.  It is quite interesting to reflect on the fact that the Gospel narratives include next to no information about what Jesus looked like.  It is the essentially imageless nature of the Spirit that is the reality behind the prohibition against making idols.  How can we image an imageless God?  Even though God has become incarnate in Jesus in such a way that what God is toward us is the same as God is in God’s own life, we are reminded by the Spirit that the intimate relationship between the divine and human natures in Christ is not like the relation between the Persons of the Trinity.  Whereas the latter are intrinsic to God himself, the former is a union of grace, one where God makes room for himself in the depths of our humanity.

Because of this relationship between the Spirit and the Father, we can stand on objective reality when we say that the nature of God is Spiritual rather than physical, even though God took on physical human nature in the Incarnation.  We stand on firm ground when we say that, proper to God’s own nature, God does not have hair, fingernails, bodily organs, or, perhaps most importantly for the debates in this contemporary world, physical gender.  The fact that the Spirit, and not just the Son is of one being with the Father shows us that God is finally neither male nor female, that such things are not part of who God is but, when we apply them to God, are false constructs that are not what is the case.  This has the effect of reinforcing the radical particularity of Jesus.  God became a particular human being, not humanity in general (though Jesus represents and substitutes for all of humanity).  There is no analogy of being (Latin:  analogia entis) between human nature and divine nature where we can equate the two, even in Jesus, but there is an analogy of faith (Latin:  analogia fidei) where God has graciously entered fully into human nature and made it his own.

Chapter 04, God the Father, Creator/Creature Relationship, Natural Science, Science as "a posteriori" Investigation

Natural Science

            Over the last hundred years or so, there has been an overarching understanding of the relationship between Christian faith and the natural sciences which presents them as warring factions who are incompatible at their very foundations.  This has been fueled by the incredible popularity of Darwinian evolution.  In spite of the fact that not all science is as biased against Christian faith as that particular view of biology (fields such as Physics are far more congenial), and in spite of the fact that both theology and science have made significant advancements over the twentieth century (other, less hostile forms of evolution have been argued for and theology, at least in some quarters, has become more rigorous), this view has dominated discussion to the point that some Christians do not think that science is a redeemable practice and some scientists think of faith as hopelessly antiquated.

            And yet, such a view shortchanges both theology and natural science.  Though there are still differences in how theology and science approach reality and these differences are significant, the two fields have much to contribute to each other and indeed are already interrelated in a profound way.

            One of the things that is interesting about the pursuit of science is that it operates with certain presuppositions which it cannot do without and yet have to be taken without proof.  One such issue has been alluded to in the discussion of the contingence of creation above.  Science operates with an assumption that there is a single, overarching order to the universe that is equally applicable, regardless of what level of nature we are looking at (that is, from subatomic particles to the movements of the planets and stars).  Where did this idea come from?  Regardless of all the experiments that scientists have done and all the data that has been accumulated, this point cannot be proven from within the scientific enterprise.  Support for it can be amassed (and has been amassed) so it is repeatedly shown to be an intelligent presupposition, but it is a presupposition nonetheless.

            When we look back at our discussion of various views of creation, the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing is the only understanding of the universe that lines up with the actual practice of natural scientists (especially physicists).  Scientists are not looking for “first principles,” they are not expecting that their experiments will yield theological truths, they are certainly not treating nature as something that finally has no reality.  They are so far from affirming that there are multiple, conflicting orders in the universe that they probe ever deeper into what seem to be contradictory phenomena to try to find out the general rule of which particular phenomena are specific cases.

            This presupposition, to speak of no others, is already full of theological ideas.  The universe has an order and it is a real order, but it is not a self-evident order.  It must be examined; experiments must be conducted in order to understand them.  This order did not cause itself, but was brought into being.  (As a side note, in my early years as a Christian, I was consistently told that the Big Bang theory was a godless and terrible explanation for the universe that firmly placed it as an opponent to Christian faith.  As it turns out, though the Big Bang theory is not the same thing as the Christian doctrine of creation, it is far closer to it than the previous accepted theory, Steady State theory.  Whereas the latter affirmed that the universe has always existed and will always be the same, the former claims that the universe had a beginning, which places it only a hair’s breadth from saying “God caused the Big Bang.”  It is not the Christian doctrine, but it is closer than science has ever been.)

            Another idea that is latent in scientific work is that nature can indeed be explained, that it is as if it is crying out for explanation, even at the subatomic level.  Further, there are human beings who are actually capable of understanding nature (to one level or another) and bringing it to coherent articulation.  Why are these the case?  Why should nature be comprehensible at all?  Why should it be able to be clearly articulated?  Science cannot answer these questions, not because of any weakness in science, but because the answers simply lie beyond science’s scope.  Regardless, they must be the case for science to carry on its work.

Science as “a posteriori” Investigation

            One of the most important things about science (and why we even bother to bring it up here) is that, unlike much of philosophy, it is an a posteriori discipline, which means that conclusions are not made at the beginning, but at the end of investigation.  Most of philosophy has been about seeking to provide explanations that are not necessarily rooted in actual experimental observation, but on mental and logical proofs.  However, natural science does not, and can not, conclude before an experiment has been performed what the experiment will disclose.  There might be a well thought out hypothesis, but only the experimental investigation itself will disclose reality to us and, what is perhaps most important of all, it does not depend on our preconceived notions.

            Science, especially post-Einstein science, has been radically dedicated to allowing its subject matter to shape its actual practice.  An investigation of nature is not able to step away from the reality that is going to be studied and work out its methodology independently and then try to make reality fit into that method.  Instead, the reality itself must force questions upon the scientist.  Only when reality is forging the questions to be answered do we find any useful information.  This information also, more often than not, raises more questions and as this cycle repeats, our knowledge becomes deeper and more nuanced, yet remains faithful to what we are studying because it has provided the questions, not us.

            If this is the case, then we cannot define science in a purely general way, where everyone agrees to a particular “scientific method” and all have a fixed way of doing science, regardless of what is being studied.  To do so would be to refuse to allow reality to shape our understanding of it.  Instead, each particular science is defined and shaped by the reality itself.  If there happens to be a similarity in the various methods, it is to be remembered that this is a judgment to be made after the fact, not a decision forced upon the various sciences, before hand and from an independent source.

            If science is shaped by faithful probing into a reality and different sciences are distinguished by their different subject matter, then theology can be a science, provided there is access to real knowledge of God (which we do believe there is, through Christ and in the Spirit).  Biology is the study of living things, physics is the study of nature at its most basic levels, and theology is the study of God.  Our questions are shaped by the reality of God, when we formulate answers, those answers are judged to be accurate (as far as they go) or inaccurate by the reality of God, and we are bound by the God who actually exists to speak rightly of him.  It is in this sense that we can call theology a science, and indeed it is good for us to do so, because it keeps us rigorously dedicated to God as revealed in Christ and not to a god of our own making.

Chapter 04, God the Father, Creator/Creature Relationship, The Contingence of Creation, Eternal/Necessary Creation, Creation as Illusion, Creation as Emination, Creation as Contingent

Eternal/Necessary Creation

            The first problematic understanding of creation is also the most complicated to fully understand.  It is important to note that the idea of an eternal creation finds its intellectual roots primarily outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition in Greco-Roman philosophy.  As has already been mentioned, such philosophy rejected that God could become Creator in any sense.  However, many philosophers still maintained that God did indeed create the universe.  How can those two ideas be reconciled?  The solution was to maintain that God has always been Creator, that creation is just as eternal as God is.  As long as God has been around, creation has been around.  In this sense, creation exists because God is Creator as a necessary part of the essence of God.  That is, God is not God without being Creator (a view radically called into question by the doctrine of creation out of nothing).  God was not able to choose to not create the universe, but was under ontological (having to do with being what he is) compulsion to create.

            If we suspend our affirmation of creation out of nothing, this view seems to be plausible at first, but we must consider its implications.  If creation is indeed necessary, it means that it is not one of many options, but is what it is and could not have been otherwise.  If this is the case, how should one go about understanding nature?  The answer was seen to be found in Euclidian geometry, one of the first pure and rigorous forms of mathematics.  Euclid’s geometry began with five statements, called postulates, that were taken to be self-evident.  From those five postulates, rigorous logic was applied to prove simple theorems.  These were then used to prove more complicated theorems.  This process continued on, developing into the entire body of geometrical knowledge of the ancient world and, until the development of non-Euclidian geometries in the twentieth century, the modern world.

            What is important to note about this is that all of Euclidian geometry is to be seen as already latent in those first five postulates.  All geometrical activity is simply a development and exploration of the implication of those ideas.  Any theorem can be traced back to those five fundamental statements and can be shown to flow directly from them.  One problem that regards any system like this is that there is no guarantee that those basic postulates are all necessary nor is there a guarantee that there are no more that are needed.  This is exactly what happened with the development of non-Euclidian geometries.  It was discovered that four of the postulates could create a coherent system without the fifth (though it required some redefinition of terms).  The result is that, even though these other geometries share four-fifths of the basic ideas of Euclid’s, they are radically different.

            As it turned out, in the ancient world, the search began to discover and articulate what were known as “first principles,” which would serve the same purpose for understanding the world as the postulates in Euclid’s geometry.  This leads to two main problems.  The first of these, in light of what was just said about the precarious nature of selecting these principles (or postulates), is that there is a need to be extremely careful about what basic ideas are chosen, as a slight change can have very far ranging results.

            The second main problem is that this practice establishes a method of understanding nature that is fundamentally a priori.  This means that conclusions about nature are deduced with logic rather than investigated critically.  This means that nature itself is never actually engaged experimentally to allow it to shape our questions and to provide the answers.  This poses two problems.  The first is that, in light of what experimental science has actually disclosed about the universe, such a method of understanding has proved to be woefully inadequate.  Nature has turned out to be far more rich, complex, and unexpected than any kind of prediction could have accounted for.  The second problem is that it is unbelievably arrogant.  It presupposes that knowledge is simply a construct of human reason and that nature is simply a logical unfolding of core ideas that we assume that we can determine.  The need to actually investigate creation in a critical way will be unpacked further below in an investigation of a view of creation that is more commensurate with Christian faith and revelation.

Creation as Illusion

            In a world of modern science, the idea that creation could be seen as simply an illusion seems humorously inappropriate.  How can one maintain that the world in which we live is simply an illusion and bears no verifiable relation to anything real that underlies it?  This way of understanding creation has both ancient and modern forms.  In pre-Socratic philosophy, there were two major schools of thought about the world.  The first view is associated with a thinker named Heraclitus.  His view was that absolutely everything was in a state of flux; everything was always changing.  If this is true than the stability that we think we see in the world around us must be an illusion, because nothing, according to this view, is finally stable.

            Opposite to this are the views of another philosopher Parmenides.  Parmenides lived just after Heraclitus and held that everything is One, that is, there is not finally any differentiation or change (even change in location).  Any change or any differentiation between people, places and things that we think we observe is held to be an illusion.  What is interesting about both of these views is that they assert that what actually is or exists is of a certain character.  Experience, however, clearly does not support either extreme in its totality.  The philosophy is left with nothing else to say but that experience is wrong.  Many ancient thinkers wrote about the untrustworthiness of human experience.

            Neither of these philosophers were trying to undermine our ability to know the truth.  Indeed, they were hoping to do quite the opposite, to affirm that we actually can know truth, even when our experience makes it harder to do so.  Both were trying to get down to the very most basic concept of what really exists.  What is more basic, being (Parmenides) or becoming (Heraclitus)?  We see both of them, but they can’t both be equally basic (or so it is presupposed).  Therefore it is concluded that either change or stasis must be more basic to existence and the other must be interpreted accordingly.

            But what has this done?  It has established a sharp epistemological dualism (as discussed in chapter three).  Reality and our experience of reality have been utterly separated, have been declared to be incompatible.  We say to Heraclitus that we experience some things as stable and to Parmenides that we experience change.  Both have no option but to say that our experience is wrong.  It is clear that our experience is sometimes flawed and misinterpreted, but is it necessarily the case that our experience is always so flawed as to bear no relation whatsoever to reality as it actually is?  Again, neither thinker made skepticism the core of their system, but, if we push their views to their logical conclusions, we must see that this is where they end up.

            This idea that reality is nothing more than an illusion has gained a new lease on life with the rise of post-modernity.  The realization that the communities in which we inhabit play a role in what we know has also tended to cast doubt that our experience is commensurate with reality.  This time, it is not because we have decided ahead of time that the world is one way while our experience is another.  Instead, it is under the guise of humility, saying, “I only know what is in my experience which is shaped by my environment and community.  How can I know that this experience is universally valid?  Even if there is an objective reality, I only ever experience it in a subjective way.”

            I say that this argument is under the guise of humility, because it is actually not very humble at all.  It not only says that their experience might be wrong, it also asserts that the experience of everyone else can have no more claim to objectivity.  In fact, if those other views presume to have an insight into how reality actually is (and not just as it seems to them), they are dismissed as paternalistic and arrogant.  And yet, how can this condemnation be made?  The only way that one can state so clearly and authoritatively that no one group has access to universal truth is to implicitly claim that the statement, “all experience and knowledge is relative” bears universal authority.  According to this view, how can we know this to be the case?  Is not such a statement just as called into question by our limited experience as any other, and would that not open the door to a possibility of actual knowledge?  Pluralism as is often practiced in the Western world is not true pluralism.  Instead, it is dogmatic pluralism; a pluralism that marginalizes every claim to absolute authority except its own assertion of relativism.  “Relativism is true” is a self-contradiction.

            The point is that, for both of these ancient and modern views, our world of experience does not bear any relationship with objective reality (if there is such a thing).  Both make the leap from the reasonable admission that our experience is not always reliable to the conclusion that our experience is, by definition, untrustworthy.  The question that needs to be raised is, “Granted that our experience cannot always be trusted and so there is not a necessary relationship between our experience and reality, is there not a possible relationship between them?”  If the position taken by this work is that of critical realism, a view that considers creation as an illusion will take a decidedly non-realist approach.

Creation as Emanation

            The last remaining views of creation will require very little treatment.  This view, that creation is simply an emanation from the divine nature has a strong similarity for our purposes with the necessary creation above.  However, in this case, creation is not only necessary, that is, could not have been otherwise and had no option of not coming into existence, it is also fundamentally divine in its nature.  Creation and God are not finally distinguishable.  This view is close (if not identical to) a view called Pantheism where everything is God and God is everything.  If this were the case, not only would all the problems of the necessary creation be present here, but also creation loses its distinctive character.  To study God is the same as to study creation and vice versa.  Truly, in this view, creation is no longer really creation, but God.  Theology is the only science.

Creation as Product of Polytheism

            Though the dominant religions in the Western world have been monotheistic, there have indeed been polytheistic religions, that is, religions that recognize more than one god.  There is not one overarching ruler that has created the universe, but many sources of deity.  In polytheistic worldviews, the gods often are doing battle with one another.  They argue, have wars, and stab each other in the back.  What kind of world would result from this kind of community of deities?  Why should there be only one overarching order in the universe?  Why should not there be as many orders as there are gods?  Further, why shouldn’t those orders be just as conflicting as those gods are?  In this world, science cannot even begin, as it has no reason to assume that it can actually come to know or understand the created order for there is no reason to believe that any kind of consistent answer can be found.

Creation as Contingent

            Christian faith has always affirmed a doctrine of creation out of nothing.  If this is the case, it means that creation is something that is other than God, but that it is dependent on God.  Further, this creation might have been different.  Why could God not have created in a different manner than he did?  Why could not the laws of nature been different?  There is no reason to assume that things might not have been different.  Further, there is no reason to assume that the creation had to be at all.  God was fully able to choose not to create.  This is very important.  God’s choice to create was just that; a choice.  It was chosen freely and out of God’s good pleasure.  Not because he had to do it, but because he chose to do so.

            Since creation was brought into existence by a single God (though this one God is a community of Persons), there is one overarching order.  Since creation is not necessary, it cannot be explained exclusively by logical and deductive reasoning.  Since creation is not an illusion, it actually can be explored and tested to obtain actual (if partial) information about it.  Since God and creation are not identical, theology and natural science are not identical and need to be separate, even if they are in dialogue with one another.  Finally, the contingent nature of creation affirms that we cannot make an overly strong link between creation and Creator.  The relationship between God as Creator and creation is external to God.  It is not part of who God is, as Fatherhood is.  These basic ideas, which are found in the Judeo-Christian (and primarily Christian) tradition, are the basis of all natural science, which will be explored a bit below.

Chapter 04, God the Father, Creator/Creature Relationship, Connection between Creation and Incarnation, The Contingence of Creation,

Creator/Creature Relationship

            Perhaps the single most important thing to keep in mind as we shift from speaking of the relationship that God the Father has with God the Son to the relationship that God the Creator has with the creation is that we are now dealing with a relationship that is external to God.  This means that, while Fatherhood is part of who God is, that is, God has never existed except as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the same cannot be said for God as Creator.  God has not always been Creator.  There once was a time (if we can use time to describe anything before creation) when God had not yet created anything.  Of course, God was always able to create, but it was at a particular moment that God created the universe.

Connection Between Creation and Incarnation

            One of the comments that was made above was that the idea of God’s free creation of the universe out of nothing was affirmed by the church long before it received similar universally accepted status among the Jews.  The reason for this is because of the remarkable connection between the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the Incarnation.  As Christians, when we say that God created the universe out of nothing, we do not mean to speak of some kind of abstract concept of God.  Instead, we are saying that the Triune God is the God who created the universe.  This is important as we remember that at numerous places in the New Testament, it is declared that nothing came into being except through the Son.

            There are two main consequences of this connection that will be taken up at this time.  The first of these has already been alluded to in the Chapter on the second Person of the Trinity.  Creation, like the Incarnation, shows us that there is, in a sense, “change” in God.  At some point, the universe came into existence and, before that point, there was nothing but God.  Though God had been able to create for all eternity (he did not become Creator as if he came to acquire an ability he did not have before), at that point, God freely chose to create, to bring something out of nothing, to fulfill the desire to not be God alone, but to have creatures with which to be in relationship.  In such a reality, we see that God’s freedom is such that God is free to do things that are absolutely new, even for God and that God is fully capable of surprising us with the new things that are done.

            The other major point to address here is that, by rooting all creation in the Son of God, that Son is excluded from that creation.  If nothing came into being except through the Son, the Son is not created but is rather the uncreated God.  This, in turn, makes two smaller points.  First, that the Son of God who took on flesh as Jesus of Nazareth is indeed equally co-eternal, equally divine, as the Father and there is no subordination within God.  Secondly, that this is not true of creation.  Creation is not God but is rather a reality that is utterly distinct from God, even though God does indeed interact with creation.  It is this second point that will be explored below.

The Contingence of Creation

            Throughout Western culture, there has been a trend to separate ideas into extreme opposites, such as hot and cold, black and white, and any of a number of others.  The problem is that, thinking along these lines forces our language, and thus, our thoughts, into extreme positions.  This is, of course, problematic, if for no other reason than that we realize that there is indeed an option other than hot and cold (such as lukewarm); there is a third choice between black and white (various shades of gray).  In spite of a tendency to force a choice between two extreme viewpoints, we must acknowledge that such a choice is indeed a false one, that there are more than two options.

            The particular polarizing language that is a concern for us here is the opposite views that creation is either necessary (that is, it could not have been other than it is) or that it is the result of chance.  The difficulty here is that, for one who is in the necessity camp, any deviation from strict necessity is seen as a leap to the other side to chance.  The argument runs something like this:  If anything is not utterly necessary (often approached in the form of predestination), then there must be something that is left to chance.  Once some things are left to chance, the floodgates are open and nothing is certain anymore.  The concerns of introducing divine involvement in the world to those who affirm the fundamentally coincidental nature of the universe are similar.  Once the door has been opened to divine involvement and order, where do you draw the line?  The reason why so many Christians have leaned more towards necessity than chance is because it is hard to reconcile the view that creation is left to pure chance with a sovereign God, a major theme in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Because of the unique implications of a contingent creation, a variety of different possible understandings of creation will be explored presently.

Chapter 04, God the Father, Father/Son Relationship, Theological Language, Priority of Being Over Language, Use of Non-Biblical Language, Gender Language for God

Theological Language

            Something of great concern to the task of theology is how we can even begin to speak about God, let alone communicate anything about him.  It has been noted that something as simple as the aroma of coffee is not able to be adequately described, that is, hearing a detailed description of the smell of coffee falls far short of actually smelling it for oneself.  If something as simple as coffee is greater than our language to describe fully, what hope do we have that we can even begin to speak about God in anything approaching an adequate way?

            One thing that helps us to get our minds around the reason that we attempt to speak of God is because we do not expect words to be able to directly communicate divine revelation.  In its most strict form, revelation is nothing other than the second Person of the Trinity, who became flesh and lived among us.  The real location of revelation is in the very person of Jesus Christ.  Words have indeed been used to describe this person and to try to communicate the gospel to later generations in the form of the Bible but, even though we call the scriptures the Word of God and revelation, we do not mean it in the same sense as we call Christ the Word of God and revelation.  This similarity of language has tempted people to say that the Bible can be thought of as Jesus in book form.  I think it would be far better to think of the Bible as John the Baptist in book form; many books from many authors, all of whom, in one way or another are pointing us beyond themselves to the reality of Christ that lies beyond them.  Their primary focus is not to be revelation as such, but to direct our attention to revelation in the truest sense (that is, the reality of God as revealed through Christ).

            In this case, we must think about our words about God, whether in a confession of faith, in a systematic theology like this, in preaching, or even in ordinary Christian conversation, as being inadequate in themselves but referring beyond themselves to God.  John Calvin had a particularly useful way to think about this.  He described the scripture as being like spectacles.  The point of reading the Bible is not to know a bunch of words, but to know God.  Our desire is not to allow the text as such to impress itself upon our minds, but to, in a sense, pass through the text and commune with God.  There are some things we must keep in mind when we speak of God.

Priority of Being Over Language

            When we assert that the language we use is not the end in itself, but rather primarily the means by which we think and speak about realities (in this case, God), we acknowledge that the words we use are not as important as the reality we are speaking of.  Athanasius had a particularly helpful way of articulating this idea.  He said that when we speak of God, “Terms do not disparage His nature; rather that Nature draws to Itself those terms and changes them.  For terms are not prior to essences, but essences are first, and terms second.”  What he means is that our words, when we speak of God, are radically redefined and reinterpreted in light of who God actually is.

            After our discussion about the attributes of God, this should come as no surprise.  After all, every time we looked at a particular word to describe God, we realized that, when we use that word to speak of God, we did not mean the same thing as we do when we use it to speak of human beings or our daily experience.  Instead, we find that, in light of who God actually is, our words can take on a rather different meaning.  This means that we can use words that have baggage associated with them because we do not intend to use them in exactly the same way as they are used in other situations.  For example, the English word “god” comes from a German word that originally referred to a pagan being.  And yet, in spite of that linguistic baggage, when Christians say “God,” they are not meaning it in this way at all.  They are using the term as radically reinterpreted by the gospel, particularly in light of Christ.

            The words we use are not as important as the reality we intend.  This does not, however, mean that all terms are equally valid and that we need not use any discernment when selecting our terms.  In reality, we need to take our selection of terms very seriously, because our goal is to be as clear and as unambiguous as possible, even if we realize that our words will be transformed in spite of that careful selection.  Some words lend themselves more easily to transformation than others, but all are transformed.

Use of Non-Biblical Language

            Throughout the whole theological enterprise, key terms are used to help express the ideas that lie at the core of Christian faith in as clear a way as possible.  However, the question might be raised, “What business do we have using non-Biblical words at all?”  This question is raised in every generation within any branch of the church that prioritizes the Biblical witness as the sole source and norm of Christian faith.  And yet, those same branches (more or less) all affirm the classic Creeds of the church, which are made up of non-Biblical language (In fact, even the churches that reject the creeds simply on the basis of them being non-Biblical will say that they still agree with their content).

            Let us consider a few problems of a refusal to use non-Biblical language and then consider some of the legitimate advantages of using them.  The first problem of such a refusal is that it degenerates into absurdity.  The idea that we should not use any words but those that are in the Bible has been put forward as pastoral advice in the form, “You should not read anything but the Bible.”  This sounds fine at first; but if the concern is that you do not want anything to superimpose an interpretation on the Bible, it stands to reason that we ought not hear anything but the Bible being read aloud.  And if this is the case, what becomes of preaching?  Preaching becomes forbidden unless it is made up of nothing more than a string of Biblical quotations.  What is interesting is that, even using nothing but words that appear in the Bible, it is very possible to put forward some very non-Biblical ideas.

            The next main reason why the absolute rejection of non-Biblical language is problematic is that the Bible was not written in English (or most of the other languages that are spoken within the Christian world).  If we should only use the words of the Bible, we should only be using Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.  After all, every translation is an interpretation, either more or less, and we cannot escape that we are at the mercy and integrity of the Bible translators unless we are quite learned in the original languages (which the overwhelming majority of Christians are not).

            A third objection to this concern to use only Biblical words comes from the Bible itself.  On the one hand, we see that, when the devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness, he does so by quoting scripture, various passages from the Old Testament.  This alone should be evidence that even memorizing and quoting scripture is not a foolproof way to assure orthodoxy.  On the other hand, we see Paul taking up the phrases of the non-Christian world and using them for distinctively Christian purposes.  The real concern is not where the words came from, but what they mean and how they are being used. 

            A more positive reason why we must not reject all non-Biblical language is because the Bible is ambiguous on many topics.  The area in which this has historically come to a climax is regarding the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  It is clear that the idea that God is a Trinity, “one being, three persons,” is not found among the words of the Bible, and yet, centuries of Christian history has affirmed that it is a true reflection of what is actually present in the Biblical witness, if implicitly.  The argument for the use of non-Biblical language to speak of the Trinity has often been fought on the grounds of clarity.  For example, someone who wanted to deny the divinity of Christ could say that Jesus is the son of God, but only in the same way that we become the children of God, that is, by being adopted into God’s family.  Saying that Christ is “of one being with the Father,” rules this heretical interpretation out of bounds, while not adding anything to the Biblical witness.

            We must always remember that it is the reality that we are speaking of (in this case, God) that is what matters.  Our words need to be chosen in order to speak of it.  The use of Biblical words is permitted only if we allow God to challenge the meanings that we think they have and be reinterpreted in light of who God actually is.  The same is true for non-Biblical words.  They also must be reinterpreted if they are to be put to Christian use.  The point is that it is the faithfulness of our words that is important, not the words themselves.

Gender Language for God

            Within recent decades, a debate has raged about the use of gender language in relation to God.  Most particularly, this debate has had to do with whether it is appropriate to retain use of Father and Son language for God.  The concern is that, by insisting on calling God “Father,” the church has hardened the patriarchal and sexist tendencies latent in Western culture so that such tendencies have acquired a holy stamp of approval.  When this is combined with the fact that all the authors of the Bible (so far as we can tell) were men, the great bishop-theologians have been men and many denominations refuse to ordain women and deny leadership positions to them simply on gender grounds, it can be argued that the church has indeed been patriarchal and sexist.  It is significant that the first generation of Feminist theologians were nearly all Roman Catholic.  The Catholic Church has claimed that priests must be male because only a male priest can adequately image a male Christ and only a male Christ can adequately image a male God.

            Though it cannot be denied that there have been examples of patriarchalism and sexism within the history of the church, it is by no means universal, nor does it go back to the roots of the faith.  Using Father and Son language to refer to God is not meant to say that God the Father is kind of like human fathers or that God the Son is kind of like human sons.  In fact, the opposite is the case.  Jesus tells his followers to call no man father because our Father is in heaven.

            In light of the previous section about how words function both in the Bible and in subsequent church history, it should be clear that there is nothing intrinsic in the idea of earthly human fatherhood that makes the word “father” more accurate to describe God than “mother” or any of a number of other alternatives.  The word “father” is taken up by God and radically redefined to have its full and final meaning in God alone.  This means that, far from being a tool for patriarchalism and sexism (which has been done all too often), the Fatherhood of God should be the strongest critique of those tendencies.  After all, if the word “father” is defined by God and not by human fathers, it stands in judgment of all the evil that our fathers have ever done, intentionally or unintentionally, to us or to others.  In fact, it is because God has declared to us, “This is what fatherhood actually looks like,” that we can judge human fathers to be in the wrong when they behave in evil ways.  If God the Father is not a patriarchal jerk, patriarchalism can find little support for itself from the example of God.

            There seems to be something of an arbitrary character of the use of Father and Son language rather than Mother/Daughter or the gender neutral Parent/Child.  The argument put forward here is that gender simply doesn’t enter into the concern at all.  In the early church, some of the greatest minds around laughed at the possibility that God might literally be male or female and that our language bound him to be one or the other.  We are bound to call God “father,” not because God is more like human fathers than human mothers, nor because there is anything in the word that can make it function as an analogy, but simply because this is the language taken up by the Bible and even by Jesus himself.

            It is absolutely true that the argument here is claiming that, aside from actual Biblical usage, there is no reason why God couldn’t be called “mother.”  In fact, there are a multitude of passages throughout both the Old and New Testaments that use female imagery to describe God.  If there is no necessity in the nature of God to be called Father, why do we need to do it?  Finally, this question is the same as “Why the Jews?”  After all, if God didn’t have to chose Israel and could have chosen another nation, why do we need to pay attention to the Jewish way of thinking?  The answer to that question is because God has revealed himself in this way.  Since God has actually set the Jews aside and revealed himself in that historical and cultural way, we are not free to overturn it because of our own reasons (perhaps, as history has shown, because we do not like the Jews).  It is because of this, that God has actually taken up the names “father” and “son,” and not others that we retain them.  To invent our own terms other than the ones actually taken up would be idolatry.

            This way of reasoning works better for the term “father” than for “son.”  After all, God is spirit and we can see how a spiritual being might be genderless.  However, when God became incarnate, he did so as a man.  Some have said that this ties God to men in a way he is not tied to women.  Others have said that this makes Jesus fundamentally unrelatable to women.  Others still have argued that, since God became a man, it means that men are better than women.  The first response that must be made is that, if God were to become a human being, he had to become either a man or a woman.  One might say that it was a 50% chance that God could have become a woman.  It might also be argued that God had to accommodate himself to our weakness and, as a female Christ would never have had a hearing in that patriarchal and sexist time, a male Christ was necessary.  By way of a little speculation (which means that this claim is even more tentative than others), we might make the following argument from our observations of the person and work of Christ.  We have seen that, in Christ, God entered into humanity at its very worst.  Instead of saying that Jesus being male means that men are better than women, might it mean that men are worse than women and more in need of redemption?  It is certainly another way to think of it.

Chapter 04, God the Father, Father/Son Relationship, Attributes of God, Love, Eternity

Love

            Love is an attribute of God that is increasingly being interpreted, not in light of the Biblical witness, but in light of contemporary experience.  Love has developed into a word with an extreme range of meanings, from a deep, committed decision for a lifetime of relationship to something that is little more than “stronger than average fondness” or “lust.”  Another particularly popular understanding of love is “never having any kind of confrontation” or “never taking a stand.”  In modern times, there are various groups that lobby for one or another of the meanings that the word “love” can have, with either more or less dependence on the biblical witness to provide the content of the word.

            Another tactic, which gets a little closer to the truth, is to draw attention to the fact that, in Greek (the language of the New Testament), there are three distinct words for “love”: ερος (eros), φιλιω (philio), and αγαπη (agape).  The point is made that ερος is primarily used to describe romantic love between two people (the word is the root of English words like “erotic”), φιλιω describes brotherly love (the root of Philadelphia) and αγαπη describes unconditional love.  This account of the Greek distinctions is only partially correct.

            It is deficient because it treats the words as if they had truly fixed meanings in every context.  This is not true for any words, let alone these words.  Additionally, there is a much broader range of meanings for ερος than this treatment would suggest (and even more so than the English words derived from it would imply). ερος is not simply romantic love, but it is the word that philosophers used to describe deep passion for the truth.  This kind of driving, almost obsessive love was a concept articulated by ερος.  When this is taken into account, the sharp distinction between ερος and αγαπη, especially that considers the former to be completely incompatible with divine love, is difficult to maintain.

            What is good about this approach is that it points out that our words carry unintended baggage.  The word used for “love” in the New Testament is overwhelmingly αγαπη.  However, it was not used because it already bore the meaning of “unconditional, selfless love.”  Before the New Testament was written, αγαπη was seldom ever used.  It was nearly forgotten in the Greek-speaking world.  It was not used as the primary word for love among philosophers, nor was it the primary word used to describe other interpersonal relationships.  What is important to notice is that αγαπη acquired its meaning from New Testament usage.  The biblical authors did not use αγαπη because it already meant what they wanted to say, but, through consistently using it to describe the selfless and gracious activity of God, it was radically reshaped and redefined so that it bore this new meaning. αγαπη derives its content from the gospel, not the other way around.

            Having considered these linguistic issues, we can turn our attention to the actual content of the love of God.  Again, the love of God cannot really be considered apart from what God has actually done.  There are two particularly helpful declarations in the New Testament that concisely articulate what is the real core of the Christian understanding of the love of God.  The first of these is Romans 5:6-8, where Paul says, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die.  But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 

Paul here contrasts the love of God with the lack of love among humanity.  Human beings do not, by nature, show love simply to show love.  Love is something that must be requited at some level or another.  However, this is not how God is.  God loves humanity even while it is steeped in sin.  God does not wait for us to become holy before loving us, nor does Christ die in order to allow God to love us; after all, Christ’s death is indeed an act of this love, as Paul has said.  We see in Christ the depths of God’s love for us, in that God was willing to die, even before we had given any evidence that we would be a good return on his investment, so to speak.

The other particularly helpful declaration is in 1 John 3:1.  “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.”  If the passage from Romans emphasized the external dimension of God’s love for us, that is, God’s being willing to die for us, this statement emphasizes the internal dimension of God’s love, an emphasis that God’s love penetrates into the core of our being and transforms us.  It is one thing for the death of the Son of God to make some kind of juridical transaction possible.  It is another thing altogether to actually incorporate sinful humanity into the family of God, to make us, as Paul says, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).  God’s love is demonstrated in that God became flesh, lived among us, died our death, rose from that death, and poured out the Holy Spirit upon humanity so that God, who needs nothing at all, might not be without us.  We would never have been able to anticipate the overwhelming nature of the love of God, and yet we see it born witness to in the New Testament.  The love that actually is is far greater than the love that we would have invented.

Eternity

            The eternity of God (which for our purposes is primarily the pre-existence of God over the everlastingness of God, though this is also important, but is a less difficult concept) seems at first glance to be something that is not dependent on the Father/Son relationship to help us understand.  After all, does not the very opening passage of Genesis say, “In the beginning, God…,” implying that God is pre-existent and, thus eternal?  And yet, though this seems logical, it is more complicated than this.

            For example, according to Greco-Roman philosophy, God was eternal, but so was creation, meaning that God does not predate the created order.  To say that God is eternal would have been granted, but it would have been argued that this is nothing unique, as all matter is equally eternal.  God’s eternality is a given, but it doesn’t tell us anything.  It might be argued that the key texts that speak of God as being eternal and especially pre-existent are Old Testament texts (again, such as Genesis 1:1), and thus the eternity of God is just as much a Jewish conviction as a Christian one, and is therefore not dependent on the Incarnation of the Son of God for clarity.

            What is interesting is that, though Christians do indeed refer to Old Testament texts to support their views of the eternity of God, the Jewish community did not come to widespread doctrinal agreement on the doctrine of creation out of nothing (Latin: creatio ex nihilo), which is a strongly related conviction to the unique eternity of God, until the late middle ages.  This has to do with the fact that the idea of “creation” in the Old Testament often carries with it a sense of “ordering” more than creation in its most narrow sense.  However, though there were doubts within the Jewish community, Christians were convinced that God created the universe out of nothing from the very beginning and this was the case because of the Incarnation.

            In the New Testament, Christ is continually referred to as the one through whom God created everything (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 1:2, to give just a few examples).  This links the doctrines of creation and Incarnation together in a deep way and intensifies both of them.  It places the Son of God on the Creator side of the Creator/creation relationship (to be discussed further below) and emphasizes the pre-existence of God (both the Father and the Son).  This is not to say that it is utterly impossible to arrive at a doctrine of the pre-existence or eternity of God without a doctrine of the Incarnation, but it was indeed the historical impetus that pressed this belief on the mind of the early church and pushed them to place a high importance on such a connection.

            There are many other topics that could be discussed under the heading of “Attributes of God,” but we will stop here for a few reasons.  First, because the primary point of this section is to emphasize the methodological concern for understanding God in and through the Incarnate Son rather than independently of the concrete revelation of God, which tends to lean more on secular philosophy than the actual revelation of God.  Another reason to hold back from engaging with every conceivable attribute is because this form of doing theology as a whole seems to be based more on “What is God like” as an abstract question rather than “How has God revealed himself to us.”  This does not mean we cannot learn about God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and other attributes from the Incarnation, but that these ideas are far less central to the Christian faith (though not to be totally ignored) and are less burdened by philosophical baggage (the baggage that is associated with God’s omniscience overlaps considerably with that associated with God’s omnipotence).  In light of these considerations, we will move on to another important observation that bears upon our contemporary situation.