Rethnking God V

The Emperor Constantine and
Bishops at Nicea

Well it would seem that everything we needed to know about God we learned from Jesus—that Jesus was God’s final Word of Revelation.  Theologically that may be true, but it is not true historically.  In fact, Jesus created a huge problem that made the Church seriously rethink everything it thought it knew about God.

We take it for granted that by the death of the last apostle and the close of the canon of scripture, our doctrines were complete.  We knew that there is one God in three Divine Persons.  We knew that Jesus was “consubstantial” (one in being as we used to say) with the Father according to his divinity and of one human nature with us as regarding his humanity.  We thought that the apostles had it all worked out.  But they didn’t.  It is clear from the New Testament texts that they were themselves trying to work out what made this man who is so much like us in so many respects so utterly different than us in others that he could be called “The Son of God”—and what did that mean anyway?
The Church would spend approximately three centuries trying to clarify what it believed about God and about Jesus before definitively defining the Trinity and it would take almost three more centuries before it clarified the relationship of Jesus to the Godhead—the theological fancy-schmancy word for God.   There were hints of the Trinity in the New Testament books—most notably the Trinitarian formula for baptism—a command put in the mouth of Jesus by the author of “Matthew’s Gospel” that the disciples should baptize “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  (Actually it seems from The Book of Acts and from Paul’s writings that for a short while the Apostles and their successors were baptizing “In the Name of Jesus” and that the Trinitarian Formula came a little later—certainly by the ‘80’s AD when Matthew (or someone) wrote his Gospel.  The idea that Jesus was God’s Son presented huge theological dilemmas for the early Christians.  Coming out of Judaism the first Christians were rigidly committed to the Oneness of God and didn’t know how to express the idea that Jesus—the “Son”—somehow shared in the Divinity of his “Father” without ending up with two gods.  And even then: what to do with the Holy Spirit?  Is the Spirit a Person like Jesus or merely an emanation of the Father like my spirit would be of me and your spirit would be of you?  All this gets argued back and forth through the second and third and into the fourth centuries.  The whole complexity only begins to be resolved with the Council of Nicea in 325 but even then the Council never uses the word “Trinity” and while the Father and the Son have a fair bit said about them, the Holy Spirit gets somewhat lumped in with other things like baptism for the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead and assorted other doctrines. 
Theophilus of Antioch writing before 190 is the first to use the word “Trinity” though the idea can be found in Ignatius at the beginning of the second century and Justin Martyr in mid-second century.  Nicea was meant to answer questions about Jesus as well—who he is in relation to God (the Father) and who he is in relation to us?  This had been a hot item in the second and third centuries as well with such ideas as Adoptionism, Sabellianism, and other formulae that we now consider to be heretical but which, in the day, had strong and avid believers.  In the event, Nicea created more questions than it answered and it took about six more councils—Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople I, II, and III, and a second council at Nicea—to iron out the details and even then lots of Good Christians—the Armenians, the Copts, and the Chaldeans among others—bailed because they didn’t agree. Finally the Western Church (today’s Catholics along with the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions) and Orthodox (Greek, Russian, and various other “Chalcedonian” Churches have agreed that Jesus Christ is one Person in two natures, a Divine Nature consubstantial (there’s that word again) with the Father and a human nature like our except in sin.  So basically this all took six centuries to work out: people—all sorts of people like popes and bishops and saints and mystics and cleaning ladies and horse jockeys and bookies and bartenders and school teachers and even a few imperial mistresses—arguing and fighting back and forth until the consensus fidelium came to a consensus fidelium.  But even then, that wasn’t the end of it.  We are always rethinking God.  We never get the answer to exactly say what we know in our collective heart is the precise truth.  Maybe it just can’t be done.     The theological process is more important than the theological product.  We never stop “rethinking God.”

Rethinking God IV

Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son: 

A Meditation on the Nature

of God  

We have been talking about “rethinking God” since I made the original post saying that Senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock’s comment that God wills pregnancies,  even those that are the result of a rape, made me stop and reflect on things that I have always just taken for granted about God.  And as I have reflected on what I actually do believe I find that it is quite different than things that I once believed even though I was never conscious of my understandings of God having evolved.  I did several postings on the shifts of God as seen in the perspective of the Hebrew Scriptures or what we Christians often call “The Old Testament.”  Now we need to move on to the “New Testament” or the Christian scriptures.  And again, I am writing not as a scripture expert—which I am not, nor as a theologian—again which I am not, but as a historian looking at the development of thought.

 Perhaps the greatest shift in our “rethinking God” comes with Jesus himself.  Jesus dramatically redefines God.  While the Hebrew Scriptures refer to God as “Father” in terms of God’s relationship to the entire people of Israel and specifically of the Davidic Kings, Jesus applies the familiar form of this word—Abba, equivalent to our “Dad” or even “Daddy” not only to himself but to each of us.  There is no parallel to this familiarity in any of the Jewish writings that go before Jesus.  In fact, while the scriptures use the term “Father” for God being the “Father” of Israel, or the “Father” of the King (see Psalms 2:7; 89:27; 110: 2-3;) there is no sense of the personal Father-child relationship between the individual Jew and God.  Jesus in his time in the desert following his baptism and in the frequent nights he spent in solitary prayer (Mark 1: 35; Luke 4:32) seems to have realized a very unique and personal relationship with God and one which he did not choose to keep to himself but into which he invited his disciples to enter when they prayed (Matthew 6: 9-13; Luke 11: 2-4).  This familiarity with God was very off-putting to the religious people of his day who considered it blasphemy that Jesus proclaims this parent-child relationship (Matthew 27:43; John 19:7). 

While we Christians take this familiarity with God as, well, familiar, for Jews and for Muslims God remains totally other—Transcendent—and this Christian concept is something with which they are not only uncomfortable but even think to be highly presumptive, a violation of Lèse Majesté.  For many Christians too the idea of God as “Abba” or even Father is no more than formulaic—they shy away from the implications that God is this loving and forgiving parent to whom they return to find not only forgiveness but an unconditional accepting love.  God remains for them primarily the judge who will mete out according to the measure of our merits rather than the measure of his love.  Like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32) they cannot move beyond the idea of “deserving” to understand the fundamental idea of Grace—the totally gratuitous love which God offers not according to our virtue but according to our need.  
Reading some of the blogs such as the infamous Les Femmes: Women of Truth out of Woodstock VA or The Thinking Catholic Blog or listening to Michael Voris’ Vortex one can see just how fiercely the compassionate Father revealed by Jesus is rejected in favor of the idea of God as put forward by the Scribes of Jesus’ day who were so threatened by Christ’s revelation concerning a God whose fatherly heart desires without condition His children’s return to him.  To a great extent the divisions in the Church today are rooted in these two diverse theologies—one emphasizing the need for propitiation, the other focusing on the idea that “it is mercy I desire, not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13). 
This problem is not confined to a few lunatic bloggers but is part of the wedge between the Catholic faithful and those “shepherds”—whether priests or bishops (or, I suppose, deacons) whose pathology manifests a compulsive need for control over the lives of the faithful and a fear of a Catholic laity whose intellectual and spiritual maturity empowers them to make moral choices for themselves.  A god who requires propitiation gives an unhealthy power to a clergy whose role it is to offer sacrifice and insert themselves between God and God’s people as the necessary conduit of grace from God to His people.  This is a role of great power and thus—like all great power—subject to great abuse.  We saw this in the episodes earlier this year in which Father Marcel Guarnizo took it upon himself and on  his own authority to deny a woman Holy Communion because he unilaterally judged her to be in the state of grave sin. (See posts for Feb 28, March 1, 2, 12, 16, 17, 27, 29, April 25, 27, 29, 30, all 2012. ) He had to “protect” God (Christ, present in the Eucharist) from contamination by one whom he judged to be a sinner.  Those who are anxious to have others denied Holy Communion or other access to means of grace reflect this idea of a god who conditions his acceptance on “merit.”  How far this is from the example of Jesus and his confrontation with the Woman at the Well (John 4: 1-42)!  On the other hand, those who accept the idea of God as “Abba” as revealed by Jesus see the need for conversion  but realize that conversion comes as a result of God’s love, not as its condition.  From these two different understandings of God proceed widely diverse understandings of the Mass and Sacraments, the role of the clergy, Christian morality, Christian political and economic theories, and other issues that are linking the Church to our society’s culture wars.  The division has become acrimonious and is creating a wide gulf that is not only disturbing parish communities but undermining authority in the Church and threatening the unity of the Church.  The subject needs to be studied carefully and a strategy for healing needs to be implemented before the gulf grows wider.  A strategy for healing does not mean submission to the neurosis that has precipitated the crisis but the selection of shepherds who have wisdom and compassion necessary for truly pastoral leadership.     

Rethinking God

I was struck last week when a politician said that even in the case of rape when a child is conceived it is the will of God.  At first I thought: “how could anyone believe that?”  Then I thought: “Wait, I believe that.”  Then I had to sit back and ask myself: "what do I believe about God?"

First, we need to clarify what the politician said.  He did not say that the rape was the will of God.  No one who is professes faith in the God of Jesus could say that.  There are certain Old Testament stories that might lead one to believe that an act of violence such as rape or murder could be God’s will but it would violate the image of God as Abba, as a loving parent, that Jesus presents in the Gospels.  Such Divinely ordained violence threatens to annul the paschal sacrifice of Christ which suffices to atone for all the evil in the world and to cancel once and for all whatever divine wrath is due to sin.  So much for the rape issue.  What about God willing a conception of life resulting from this act of violence?  When this issue came up, I realized that I had long believed that God directly willed the creation of each and every human life at the time of its conception.  But after reflection it also dawned on me—in this context—that I have not for some time believed that God has directly willed the creation of each and every human life at the time of its conception.  It took a shock like hearing this jerk say something as outrageous as God has willed the conception of a baby as the result of an act of violence for me to realize that my thoughts about God and his role in our lives have indeed changed over the years.  Now, I am not saying that God therefore gladly permits the termination of an innocent life because of the circumstances in which it was conceived, but what I am saying is that I have come to more clearly differentiate God the Creator of Life from Santa in his workshop.  The creation of life is a biological process not an artisan craftsman at his skill.  I don’t mean that God has a conveyer-belt that piles up souls and shoots them into embryos like Pepsi being mass-squirted into racked bottles passing through a machine.   To be honest, I am not sure exactly what a “soul” is.  I am not saying that I don’t believe in souls, only that I don’t know what one is and how one is joined to a biological product.  I haven’t gotten that far yet.  And to be honest, I probably won’t spend a lot of time figuring that one out.  The important thing is that I realized I have begun to seriously reconsider what I think about God, how I understand God, my “concept” of God—my theology.  And obviously I am not alone. 

This is no surprise.  We Christians have redefined God at any number of points in our history.   Indeed the People of Israel redefined God periodically through their history before Jesus ever came along and gave us a very new and very different notion of God than had been held by his co-religionists.  Maybe we should look at some of these shifts in our understanding of God.  I am not saying that God changes but rather that our human understanding of God has changed throughout the history of our religious thought. 

And it is this shift in our basic understanding of the most important object of belief that has so many Catholics frightened and the consequent polarization as some in our faith have moved into brave and new experiences of God and others are anxious to keep God in the same Box in which they found him in as children.  We are going to have to look at this conflict.

Jesus, the Reason for the Season? Or Not?

There is more to Christmas than Christ, and for some
there's less to Christmas than Christ, much less than
Christ, but that's just fine.

A friend of mine recently told me a story about Christmas and grinches. My friend teaches at a private school somewhere in the Northeast.  The school has adopted a strong secular identity and few of the students come from Christian homes.  There is a policy forbidding so much as a poinsettia plant in the faculty lunch-room or a jolly elf in the library.  Even reading The Polar Express is verboten and a teacher was reprimanded for wearing a green sweater with a red and green plaid skirt.  Boy, anybody who thinks only conservatives are rigid needs to visit this school!!!  Well, my friend told me, one parent was upset because—horror of horrors—there was a Christmas tree near the entrance to the parking lot.  You see, this school rents its property from a Christian Church to whom the parking lot belongs but this particular parent obviously thought that the landlords should refrain from decorating their property because she did not want her child to be exposed to Christmas.  A Christmas tree has no religious significance.   And so let’s take a break from this Founding Father and Christian Nation thing and indulge ourselves a bit in a look at the history of Christmas.  After all Jesus “is the reason for the season.’  Or not.  Now when I say that, I am not being anti-Christian or on the “Take Christ out of Christmas” bandwagon.  I am a devout Roman Catholic—more devout than most I would suggest—but we need to look at Christmas in its wider picture context if we want to consider intelligently the issue of the crèche on courthouse lawns that we have been looking at. 

      While Christians began celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25^th in the fourth century they built their celebration on already existing “pagan” festivals.  History does not know the actual date of Christ’s birth.  Some argue that the story’s relating to us that “shepherds were keeping watch in the fields by night over their sheep” argues against a December date as in the winter the sheep would be kept in barns through the cold nights.  I am not familiar with sheepherding protocols in first century Palestine but I do know that December in Israel/Palestine has long nights with low temperatures—not as low as Idaho or Colorado and American sheep, but regularly in the 40’s and occasionally below freezing.  And, in any case, contemporary biblical scholarship would not consider night-time temperatures of Bethlehem fields relevant to whatever historical/biographical shreds might be recoverable from the gospel texts.   Suffice it to say that we don’t know the actual date of the birth of Jesus.  Nor do we need to. The Queen’s Birthday is a Saturday in June—any Saturday her government might choose for the festivities—though she was born on April 21^st.  But it rains a lot in London in April (April showers,May flowers, and all that) so it is celebrated another day.  Same with Jesus.  Who knows when he was born, but December 25^th works well as everybody needs a lift from the dark days and longer darker nights of midwinter.  And long before Jesus was even a twinkle in some celestial star (I am speaking here of the man born, not the Word who became incarnate in that birth) people were reveling at midwinter.  According to the historian the Venerable Bede (8^th century) the ancient Anglo-Saxon peoples celebrated Modranecht (Mother’s Night) on December 25^th.   The Celts had Meán Geimhridh—the festival of the winter solstice.  Germanic and Nordic folk had Yule.  Baltic peoples had Ziemassvētki.  The Slavs had Rozhanista.  The Roman/Graeco culture had a variety of feasts in honor of the god Bacchus, the god Saturn, or the Sol Invictus: the unconquered Sun.  Customs varied from culture to culture but certain common features included gift-giving, revelry (usually to excess), hospitality, and the use of light.  The further north, the darker and longer the nights, the more ardent were the celebrations.  Greens were often brought indoors to decorate the home (and probably to freshen the air of the houses closed tight against winter cold) and to keep the awareness of nature when all outside seemed dead and awaiting the rebirth spring would provide. 

     Initially there seems to have been some resistance among Christian theologians to the idea of celebrating the Birth of Jesus as it was too close in concept to the pagan celebrations honoring the birth of various deities.  Of course Kings, Pharaohs, and Emperors regularly had their birthdays celebrated but primitive Christianity distanced itself from such royal celebrations as well because the implication was attributing divinity to the monarch being celebrated.  It does seem by the middle of the fourth century however that the feast was being celebrated at Rome from where it spread eastwards to Constantinople and the Churches of the East.  This makes it somewhat of the exception as most of the ancient feasts began in the Eastern Church(es) and spread westward to Rome.  The Church in the West was always inclined to a more Spartan liturgical style than the more exotic East.  By the end of the fourth century Christmas had achieved great popularity as it was used to combat the Arian heresy that denied Jesus full divinity, equal to the Father.  Christmas became an affirmation of the idea that in the birth of Jesus, God (the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity) became human, uniting in one person the human and divine natures. 

     The name Christmas derives from the Old English Christemaesse—Christ’s Mass—even as other feasts were called after the Mass celebrated on that day—Michaelmas  (St. Michael’s Day, September 11^th ) or Martinmas (St. Martin’s Day, November 11^th). 

     It’s clear that our contemporary Christmas is an amalgamation of Christian and Pagan elements.  Christianity has often adopted and then adapted indigenous customs, “baptizing” them as it were with Christian meaning.  The Chinese Rites controversy of the seventeenth century is one of the more interesting examples of this practice and the rejection by Rome of the use of Chinese practices by the Jesuit missionaries was a huge mistake from an evangelizing point of view.  Pius XII, in one of the first acts of his papacy, admitted the mistake and to remedy it repealed much of the legislation of Clement XI that had outlawed the incorporation of Chinese practices into Catholic liturgy and devotions.  We will have to do a study of the Chinese Rites issue in the future but before we blame Clement XI for his narrow mindedness we need to locate him in the ambiance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.  This was the same time, incidentally, that Puritans in Boston were outlawing Christmas because of its pagan roots.  And so we should distinguish between the Christian meaning of Christmas (the liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth with its worship services, scripture readings, and sacred songs) and the cultural survivals of pre-Christian practices with evergreens, blazing lights and fires, revelry and (not so sacred)songs.   They both have their place but a Festooned and light-bedecked tree is no more a Christian symbol than is a Halloween Jack-o-lantern or a Fourth-of July firecracker.  So get over the Christmas tree in the Park or the wreath of lights on the lamppost.  And while you’re at it, let Ms. Paula wear that red sweater and plaid skirt: she looks real cute in it.