Thinking about God in a world of Terror

August 2012, a stopover in Oxford after a project in Nairobi, Kenya.

  

Preface 

A bare fact of our world is that some people mix politics and religion. The point of this series is not to argue whether the mixing of the two is good or evil. Rather, the point is to remind ourselves that many people do think that it is good, or at least necessary, to see politics through spiritual eyes. If we wish to work for peace and for justice then we must, because of the global reality of religion, deepen our understanding of what politics and religion are, and why, for some, their mixing is important, even unavoidable. We must begin listening to the thoughts - the hopes and fears, successes and failures - of the outsiders.


This first article deals with the reality of a relatively new outsider in the realm of ideas in the West - Christian theology. Many would step in here and say, "Look around us, religion has all sorts of power!" I agree. But many religions, if not most, are losing any significant influence in the realm of accepted cultural ideas. Christianity, of the orthodox tradition in the West, has a voice outside of the State and outside of pop-culture; but within those two realms it is silenced. Christian theology is barred from public discourse, and yet 77% of Americans claim to be Christian, and 27% of Americans claim to be broadly of the orthodox tradition, focusing on the historical death and resurrection of Jesus and its implications for all people. These things must be discussed openly and directly. If we wish to unify, then we must understand our differences.

The book of Isaiah will be a great place to start.


I: Introduction

Imagine, if you will, that like me you believe that the following verses are true.  (Remember, they contain mental-visual poetry; the meanings are retained but the images are not meant to be taken 'literally.' For example, in the first verse below God is not imagined to be sitting down 'somewhere up there', materially; rather, God is to be understood from the various imagery as the all-knowing, all-wise, and all-loving true sovereign.)

  It is he - who sits above the circle of the earth,

and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers -

who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,

and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

  who brings princes to nothing,

and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness.

                        ... 

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary;

his understanding is unsearchable.

  He gives power to the faint,

and to him who has no might he increases strength.*

The views, political or otherwise, of many orthodox Christian thinkers** today reflect the central ideas that are found in these verses. Political theologians have, for more than two-thousand years, structured their political concerns on the concerns of God. "What is God like?" the theologian asks. "And if God is like that, how does that knowledge of God's nature, character and purpose change human meaning?" Political theologians have drawn their knowledge of God's concerns from both God's revealed essential character and God's action in the world (the technical terminology of God's essential character and action in the world are 'the immanent Trinity' and 'the economic Trinity,' respectively).

The phrase that I used above, "revealed essential character and ... action...", needs some explanation. Orthodox Christians believe (1) that God intends and desires to communicate with humanity and (2) that God has done so in and through the Bible, especially in the person of Jesus. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world believe this. Those who believe this think that human beings are responsible to someone other than ourselves and our environment. However, remembering the character of God, especially as displayed in God's self-sacrificial death on the cross and subsequent resurrection after death, to be responsible to God includes loving others and caring for the environment.

To sum up so far: The beliefs (1) that God is the creator of all things and (2) that God has communicated his character through his actions in real, material human history - these beliefs greatly change the way that a person views the world, politically or otherwise. The first, God as creator, is the centerpiece of this post.


II: Creation

"The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth" (Isa. 40:28). This belief alone drastically changes the way that people and political organizations work together. I've often said that when people believe the first five words of the Bible - "In the beginning God created..." - they make different life decisions. Beliefs do actually influence actions, not least political actions.

Not only is God seen as creator, but an historically orthodox Christian believes that God is other than creation, and therefore not beholden to the laws of nature (biology, physics, and so on). The material laws, in this view, have a beginning, a source. God is the source of those laws. One significant implication of God's difference from and sovereignty over creation is this: If the laws of nature work in such a way so as to propagate evolving life, this does not mean that God isn't centrally involved. Consider afresh the meaning of the voice of God in Genesis 1:24:

Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth...

If God is the source of the natural laws, and is sovereign over them, it necessarily follows that, whether the truth is in evolution or six-day creation, the ever-deeper, ever deepening truth is that the whole universe - natural laws included - are sourced in God.*** And this deeper and deepening truth is the politically important bit.

It is important because it divides. For a non-believer, ethics, morality, politics, and so on, are all based on a purely material world in which there is no 'Creator'. The materialist need not consider what God wants done with the world. The way in which person thinks and acts toward people and things will be altered by their beliefs about God and the world. Perhaps this earth is just a speck in a blind, ever-expanding cosmos. Perhaps not.

Isaiah 40, in the portion quoted above, proclaims God's status as Creator immediately following the statement that God "brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness." God is, in this text, unimaginably more powerful than any human leader; Christians believed that people, political rulers among them, have been created by, through, and for the just and loving God, and are ultimately responsible to God.

This is just the beginning. A person's understanding of the character of God profoundly alters the way that person views and responds to all of life.

________

* Isaiah chapter 40, verses 22-3 and 28-9. (Isaiah is a poetic, prophetic book in the Hebrew Bible - in the Christian Bible, the Old Testament)

** I say orthodox based on the creeds and canons of the Church over the course of approximately two-thousand years. Orthodox Christianity has been incredibly steady in its core beliefs, nevertheless situating itself within the surrounding culture in peripheral matters.

*** Whatever the case may be, let the Church not divide over science, or even the interpretations of the poetry that presents the world in Genesis 1. Those verses have been interpreted in myriad ways by the most influential figures in Church history. Augustine (3rd century AD), the father of many of our specific theological and political categories, thought that the all-powerful God must have created everything in an instant, because of the influence of Plato's philosophy. Augustine interpreted the first chapter of Genesis allegorically. Others have said other things. C.S. Lewis thought that evolution was true, though the product of intelligent design and the guiding hand of the Designer. On the other hand, the push for literalism in the creation account of Genesis is very new - we're talking less than 75 years. Western Christians desire that the Bible address explicitly all cultural concerns. Science is a significant cultural concern. There is this fear that if Genesis doesn't refer to the insights of modern science then the truth of the Bible is in question. This simply is not the case. We are bringing massive interpretive lenses to the text when we expect that the first chapters of Genesis were written in modern categories with scientific precision. The point is this: however God created, God is sovereign. If evolution is true, it proves nothing of God, except perhaps that he is a God of careful, lasting life that changes and adapts to meet the needs of its environment. That to me doesn't sound too bad. And, incidentally, it makes sense both of the line, "Let the earth bring forth...", and of God's long and adapting treatment of his son among the nations - ancient Israel - in the grand narrative of the Hebrew Bible.