The trouble with "Father God"

I'm a new father. My 3 month old son is a constant source of entertainment and challenge, and over the weekend I started thinking about the analogy of God as a loving father. There is something about the analogy that doesn't quite fit when it all is put together. I know that analogies only hold up so far, but this is one that seems to have been given ultimate congruence with reality, and I'm not sure that is appropriate. Here's why:

As a father, I know better than my son what is best for him. At times, I cannot give him what he wants because it will not be good for him- we are in the process of letting him learn to sleep by himself right now, as object permanence is developing in his mind. As much as he wants to be held in order to fall asleep, when he wakes up he will be hysterical if we put him down. This will prevent him from getting the sleep he needs, as well as keep us from getting the sleep we need to care for him appropriately. Or, if he wants to eat when his belly is full in order to go to sleep, he will overeat and throw up the food that is already in his stomach, and then still not get the sleep he needs either. It is a difficult thing to care for a child against his wishes, but this how God cares for us at times. And to this point, the analogy holds.

But where it begins to break down is when we move beyond training and into protection. I love my son, and as much as it is within my power I will not let anything life threatening or dangerous happen to him. I will not let him play with electrical outlets or the burners on our stove. But eventually he will have to learn about these things and understand the pain that can be caused by them. Eventually I will stop telling him not to touch (when he is much, much older, of course. Like 25. Then I'll let him touch the burner...), and if he hasn't figured it out by then, he will get burned or shocked and learn why I told him not to play with those things for all those years. But I will not let him, as much as it is within my power, play on the train tracks, or run into traffic, or try to pet lions. When he gets older, I hope to have taught him the dangers of heroine, or cocaine, or alcohol abuse. And I will not stand by and let him kill himself. And here the analogy breaks down, because I am not all-powerful. I cannot keep my son from doing things that will cost him his life, despite my best efforts.

But we say that God is all-powerful. The only way my son is going to die as a child is if I am unable to prevent it. That is a possibility because I am not all-powerful. When he is an adult, I will not be able to prevent him from making life ending choices because I will not be with him all the time. But we say that God is with us all the time. He could end his life when I am not looking. But we say God sees all.

And this is where God is not a father like me. I will let my child experience difficult and painful things in order that he may learn and grow and become a person of character, but character is irrelevant to a dead person. While I understand that my capacity for love, for understanding, for goodness is finite, I can't accept without critique the idea of God as a loving father, because I've known far too many people who have taken their own life, or have died of accident. Even accidents can be understood as being God's time for that person to die, but suicide does not fit into that for me.

There seem to be two obvious choices in light of what I've just said: first, we have to say that either God is not all powerful or all loving. OR, we need to adjust our perspective of who God is to match both what the bible tells us about God as well as what we experience in life.

So I wonder, then, if we might do well to re-evaluate our talk of God as father, because there is more to it than that. I'm not prepared to suggest that God is limited in power or love, but I do think we need to reconsider the limits of reality that we construct around God. We need to change the way we talk about God. We then need to change the way we imagine ourselves and our relationship to others...

"An Honest Question to Difficult Answers"

Last summer, I was given the opportunity to write an article on music, worship, and anti-racism for the journal Liturgy. My task was to explore what it is to work towards racial reconciliation through church music in non-multicultural congregations. That article was published online on Tuesday and will be out in print next month! The subscriptions are pricey, as is individual article purchase, so my publisher has been gracious enough to give me a link to share that offers free access to my article! The link is below, followed by the Abstract for my article. Enjoy!

"An Honest Question to Difficult Answers: Explorations in Music, Culturalism, and Reconciliation"

The importance of worship music in conversations about congregational health and growth is contested. The perception persists that worship music style is a primary means of determining comfort or belonging for “church shoppers” at a given congregation. Yet actual research shows that it has a more modest role than is assumed.[i] Nevertheless, conversations regarding worship music abound, and with each passing publication we become more and more obsessed with finding and exploiting the correlates between worship music styles and ecclesial success.

Yet there are many styles of worship music, and the style that best expresses the prayer of one person may not best express the prayer of another. Moreover, in a society that is made up of as many and diverse cultures as North America, we begin to discern that cultural distinctiveness is embodied in the music we find pleasing—sometimes to the exclusion of those who differ from us. Yet the church is intended to be the united body of Christ (1 Cor. 12), and we must ask ourselves how we can live into this reality in the realm of music. Can we find ways of worshiping that allow for those who stand beyond our cultural heritage to join in our musical expression of prayer? And, perhaps, we in theirs?

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[i] Gerardo Marti, Worship Across the Racial Divide (New York: Oxford, 2012), 80.

Truth As Relationship

Vacation is over, and it is time to get back on the blogging horse again. I trust you have enjoyed my break as much as I have, and now it is time to resume exploring how our orientation towards truth as that which proves Jesus in retrospect is flawed, and offer an alternative view of how Jesus is indeed the truth.

To begin with, and briefly, I assume that in light of Jn. 14 Jesus is the revelatory point of origin for the revelation of God. That is to say that I, along with Bonhoeffer and others, consider God to be the ultimate "reality" (non-platonic sense), and in Christ that reality has been made known to humanity. This means that the ultimate reality is then the incarnate God in Christ in humanity.

Yet this kind of truth talk requires qualification. That is because unless further defined this type of truth talk can lead us to disallow the real experiences of people as untrue. But the other side of the coin causes us to question the qualitative merit of empirical truth- just because something is true does not mean that it is good. How then do we find consonance within the triadic dissonance of Jesus the truth who is not all truth but at the same time does not negate as unreal that which he is not?

I would like to propose a different way of thinking about truth theologically. What if instead of a binary conception of truth that is either a 1 or a 0-that is or is not-we consider that in light of Jesus' claim in Jn. 14 that truth thus revealed describes the quality of a thing? What if truth is actually the relationship between an entity and reality?

I come to ask this question because I think it reveals what we mean when we say that something is true: we assume truth to be good. This subconscious equation is a by-product of our modern conditioning, the outgrowth of positivism. We tend to hold truth as the highest human value, but truth has a dark side to it. We call it evil. But evil is as true as goodness. How then do we determine the difference between what is and what should be?

I suspect that the simple answer of "let Jesus be the determiner of what is good" is on the surface accurate, but it is too broad, because it fails to account for humanity' inability to determine what is good. Majority rules? Might makes right?

What then is good?

The truth is not Jesus

There are many idols prowling around our consciousness' these days, and an even easier one to spot than belief is the truth. I know this sounds extreme and I will undoubtably get lampooned by some friends on this one, but the truth is not Jesus.

But wait, Jesus said that he was the truth (Jn. 14).

He did indeed. But here is the problem with what I've just said:

In formal logic, there is a fallacy called "Affirming the Consequent." Affirming the Consequent means that because A causes B, and B is happening, therefore A must also be happening. The standard example given is "If it's raining, the streets will be wet; the streets are wet, therefore it's raining." This is a fallacy because there are many reasons for the street to be wet. It may have been raining earlier and the streets have not dried yet. A fire hydrant may have burst. Some kid could be playing with the garden hose. It might not be raining.

If we think about Jesus' words in Jn. 14 in this way, we must realize this: Jesus is the truth, but the truth is not Jesus. All truth is not actually God's truth.

Here's why.

Truth, as we conceive of it, is not a Christian concept, because Christianity doesn't trade in concepts. Ever since the Enlightenment unshackled truth from its "religious" moorings it has been floating around the ether like a specter waiting to be returned. The problem with saying that all truth is God's truth is that there are many things that are true that are not of God. The holocaust is true, but was evil, through and through. It is true that many people do unspeakable things in the name of God, but that too is utterly evil. Now, unless we are prepared to say that evil is God, we need to rethink our claims about truth.

But this is only half of the issue. If we make Jesus into the truth then we have turned him into a concept, not a person. The second person, actually. Anyway, this leads us to proceed like this: from truth -> Jesus. Pursue the truth, and you will find Jesus. Ever heard anyone say that? I have. But starting there assumes a real entity of truth that exists beyond the person of Jesus. It takes truth as the starting point. But truth isn't the starting point, because it exists in our minds as something other than Jesus. We have an idea called "truth" that we defend as if it were God because we have affirmed the consequent of Jesus' claim to be the truth. He is that, but there are other things that are true besides him, nevermind our inability to distinguish truth from fiction!

The problem is that we confuse our own version of conceptual truth with the truth that stood before Pilate as he asked what truth was. Philosophy actually affirms Jesus' claim in a weird way, in that if I get far enough into it what I think of as truth turns out only to be my own imagination. But we've made what we think truth to be into a godlike entity that needs to be defended in order for Jesus to be the truth. But it doesn't, because your imagination is not Jesus. Jesus' truth is not your version of it.

P.S. I am on vacation and will be taking a short break from the blogging world. I will return with more thoughts and provocations April 15th. Until then, seek Jesus, not what you think the truth is.

Radical Openness to What?

I ended my last post by suggesting that faith is a radical openness to what God is doing. I want to expand and elaborate on this point because it can be taken in any number of unhelpful directions. I want to take it in this one:

Radical openness is not conceptual; it is not openness to anything that may cross your path. This is one way that faith is not a concept but a life; faith is not about ideas. That there are ideas about faith is not up for debate. But an idea is only an idea until a decision is made about the idea. Once a decision has been made, an action will follow. But faith is not the idea, nor the decision, nor the action. Faith is a continuance of all of those things. But we are still talking conceptually about faith, and faith is not a concept. Additionally, the faith of the bible is particular; it is not some universal principle.

Faith starts with being for others. "Let each of you look out not only for your own interests, but for the interests of others" (Phi. 2:4). Faith as the radical openness to what God is doing demands an attitude of others focused living. This means working for the betterment of those who are less well off than you are. It means advocating for the rights of those on the margins. It means demonstrating concern for the helpless and the vulnerable. We call this love.

Faith is, at its core, loving others. My fundamentalist origin recoils at this statement, accusing myself that love is misunderstood, for love requires truth. But truth does not supersede love in the bible. In fact, the bible is little concerned with truth, except to say that Jesus is truth. Yet loving others still has a jagged edge to it, and we by our allegiance to a doctrine of sin are still obliged to love by judging. And this convicts us for our own inadequacy.

This is the second aspect of faith; the conviction of the self. When we are for others we see how we are not for others. We see our complicancy in the sin of our society. We see that we are guilty for what has happened to the victims, and what is more we see that we are them. Jesus' parable in Luke 10 of the good Samaritan answers the lawyer's question most surprisingly- "you are the neighbor." It is not who is my neighbor, but rather that you are theirs.

Faith then is not rooted in some abstraction of being. It is rooted in the flesh and blood reality of Jesus Emmanuel; God with us. That he is no longer present in his earthly body does nothing to negate the presence of his spirit, nor to negate the concrete reality of his being evidenced by the physical presence of his church. But the church is not the the church because it says it is. It is the church because it does what Jesus says; it is for what Jesus is for. But it is here. It is present. It is physical. It is not ethereal, it is not mystical. That's the thing. Faith is a life lived in obedience to Christ, not the service of our beliefs about him. If you think that what I am saying is self refuting, you are still thinking in terms of the superiority of belief.

The Creation of Idols

"Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything" - St. Gregory of Nyssa

The difficulty in distinguishing faith from belief is immense. This is primarily so because of our post-Enlightenment penchant for conceptualization and rationality within the framework those concepts create. Yet for the present I will attempt to distinguish the concepts of faith from the concepts of belief with an eye towards how biblical faith is not a concept, but a life.

Conceptually, beliefs are the mechanism we use to make sense of the world; they are the ideological boundaries we impose on our experiences in order to make sense of them. In order for me to maintain a firm grip on reality I must be able to assign some sort of category or label to my experiences. These categories can be quite broad, such as "bad" or "good," or they can be nuanced such as "progressive" or "creative."

Faith, as we conceive of it, is the assurance that our experiences will fit into the categorical structures of our beliefs; the confidence that our understanding of reality is right. In this way, our faith is subsumed beneath the heading of belief and relegated to the subservient role of confirming our beliefs.

And so in a conceptual sense, we have indeed created an idol of belief for ourselves. Our faith is to be in God, not in our beliefs. But when our beliefs are given primacy over faith, they are unconsciously given the authority to construct the framework for who God is. 

It would be nice and pleasant if at this point I could saying "Instead, the bible says..." and rattle of some perfectly obvious scripture. But that option is unavailable to me, because the bible does not conceptualize faith and belief in this way. In fact, it does not conceptualize at all; that is part of the problem with how we read the bible period - conceptually. When we function within the conceptual structure of beliefs that I have just outlined, we read Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is the confidence in what we hope for, the assurance of what we cannot see," to assure us of the reality of our structures of belief. But then we go on and continue reading chapters 11 and 12, and we get confused because this is not how the bible talks about faith. When Abraham's faith obeyed God by leaving his home and going where he did not know, we stumble, because faith led Abraham into uncertainty; into experiences that his beliefs could not contain. 

This is the crucial turn: faith leads us into experiences that our beliefs cannot contain. They are mysterious. They are mysterious even years after they occur. I think that what St. Gregory was getting at in the quote above was that our concepts of things (St. Gregory was a Platonist, meaning he considered ideas to be real entities, nouns if you will) cannot take the place of radical openness to what God is doing. God will always offend our sensibilities and personal sense of righteousness. God is constantly offending and upsetting my beliefs. And faith in God will always lead us out of certainty and into the assurance of what we cannot comprehend.

NEXT WEEK: Beyond the concept of faith and into the realm of living.

The Bible Is Not About Believing.

I left you all dangling a bit with the end of that post; so much so in fact that my mom emailed me to confirm that I still thought there was a God! Having assured her of that reality, I will offer up another initially offensive proposition:

The bible never, not once, tells us that we need to believe.

Of course, if you've ever read the bible you know that statement to be false. But it is false only on a literal linguistic level, but not on the level of meaning. Here's what I'm getting at:

The words "faith" and "belief" in English mean two different things. Look them up in a dictionary. While there can be some overlap in the definitions, what the words signify are two different ideas and postures. They are not interchangeable.

The bible never uses the word "belief."

It's not in there. Instead, the bible uses the word "pistis/faith." "Faith" and "belief" are nouns, meaning that they denote an entity or thing. But we do not have a verb form of "faith" in English; instead, we have "believe." "Believe" connects etymologically to "belief," as in to practice belief. But the word that we translate "believe" is not connected to "belief" in the bible, but to "faith:" pisteuo, the verb of faith. Literally to believe biblically is to do faith.

Unfortunately, the way that "believe" connects to "belief" for English speakers causes a conflation between what we intuitively know to be belief and what we know to be faith. Faith has a much bigger meaning than belief, and when we encounter this kind of compounded meaning we tend to gravitate towards the smaller of the two; the lowest common denominator. This is born out by the way we talk about what it is to follow Jesus. When we say that it starts with belief, we are saying something other than what the bible says.

Let me say that again so that it sticks. When we say that following Jesus starts with belief we are saying something other than what the bible says.

Of course, we are now left with the task of figuring out what the bible means when it says to do faith. That will, of course, be the subject of coming blog posts.