Saturday, November 26, 2005 AD
"At all costs cling to the revealed God"
Great Luther quote from Jeremy at Living Among Mysteries:
As Luther points out, all the things that "everyone" agrees on about God - even atheists, when constructing a God which they then choose not to believe in; I speak from personal experience - are meaningless speculation: the "attributes", the abstract qualities, the in-that-ableness and im-this-ableness. As Luther puts it somewhere else, "I know of no God other than the one called Jesus Christ".
Even the concept of "revelation" can be misleading when we turn it into an abstract concept of which Jesus is merely an example (even if the best example). Jesus isn't only the revealed God, or the God who reveals - he also defines what revelation is (a point made very effectively by the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, in his book The Revelation of God).
Away with abstraction! The gospel is about concrete things: not an abstract God, but a God who lies in a manger, walks around a particular country at a particular time, dies on a cross, rises on the third day, ascends to heaven forty days later and will return in glory at a particular time.
And the gospel itself is not an abstraction, but something that confronts us in a concrete manner: here is a man proclaiming the forgiveness of sins and the gospel of Jesus Christ in this church - do you believe, here, now? Here is water, poured out in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins - do you believe, here, now? Here is the very body and blood of Christ, under the forms of bread and wine - do you believe, here, now?
That in turn is why it is so important that we go to church, and that (when we get there) each church is doing its job properly of proclaiming that message of forgiveness in word and sacrament. We can't sit around waiting till we believe in a set of principles and then go to church. What we're looking for isn't to be found merely in a set of principles and concepts, but in the place where God has promised to be found.
God is invisible, inscrutable, incomprehensible, and so on. ... Give up all such speculating, which is utterly unrelated to the word of God anyhow. God is saying to you, From the unrevealed God I shall become your own revealed God: I shall incarnate my own beloved Son ... "This is my beloved Son. Hear you him." Behold his death, his cross, his Passion. See him hanging on his mother’s breast, and hanging on the cross. What Christ says and does, you may be sure of. "No man cometh to the Father but by me." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." What God is saying to you is this: "Here in Christ you have me, here in Christ you will see me."I seem to recall NT Wright making the point in the opening chapter of The New Testament and the People of God (that would be - ahem - the only chapter I actually finished of the good bishop's (very) magnum opus) about the way in which people tend to assume we all know what the word "God" refers to - who God "basically" is - and then this skews the way we understand Jesus, because we look at Jesus through the lens of our prior understanding of God, rather than letting God's self-revelation in Jesus come first and determine our understanding of God.
If you want to escape from despair and hatred of God let speculation go. Begin with God from the bottom upwards, not from the top downwards. In other words, begin with Christ incarnate, and with your own terrible original sin. There is no other way. Otherwise, you will remain a doubter for the rest of your life.
At all costs cling to the revealed God. Allow no one to take the child Jesus from you. Hold fast to Christ, and you will never be lost. God the Father longs for you. God the Son wishes to be your Savior, your Liberator. In this kind and lovely manner has God freed us from these terrible assaults and trials.
As Luther points out, all the things that "everyone" agrees on about God - even atheists, when constructing a God which they then choose not to believe in; I speak from personal experience - are meaningless speculation: the "attributes", the abstract qualities, the in-that-ableness and im-this-ableness. As Luther puts it somewhere else, "I know of no God other than the one called Jesus Christ".
Even the concept of "revelation" can be misleading when we turn it into an abstract concept of which Jesus is merely an example (even if the best example). Jesus isn't only the revealed God, or the God who reveals - he also defines what revelation is (a point made very effectively by the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, in his book The Revelation of God).
Away with abstraction! The gospel is about concrete things: not an abstract God, but a God who lies in a manger, walks around a particular country at a particular time, dies on a cross, rises on the third day, ascends to heaven forty days later and will return in glory at a particular time.
And the gospel itself is not an abstraction, but something that confronts us in a concrete manner: here is a man proclaiming the forgiveness of sins and the gospel of Jesus Christ in this church - do you believe, here, now? Here is water, poured out in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins - do you believe, here, now? Here is the very body and blood of Christ, under the forms of bread and wine - do you believe, here, now?
That in turn is why it is so important that we go to church, and that (when we get there) each church is doing its job properly of proclaiming that message of forgiveness in word and sacrament. We can't sit around waiting till we believe in a set of principles and then go to church. What we're looking for isn't to be found merely in a set of principles and concepts, but in the place where God has promised to be found.
