Small / Big

Do we think God is big or small? It’s not a trick question. Few people would consciously think of God as small or petty. Titles like ‘Creator of the Universe’, ‘Supreme Being’, ‘Omnipresent Omnipotent One’ tend to give the clue that God is big.

However, sometimes it seems we have certain preconceptions of God that tell a different story. I’ve kind of caricatured them below – I don’t imagine many Christians would just come out and say these things. But, these assumptions are sometimes implicit in the way we talk or think about Him. If these are true then doesn’t it make God rather… smaller:

• God is bound by doctrines and theologies as they are taught and understood by men.
• I can understand all of God’s ways, His purposes, His likes and dislikes.
• God thinks a lot like I do. He talks a lot like I do, too.
• God is offended and outraged at exactly the same stuff that offends and outrages me.
• God is interested in and relevant to only the ‘spiritual’ side of my life – stuff that happens on a Sunday, or when I pray. My relationship with God is a private matter.
• God is deeply uncomfortable with doubts and questions. He would much prefer that we believe blindly, as an act of will rather than engage in any messy searching.
• God only knows about stuff if He is kept informed by people. Most of my prayer time is spent with me talking, keeping God up to speed. I often help Him out by telling Him how situations can be best resolved.
• God can only be found inside a church.
• In fact God can only be found inside ‘our’ particular denomination of church. He is very picky like that. There are some other denominations that are nearly there…but basically the more they disagree with us, the less likely you are to find God there.
• And obviously God can only talk to and use Christians for His purposes. He’s only really interested in Christians. Obviously, He would like other people to become Christians… so that He can start being interested in them!
• Although, in theory God loves everyone, in practice He actually only loves us.
• God likes rules and legal deals. He likes neat criteria by which we can all judge… well pretty much everything. If you don’t fit the criteria… well sorry: God would like to help, but it’s just not possible.
• God loves labels. He particularly enjoys very fastidious definitions of when a label should or should not apply. Terms like ‘Christian’ and ‘Non-Christian’ mean a lot to God, and He absolutely agrees to constrain Himself to work within them.
• God likes Christian branded products: Christian CDs, Christian TV and Radio, Christian books, films, websites… Anything else is, well, a bit tainted. Or worse in complete thrall to The Prince of Darkness. So it doesn’t matter how bad it is… Buy Christian.
• By extension, it is completely impossible to be inspired or moved closer to God by anything ‘non-Christian’.
• If some practise, technology or other aspect of the Created world is somehow adopted by people who don’t call themselves ‘Christian’ or worse espouse a different faith perspective, then we should have nothing to do with it. It has become tainted, ‘dodgy’ or a ‘gateway to evil influences’. God believes firmly in throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
• God has no sense of humour. Despite the fact that He created ours…
• When thinking about the nature of God, it is unproblematic and correct to use expressions like ‘God can’t’. There is no conceptual problem with ascribing absolute limitations to the Creator of the Universe, The Most High, He That Fills All In All.
• If God could have any job then it would probably be an accountant. Or perhaps a solicitor dealing in some very technical aspect of the law. The Great Artist of Creation, the Composer of the Cosmos, who thought smell and taste and touch and rainbows and millions of different species of beetle and sunsets and music and wine and laughter and silence and Autumn and joy for no reason and curry and sleeping children’s faces and forgiveness and friendship were worth weaving into the texture of the universe… is always best imagined as a cold, grey, balancer of scales.
• God rarely surprises me. I am rarely delighted in Him.

God is BIG. Bigger than we imagine. Bigger than we dream.

Bear Grylls at HTB

Just watched a really interesting and fun video of Bear Grylls being interviewed by Nicky Gumbel at Holy Trinity Brompton. Well worth check ing out. The way Bear descibes his faith is for me a great model of evangelism – what he speaks about really sounds like ‘good news’. It’s not about delivering packets of doctrine, ‘religion’ or formulas; instead he speaks simply but eloquently about ‘backbone’, ‘strength’, ‘comfort’ and ‘peace’. And he does some cool martial arts moves on one of the priests… Now that’s church!

Watch it here (scroll down and click link)

Wilderness

Just listened to a very insightful and moving message by Greg Boyd, an excellent theologian and preacher if you have not come across him before. In it he talks about the Wilderness in which we find ourselves, the suffering and evil of the world. This is certainly one of the most clear and eloquent preaches I have heard on this difficult and important topic. I particularly recommend listening to the conversation he has with Scot towards the end of the file. Very illuminating to us that would seek to rush in and ‘fix’ the brokenness too quickly… or be discouraged when the brokenness remains.

Watch it here

Good News, Repentence and the Kingdom

These are my notes from Sunday’s preach if anyone would like to check them out… I rambled a lot – should have stuck to my notes a bit more! Oh well.

Repent

Laughing With

Listen to Laughing With by Regina Spektor if you get the chance:

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God when it’s gotten real late and their kid’s not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God when they see the one they love hand in hand with someone else and they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door and they say, “We’ve got some bad new, sir”
No one’s laughing at God when there’s a famine, fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they’re about to choke

God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when they’ve lost all they got and they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize that the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God when they’re saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they’re about to choke

God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war

No one’s laughing at God in a hospital
No one’s laughing at God in a war

No one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
We’re all laughing with God

The god I don’t believe in

2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
1 Samuel 15

In a review of Brian McLaren’s book ‘A New Kind of Christian’ I found this quote:

“When we let go of [the Bible] as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live.”

The phrase ‘a modern answer book’ really leaped out at me. I have posted before on how troubling I find certain concepts of what the Bible actually is. On that occasion it was the Bible as ‘map book’ analogy. Even worse to my way of thinking is the old chestnut that the Bible is an ‘owners manual’ (like a cosmic Haines guide) or instructions that accompany some infernally complex piece of flat pack furniture. I understand these are analogies and often well-intentioned, but they may be so simplistic as to actually distort the picture.

I said in my last post that the Bible is a very old book. That is only partly true. It is a very old collection of even older writings. It seems likely that the majority of the Old Testament was committed to written form during the Babylonian exile. That is not to say that these writings did not rely on older oral traditions. But we must acknowledge that the scribes were relating to events that were as distant to them as the exploits of King Arthur or Robin Hood are to us.

Dozens if not hundreds of different hands were involved in its authorship of scripture over thousands of years. Contrary to an attitude that sometimes seems to emanate from the church, there is no Christian tradition that the book arrived complete at the end of a lightning bolt, or was dictated by angels to obedient human scribes. The Bible is a result of process.

This is no neat set of holy histories or pithy wisdom texts; it is the mysterious history of the revelation of the Divine to and through broken, messed up human vessels. Scripture has been contested, fought over, edited, cast and re-cast. It is that process that for me makes it alive. Let me be clear: I have a very high view of scripture. I believe it is inspired by the Holy Spirit (which is a no-brainer if you consider what ‘inspired’ means). It’s just that I see no contradiction between something being inspired, but also being messy and difficult and obscure sometimes.

In my last post I wrote about how often anti-theists will attack the content of scripture, pointing to passages like that at the beginning of this post. Sitting in a 21^st Century context, reading a modern English translation, they will draw conclusions about a culture that is ancient, alien and entirely opaque to them. And why shouldn’t they? Christians have been doing it for years!

I could easily slip now into my usual rant about lumpen, flat-footed, prosaic ways of reading the Bible, the complete misunderstanding of ‘literalism’ as an academic term… but it will take me away from what I really want to say.

A certain way – I believe the wrong way – of reading scripture could very easily lead you to imagine a god who is angry, misogynistic, vengeful, genocidal; a god who’s sole purpose seems to be to smite those who displease him on legal grounds that seem to offend even our own fallen notions of justice. Many an atheist or agnostic will justifiably ask how one can or would choose to believe in a god like that. My response is that I don’t believe in that god.

As a Christian I believe that the ultimate revelation of God is found in Jesus. We understand the God of the Old Testament by looking at the figure of Christ in the New; if we are to take the doctrine of the Incarnation at all seriously, we can do no other. Now to be sure, this is sometimes a difficult process; the early heretic Marcion advocated a complete split in Christianity from the Jewish Yahweh. Some non-theists are sceptical, seeing this as a kind of retreat from the harsh realities of the Old Testament to a more palatable ‘gentle Jesus’. But this view is built on caricature and a backwards notion of the trajectory of Christian theology. We should not assume that we understand the concept of ‘god’ – even from the writings of the OT – and then see if Jesus fits our preconceptions. We must look at Jesus first and try to understand the OT through that lens.

With that approach, the first caricature that gets discarded is the ‘gentle Jesus’. Instead, we find a radical, revolutionary, deeply challenging figure. Significantly, one of the central thrusts of Jesus’ career was his attack on the forces of organised religion: on those that claimed they spoke for God or held some kind of divine monopoly.

Sometimes it can seem like we view the Bible as a jigsaw puzzle, with each verse as a piece that we must somehow fit in correctly to make the picture. However, if we do this perhaps we fall into the same mistake as the Pharisees: Zealous in their attention to the detail of scripture, but crucially missing the heart.

The New Testament authors played pretty fast and loose with their handling of Old Testament prophecy. Often when we read that something ‘fulfilled’ a prophecy we might do better to note that the Greek word behind this can also carry the sense of ‘filled full’. Jesus Himself interpreted (or reinterpreted) and edited the scriptures. For example, look at Luke 4. He read some things out and pointedly omitted others. He didn’t seem to need to play our game of scriptural Diplomacy. He clearly favoured some texts over others presumably because they were more relevant or more true to his message and agenda. This could seem marginally offensive to us, because as in Brian McLaren’s quote, we want to see the Bible as a modern ‘answers book’: as a grab bag of proof texts and pithy life verses. While that potential exists, we must not lose sight of the fact that there is a narrative, an over-arching story that runs from Genesis to Revelation. And it is to that greater narrative rather than to individual verses that it seems Jesus was most committed. Perhaps we should be too.

Satisfaction (I can’t get no…?)

At various times I have been drawn into discussions with atheists on forums. Sometimes it can be a very negative experience. Usually that negativity has little to do with the atheists, but with the other Christians taking part. It’s fair to say that the most abuse I’ve had is from people that I’m bound to consider brothers and sisters. Go figure.

In contrast, most of the people who I have engaged with on discussion boards that might describe themselves as atheist, anti-theist or agnostic have been thoughtful, polite (if you are polite to them) and I would say genuinely seeking something. Why else would they hang out on religious discussion forums? If it’s all a load of bunk, why waste their time – why can’t they let it go?

However, they do seem to share some misconceptions about the nature of faith. I also saw this in Dara Ó Briain’s stand up routine that was on TV recently. I have to say, I think the guy is genius funny… and I’ve heard him describe himself in the past as a catholic atheist, which even if it is a joke just cuts to the heart of some of the contradictions of life and faith brilliantly.

The misconceptions are usually revealed in comments which basically amount to: “Don’t you realise that science (or psychology, or anthropology, or whatever) explains all this? You don’t need a cosmic magic man to help unravel the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. Science can give you a perfectly rational alternative.” You get this basic sentiment in Dawkins and pretty much everywhere else that the discussion comes up. And many (I would guess) well meaning and sincere people of faith jump in to counter this view: ‘no, science doesn’t explain XYZ’ or ‘no, such and such a theory is defective for these reasons’. While their responses may or may not be accurate, I think the answer is a lot simpler. It’s this:

Yes, we do realise that.

We do realise that an alternative hypothesis can be argued for pretty much anything. You can construct a view to exclude the divine if you wish. It’s not that we are too stupid or closed minded to understand the science. It’s not even that we disagree with the science in some cases; I’ll go on record as saying I have no problem with evolutionary theory. I’ll go further and say that in my opinion, to try and make Genesis 1-3 into some dry, flat footed, prosaic, scientific / historical description of the Creation is to misrepresent, even to abuse the nature of the text. That’s simply my opinion. I respect the alternate view: I just don’t find it satisfying.

And there is that word that I think helps to take the discussion further forward in a positive way with our atheist friends. The test of a theory lies only part in whether it is rational and coherent. It must also be satisfying. Taking all of experience in a holistic way, what seems to connect most dots? What addresses the most central and pressing concerns?

Take the example (not original I realise) of love. Yes we can see that it might be some evolutionary by-product: some mental feedback loop from the desire to pro-create the species, or to form mutually supportive family groups. But love can also be self-destructive, as anyone who has ever had a broken heart will tell you. What about the other components of love relationships: the sense of a need for faithfulness and the devastation when that trust is broken? What about when one partner is lost and the other has no desire for anyone else? Surely these things are counter-productive to the simple pro-creative instinct. To say that these are ephemeral aspects of love, secondary to the central biological function would seem to me a very arbitrary definition, very difficult to prove… ahem… scientifically.

How about the old chestnut that all the wealth and material success in the world can’t give you happiness. Despite the prosperity in the developed, materially wealthy west this seems to be born out in research. Surely, material success should be ultimately emotionally rewarding for the security and opportunities it brings (to procreate, have healthy offspring etc). Yet we yearn not for things, but for love and relationship; when we have wealth but not love we are incomplete. Conversely, love and relationship can sustain us in contentment even when we are materially poor.

Now to all of these points I’m sure some non-theist will want to say: “Don’t you realise that science (or psychology, or anthropology, or whatever) explains all this? You don’t need a cosmic magic man to help unravel the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. Science can give you a perfectly rational alternative.”

Once again (with feeling): Yes I do realise that.

At the heart of the Christian story is a God who Himself exists in eternal, beautiful, relationship and community: Father, Son, Spirit. Love defines God… or rather God defines Love: we celebrate that ‘God is Love’. In that, love becomes the most important, central thing in life and experience; not some ephemeral by-product or happy accident. And that for me is a far more satisfying starting point to consider the whole of my experience.

Now the Bible is a very old book, from a culture quite different from our own, with a history of authorship, development, interpretation and application that ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, the shameful and the tragic. The waters are far from clear and this whole God-Love thing takes time to work through in some of its stories. Some atheists – quite understandably – are more concerned with attacking the nature and content of scripture. I’ll consider some of those issues next time…

Blessed are the Meek

The latest in our study of the sermon on the Mount:

Meek

Thanks to all the guys that came along and contributed yesterday – really good evening!

J

Incarnation

I led one of the teaching sessions yesterday at Opengate on the subject of Incarnation. Thanks to all of those who attended and contributed to the session. Attached are my notes if anyone wishes to use them as a basis for further study.

Incarnation

The Poor in Spirit

We’ve just begun a series going through the Sermon on the Mount in our study group. Last week I kicked off with Blessed are the Poor in Spirit: the notes are available here.