Religious Concepts—Part Two

This is part 2 of my discussion on Religious Concepts. The last discussion ended on How It Began: Building Religious Concepts From Scripture I will move onto Worshiping Doctrine.

Worshiping Doctrine

One important product of Christian religious Concepts is Doctrine, essentially a set of ideas and themes drawn from a Concept, and woven together to assert a specific philosophical tenet that generally was often not explicitly present in the scriptural text, but was imputed from it by linking several verses and ideas found there. Some are fairly straightforward and provoke little controversy, while others continue to be contested.

Some of these Doctrines are labeled heresies, usually because they tended to divide the Church into factions, or because they contained elements that appeared to misrepresent God, or contradicted the dominant Doctrines of the period.

There is an old saying: “History is written by the victors.” This helps in understanding why we believe what we believe today in the Church, at least in terms of Doctrine.

The problem begins to unveil itself here: Once a Doctrine gains sufficient prominence, it tends to draw not just advocates, but worshipers. Instead of worshiping God alone, we worship Doctrines about God, and promote and defend them passionately. They are easier to understand and control than a Being Who is Holy, Wholly Other, Omnipotent and Omniscient.

Even if I believe God loves me, and desires loving relationship with me, His power and otherness frighten me—as they should.

Doctrine doesn’t scare me. As with wealth, fame, success, and possessions, I want to hold on to my doctrine and defend it. And like wealth, fame, success, and possessions, I can and do make an idol of it.

We die for and kill for idols all the time. Humans always have. We still do. Whether “honor” or position, fame or religion, nationalism or race, gender or beauty, we tend to idolize what we want or want to keep, and we fight for it, often regardless of the harm we do to other people or to our world.

We make idols and fight to defend them. We justify such battles with self-righteous explanations, and we labor to get others to bend to our will or submit to our vision. Such idolatry is not unique to Christians, or even to religion, but it is common to our humanity. This is why Scripture is so compelling, and why we must listen again to God’s first commandment:

You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind, or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. (Deuteronomy 5:7-9)

In the event that anyone thinks this passage is simply about tribal gods made of stone or wood, and not about idols like pride or fame or property or wealth—or idols of Doctrine, Ritual, even Hermeneutics—just read the Bible. It is replete with such idols and exhortations against them. We began all of those kinds of idolatry right at the beginning, and they were well-known to God and to the ancient authors of Scripture. We were warned early!

Our idolatry of Concept—especially the part called Doctrine and supposedly all about God and holy behavior—leads us to attack, disfellowship, injure and hate others who cling to different Doctrines, or to none.

Even if their Doctrines are wrong, we conduct our debates as if we are exempt from God’s commandments about loving neighbors and even enemies. We attack and belittle others. We treat them with condescension and sarcasm, full of ourselves and with self-righteousness. At our worst, we murder our opponents en masse. The partisanship for and the idolatry of our Doctrine wounds the heart of God. Our actions are wrong—even if our Doctrines are right.

The problem is rooted in our focus on Doctrines, and debate about them, rather than on loving relationship with God and neighbor.

If we want evidence that the Church has forgotten what Jesus taught, we need only consider the state of the Church—disputing not over how better to live as Jesus called us to live, or about love of God and each other, but over Concepts: doctrine, worship, authority, liturgy, baptism, gender, Communion, translation, hermeneutics, tradition, tongues, evolution, end-times, titles, music, rapture and the internal structure of God. And a thousand thousand more. We have collapsed into a heap of warring factions, followers of this Concept fighting followers of that Concept. We are obsessed.

The problem is that our foundation is not God, not even Scripture. It is instead Philosophy, and its Concepts.

We are not doing what Jesus told us to do.

We love Concepts and fight about them in the “Lectures About God” lecture halls. We avoid the door labeled “God.”

Even now, seeing this achingly clearly perhaps for the first time, we will likely return to our fights, and we will find other things to do. We will justify our sin as a defense of God.

Here is an example of the concepts we fight about and how the problem manifests:

Baptism

Baptism with water in Scripture is a physical action with spiritual meaning. It signifies initiation and acceptance by God, was and is used by Jews to signify repentance and purity (both literally and figuratively), and occurs in the New Testament with John baptizing both repentant Jews, and Jesus. Later Jesus instructs His disciples to take the Good News to all nations and baptize them “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19) We later read of the disciples doing just this.

There are no rules given in Scripture regarding who can do baptism or receive it, although many rules have been formulated based upon various verses referring to baptism, as well as upon varying Concepts of God and the Church.

Nowhere in Scripture will you find a formula for only an adult making a specific and individual profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and then being fully immersed in water, with certain unfailing words, in order to be baptized and become a member of the church. But today you will find certain sects of Christians who will insist that certain specific rituals and practices about this are necessary, or not, to the true faith.

•                  Some will baptize infants unfailingly, and adults only if they had not been baptized as infants. These sects will not re-baptize an adult if he or she was baptized as an infant, believing baptism can only happen once, though they normatively require someone baptized as a child to go through “confirmation” when they reach the age of reason, and then profess their faith in Jesus.

•                  Others refuse to baptize infants, insisting that only an adult can make a true profession of faith, and only after this can baptism occur. If an adult was baptized as an infant, it is considered no baptism at all, and re-baptizing is required (though of course it isn’t considered “re-” because the first baptism isn’t acknowledged).

•                   Some sprinkle or pour water for baptism; others call this “Satan’s counterfeit” and   require full immersion.

•                   Some denominations recognize baptisms done by some other denominations. Others consider them meaningless, and insist on baptizing anyone joining their church from outside the denomination.

•                   Some ritually baptize ancestors who died outside of their denomination, and even outside of the faith.

•                   Some churches will allow followers of Jesus to receive Communion in their church only if they have been baptized. Others will allow anyone professing faith to receive Communion. Still others will allow anyone who desires it to receive Communion. Some will allow only members of their denomination, and who have been baptized in their denomination, to receive Communion in their church.

•                   And some believe, as in the story I told back in Chapter 3, that unless you have been baptized in their single local church, you are still lost in your sins.

Every one of these positions on baptism is argued voluminously by countless authors over many centuries, and those who disagree with any of these positions have either fled or been forced out of their churches. Although today these debates consist, at best, of lengthy analysis and argument, and at worst of ad hominem accusations, sarcasm and disfellowship, over the centuries thousands of people were literally tortured and killed for choosing one side or another in this disagreement.

It was and still is a scandal.

Every one of these rituals and practices (as well as the Doctrines and Canons that accompany them) came from a religious Concept, drawn from pieces of Scripture and tradition, and reasoned out in a thoroughly analytical Greek way, and then used as a plumb line by which to judge the faith and worthiness of individuals and other Concepts.

Religious Concepts of Jesus range from believing He is actually literally also Father God and Holy Spirit (manifesting Himself as each as needed), to three Persons in One God, to belief that He was a liberal political activist (not divine at all) railroaded to death by conservative enemies. All of these, and thousands of others, are the excuse for bitter dispute, division, divorce, disfellowship, and with many, even torture and killing.

What in heaven does this have to do with loving God and neighbor?

It is attention to things, not God or people. Even if we are thoroughly convinced that our Concept is superior to the other Concepts, how sad it must make the heart of God to see us viciously attack and separate from each other for the defense of our favorites.

We elevate things above people. Even though our “things” are built with religious words, and are partly derived from Scripture, they are still Concepts, not God and not human beings! Jesus did not set aside the Law and the Prophets, but He did insist they hang upon, and are subservient to, love of God and neighbor.

We fabricate religious Concepts, worship them, and we hurt actual people while defending them. We fail to preserve the love of God and neighbor.

Do our Concepts outrank love of God and neighbor? Sadly, the answer is yes. No excuses. It is what we have come to. God forgive us. What shall we do?

In Christ,

Pastor George

Religious Concepts - Part One

Religious Concepts

The Gospel is arguably God’s greatest revelation to us, but if we worship our Concepts about it, rather than live it, we render it worthless—and we can become dangerous.

We all have methods of thinking and feeling about things—analyzing, measuring, judging, accepting, rejecting, praising, weeping—to determine whether something is to us: true, valuable, dangerous, trite, profound, unimportant, beautiful, and so on.

These methods are partly rooted in our common humanity, and partly taught to us by our cultures, our experiences, and our educational training in the social, scientific, religious, psychological, and emotional worlds we all inhabit. These vary considerably across the world and through history.

It is a very difficult thing to try to see and feel something afresh, free of these methods, or even to realize that these methods are limiting us in how we comprehend and emotionally respond. And yet even if that assertion is granted, and the desire is present to realize and then step beyond our ingrained methods of thinking and feeling, it is really hard to do—near to impossible!

Yet essential.

Two Doors

Two doors stand before us. One is labeled “God,” and the other, “Lectures About God.”  Everyone is lined up to go through the second, because going through the first is too frightening. But if (as Scripture reveals) there is a God who is Creator of us and all that is around us—and who is Other than us and beyond our comprehension, but who desires relationship with us and reveals Himself to us (to the degree that we can receive it, which He knows)—and makes covenant with us and offers us access to Himself and reconciliation even when we have left Him … then why would we choose lectures instead?

The testimony of Scripture, which is the testimony of generations of people He created and led and loved, is just this: He desires and makes available to us a loving, chastening, and deepening relationship with Himself, a covenant. He offers counsel on what makes this possible and what hinders it. He chases after us even when we rebel. He desires us to be with Him so much that He willingly suffered death to demonstrate it. He cares for us and tells us to care for each other.

We find other things to do instead.

We ignore Him. Or deny He exists. For agnostics and atheists, at least they can claim no obligation to follow His commands, or His teaching on love. Instead they must construct their own systems of relationships, justice, and organization. And these stand or fall based on efficacy, or power, or inattention.

But for those who claim to believe in God, we seem largely to fail often, and often miserably, at living out what He called us to do as our part of the covenant. As His creations, you’d think following His lead would be our heart’s desire.

We find other things to do instead.

DISTRACTIONS AND AMBITIONS

These “other things” include the obvious: work, entertainment, hobbies, food, sports, and other distractions. These are not ungodly in and of themselves; they are an issue only when they consume us and diminish or replace love of God and each other.

But there is another class of “other things” that is innately ungodly, though it has the guise of godliness: when we elevate “things” over love of God or people.

Here I do not just mean the conspicuous “things” of ambition: wealth, fame, success, possessions. These can easily replace God on the throne of our hearts, and our pursuit of any of them can run roughshod over people who get in our way.

Wealth, fame, success, and possessions can be handled with humility and caring, but they carry obvious danger both in their pursuit, and in reliance upon them once obtained.

But this is all well and often proclaimed. It is not my focus here. Rather it is our willing idolatry of religious things, and our vicious defense of them.

RELIGIOUS IDOLATRY

What is most insidious among those who claim belief in God is the idolatry of religious doctrine, worship, polity and culture, and the use of disagreement on these as an excuse to mistreat others. This ranges from disregard to shunning to verbal attack to physical assault to murder to genocide. All in an alleged defense of God, who is omnipotent and needs no defenders. It would seem silly were it not so profoundly tragic.

There is a reason Jesus spoke of two great commandments rather than just the one to love God. He saw that those who claimed to love God were using it as an excuse for all manner of ungodly behavior toward other people. (See Mark 7:6-13 and John 8:1-11)  He said, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”(Matthew 22:40, NIV)  Then He immediately illustrated the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” by describing to His listeners a neighbor who was a Samaritan—a despised outsider whose religious beliefs were flawed. (See Luke 10:25-37 and John 4:20-22)

Jesus eliminated the loophole of claiming “neighbor” to be someone like us who we love anyway (or who has religious beliefs we approve of). And on the outside chance that someone might claim that an “enemy” fell outside even the broadest category of neighbor, He said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

He didn’t leave any loopholes.

Let me first spell out explicitly how we have violated Jesus’ commandments in seeming to be His followers, and then propose a heart-understanding He has given us that can act as a corrective to this misapprehension and misapplication of His teachings and sacrifice—so that His love for us may no longer be wasted. Or worse, that He does not even recognize us as one of His own.

We Christians have a serious problem, and we need to see it and confess it before we can be redeemed from it. So I will be blunt and thorough in describing it, and I will pray for God’s grace in its solution.

Once more: Much of what has seemed, over the centuries, like a vital defense of God, or of Jesus, or of the Christian faith, has in fact been a battle of concepts within a philosophical framework that is ultimately foreign to the God who reveals Himself in the Bible.

Different denominations have different philosophical structures (of doctrines, worship styles, etc). Different theologians and movements within and outside of denominations also have different philosophical structures they defend.

The followers of these many structures constantly and fiercely attack one another, and are praised for doing so by their fellow adherents. The overarching battle of concepts rewards and promotes this ungodly behavior, because this battle of concepts is founded on “defending God” by means of attacking those who do not share their beliefs. In the process of “defending God,” they violate Jesus’ command to love God, neighbor and enemy.

It is a very serious issue for the Body of Christ, and it has gone largely unnoticed or intentionally ignored, with far-reaching consequences.

There have been battles over small parts of it, but the larger issue has been missed. I believe God is afoot in bringing us to a realization of the problem, and intends to redeem us and it to His good purposes, but we have to face this disorder and call it out.

How It Began: Building Religious Concepts From Scripture

Our modern age and the whole Western world owes its foundation to ancient Greece. In the several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greece produced some of the greatest minds of all time, and from them whole schools of philosophy, geometry, science, and more.

In most cases those schools of thought encompassed all of these topics as an integrated whole: The universe was seen by many of these gifted thinkers with the beauty of pure geometric forms expressed in the symmetry of nature, in the planets and their motions, in the mathematical means to build great buildings and temples with extraordinary precision, or simply to think through the pure discipline of geometry and the proofs that could be deduced from simple premises.

Various groups and individuals have pulled from the scriptural narrative various themes and ideas, fabricated them into a philosophical structure, a religious Concept, have used this to guide the production of Doctrine, Ritual, Polity and more—as well as to interpret other themes and ideas in Scripture and in the world—and have given the Conceptual structure an independent status and reputation of its own.

Saying that various religious groups fabricated them is not meant to imply fraud, but rather an extended and complex process of analysis, extraction, abstraction, categorization, comparison, critique, deduction, induction, and careful fabrication—piece by piece, category by category, syllogism by syllogism, reference by reference—until whole Concepts emerged from this pulling of themes and ideas from the scriptural narrative.

As these major religious Concepts evolved, they generated layers of sub concepts, including doctrines and practices, patterns of worship, methods of authority and organization (polity) forms of both promotion and defense, and more. This produced vast warehouses of Concepts, often each headed by a religious genius.

The whole fabrication process of Christian religious Concepts is simply Greek in its origins and methods. As noted, all of the Mediterranean world and the Middle East had been under the deep influence of Greek philosophical teaching, methods and culture for centuries before the first New Testament book was written. Even the Old Testament itself had been rewritten in Greek (the Septuagint) because it was a language most Jews spoke—like nearly everyone else in that day and place.

This Concept-building process, at least in its early stages, may not even have been an intrinsically bad thing. In humble hands such Concepts could help to share God’s love with others.

One might even say that this is just what Paul did in taking the Gospel to the Gentiles. He “contextualized” the God of Israel into concepts that his hearers would understand, so that they might accept the invitation of forgiveness and salvation, the covenant that Jesus shared and embodied.

However, the key point is that much of early Christian writing and debate—as well as the establishment of the Church after Constantine, the complete integration of the Church into the Roman Empire’s political structures, the energetic establishment of Doctrine and Creed, Rituals, Practices, forms of Worship, Polity, Hermeneutical methods, the development of Systematic Theology, and then the division of the Church into countless denominations (tens of thousands at this point)—all owe their foundations to Greek philosophical methods and culture.

These produced Concepts about God and man, and these Concepts multiplied and gained independent recognition and authority. They were about God, and about Scripture (the Story of Life with God: both Old and New Testament), and they contained vocabulary from Scripture (as well as Greek philosophy), but they were neither God nor Scripture. They were Concepts.

The Church was steeped in things Greek even from its first moment, because the culture of the Middle East had already been Greek for more than three centuries. As the Church matured, this influence of Greek philosophical methods—of thinking, analyzing, categorizing and describing—only deepened. In the centuries after Jesus, it changed the Church from a Greek-influenced Jewish movement in and about Judea, to a largely Greek-culture religious institution throughout the Mediterranean, with a Roman governmental structure and Roman norms of authority and hierarchy.

But again: Long before Thomas Aquinas “rediscovered” the Greeks and their methods of reasoning, their ways of doing philosophy, their ways of fabricating philosophical structures, Greek philosophy was already the foundation of the Christian Church’s religious Concepts. It was in the DNA of the Church, though the Church seemed unaware of it, or unaware that it had been so thoroughly infiltrated and overtaken.

This is not a new revelation or big secret. It is the analytical and creative thought process by which Christian religious Concepts, and their subsequent doctrines, dogma, creeds, rituals, liturgy, worship, practices, polities, canons, and even hermeneutics were formulated. (And this is not to deny the work of the Holy Spirit in any of this, but as we will see shortly, the products of the process take on a life of their own.)

Further, these Concepts have more in common with scientific hypotheses than they do with settled truth, yet over time they are treated as if they have arrived fully revealed from the pen of the Almighty.

This is sometimes called a “Protestant problem” is because Scripture is held in high esteem by many Protestants (i.e., Sola Scriptura—“Scripture Alone” is the authority), and Church Tradition is held to be nonessential, or at least less essential. Roman Catholics (and some Protestants, including Anglicans and Lutherans) on the other hand, hold Church Tradition very high, along with Reason. But what is so highly esteemed in this theological trinity (Scripture, Tradition and Reason) is also its weakness: The way in which Greek philosophy provided the framework of Tradition and Reason led to Concepts that were fundamentally analyses, not laws; they may have been well-thought-through, but they were not proofs and not revelations from God—and though the Holy Spirit is invoked looking back at the process, His presence is not so self-evident as the proponents claim. These Concepts may have seemed important and valuable in the growth of the Church, but they were elevated beyond their function and station, and the Greek origin of the process was largely considered of no great matter. But it was key to this entire development.

I will continue this discussing next week.

In Christ,

Pastor George

Bible Authority

In this blog we will be looking at the authority of the Bible. This is not trivial, and parts of it will be a little bit complex, so I ask your indulgence.

Let’s be honest: The Bible is not the most user-friendly book you can read. Here are some great reasons NOT to read the Bible:

•          It’s long and intimidating, and it’s not put together like a novel or a “how-to” book or a  textbook or most any other kind of book you can buy.

•          Different Churches and traditions don’t even agree on which books belong in it and which ones don’t.

•          There are many different translations, and advocates for one or the other often fight bitterly and publicly against translations other than their own favorite.

•          Starting at the beginning and reading through to the end is often boring and really difficult.

•          Really creepy people have used the Bible to (try to) justify everything from segregation to religious persecution to murder.

You have to wonder why anyone would even bother to begin to read it.

On the other hand, the Bible is obviously an extraordinary and profoundly important book.

This is true even if you don’t believe in God at all.

The Bible is something we ought to take seriously, but Christians have to ask the question: “What is its authority in our lives?” Secular opinions include:

•          Who cares?

•          It’s a bunch of fairy tales and outright lies.

•          It’s just a book written by people in one ancient cultural context and with primitive superstitions about a god who created them. Nothing more.

•          It may be interesting to cultural historians and may even contain some good ethical ideas, but as a book, it’s not much different than other religious texts, from other cultures, in other times. Just one of a bunch.

•          It’s an instrument of oppression used by a patriarchal institution—the Church—to control women and other oppressed minorities. It’s all about domination and control.

 

Many versions of each of these views are common, and range from measured academic assessment to bitter disdain.

At the other end of the spectrum is the view that Scripture is the infallible and inerrant word of God written by men under the direct inspiration and control of the Holy Spirit—and that those who do not accept this view threaten the future of the Church and risk their immortal souls.

If you have not already had your view of the Bible demanded of you by those holding any of these points of view, just wait—your time will come.

As for me, I believe we can trust the Bible as God’s reliable and intentional revelation of Himself without being drawn into any of the partisan fighting. So, let’s unfold the history and the issues and see where it leads us.

The Original Manuscripts

First, do we really know what the original manuscripts said? We don’t have any of them, not one. We only have copies. This causes several problems:

Authors can make up conspiracy theories that excite and mislead their readers, and no one can prove they are wrong. One group believes the Church was in control of the Scriptures for centuries, so they could make it say whatever they wanted it to say—and did, in order to keep the people under their control. Various conspiracy theories imagine that it was “edited” by the group in power and so isn’t what was originally written.

But it turns out there are actually some pretty solid reasons for believing that what we have is, with few possible exceptions, what the authors originally wrote. We have quite-good evidence of this.

There is a method, now greatly aided by computers, called textual criticism. This is a technique intended to recover, as well as possible, the original text based on a multitude of copies. The technique is quite ancient (it was in use thousands of years ago) and consists of looking at how the copies we have differ from one another. Here’s a simple example to illustrate the principle. A teacher writes a sentence on the board, and three students copy it onto three pieces of paper. The papers read as follows:

1.         I went to the corner store and bought ten peanuts.

2.         I went to the general store and bought ten pennies.

3.         I sent to the corner store and sought ten peanuts.

The teacher erases the board and leaves. We are given only the students’ copies of what was once written there. Which one is most likely to be accurate? Don’t go on to the next paragraph just yet. Look at these three and see if you can figure it out. Then read on.

What did you conclude? The correct answer is number one, because that sentence is more likely, sensible, and logical, but also because in those places where #2 and #3 differ, parts of them are the same as number one. So, “went,” “corner,” “bought” and “peanuts” were probably in the original.

When it comes to ancient documents, the more copies we have that are consistent with each other, and the more places they are from, the more likely that what we believe to be content of the original is actually so. This is a widely accepted principle in the study of many ancient texts, not just Scripture.

What is compelling about Scripture is how many copies we have that can be dated not far from when the original (now-missing) document was written.

Some might not agree with the content of the New Testament, but it is highly probable that what we read is what the authors wrote. So that deals with the issue of whether what we have is what the authors wrote. We have lots of evidence (see the book for a more thorough discussion of this).

How to See the Bible

Here is a simple three-step way for dealing with the authority of the Bible:

First, God was and is intentional and serious about restoring and maintaining a relationship with us. He was intentional and serious in causing all of Scripture to be written. He was intentional and serious in the historical process of many minds and hearts who discerned what was to be a part of the Canon of Scripture and what did not rise to that level.

This doesn’t mean that some of the other books written in New Testament times, or even in modern times, aren’t true or don’t contain valuable insights into God’s character. The Epistles of Clement, Augustine’s Confessions and Mere Christianity are shining examples … but the Bible stands alone in both form and content. There isn’t anything else like it even among the most profound scriptural texts.

Second, it does God and us a disservice to pick verses out of context and build belief systems on them. We need the whole counsel of God in Scripture, and we need it in order to understand any verse truly and fully. That means we need to take the whole of Scripture seriously. We should not read it with a razor blade.

Thomas Jefferson is an example of this. He made his own version of the Bible by cutting out every verse he didn’t like or agree with and then pasting together the ones that remained. As smart as Jefferson was, I don’t think that was his best idea.

God was serious in the creation of Scripture. We need to be serious in its absorption. If a particular verse or part of the Bible offends me, rather than skip it or declare loudly that I disagree, I should consider it instead a red flag indicating that there is something I don’t understand yet, that God wants me to understand. I should dig deeper rather than run away or cut it out. This may seem counterintuitive to some, but it will yield great rewards: Press in rather than flee.

Third, don’t be intimidated by either those who reject the Bible or those who insist you aren’t a Christian if you do not take it literally.

Rejecting the Bible completely, saying, “It’s just a creation of another culture; we don’t really need to pay attention to it,” is misguided.

Taking it literally makes nonsense out of its poetry, imagery, metaphor, and parables. It is equally misguided.

Take it seriously. It is reliable, and it contains all things necessary for salvation.

The Covering Authority

All of Scripture, and all of the councils and teachings of the Church, stand under the covering authority of two great commandments, and so must we. Those two great commandments come from the lips of Jesus, and He said this:

“‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love  your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40, NKJV)

That is, every word of Scripture, everything about our faith, belief, practice, doctrine, theology, church polity, teaching, authority, and our daily living in the world, stands under the force, command, and the covering authority of those two great commandments. Jesus said all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. They are the standard and touchstone for all that we believe and do.

Yet what is true of many of us as Christians is that while we may believe that all the Law and the Prophets stand under those two commandments, we don’t think we have to, particularly if we feel threatened by doctrine, practice, theology, people—or other religions. Then it is okay to behave with sarcasm, with bitterness, with anger towards our enemies, attacking them, belittling them, caricaturing them, putting them down, treating them as less than worthy of the love Jesus commanded.

But we are not exempt. We too, like the Law and the Prophets, must stand under those two great commandments. If we believe the Scriptures and the Church have authority in our lives, there is no other option.

In Christ,

Pastor George

Trinity

In this blog we are going to look at the Trinity. This is a concept that is easily discarded—and only with great foolishness, I believe. Note however that I said “concept.” This will prove important as we seek to understand what Christians believe about that nature and character of God, and how that is applied in their conduct in the church and in the world.

Christians believe Scripture teaches that there is one God in three Persons.

Not three gods in competition with each other.

Not one God operating in three modes. 

But rather, Christians believe that there are three Persons who coexist eternally in unending, loving relationship with one another—glorifying each other, edifying each other, working with and through each other.

Yet we need to recognize that what we know about God and what we assert about this “Trinity of Persons in one God” is deduced from what is revealed to us in Scripture. That is, nowhere in either the Old or New Testament do we find an explicit statement that the nature of God is “three Persons in one God,” nor that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one substance—also a part of the normative definition of Trinity in Christian theology.

Both Testaments are replete with references to God that reflect enormous complexity and diversity and numerous assertions and implications of activities and of living beings present in the Godhead, beyond only one—yet affirming one God. Christians assert that the correct number within the one God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Even if we are exactly right about that number, the actual content of the Godhead is still above our pay grade, beyond our understanding, outside of our ability to comprehend. We cannot know what is beyond a human mind’s ability to know.

Much serious scholarship has gone into defining and defending the Trinity over the course of many centuries, and that scholarship has been valuable in encouraging us to conceive of God as three Persons in unending, loving relationship with one another. It has helped to remind us that it is in this image we are made (and hence we should treat each other this way). But the inescapable reality is that to our human minds, Trinity is a concept. That is, Trinity is a philosophical proposition used to help us conceive of God, affirm the authority and divinity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and guide us in our worship and behavior.

I am not saying that the concept of Trinity is wrong, nor that it is “just” a concept. As deeply real as the Trinity is within the Godhead, there is still an issue here that needs to be seen and understood.

However excellent a job is done in constructing this proposition, this concept of Trinity is not God, and it cannot contain (or even well describe) God’s actual nature. In fact, what God reveals about Himself in Scripture, if anything, upends every human attempt to capture or really understand Him. God says, “I am that I am.” (Exodus 3:14) He confuses those at Babel who want to climb up to see Him. He says quite explicitly, “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways.”(Isaiah 55:8)  He even says that if we were to look at His face we would die. (Exodus 33:20)

Whatever it is that He is, He does not play by our rules and will not be confined to our concepts about Him, however bright, competent, accurate, and scholarly they might be.

So, we have to kneel and recognize that by God’s grace He has revealed the image in which we are made—that is, to be in loving submission and loving care for one another, with a Father, a Redeemer-Lord-Messiah-Son, and a Holy Spirit—all revealed in Scripture—in both Testaments, however we describe these to coexist, relate, proceed or be numbered. I’m not trying to be cute or heterodox here, but rather acutely aware of our own human limitations, and therefore humble in our assertions.

Christians deduce and conceive Trinity from the revelation of Scripture, and we should, by God’s power, do our best to live out its implications and imperatives. But we should not confuse a concept, however well-formed, with the reality of God.

Many great minds have worked for many centuries to spell out exactly what our precise concept is of the Trinity, what the characteristics are of each of the persons: Father, Son, Spirit. What their relative roles and responsibilities are, how they relate and proceed to and from one another, and on and on and on.

But we cannot have a relationship with a concept—that’s all inside our own heads! We can only have a relationship with God. We must get out of our own heads and have an actual relationship with our Creator.

Knowing God is not the same as having well-defined and defendable concepts about God.

For Christians, the ultimate example of knowing God is contained in the life and willing sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus didn’t simply have a better set of concepts about God or Trinity. He had relationship with the Father! And out of this relationship, Jesus says, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”(John 14:9b)  Jesus also says that He and the Father are one. (John 17:11, 21)

We can spend much ink and heat in deducing and debating philosophical propositions from this assertion—whether the Two are actually a Single One, of the same or similar substance, whether this is just metaphor, or if it describes reality, whether One is lesser than or equal to the Other, whether One is begotten or created and what exactly that means, whether Both existed before time, whether the Spirit is separate from the Two, and whether He proceeds from One or Both, and on and on. But when we do so, we have often trapped ourselves in concept, and missed relationship.

We live like intellectual Deists, asserting there is a God, but often having nothing actually to do with Him.

Some claim that the whole Christian faith is based upon the concept of the Trinity, and insist that good Christians must subscribe to it to truly be counted as Christian. But the danger is that this then has become our foundation: not God, but our well-defined and defended concept about God. However accurate the concept is, it is not God. Knowing the concept is not the same as knowing God. Knowing a concept is not a relationship.

Maybe some solid, thoughtful Trinitarians will say, “Yes, of course. What’s important is the Trinity Itself, not our explanations of it. This is obvious. Of course that’s what is important. Of course that’s what we mean and defend.”

But I don’t believe that is what we have actually seen through history.

Instead, we fell in love with concepts in a Greek philosophical system, worked out structures and appurtenances to the nth degree, and gave religious and biblical labels to the parts. We fought over which was the most beautiful, refined and true, yet they often became idols made by our own hands and minds—and we spoke bitterly of, shunned and even killed those who made and embraced other ones.

We have made idols of our concepts, and fought over them.

In so doing we neglected relationship with the One true God.

Trinity is a valuable, useful concept to help us understand the nature of the Godhead, but no matter how true or accurate a concept it is, it is not God, and it is not relationship with God.

Relationship is in covenant, not concepts.

In Christ,

Pastor George

A Severe Critique

The very challenge of discussing heresies, ancient and modern, makes my head hurt. The debates that rage are often so rancorous and bitter that I don’t even want to read the stuff—even from people I agree with!

Hence I want to warn you in advance that there will be, here, a quite-severe critique of all of this—not self-important, I hope, but what I believe is a necessary and overdue upbraiding of the Church’s doctrines, and the cost of those doctrines, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. More later.

How to Disagree

I believe we do need to be serious in understanding what the Lord wants us to know about Him, and what isn’t true about Him. Right doctrine is important. But it never trumps love.

There will be points at which any of us will disagree. So long as we abide by the two commandments that Jesus has declared supreme, and on which our doctrine should hang, we can keep on talking to each other and loving each other. Jesus said,

“‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40, NKJV)

Even if we have got our doctrine “right,” if we apply it in a way that violates those two commandments, we’ve got it wrong.

This is a very hard thing for us to remember, because in the Church, people disagree—just as with politics, sports, families, and life in general. Then they get angry and bitter, and quickly dash to the violation of those two foundational commandments Jesus gave.

And when someone complains that the debate has become rancorous and mean, the charge is laid that the peacemakers value being “nice” over being in accord with God’s will, that they stick their heads in the sand or are afraid to name aloud what is seriously wrong. Those who do not approve of vicious attack are themselves attacked—accused of being wimps, or quislings, or traitors—apparently in the hope of silencing them, or justifying the hateful attacker’s words and methods.

My desire is that as we face serious issues in the Church, we approach them consistently with Jesus’ two commands. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter if we are right about where we stand, because we are unholy at the roots.

A Severe Critique

You may remember back in Chapter 14, “Covenant—The Law of Moses,” I quoted Rabbi Ronald Isaacs, who said, “Judaism has always been more a religion of action and deed than belief and creed.”

This is a deep and historically profound insight, and if understood is likely to remake how Christians understand who they are, and how to live life more fully in relationship to our Creator.

Philosophers love to draw parallels and make connections across centuries and cultures. The abstractions and categories created in doing so can provide insights into how humans live, believe and behave—and there are surely deep commonalities among human communities, even when widely separated by distance or time.

But such abstraction and categorization is not universal. That is, not all cultures think this way. Oh, they do to a degree, but the real flowering of this approach to analyzing and describing human life and the world is essentially Greek in its origins, especially in the West, and especially in Christianity.

Think of it like this: The entire Old Testament is essentially a narrative story about a people, the Jews, and their robust, constant, joyful, rocky, rebellious, dedicated, awestruck and argumentative love affair with God. They are so familiar with Him that they will yell and wrestle with Him, even turn on their heels in fits of pique, and yet they are so profoundly in awe they will not even say His name aloud. In the entire Old Testament there is virtually not a word of doctrine, nor a foundational philosophical proposition.

A philosophically minded person could look at it, and impute doctrine or philosophy, just as could be done with any narrative, but neither of these are in the worldview or methods of Hebrew thought.

The Greeks, on the other hand, developed a philosophical approach to human life and the world. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said, and this conviction characterizes their passion to examine and explain. They abstracted, categorized and organized what they observed, and drew parallels and distinctions. From these they were able to establish foundational propositions, and from these came doctrines: definitions of what fit or didn’t fit the foundational propositions.  Whether it was the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Stoics, the Rhetoricians, the Epicureans, the Cynics or the Skeptics (to name a few), the approach of abstraction, categorization, organization, proposition and doctrine was essentially the same: The various schools differed primarily on what values were key, and which were not. They had many gods, some of which were icons of these points of view, others of which were a means to self-satisfaction, or defense, or spiritual mystery. The Greeks were complex and deep thinkers, as well as being sensual and pleasure-seeking.

Greek philosophy intersected Hebrew thought at several key points throughout history:

·         When Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquered the known world and Hellenized it. Greek became the common language of all the nations he defeated. (It’s because of this that the New Testament was written in Greek.)

·         When Rome, whose leaders were all trained by Greek teachers, conquered all the lands of Alexander, and more. Greek continued to be the common language, and Greek philosophy the way of thinking about the world. Pilate, the Roman governor, said to Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38a) This was a profoundly Greek question.

·         When Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, explained the God of Israel (and Jesus) to people who didn’t know how Jews thought, and didn’t know the Old Testament, but who were accustomed to thinking in Greek philosophical categories (including their beliefs about Greek and Roman gods) and listening to rhetorically sound argument. Read Acts 17:16-34 for a quick insight into this. Paul was trained in rhetoric and continues this approach throughout most of his letters to the Gentile believers.

·         When the expanding Church defined and defended itself in debate over many centuries, most of which took place between Gentile authors and leaders (starting in the second and third centuries), hence imbued with and expressed through Greek philosophical and rhetorical methods.

·         When Thomas Aquinas discovered the writings of Aristotle, which had been lost to the West for centuries, and began to explain Christian theology in Greek philosophical terms (even transubstantiation, substance and accident are concepts from Aristotle).

·         When Humanism arose, heavily dependent on Greek ideas, and began to claim values arising from human reason (in which the Greeks delighted). Remember that “man is the measure of all things” is from a contemporary of Socrates, the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who predated even Alexander the Great.

·         When science arose, contesting religion for primacy in the lives and faith of people, and showing its superior and growing ability to cure disease, tap power from the atom, and travel even into space. It remains dominant to this day. Its roots, like the Enlightenment and Humanism, are largely Greek.

Each of these intersections of Greek philosophy and Hebrew thought have affected how we understand and respond to the God of Israel, Who we Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) believe to be the One True God.

Now, you may not have thought about it this way before, but the fact is that much of the theology that we do today, and that has been done in the Church since the second or third century, has, in structure and even in content, been fundamentally a Greek philosophical debate.

It is a Herculean effort to explain God, to abstract, categorize and organize what the Jews and followers of Jesus experienced, and then to draw parallels and make distinctions. From these were established foundational propositions, and from these came doctrines: definitions of what fit or didn’t fit those propositions.

Instead of a robust, constant, joyful, rocky, rebellious, dedicated, awestruck and argumentative love affair with God, we have given our hearts to propositions. We have fallen in love with our own thoughts about God, and missed Him. I realize this is a difficult thing to hear or countenance. I myself want to jump up and defend good doctrine: Bad doctrine can lead to disaster. I know! And Paul warns us:

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. (2 Timothy 4:3-4, NKJV)

“Doctrine” here in Paul’s quote is the Greek word didaskalia, and means “teaching, precept, proposition.” And we do want to get that right, and not be led astray by fables instead of the truth.

But the truth isn’t a concept to Jews or Christians: God is truth. So the issue fundamentally isn’t about getting the doctrine right, so much as it is about getting the relationship right. If bad doctrine can lead us away from relationship, let’s point it out and move on, seeking Him. But right doctrine can and does also lead us away from Him—when we focus on it instead of Him, and when we try to grasp and explain Him by doctrine.

We’ve now endured centuries of this approach to God, and we’ve missed the point, which is—well, God. It isn’t our intellectual assent to propositions about Him that He seeks. It is our trust. It is intimacy. It is wrestling. He offers love and covenant, marriage, not highly ordered thoughts and explanations about Him. There is no explaining Him.

This problem began early, with the Hellenization of the Mediterranean and Middle East under Alexander the Great. It affected Judaism and Pharisaic methods in the Talmud, and it continued under Paul, both in his training as a Pharisee, and later as he sought to reveal the God of Israel in terms and concepts his Hellenized Gentile audience would grasp.

I understand this and don’t even really object to it, as it is. It was a door for the Gentiles, an opening, to a new way of life and to salvation and the love of God. Paul taught them in their language, in their own modes of thought. But his goal was not to have his philosophy beat the other philosophies—it was to introduce them to their Creator and Savior.

In our day and age we have virtually abandoned the prospect of life with God, and have settled instead for debates about His nature and intentions.

Even the struggle between Humanism and Theism is almost entirely within the Greek philosophical arena. The Humanists adopt basic Greek philosophical ideals about the nature of man, from Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, from the Skeptics and others, and posit a world of human relations in which God is absent at best, and we are left to determine what we will value and what standards we will maintain.

But the Theists, though they proclaim a God in intimate relation with humanity, act largely like Deists (who believe God created the world but is now uninvolved in it), and posit their own worldview in carefully structured, detailed and defended doctrines, deduced from Scripture and Tradition, and re-formed into a philosophical system of considerable breadth and compass. Their thought is dialectical: One way is right and the other wrong. The smallest deviation is cause for attack. But even if it was consistent to the nth degree, and “right” in some elemental and universal system of “truth,” it is still Greek and not Hebrew in its approach to God and to life.

Well, so what? Is God a Jew? Do we need to think like Hebrews in order to love God or be saved? Doesn’t Scripture tell us that God is the God of all nations, and that in Him we are neither Greek nor Jew?

Yes, of course. But I contend that by putting all of our effort into explaining God, arguing about God, understanding God and defending God in philosophical terms, in debates about doctrine, we have fled the door labeled “God” and packed a hall for “lectures about God,” delivered by contesting theologians.

Christian liberals and Christian conservatives alike are essentially Greek in their approach to God and life. We differ on philosophy, we align with sparring schools, we accuse each other of ineptitude and bad motives, and we fight about how we each define and explain God.

We instead need to be married to God, and let Him have His way with us. We need to be ravished, not lectured.

In Christ,

Pastor George

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