The word “God” means so many different things to people...
Of course, the English word “God” would have been unrecognizable to ancient Hebrews and Greeks. Early English speaking Christians searched for a word that would express what the Hebrew scriptures meant by the words “Yahweh” or “Elohim”. They chose the word “God”. Unfortunately, we use the same word to refer to any deity of any religion. That means that the word “God” does not communicate the same thing to everyone.
Socrates always insisted that the first order of business in any discussion is to define the terms to be used. We don’t want to upset Socrates, so lets stop and define the word “God”.
First, Christians believe that God has a personality. He is not like a borderless mist, some undefined, impersonal force of nature. God has a personality. We can know Him, communicate with Him, even have a relationship with Him.
Once we begin to believe that God has a personality then we are likely to ask, “what is His personality like?”
The Bible says that the essence of His personality is a quality called “holiness”. Being holy certainly means that He doesn't lie. He doesn't cheat. He doesn't go back on His word. But even more importantly, the Hebrew word kadosh, which we translate “holy,” means “other.” When we say that God is Holy we are saying that He is not like us or like anything else that we can or could ever know. He is beyond comprehension. He is “awe-inspiring”.
The only thing we can know about God are those things which He has revealed to us. However, even those things are sometimes difficult to grasp, as we have seen. Then, beyond all the we do know about God, there is infinitely more that we do not know. Realizing this keeps us from trying to make Him into our image. It stretches us toward Him rather than trying to bring Him down to our level. When we reject the idea that God is “beyond finding out,” we make a mental or physical image and call that image, “god.”
The Bible calls that process idolatry. It is strictly forbidden by scripture. The problem is, we all have idols; we must always be working to destroy them. We never get to know the real God if we keep admiring the substitutes we have made!
Yet once again we return to worship. We cannot figure God out, but we can worship Him, “in the beauty of holiness”. Jesus tells us (in Matthew 6:9) that we should begin our prayer by recognizing this aspect of God’s character, by saying, “Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed (Holy) be Thy Name!”
Monday, October 27, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thoughts on Trinity
Mark Twain wrote a wonderful story called the Prince and the Pauper. It is about a prince who discovered that a poor boy who often came by the palace looked enough like him to be his twin. So, one day the prince and the pauper traded places. The pauper got to experience royal life and the prince got to experience the life of his subjects. Christians believe that something like this really happened. God became a man and experienced human life, so that human beings could enter paradise and have eternal life.
We are speaking about Jesus, of course. He was a Jew who claimed to be God (see John 10:24-34). He was a wonderful teacher, or rabbi. He claimed to be the legitimate King of Israel. We believe that He was God. We also believe that He was fully man. Christians believe that this God-man, Jesus Christ, offers a way for human beings to become God’s immortal companions. We also believe that as King of the covenant nation of Israel, Christ has granted citizenship to all that believe in Him and accept Him as their King. In other words, Christians believe that the Christian church is the spiritual continuation of the ancient nation of Israel, and that Christians are citizens of that nation.
Sound preposterous? It is preposterous! That is, unless it is true.
If you have the slightest idea that it might be true, I suggest you look deeper into the story for yourself. To do that, you will have to read the Bible. So allow me to give you the “Cliff Notes” version of the Bible.
The Bible is the spiritual history of Israel, the life and teachings of Christ, and the beginnings of the Christian Church. Christians accept the Old Testament, or God’s revelation of Himself to the ancient Hebrews. We also read the New Testament, a collection of writings that introduces Jesus and the Christian Church. It tells us (in Acts 15) that the Church made a decision early in its history to include gentile (non-Jewish) peoples, if they believed in Jesus. It tells us that the purpose of the Church was to help us obey Jesus Christ, to help us grow in Him, and to take His offer of salvation to all the nations of the world. However, the early Christians intended to build upon the revelation that God had already given to His ancient Hebrew people. They certainly did not see their faith as “a new religion. ”
It was their commitment to remain faithful to God’s revelation to the ancient Hebrew people that caused Christians a most difficult theological problem: what to do about their doctrine of God. Being Jews, the early Christian leaders prayed a special prayer, called the Shema, every day. That prayer says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” (Deuteronomy 6:1-4). That prayer is a declaration of monotheism (the belief in one God). It is a pledge to be faithful to the One invisible and almighty God of Israel.
Jews have always been willing to die for that monotheistic belief. Indeed they often have died for that belief, both in ancient and in modern times. The early Christians, being Jews – or at very least believers in the Jewish God – shared all of these convictions.
However, Christians had a dilemma. They believed in God, to whom Jesus had prayed and called Father. They believed that Jesus was Himself God “come in the flesh” (as St. John puts it (in 1 John 4:2,3). They also believed in the Holy Spirit, whom they had experienced after the resurrection of Christ. They said that He too was God! Did that not make Christians tritheists (believers in three gods)? Which were they; monotheists or tritheists?
What a problem! They believed in one God. But they also believed that the Father was God, that Jesus was God and that the Holy Spirit was God. They believed that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were somehow distinct from one another. Yet they continued to fiercely declare that there were not three gods … only one! “What could they possibly mean?” their Jewish brothers were continually asking.
It took Christians about three centuries to develop a language of faith that would fully express what they believed about the nature of God. Sometime in the second century AD, Christians begin to use what we call the Apostles’ Creed which declared their faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, the creed did not attempt to further clarify the issue. As the years went by however, Christian leaders and thinkers gradually began to use a new term to express what they believed about God. It was the word “trinity, ” a shortened way of saying tri-unity, or “three in one.”
Then the Church Fathers (the people who participated in the early church councils) borrowed a word from the theater (of all places!) to express how Father, Son and Holy Spirit were distinctions within God’s nature. In Latin, that word was “persona.” Although the English word “person” is how we normally translate the Latin word, in those days a persona never referred to an individual as it does for us. According to the Langerscheit-Shorter Latin Dictionary (McGraw Hill Book Co.:1969) the word meant a “mask” (worn by an actor), “character” (part in a play), station, rank or condition.
Obviously, by deciding to use the word persona, the Church fathers were using a metaphor to help us understand the nature of God as we had come to understand Him in the New Testament. Like all metaphors, the word persona has strengths and weaknesses. A mask hides the actual face of a person. A role is something an actor assumes in contrast to his actual personality. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not God’s masks; they are who He is. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not roles the God assumes; they are revelations of His actual nature. So the word persona can confuse as well as enlighten. Greek speaking Christians decided not to use the word persona for that very reason. However, Western Christians have continued to use it, despite its limitations because we really have no other word that works nearly as well. I once heard an Eastern Orthodox theologian say that “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are the interior names of God, they tell us what God is like inside Himself. That comment helped me a lot.
Anyway, if your mind is turning around and around, don’t feel bad! The fault is not with your intelligence. All the best minds of the Christian church have found it difficult to express what the divine Godhead is like. They still do! They often get frustrated!
Nonetheless, let’s try again! If God is really who the Church Fathers proclaimed, then it is important that we try to understand them. In the Old Testament, God reveals that He is One and that this truth is extremely important. Israel’s God was unique. One rabbi says that when God told Moses, “I am what I am!” He was saying something like, “If I told you what I was really like, you would never believe it!” Another writes that in the shema (“Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) God is saying “I am in a class all by myself. There is no one like me.”
God wanted His people to understand that He was not some celestial pagan king, capable of being bribed and manipulated. God was above all of that. He was in a class by Himself. One!
We are speaking about Jesus, of course. He was a Jew who claimed to be God (see John 10:24-34). He was a wonderful teacher, or rabbi. He claimed to be the legitimate King of Israel. We believe that He was God. We also believe that He was fully man. Christians believe that this God-man, Jesus Christ, offers a way for human beings to become God’s immortal companions. We also believe that as King of the covenant nation of Israel, Christ has granted citizenship to all that believe in Him and accept Him as their King. In other words, Christians believe that the Christian church is the spiritual continuation of the ancient nation of Israel, and that Christians are citizens of that nation.
Sound preposterous? It is preposterous! That is, unless it is true.
If you have the slightest idea that it might be true, I suggest you look deeper into the story for yourself. To do that, you will have to read the Bible. So allow me to give you the “Cliff Notes” version of the Bible.
The Bible is the spiritual history of Israel, the life and teachings of Christ, and the beginnings of the Christian Church. Christians accept the Old Testament, or God’s revelation of Himself to the ancient Hebrews. We also read the New Testament, a collection of writings that introduces Jesus and the Christian Church. It tells us (in Acts 15) that the Church made a decision early in its history to include gentile (non-Jewish) peoples, if they believed in Jesus. It tells us that the purpose of the Church was to help us obey Jesus Christ, to help us grow in Him, and to take His offer of salvation to all the nations of the world. However, the early Christians intended to build upon the revelation that God had already given to His ancient Hebrew people. They certainly did not see their faith as “a new religion. ”
It was their commitment to remain faithful to God’s revelation to the ancient Hebrew people that caused Christians a most difficult theological problem: what to do about their doctrine of God. Being Jews, the early Christian leaders prayed a special prayer, called the Shema, every day. That prayer says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” (Deuteronomy 6:1-4). That prayer is a declaration of monotheism (the belief in one God). It is a pledge to be faithful to the One invisible and almighty God of Israel.
Jews have always been willing to die for that monotheistic belief. Indeed they often have died for that belief, both in ancient and in modern times. The early Christians, being Jews – or at very least believers in the Jewish God – shared all of these convictions.
However, Christians had a dilemma. They believed in God, to whom Jesus had prayed and called Father. They believed that Jesus was Himself God “come in the flesh” (as St. John puts it (in 1 John 4:2,3). They also believed in the Holy Spirit, whom they had experienced after the resurrection of Christ. They said that He too was God! Did that not make Christians tritheists (believers in three gods)? Which were they; monotheists or tritheists?
What a problem! They believed in one God. But they also believed that the Father was God, that Jesus was God and that the Holy Spirit was God. They believed that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were somehow distinct from one another. Yet they continued to fiercely declare that there were not three gods … only one! “What could they possibly mean?” their Jewish brothers were continually asking.
It took Christians about three centuries to develop a language of faith that would fully express what they believed about the nature of God. Sometime in the second century AD, Christians begin to use what we call the Apostles’ Creed which declared their faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, the creed did not attempt to further clarify the issue. As the years went by however, Christian leaders and thinkers gradually began to use a new term to express what they believed about God. It was the word “trinity, ” a shortened way of saying tri-unity, or “three in one.”
Then the Church Fathers (the people who participated in the early church councils) borrowed a word from the theater (of all places!) to express how Father, Son and Holy Spirit were distinctions within God’s nature. In Latin, that word was “persona.” Although the English word “person” is how we normally translate the Latin word, in those days a persona never referred to an individual as it does for us. According to the Langerscheit-Shorter Latin Dictionary (McGraw Hill Book Co.:1969) the word meant a “mask” (worn by an actor), “character” (part in a play), station, rank or condition.
Obviously, by deciding to use the word persona, the Church fathers were using a metaphor to help us understand the nature of God as we had come to understand Him in the New Testament. Like all metaphors, the word persona has strengths and weaknesses. A mask hides the actual face of a person. A role is something an actor assumes in contrast to his actual personality. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not God’s masks; they are who He is. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not roles the God assumes; they are revelations of His actual nature. So the word persona can confuse as well as enlighten. Greek speaking Christians decided not to use the word persona for that very reason. However, Western Christians have continued to use it, despite its limitations because we really have no other word that works nearly as well. I once heard an Eastern Orthodox theologian say that “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are the interior names of God, they tell us what God is like inside Himself. That comment helped me a lot.
Anyway, if your mind is turning around and around, don’t feel bad! The fault is not with your intelligence. All the best minds of the Christian church have found it difficult to express what the divine Godhead is like. They still do! They often get frustrated!
Nonetheless, let’s try again! If God is really who the Church Fathers proclaimed, then it is important that we try to understand them. In the Old Testament, God reveals that He is One and that this truth is extremely important. Israel’s God was unique. One rabbi says that when God told Moses, “I am what I am!” He was saying something like, “If I told you what I was really like, you would never believe it!” Another writes that in the shema (“Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) God is saying “I am in a class all by myself. There is no one like me.”
God wanted His people to understand that He was not some celestial pagan king, capable of being bribed and manipulated. God was above all of that. He was in a class by Himself. One!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
The Gospel of Halloween
We are in the season of masquerade. Soon the streets will be filled with pumpkins, cats, little red devils and mighty super heroes about waist high. Many of us are afraid of Halloween, either because it has become unsafe to take our children from door to door to collect candy, or because many Christians have come to believe that there is something inherently wicked about this holiday when children dress up in masks, capes and costumes. The charge of course is that Halloween has pagan roots, which is true. What is also true is that our contemporary preoccupation about paganism sometimes drives me up a wall!
According to some people, even Christmas and Easter (or an annual celebration of any kind) is a Hellish invention to trip up the saints as they make their way toward Heaven. The source of some of this attitude towards holidays is a war against any part of our human experience that might actually be fun! But replacing elements of our life that have non-Christian sources would be next to impossible. If we really wanted to be rid of all things with pagan roots, we would have to rename the days of the week and the months of the year. Also, church steeples and the great seal of the United States would have to be eliminated. (Church steeples are rooted in the worship of – Ok, I'll say this as delicately as I can – "fertility.")
But before any of my readers get their righteous ruffles up, I'll quickly reassure you that I agree that many aspects of Halloween have become unsafe and unholy. In fact, I'll even agree that it started out unholy – before Christianity even arrived in Northern Europe. It was a very important day on the Druid calendar, among the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. When my Irish ancestors became Christians however, they did what Christians often did; they re-appropriated this festival for a new purpose. Halloween was now to be called All Saints Eve, a time to remember all the saints of God who were not honored by name on other days. (Many of the 'bigger and more famous' saints had their own appropriated day of celebration. Apparently we needed a day to honor all the 'little people!')
Anyways, the old Druid holy day got converted. What survived was our custom of dressing up.
Quite honestly, I love dressing up. Always have. I love the theater, acting, stages, props …all that stuff. So as a kid I naturally loved Halloween. Back in the ancient days of my childhood, even very conservative Christians didn't mind dressing up their children like witches because we thought there were no real witches left in the world. We were playing around with something that had been vanquished, defeated. We only started worrying about the significance of Halloween when people began to take witchcraft seriously again. Now, even Christians take it seriously – and, unfortunately, fear it. So a good fun day for children has been effectively destroyed. (It makes one wonder if there will be any childhood at all in the near future.)
Anyways, I loved Halloween. My parents bought me a Superman suit when I was in the second grade. I wore it to school under my clothes and impressed several of my schoolmates by opening my shirt to show them the famous “S" on my chest.
The most important thing about that suit was the cape. Because, as every child knows, the cape is the piece of clothing which really makes Superman SUPERMAN! If you let a boy tie a towel around his neck, you will see him instantly turn into a flying fool. He will run faster than a speeding Chihuahua. He will leap tall end tables in a single bound.
I loved it. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Iron Man - all those guys. A humble worker at The Daily Planet could turn into quasi-deity by just changing clothes in a phone booth. A humble preacher's kid from a house on the river bank could turn into the champion of justice, the guardian of the oppressed. One red piece of cloth could do that!
Children can play these types of roles openly and without shame. Adults learn to dress up and pretend a bit more subtly. By mutual agreement, we decide to allow others to play along in this ‘game’. We play without comment, because the other players return the favor. And many times, as the song says, we get lost in the masquerade. The reason children want to dress up and pretend is because that is what they see modeled by adults. Much of life will be about dressing up, pretending, and hiding out… first behind this mask and then the next. Unfortunately, few people get around to developing the person behind the mask. Indeed, some people panic when they lose their mask because they are not sure if there is anything behind it.
I once heard an Orthodox priest say, “The problem with you pastors who don’t wear vestments is that you never take yours off!” I had to think about that for a while. His point was that when we consciously put on a mask or a costume, we are complexly aware that we are playing a role that is not in all respects who we actually are. A judge wears a robe and a policeman wears a uniform because they realize that they are speaking on behalf of the law and not their own behalf.
Perhaps if we put on a mask more often, we might become more aware of our invisible masks.
Some masks are real: they reflect some role we play on behalf of others, but which require more than we are humanly able to give. The doctor’s smock, the priest’s collar, the judge’s robe – all these say to the wearer and to those who view them that the role the person is wearing is more than the person of himself or herself.
Some of our masks are false and should be discarded. The mannerisms and material objects I display in order to hide my insecurities, the continual references to academic degrees or accomplishments – these kinds of masks distort my humanity and help me hide from myself the need to develop and mature.
The saints are the people who discard false masks and who become what the real masks represent. We have all “put on Christ.” The mask is far beyond where we are when we first dress up as Christian. A saint is a person from whom the Lord rips off the “Jesus mask’, only to reveal that the person underneath has been molded by that mask and now has genuinely become what he was pretending to be.
Those are good things to think about as we approach ‘All Saints Day’ the day that replaced the night of devils and deception.
Now, if I could only fit into my old Superman costume…
According to some people, even Christmas and Easter (or an annual celebration of any kind) is a Hellish invention to trip up the saints as they make their way toward Heaven. The source of some of this attitude towards holidays is a war against any part of our human experience that might actually be fun! But replacing elements of our life that have non-Christian sources would be next to impossible. If we really wanted to be rid of all things with pagan roots, we would have to rename the days of the week and the months of the year. Also, church steeples and the great seal of the United States would have to be eliminated. (Church steeples are rooted in the worship of – Ok, I'll say this as delicately as I can – "fertility.")
But before any of my readers get their righteous ruffles up, I'll quickly reassure you that I agree that many aspects of Halloween have become unsafe and unholy. In fact, I'll even agree that it started out unholy – before Christianity even arrived in Northern Europe. It was a very important day on the Druid calendar, among the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. When my Irish ancestors became Christians however, they did what Christians often did; they re-appropriated this festival for a new purpose. Halloween was now to be called All Saints Eve, a time to remember all the saints of God who were not honored by name on other days. (Many of the 'bigger and more famous' saints had their own appropriated day of celebration. Apparently we needed a day to honor all the 'little people!')
Anyways, the old Druid holy day got converted. What survived was our custom of dressing up.
Quite honestly, I love dressing up. Always have. I love the theater, acting, stages, props …all that stuff. So as a kid I naturally loved Halloween. Back in the ancient days of my childhood, even very conservative Christians didn't mind dressing up their children like witches because we thought there were no real witches left in the world. We were playing around with something that had been vanquished, defeated. We only started worrying about the significance of Halloween when people began to take witchcraft seriously again. Now, even Christians take it seriously – and, unfortunately, fear it. So a good fun day for children has been effectively destroyed. (It makes one wonder if there will be any childhood at all in the near future.)
Anyways, I loved Halloween. My parents bought me a Superman suit when I was in the second grade. I wore it to school under my clothes and impressed several of my schoolmates by opening my shirt to show them the famous “S" on my chest.
The most important thing about that suit was the cape. Because, as every child knows, the cape is the piece of clothing which really makes Superman SUPERMAN! If you let a boy tie a towel around his neck, you will see him instantly turn into a flying fool. He will run faster than a speeding Chihuahua. He will leap tall end tables in a single bound.
I loved it. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Iron Man - all those guys. A humble worker at The Daily Planet could turn into quasi-deity by just changing clothes in a phone booth. A humble preacher's kid from a house on the river bank could turn into the champion of justice, the guardian of the oppressed. One red piece of cloth could do that!
Children can play these types of roles openly and without shame. Adults learn to dress up and pretend a bit more subtly. By mutual agreement, we decide to allow others to play along in this ‘game’. We play without comment, because the other players return the favor. And many times, as the song says, we get lost in the masquerade. The reason children want to dress up and pretend is because that is what they see modeled by adults. Much of life will be about dressing up, pretending, and hiding out… first behind this mask and then the next. Unfortunately, few people get around to developing the person behind the mask. Indeed, some people panic when they lose their mask because they are not sure if there is anything behind it.
I once heard an Orthodox priest say, “The problem with you pastors who don’t wear vestments is that you never take yours off!” I had to think about that for a while. His point was that when we consciously put on a mask or a costume, we are complexly aware that we are playing a role that is not in all respects who we actually are. A judge wears a robe and a policeman wears a uniform because they realize that they are speaking on behalf of the law and not their own behalf.
Perhaps if we put on a mask more often, we might become more aware of our invisible masks.
Some masks are real: they reflect some role we play on behalf of others, but which require more than we are humanly able to give. The doctor’s smock, the priest’s collar, the judge’s robe – all these say to the wearer and to those who view them that the role the person is wearing is more than the person of himself or herself.
Some of our masks are false and should be discarded. The mannerisms and material objects I display in order to hide my insecurities, the continual references to academic degrees or accomplishments – these kinds of masks distort my humanity and help me hide from myself the need to develop and mature.
The saints are the people who discard false masks and who become what the real masks represent. We have all “put on Christ.” The mask is far beyond where we are when we first dress up as Christian. A saint is a person from whom the Lord rips off the “Jesus mask’, only to reveal that the person underneath has been molded by that mask and now has genuinely become what he was pretending to be.
Those are good things to think about as we approach ‘All Saints Day’ the day that replaced the night of devils and deception.
Now, if I could only fit into my old Superman costume…
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