Rethinking God VI

Blessed John Henry Newman

champion of listening to the

faithful

A major player in in the debate over the divinity of Christ was a priest from Alexandria in Egypt by the name of Arius. Arius lived at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth.  Trying to preserve the traditional view on the Unity of God—that God is One—Arius would not ascribe full divinity of Christ.  As I posted yesterday, the received Tradition from Judaism: “ Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One,” the prayer known as the Shema Yisrael  taken from Deuteronomy 6:4, created a huge problem for Christians in the first six centuries as they tried to reconcile the Unity of God with the Divinity of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  The idea of the Father being God, the Son being God and the Holy Spirit being God sounded too much like three gods to a lot of people.  Arianism acknowledged that Christ shares in Divinity but to a lesser degree than the Father.  While still an Anglican before his becoming a Catholic in 1845, Blessed John Henry Newman had written a study of Arius and history published under the title: The Arians of the Fourth Century.  Arius was opposed by Saint Athanasius, the secretary to Arius’ bishop, Alexander, but according to Newman the majority of bishops in the Church had accepted the Arian theology.  It was only at the Council of Nicea that the bishops—at the urging of Athanasius, defined that Christ is consubstantial (one in being) with the Father—that is, that Christ shares fully in the same Divine Nature as the Father.  Incidentally only 318 bishops out of the 1800 Constantine had invited came to the Council—a very small minority.)  While the majority of bishops had originally agreed with Arius, the laity and the lower clergy—the faithful—had held to faith in Christ’s divinity. Newman always remembered this and years later as a Catholic wrote his famous essay “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” Newman argued—with quite a bit of opposition in his day—that the magisterium needs to pay close attention to the faith of the People of God. The laity are not merely to be instructed by the pastors of the Church but the pastors must remember that the Faith of the Church is that which is held in the hearts of the Faithful and therefore those who teach need to be in tune with the faithful.  This is something to pay attention to today.  Too many think that it is up to the Bishops to teach and the faithful to listen but if the bishops are teaching something other than that which is in the faith held by the people, the bishops are not teaching the faith of the Church.  The faith of the Church is no more and no less than the faith put into the hearts of the People of God by the Holy Spirit.  There are those in the Church today who are upset that the faithful are not listening to the bishops when they teach but maybe we should be more concerned that the bishops have not been listening to the faithful before they teach.    

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 III

Model of the Jerusalem Temple where

sacrifices were long offered to God in

the period of the Hebrew Scriptures

After reading the previous post about how our ideas of God have evolved since the historical periods  in which the Hebrew Scriptures were written one of my readers sent me this letter which had been circulating on the internet some years back.  You may remember Dr. Laura Schlessinger, physiologist turned advice counselor/radio personality, whose nationally syndicated radio show ran from 1994 to 2010.  From 1998 until 2003 Dr. Schlessinger practiced orthodox Judaism and often brought her religious insights to bear on the advice she dispensed to her listeners.  For the most part this very rich tradition was well received but people who did not share her religious convictions sometimes found her opinions off-putting.  These adversaries were not necessarily non-believers but often Christians and Jews who had a “different read” on the meaning of Scripture for contemporary society.  I want to print a letter purportedly directed to Dr. Schlessinger  that was circulated about twelve years ago that spoofed her biblical literalism.  I do this not to support the views of those who disagreed with Dr. Schlessinger but rather to show how different our understanding of God is today—even Dr. Laura’s understanding—than it was two or three millennia ago.     

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
a.              When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b.              I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c.               I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
d.              Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
e.               I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f.                A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
g.              Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h.              Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
i.                 I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j.                My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

 

Rethinking God II

The Return of Jephtah by

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini,

or, God likes his virgins

roasted

My last posting in which I said that I find that I am rethinking God—reconsidering what “God” means to me in the light of my actual experience—has shocked some people and led to a number of comments, both positive and negative.  The ultra-orthodox are quick to remind me that “God is unchanging.”  Of course, I am not quite sure what it means that “God is unchanging,” but as a historian I am well aware that the human understanding of God has changed frequently over the approximately four thousand years that God and humankind have been on speaking terms.  I have never read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000 year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but it is on my next order to Amazon.  I do recall from days as a theology student that “back in the day” when God introduced himself to Abram of Ur of the Chaldees, that there were many deities in the Abramic pantheon and that despite the careful editing of the stories by later editors at the time of the Babylonian exile (or even later) Abraham (as Abram was later known) and his son and grandsons worshiped a number of deities.  I remember that God as known under the soubriquet  Y-WH was originally a warrior-god in the Canaanite pantheon.  (I am very reluctant to use the full name or even the full Tetragrammaton as there is a strong tradition—in Judaism a law—that the Name of God is never pronounced or written and while we Christians do not feel so compelled, I do think we should not be cavalier with the Name.)   Of course God was known under several other names in the Hebrew scriptures, most notably El Elohim. In the Hebrew texts of the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible, or the  Torah—God is referred to sometimes by one Name, sometimes by the other.  All that is well and good, but they seem to have actually been two distinct deities who are over a period of time conflated into a single deity.  Moreover, even the name “Elohim” is a plural form and not singular.  While when it refers to God, the word employs a singular form of the verb (taking the plural when it refers to the “gods of the nations”—i.e. the “pagan” deities of Israel’s neighbors) the fact that it is a plural form indicates that it originally did refer to a plurality of gods and that later editors cleaned up the text to reflect the monotheism that eventually replaced Hebrew polytheism around the time of the Babylonian exile.  So here is one example of how even in ancient times God was being rethought.  God went from being two (Y-WH and El Elohim) deities among many to be One and One only with no other deities.  
But God has changed—or rather our understanding of God has changed—in other ways as well.  In the 11^th chapter of the Book of Judges, Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to Y-WH to fulfill a vow he had made—a vow to perform human sacrifice should God make him successful in battle against the Ammonites.  This indicates that in the 11^th century before Christ Jews still believed that God found human sacrifice acceptable.  Yet clearly this practice was done away with fairly early on as subsequent biblical texts do not mention human sacrifice being offered to God—indeed prohibit it—and by the Christian era it is an embarrassment to the rabbis who alter the story to say that the girl was  not in fact killed but sentenced to perpetual spinsterhood. 
These examples don’t imply any change in God but they clearly spell out that our knowledge of God is evolutionary.  We continually refine our understanding of God and of his law.  It is not a fixed reality.  I will bring up other examples of how in Christianity the concept of God changes radically as we come to understand God at ever deeper levels.  Some will claim that during the period in which revelation occurs that God tells us more and more about himself but once the canon of scripture closes—with the death of the last apostle—all that can ever be known is known.  But we will see that the Christian concept of God has continued to evolve long after the apostles.  Scripture reflects the experience of God—it does not “reveal it.”  God has revealed God’s Self to humans over the course of centuries—millennia—and continues to do so.  This does not mean that every human articulation of the encounter with God is of equal weight.  There is a tremendous amount of subjectivity in religious experiences of which we must be very careful but it is simply untrue to claim that we no longer learn anything new about God. 
Of course there are those who are terrified of not being able to control what others believe about God.  One priest I know says that in the almost forty years of being a priest, the subject that most angers his listeners when he preaches is “The Mercy of God.”  “You would be surprised,” he says “of how many people demand God to be ‘just’ by which they mean that God should follow the same moral code to which they hold, and when you say that his Mercy overflows our sins—or rather, it overflows the sins of 'others'—such as abortion, homosexual intimacy, entering the United States illegally, thinking for oneself rather than blind obedience to “The Church”—they go nuts.  Of course these are the children of those who thought that God wanted black children to go to a different school than white children or be nursed in ‘separate but equal’ hospital wards and the great-grandchildren of those who thought God wanted some people to ‘own’ others.”  Ah yes, there are many of our presuppositions about God to which we had better give some thought.

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.

Wanted: Sound Leadership

Hilda of Whitby,

a match for any

bishop today

I was at a talk several weeks ago by Father John O’Malley SJ, a Georgetown professor who is a historian and who has written extensively about the Second Vatican Council.  Father O’Malley was asked about the role of women in the Church and he pointed out that until recently the Catholic Church has been seen as a champion of the cause of women.  He mentioned—as I always make a point in my classes—that sixty years ago the only women in the United States who were College Presidents or Hospital Administrators were Catholic nuns.  (Even the famous “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges had men presidents!)  Catholic sisters had broken any number of glass ceilings in the professional and academic world.  (Of course, this was an America in which few women worked outside the home.)  One can go further back in history and see the medical work done by Sisters on the battlefields of our Civil War as well as some of the horrible European wars.  Educational opportunities were open to Sisters that were not open to laywomen of any faith.  Catholic women like Mary Ward and her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Angela Merici with the Ursulines, established schools for women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when education was not available to women.  And of course in the Middle Ages the great Abbeys of nuns such as Barking, Gandersheim, Helfta, or the Paraclete were centers of learning for women that rivaled the great monastic schools of men.  There were remarkable women intellectuals such as Hildegard of Bingen, Roswitha of Gandersheim, Hilda of Whitby, Gertrude of Helfta, Heloise, Gertrude of Hakeborn.  In addition to these scholars there were the great women mystics of the medieval period—Hadewijch of Antwerp, Beatrice of Nazareth, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Genoa, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Brigitte of Sweden and others who wrote books about their spiritual experiences that shaped the lives and spirituality of countless people. 
These women were not people who let others—even priests and bishops—think for them.  There were souls filled with grace and shaped by the faith of the Church but who had the courage and intellect to make up their own minds and be true to their own inner lights—or rather, to be true to the grace of the Holy Spirit within them.  And why do some people think that women—and men—should let the bishops and the priests think for them today? 
What we need are bishops and priests who themselves are intelligent, well-read, clear thinkers and articulate who can explain the principles of our faith in a intellectually convincing way. We don’t need fools like Bishop Daniel Jenky who use intelligence-free rhetoric or Bishop Thomas Olmstead who speaks without researching his subject.  We don’t need a Francis George who is brilliant but so tightly wrapped in his intellect that he inarticulate.  We don’t need a Donald Wuerl who with a second-class academic degree and no professorial experience thinks he can take on a far superior and more practiced intellect such as Elisabeth Johnson.  Hearing someone like Father O’Malley talk, I know there are people in the Church who know their stuff, see the connections between the historic faith of the Church and contemporary life, and can explain the faith at a level when people can make the connections for themselves and make rational and responsible decisions for themselves.  Is it too much to ask that bishops and Church leaders be selected from among the ranks of such men?  The day of a laity who will follow directions of a hierarchy and clergy are over.  People today need to be convinced and we need leaders in the Church who can make their case and not merely expect to impose their will.