Some Observations Concerning Our Thinking About God and About Christ

Some Observations Concerning Our Thinking About God and About Christ 

1. God is not threatened by our various opinions and beliefs about Him/Her. Likewise, neither is Jesus Christ threatened. God, in all of God’s manifestations, can take care of Himself/Herself without human help. God does not need to be “protected” from our opinions about Him/Her. 

2. All of our titles for God and for Christ, and all of our metaphors and similes used to describe God and Christ are only partial and inadequate. And they cannot affect God’s reality. When we pray, we may address God in terms of the beliefs that we have, but in the back of our minds we are (or at least always should be) addressing God, not as we believe God to be, but as God knows Himself/Herself to be. 

3. When we speak of God and of Christ we can only use metaphors and similes. We can speak only in terms of our human experience, and using limited and inadequate human language. I am convinced that God has no genitalia, and thus, no gender. This is not a matter of “political correctness” for me. “He” or “She,” “Himself” or “Herself,” will do equally well for me. The main thing is that for me, God is a Person, with Whom a human being can have a “relationship.” I think that is at least part of what it means to say that humanity was created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26). 

Human experience and this-worldly, human languages are limited, and inadequate to describe heavenly, other-worldly matters. When we talk about God we are attempting a basically impossible task: to describe the indescribable and to express the inexpressible. 

For example, God is described and addressed in Scripture as “Father.” And contrary to the “politically correct” concepts of some Christians I know, I think that calling God “Father” is perfectly OK. But this does not mean we must believe that God exists in a human body having male genitalia. And it does not mean that the use of “Mother” or other feminine metaphors for God is excluded or inappropriate, for the Bible itself uses such metaphors. But the use of the term “Father” does mean that God is perceived in some sense as being the originator, the begetter, the initiator of human existence. It is also an indicator that God cares for human beings as in some sense members of God’s “family,” and that humans can have a degree of relationship to God as a “Person,” and not just as an abstraction. The term also suggests that God is in a role of “authority,” setting guidelines for His/Her children as they grow up within the household of faith. 

Yet none of the writers of Scripture would assume that to call God “Father” is to limit the Being, the essence, the character, or the qualities of God to that one metaphor. On the contrary, the term “Father” is not adequate in itself to describe God, and it does not tell us everything that God is. Furthermore, the term “Father,” used without qualification, can be misleading. 

My own human father, for example, was the husband of my mother, and he was the “breadwinner” in my family. He had, along with his good qualities, many imperfections. I loved him, but sometimes I feared him, and at other times I was annoyed with him, and in his later years he was not the caregiver for his family, but rather, the family was his caregiver. I do not think of God as “Father” in those terms. Indeed, some of us may have grown up not having experienced in any sense the kind of “fatherhood” that the writers of Scripture intended to portray by the use of that concept. Some of us may have grown up in a family with a mother, but no father, in the household at all, and others may have lived in a household where the father was either totally uncaring, or even abusive. 

Thus, many find it difficult to identify with the metaphor “Father” for God. But that does not mean that the term should no longer be used. It means only that every metaphor for God must be supplemented by other metaphors, and that every person must draw upon the entire wealth of metaphors and similes used for God in Scripture, and perhaps even envision new ones, and relate them to their own experiences and understanding of God. 

4. As for our understanding of the Person of Jesus, we should remind ourselves that none of the writers of the Gospels, as far as we can tell, were actual “eyewitnesses” to the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. (The names of the Gospels were given to them many years after their writing.) Some of their material may have come from such eyewitnesses, but there is still a strong interpretive element involved in the Gospels, and the same thing would have been true of the narration of any eyewitnesses whose testimony was handed down and utilized in the writing of our Gospels. Oral tradition about what Jesus did, and Who Jesus was, and what Jesus was like, has been filtered through the experiences and the faith interpretations of those who handed down the traditions. That would be only natural, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that this is the case. 

5. It is probable that Jesus Himself never publicly proclaimed that He was God in the flesh, and that He never Himself used most of the titles for Himself that later Christians have used to describe Him. For the most part such titles have come from later reflections of the earliest Christians and their descendants in the faith. However, that does not necessarily mean that those titles do not express a part of the truth about Who Jesus was and about what His work was. But we cannot now recover from the Gospels exactly what Jesus believed about Himself, because so much of what we encounter in the Gospels is overlaid with later faith-interpretation. Yet I do believe that there is a fairly reliable impression of Him that does emerge when we study the Gospels carefully, with an open mind, and using the best tools of modern Biblical scholarship. 

6. Paul is probably the closest to be being an “eyewitness” to the Risen Christ whose testimony we possess. But even in His own writings Paul is very reticent to discuss in detail just what the Risen Christ was like. And as far as we know Paul was not an eyewitness to Jesus’ earthly life and ministry. And it is even possible for an “eyewitness” to mis-interpret what he or she has experienced. Paul virtually never calls Jesus “God.”[1] However, from the experiences that he had with the Risen Christ, Paul does attribute to Jesus many of the “attributes” of God, while also clearly describing Jesus as fully human. 

7. The writers in the New Testament who are most insistent that Jesus was God (namely, the writer of the Fourth Gospel and of the Letters of John, and the writer of the Book of Hebrews), are the very writers who are also most insistent on the full humanity of Jesus. If pressed, they would probably insist that Jesus was both fully Divine and fully human, and not just God “masquerading” as a human being. The writer of the Letters of John even insists that anyone who denies that Jesus came “in the flesh” as a human being is an “Anti-Christ” (1 John 2:22 ff., 4:2-3; 2 John 7)! 

8. In the New Testament there appears to be a “backward trend” in the understandings of Jesus by the various writers. The earliest writer, Paul, seems to hold that, at the death of Jesus, God “adopted” Him as “Messiah” and “Son of God.” And in this view, the resurrection is practically identical with the concept of the “ascension.” Of course, Paul eventually seems to progress somewhat beyond that, but he almost never actually speaks of Jesus as being “God.” The earliest Gospel, Mark, apparently holds that God “adopted” Jesus at the time of Jesus’ Baptism, and that His disciples did not come to this understanding until the incident at Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks, “Who do people say that I am?” Matthew and Luke, perhaps a generation later than Mark, seem to hold that Jesus became “Son of God” and “Messiah” at his birth. And then the latest Gospel, that of John, holds that Jesus was Divine from the creation of the world. It appears that, as people came to experience the Christian faith, and sought to understand that experience, and to reflect upon it, their understandings were enlarged. 

9. But most of the titles and metaphors for Christ in the New Testament are not statements about the nature of Christ (Divine vs. human) at all, and they are not related to the later controversies that led to the definitions of the ecumenical Church councils and the creeds in the fourth century CE. The titles and metaphors for Jesus in the New Testament are related, not so much to Who and what Jesus was, but rather, to what Jesus did, and to what those early followers were convinced that the risen and ascended Jesus continued to do in their lives. Those titles and metaphors were never meant primarily to describe Jesus’ essence, but rather, they were used to describe Jesus functions and continuing activity, in light of what those earliest Christians had experienced as Jesus’ followers, both during His ministry, and after His death. And the central function that they described was that Jesus lived, and suffered, and died, and was raised, in accordance with the will of God, as a mediator for God’s love and forgiveness to and for all sinful human beings. 

10. The various “doctrines” that we Christians have held through the centuries about God and about Christ did not come first. No one at the beginning just handed out the “doctrines” about the nature of God and about the nature of Christ, and said to the very earliest Christians, “First you must believe the truth of these “doctrines,” and then you will be ‘saved.’” On the contrary, first, there were experiences with Jesus during His earthly ministry. And then, there were experiences of Jesus’ living Presence after His death. And people then reflected on the meaning and significance of these experiences. Only then came the “doctrines,” by which people attempted to explain to themselves and to others, however inadequately, their understandings of the significance of those experiences, . 

11. It may be true that there is a “problem” with the differing metaphors and similes and doctrines concerning the nature of God and of Christ, and concerning the work of Christ. If so, that “problem” is the natural result of the fact that different people, at different times in the history of the Church, have experienced God in different ways, and even when they had the same kinds of experiences, they still interpreted them differently. This should not be surprising, and it is not a bad thing, for study about God is like the examination of a finely cut diamond – only more so. Certainly a diamond has a lot of facets and its true beauty is often known only by examining it from many angles, and in different kinds of light. But how much more so must it inevitably be with God! 

12. Personally, I am still trying to keep an open mind about just Who and what Jesus was and is. My experiences with God and with Christ grow every day. And often, to grow means to change. To a certain extent I am sympathetic with the aims and the methodology of the “Jesus Seminar,” and I am very impressed with the color-coded translation of the Gospels that they have produced. And I look forward to their completion of the entire New Testament. But I do not agree with a lot of their conclusions. In fact, I believe that many of their conclusions about the words and acts of Jesus and about Jesus’ own self-consciousness were colored (no pun intended) by their preconceptions about him before they ever began their investigations as a group. All of us must guard against being prejudiced by our preconceptions. 

A Jewish rabbi friend once said to me, “The one sticking point that I have with you Christians is your belief that Jesus became God. It’s arrogant for anyone to think that any human being could become God.” I told him that I was in full agreement with him when the matter is put that way. But I did not feel that the New Testament writers were attempting to convey that idea at all. Practically all of them would have insisted on the full humanity of Jesus. But they also recognized that Jesus was unique and special, and they attributed His uniqueness and “special-ness” to God’s working in the Person of Jesus. They believed that God manifested Himself in the life and Person of the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Our “doctrines” about Jesus have been our inadequate attempts, using inadequate human language, to interpret our experiences of that “special-ness” that we each find in Jesus. 

I told my Jewish friend that my preferred way of stating the matter was to simply to say with Paul (2 Corinthians 5:19) that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.” And I further told him that even in that statement I felt that Paul’s emphasis was not on the nature of Jesus, but on His function and activity. Furthermore, I suggested, even where Paul himself and the other New Testament writers appear to go beyond that, the idea was never that a human being became God, but rather, that God manifested Himself/Herself in the Person of this human being, precisely for the purpose of effecting that reconciliation. 

Those views are the starting point for my conception of Jesus, but I hope I always continue to be open-minded and to grow in my understanding of such matters. 

[1] Some insist that he does this in Romans 9:5, but whether Christ is called “God” in that passage depends on the way the Greek text is punctuated, and the earliest Greek manuscripts themselves did not have punctuation. If Paul did call Jesus God here, it would be an unusual departure from his customary practice. Personally, I believe Paul was too Jewish in his outlook to do that, although, of course, I could be mistaken.