Eating the Church is my way of explaining my critiques. From the beginning the Church sought to find her place in the real world of hunger and sickness; power and influence; personality and identity. This task has taken the Church far and wide searching for language to explain God and God’s relationship to humanity. A truly impossible task. Augustine tells a story of a man walking on a beach. A young boy dug a small hole in the sand. He was taking sea water in his hands and pouring into the hole. After a while the man asked the boy, “What are you doing?” The boy answered, “I am emptying the sea into this hole!” Augustine realized that what he was doing, writing a book about the Trinity, was just as ridiculous as that boy’s attempt to empty the Mediterranean Sea into a small hole in the sand. To try and explain God in human language was silly task. Yet a noble and necessary one. As God has speech and language, so does humanity. As God has a consciousness, so does humanity. As God has engaged in self-revelation, so humanity can see that and talk about it. This is part of what makes us human. We have the ability to question and seek answers. And, perhaps, more importantly God is happy when we do. God isn’t afraid of our questions. God will not take offense at our inquiring. According to Scripture humankind was made and fashioned in the image of God. So, God knows who and what we are. It makes God glad when we engage in these human activities.
That’s a long-winded way to say that in the search for identity and place, the Church has often strayed into philosophies and human logic. Much of the earliest Church thought was influenced by the Greeks. Plato and Aristotle influenced many of the great thinkers of the Church. What developed from the strange marriage was a metaphysical view of God that diverged from the Hebrew understanding that it became a stranger to its own historical roots. The unity of humans as a single, living soul was lost to the Greek dualism where the spiritual and physical realms were separated. The spiritual became the ‘perfect’ while the physical was considered base and profane.
God was divided as well. Rather than a Good Creator, God became an angry and vengeful deity as well as a loving Savior. This was clearly displayed in a couple of early so-called heresies. Gnosticism and Marcionism sprung up within the Church. The Gnostics held that a lesser ‘god,’ or demiurge, was responsible for the physical creation of the world. A superior redeemer God was revealed in the Greek Testament. Manichaeism considered the spiritual realm good and the material realm evil. Marcion was Gnosticism on steroids. He developed his own church with scriptures that he approved. His scriptures tossed the Hebrew Scriptures altogether. It consisted of the Gospel of Luke, (edited of course), along with the letters of Paul. For him there was nothing good before the Good God was revealed in the life of Jesus.
In the 17th century brought Descartes and another way to view, or not, God. His thoughts held prominence throughout the period of the Enlightenment when Reason became the primary influence for all of human thought and philosophy. Again, God’s ‘reality’ became subject to a new metaphysics that distorted the witness of the Scriptures. One writer remarked, “the God in whom the 19th and 20th centuries came to disbelieve had been invented only in the 17th century.
It’s no wonder that people are at odds and confused about God!
(Aside: A dear friend of mine once told me that she liked it when I wrote about myself and my thoughts and feelings rather than the abstract theologizing that I am prone to produce. I know that everything written above falls into the latter category. Sorry. But I promise that it is relevant to my experience and feelings!)
In my faith journey I have heard many people say they’re not sure to whom they should pray. “Do I pray to God? Do I pray to the Father? Should I pray to Jesus?” Other folks assume that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is, in fact, the Father. That’s because that God seems brutal and punishes perceived disobedience. He kills and destroys. At best He’s a bully. At worst, a blood-thirsty tyrant. This is not an uncommon view! We can defend and justify this position because those who have come before us have tried to explain God and God’s relationship with the creation through the lenses of human thought and philosophies.
And the Church is responsible! (Knew I’d get there!)
I could go into the history of the Church and point out time when she slid off the rails. That’s not my point here. My point is how the Church has not said or done anything to correct this. How the distortions have not been addressed. Because of this people are confused about God.
Let me start with a quote from the Hebrew Bible, “4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This is commonly known as the Shema. It’s the declaration that there is only One God. It also is the foundation of any discussion about God. Yet the Church has allowed God to be divided into many parts. So, when I mention something about judgement in the Hebrew Bible someone will say, “Oh, that’s the “Father.” My response is, “No. That’s God.” Then we can let confusion ensue. In fact, one of the few mentions in the Hebrew Bible of God referred to as “Father” is in the context of God as Savior of David who was King in Israel. God is the Faithful one whose Love is everlasting. Not of any vengeful god looking for someone to squash.
Jesus is also spoken of as the One who is “the same yesterday and today and forever.” He also told people that “before Abraham, I Am.” The Evangelist John wrote of Jesus as the “Word of God” who “was God” from the very beginning.
God’s Holy Spirit was also present from the beginning of the story. The story tells how the Spirit hovered, undulating over the deep.
Look, I’m not gonna go into depth with any of this. You’re welcome. What I want made as clear as possible is that God is God is God. God ‘is and was and is coming.’ There was no magical change in God after Jesus came. When one prays to God, the prayer is to God. When one prays to the Father, the prayer is to God! When one prays to Jesus, the prayer is to God! When one is filled with the Holy Spirit, one is filled with God! Period!
This is something that the Church avoids discussing. It’s too convoluted and beyond our ability to get our heads around, they say. While I agree that knowledge of God is greater than our brains can understand fully, I disagree vehemently that the self-revelation of God is too obscure. Read the previous paragraph again. That’s how God has revealed Godself. I don’t think that it’s too difficult for the Church to preach this and teach the folks in the pew about God in this way. So much confusion and anxiety could be eliminated.
I hope that this little rant isn’t too far ‘out there.’ I feel strongly about this. It’s past time for the Church to address this topic.
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