What We Talk About When We Talk About God

 

Moses & Burning Bush, Byzantine mosaic

"Is God real?" In Theology: a short introduction David Ford writes that the answer depends on what you mean by "God" and what you mean by "real."

Sounds like an evasion. One type of reader will say that theologians just complicate something obvious, while another type of reader will scoff that a theologian can't give a straight "yes or no" answer because there's really nothing there to talk about, only our own projections on the unknown.

But this reader is having some fun.

I'm amused when Ford sidesteps the different concepts of God by defining "God" as "that which is worshipped."

Then it's refreshing to be reminded that there are different kinds of reality. A table is real; a conversation that happened at that table centuries ago may have been real; love may be real. Even writing in 1999, before the era of deep fakes, Ford avers that all ways of determining reality rely to some extent on trust -- of your senses, of your sources, of your reasoning, of your experience.

Experience, what Ford calls "self involvement" in a faith is what builds the trust that assures the believer of reality. Seeing that believers in all kinds of faiths have "experience," what are Christians to think? Ford writes that we can all be "bilingual" in faith, respecting elements of worship that we share while remaining "agnostic" about relationships of one faith tradition to another.

I suspect that "the Trinity" would not be the first answer that anyone in my church would give to the question "Who is God?" But Ford points out that the God worshipped by Jesus and his Jewish followers was already experienced three ways. In a voice from a bush that burned yet was not consumed -- a sign of ongoing and everlasting power -- God tells Moses "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I have heard the cries of my people." Asked for a name, God says "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be." Ford points out that these are elements of the Trinity: Creator God known through history, Compassionate God with us in our suffering, and unbounded Spirit God who "can go on springing surprises in history."

"Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus," Ford writes, and find that the first Christians experienced God in trinitarian terms. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of Jesus. In Jesus, God was compassionately involved in our lives. "The resurrection was the great surprise... comparable to a new creation," Ford writes.

To me, the surprise in Ford's essay is that he moves on to look at the messy way this idea of the Trinity was worked out over the first 300 years of Christianity, first among followers of a persecuted sect, and then among leaders in an imperial church. Ford makes that a model for how we all know what is real, through practice:

...teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. (35)

My big takeaway from this is how Christian theology was never just "deductions from authoritative statements" but was -- and still is! -- "worked out by worshippers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday life [and] the ups and downs of history."

Ford confirms my sense that the ancient doctrine of the Trinity is getting more attention now than when I first believed; the renewed emphasis on the Trinity has been "exploding" for less than a century.

So, what do Christians mean by "God?" Naturally, Ford gives three parts to his answer: don't accept any description of God that's less than trinitarian; do see God's very being as a relationship that includes us in the love between Father, Son, and Spirit; and be ready for "more surprises" from this God.

At this point in his chapter, Ford focuses on that idea of "trust" mentioned above. He warns that the Christian scriptures are "vulnerable" to being "misunderstood, manipulated, tortured, and killed" -- like Jesus himself (43).

Ford's final message in the chapter concerns peoples of different faiths. Christians know the Trinity through experience. They can learn the languages of other faiths "through study, collaboration, hospitality, and friendship across the boundaries separating the religions and worldviews."

That's part of what we're talking about when we talk about God.

[This is my reflection on David F. Ford  "Thinking of God," third chapter in Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press).]

[In chapter 6, Ford explores many ways that Christians have explained the meaning of the crucifixion -- including metaphors of the sacrificial lamb, conquering hero, ransom paid to the Devil -- before finding a succinct and very satisfying answer.  See my response, Angles on the Crucifixion (10/2018).]