Saturday, September 14, 2013

God is (W)Here?

All men naturally desire knowledge; but what good is knowledge without the fear of God? Surely a humble peasent who fears God is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting his own soul, occupies himself in studying the course of the stars. - Thomas á Kempis

This passage is from one of the morning prayer offices found in The Little Book of Hours.  It came up (thank you Spirit) as I was pondering what to write about the next chapter in Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God. For part one on this book click here.  

Rollins second chapter addresses a postmodern approach to thinking about theology and what theology can tell us about God.  

*Spoiler Alert* it's not much. *End Spoiler Alert*

The problem with our understanding of God, who God is, and what God is up to in our lives stems from a previous post on if we can objectively know anything about the world.  Again, click here if you missed it.  This is where Thomas à Kempis comes in above.  He so kindly reminds us that we can try and know things, but if we don't have a fear (perhaps reverance is a better word) towards God all our knowledge will come to naught.  

Rollins reminds us (me in particular) that we can search and should search for God, but if we don't hold our beliefs in some kind of a/theistic suspension we can get ourselves in trouble with the idolatry of ideology.

Let me take a second to explain what I mean when I say "a/theistic suspension."  By this, I'm not advocating that we all take up the belief that God doesn't exist.  Rather, that seems more in line with an "anti-theism" which Rollins describes in this chapter.  Instead, I think that we should be more willing to re-examine our belief system that we hold about God, and disbelieve the particulars within that system - our atonement theories, for example.  The main point is that when we continually re-examine and deconstruct our theology, we are able to keep looking at what is helpful for coming to an understanding of God and then let go of what might be harmful for looking about God.

This is something that is evidenced throughout the scriptures - Old and New Testaments.   God as depicted in the Old Testament seems completely different from God as depicted in the New.  Many Old Testament depictions of God can be seen as vindictive or in need of sacrifice, while the New Testament God depicts a God that is of peace and love.  While simplistic, this contrast points out how as each author of each text comes to encounter God (from exodus, to exile, to the return, to the person of Jesus) they record one more glimpse of the character of God.  Their writings witness to the continual questioning done by the Hebrew people and then the early Christian church as they took what they knew about God and compared/contrasted it with their new experience of God - an a/theistic suspension of sorts.

So, keeping this a/theistic suspension in mind, our knowledge of God was never intended to be an objective fact, but rather a subjective and intimate knowledge that is evidenced by our relationships with close friends and family.  In fact, the very thought that our primary knowledge of God is subjective and intimate (subjective here not being relative, but rather a way of saying that we see God as something beyond height, weight, gender, etc.) is a gift for our minds could not handle an objective knowledge of God.  

This is what I hope Thomas á Kempis meant when he describes the "fear of God."  This intimate and subjective knowledge that is an expression of love for and from the almight Creator of the Universe.  A fear that comes out of respect for power and majesty, that also creates the space for a communal relationship with the Trinity.  

So then, what of (our attempts at) theology?  Have the past 2000+ years of Judeo-Christian theology been for naught?

I think it is safe to answer this question with a resounding "No!"

Our denominational theology and traditions are done as prayerful responses to God.  From the apostolic fathers to the mystics, to the medieval scholars to the reformers, and through our own experiences today, we all have some experience of God that we try to understand.  Theology then, becomes a way of processing through that experience of God and filtering it through the lenses of what we know and don't know.

I personally find this to be extremely liberating and freeing in one sense.  It means that I do not have to tie myself down to ideas and thoughts about God that aren't helpful or useful anymore.

Penal substitution is one such idea, that from which I feel freed.  This idea was incredibly popular for much of the Middle Ages as a way of understanding Jesus' death and resurrection on the cross.  To be fair, when Anselm was describing the penal satisfaction model for atonement, it was helpful  The Medieval scholars would have understood his writing through the lenses of the feudal system that permeated the context of Western Europe at the time.  However, this particular aspect of theology doesn't quite lend itself to the currently Western thought of individual justice and individual action.  Therefore, we have tried to make sense of the medieval atonement theory in our modern context instead of working through Jesus' incarnation, life, death, and resurrection for ourselves based on the accounts that we have in scripture (which are in and of themselves theological interpretations on the person of Jesus Christ, based on the culture that springs up after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE)

At this point, a lot of people give up because this is hard work.  It's near impossible to come up with an objective explanation of how God works in the person of Jesus Christ, when we aren't looking at a candid photograph of Jesus, but rather an impressionist painting done based on oral traditions of who Jesus was.  Which is kind of the point, I think.  It's not about having an objective grip on God the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.  It's about coming to an intimate understanding of how God grasps us and holds us in faith, so that we might be joined to the Kingdom of God, now and not yet.

All of this is an awful lot of groundwork to get to what I found to be one of the most exciting ideas presented in this chapter - the hypernymity of God.

Hypernymity is the opposite of anonymity.  Instead of having little to no information about God - which might be seen to be the base assumption based on what I've written above, we have far too much information about God.  We are trying to process hundreds of thousands of experiences of God - big, little, and everything in between.  There is so much information about God, that each and every person who encounters God might walk away from their encounter thinking they've experienced an entirely different God from their neighbor (which brings us back to the comfort of a/theology in that we are always re-evaluating our own experiences of God in light of the community's experiences of God).  At times we are frustrated because we feel we haven't gotten to know anything about God, at all.

However, this is not the case.  Instead of thinking that we have not learned anything of God, we must learn to live within the tension created by multiple experiences of God.

The idea of hypernymity is witnessed to in some of the "conflict" in the differences within scripture between the immanence and transcendence of God. The idea of hypernymity is such that God is so immanent, so intimately involved with every single created thing, that God is transcendent that we can no longer process God's presence and so God has become immanent.  God's very existence permeates everything and God is so fully revealed that our human brains are incapable of processing just how present God is and how open God is.  We revert to our sensory experiences even though our very souls cry out to be united with the God that is right there, so in front of us, that we cannot see it.

Jay Gamelin at Pilgrim Lutheran Church preached about something similar at his Easter sunrise service in 2013.  The illustration he used that I find helpful when thinking about this type of idea was that of Mount McKinley as seen from Anchorage Alaska.  When you are on the ground in Anchorage, you are able to see Mt. McKinley However, it permeates the landscape so much that it is almost hard to see the shape of the mountain because it takes up all of our vision.

Now imagine standing on the ground looking up at this.

So too, is our experience of God.  God is so present that we are unable to put clear definitions around who God is and how God is working in our world.  The best we can do is make out fuzzy areas where we are able to identify God's work in some way, shape, or form whether it is as Creator, Redeemer, or Spirit.  But we also recognize that those identifications of God are, at best, like impressionist paintings.  They capture one person's experience without putting clear boundaries on what that experience is.

I find this idea that God is so present in the world, that my fallen nature has to filter through God's activity in the world just in order to survive to be comforting.  For me, this is a way of dealing with doubts, questions, and concerns about how God is acting in the world and that God is, in fact, present in all of my struggles.

God is there in all things.  God is in the grief of the mother who has lost a child, because God has also lost a child and understands the grief that is present.  God is in the anger, the sadness, the loneliness - in all of this, God is present.

God is so present, in fact, our own emotions are intensified because God participates in them with us.  Yet, because we cannot process our emotions plus God's presence in our emotions, plus the emotions of everyone who has gone through a similar experience, we filter them out.  At best we are able to handle our own emotional state as well as being able to sympathize with others who have experienced something similar.  In order to protect our sense of "self" we block out our perception of God's intimate presence.

The comfort I find in the midst of this is that even though my sense of "self" blocks God's immediate presence as an act of self-preservation, God is still present.  God is still there in my grief, in my anger, and in my joys even though I might not always be able to sense God.

And this is good news indeed!

When I experience doubt or wonder about God's presence, it's not because God has abandoned me, rather it's the sinner within me that is trying to close it's eyes and protect itself from the overwhelming light of of God.  And the fact that my soul feels the need to protect itself from God's light is a sort of proof that God is still there.  In all things God is fully present in my life and the life of all creation.  We do not need to grasp all aspects of God for this to still be true because faith in God "is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us." (Rollins, 31) 

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