A BIT ABOUT GOD
Let me start on a personal note.
First thing I do after breakfast is scan the lectionary for the day, select a text from either the Old-, a Psalm or the New Testament, and write 500 words on my MacBook as the words tumble from my mind to my fingers and on the screen as the spirit moves me. Done it for more than 27 years.
I also always have a few books on the go. Lately I have been reading “The Art of Loving”, the title of a book by Erich Fromm. My brother Drewes in The Hague, alerted me to this author, and, through the Tweed Library I obtained it. This Jewish, German born, mostly USA situated author and psychoanalyst impressed me with his insight into the human character but also his acute observations on God and his thoughts about the shallowness of those who call themselves Christians.
Fromm’s parents and grandparents were devout Jews but soon in life he abandoned the ‘faith of the fathers’, which, nevertheless, had a profound influence on his life.
I was intrigued by his thoughts on God and believers in General. But before I quote Fromm, a citation from Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian Faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.”
Seeing God and the world as one, was also the tentative conclusion of another Jewish author, professor of Hebrew, Richard Elliott Friedman, who, in The Hidden Face of God, ends his intriguing book with, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” (emphasis his). In that conclusion he echoes Bonhoeffer whom he quotes quite often.
Bonhoeffer also wrote that, “It is only out of the future that the present can be lived”.
That has become my rule for life. That’s how I wrote my “Day without End”, a book visualizing my conception of eternal life in the New Creation. However, God, the Father, never entered into my story. Jesus did, quite prominently, but not God. That absence can be explained by seeing all of creation as an expression of God, just as J.S. Bach speaks to us today through his music and all famous artists through their works.
But, back to Erich Fromm.
He writes that “God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, or something finite. How can God have a name if he is not a person, not a thing?” Fromm again, ”When God talked to Moses, he tells him that his name is ‘I am becoming that which I am becoming”. “I-am-becoming is my name”, which means that God is not finite, not a person, not a ‘being’”. For Israel, God’s chosen people, God became tangible in the Ark of the Covenant, a holy symbol, and the temple. When Jesus died, the curtain dividing the Holies from the Holy of Holies, ripped, signifying the end of any formal religion.
So, how do we deal with God now that the temple is gone?
The New Testament tells us that. When Jesus talked to a woman at the well in Samaria – as recorded in John 4 – he told her that, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Paul wrote to Timothy that “God lives in inapproachable light: nobody can see God and nobody has seen God.” (1 Timothy 6: 16).
God-Confusion.
We find ourselves in a situation where confusion about God is rampant, and the church, in general, is at the heart of that mix-up, still sees itself as God’s house. It tries to – at best – to explain something that cannot be explained, and usually muddles the issue, rather than admitting that the mystery of God remains a mystery.
Fortunately, Paul provided the solution. In Colossians 1: 15-20, he wrote,
Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
That, in my opinion, explains the disappearing God, and gives Jesus the prominent place in life, and especially in the church. A church without Jesus ceases to be a church. A church without living with and in creation and loving it unconditionally also ceases to be a church. God, the invisible God, beyond comprehension, is visible in Jesus Christ, and remains a constant presence in CREATION: Romans 1: 20 clearly indicates that, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.
That explains to me the God mystery: he manifests himself through Jesus Christ, and through creation. This also means that worshiping God without Jesus and apart from creation, smacks of idolatry: he is and remains beyond name and beyond understanding.
Fromm again.
Erich Fromm wades into this morass when he writes that “instead of a religious renaissance, we witness a regression to an idolatric concept of God”. I believe that, unwittingly, Fromm, as an Old Testament Jew, has made the correct discovery, because the church, in general, has made an idol of God by not recognizing the New Testament ‘creation’ version of the Father, a concept that, now in our very ‘last’ days, is becoming prominent.
Fromm is also correct when he writes that in the Middle Ages the average person looked at God as to a helping father and mother, taking God seriously, making it the paramount goal in life to live according to God’s principles, to make “salvation” the supreme concern to which all other activities were subordinated. “Today, nothing of such effort is present. Daily life is strictly separated from any religious values”.
Fromm, ever the psychoanalyst, adds, “Man of truly religious culture may be compared with children at the age of eight, who need father as a helper, but who begin to adopt his teachings and principles in their lives. Contemporary man is like a child of three, who cries for father when he needs him, and otherwise is quite self-sufficient when he can play.” Bonhoeffer’s view was identical: Deus Ex Machina, pulling a magical string when we need God.
I should add that Christ did not come to start a religion: he came to abolish it and teach us how to live as a human being in God’s creation, which now is on the edge of total destruction thanks to our “economic growth religion’, a religion not about the disappear, in spite of the Climate Change.
By and large the church sees the earth as evil and preaches escape from the earth. But, says Bonhoeffer, “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other worlds beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”
“It is only out of the future that the present can be lived”. That future is the new creation.
The alternative is hell on earth, for many already a reality as Climate Change has become unstoppable.