IS LOVE THE ANSWER, THE ONLY ANSWER?
“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.33 Take heed, watch and pray; for you do not know when the time is. (Mark 13: 32-33).
I have a good friend, a professor emeritus at several prestigious universities, who faces his own mortality. He asked me to explain ‘Christianity’ to him. Well, here it is. Somewhat.
I am a man of habits. One of them is to write a few hundred words each morning on a text of the lectionary – the prescribed daily Bible readings. Last Monday morning I selected the above text, as it puzzled me that the Father had not shared the date of THE END with the Son, in spite of Jesus’ words: “I and the Father are one.”
The text suggested to me that Creation is a force that works independently from the Son and the angels, and indicates, that God and Creation are identical or complementary, and that Creation, has a tipping point, only it knows.
The unity of God with Creation, is a concept new to me, and changed my concept of Christianity. If God is out there, in the air and water and soil, in you and me: shouldn’t we be a bit more careful how we live?
About God, the Great Unknown.
Knowledge about Scripture is very important. Paul writes – 1 Timothy 6: 16 – God alone is immortal and lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. God is the great Unknown. Just as the famous author of King Lear and Hamlet, God too, is the Great Unknown, only knowable through his creation. The Belgic Confession hits it right.
We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures, great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1: 20:
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.
Second, God makes himself known through the Scripture.
Want to know about God?
Look at Creation! Creation is God’s Primary, God’s Holy Revelation! Yes, Creation is HOLY!
And the Scriptures?
The Scriptures are like a mining light attached to our foreheads, to make it possible to navigate inerrantly through creation: Psalm 119: 105 teaches us that “God’s Word is a lamp for our feet, and a light for our path in Creation”.
We, however, keep on staring into the light of Scripture, God’s secondary Word, and have become blinded to the reality of God’s Primary Word, and, in the process have become oblivious to the plight of the Planet.
The Scriptures are indispensable.
John 3: 16-17 tells us that God loves Creation so much that his Son’s life was used to buy it back. Loving Creation as God does, gives us ‘eternal LIFE’ there”. (At one point in early human history we gave our Creation’s ownership to God’s adversary, just as American ‘Christianity’ surrendered itself to Trump as the new savior). Also, the Heaven Heresy so prevalent still, has made much of the current church structure irrelevant. That’s why in Revelation 21: 22, describing the New Creation, specific mention is made of the absence of Temple and Church and Bible.
Bonhoeffer and Richard Elliott Friedman.
Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings, concluded that Bonhoeffer presented as specific to the Christian Faith the perception of God and the world – cosmos – as one. Professor of Hebrew and Bible translator, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his “The Hidden Face of God”, concludes, after 284 pages of delightful reading: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God. (Emphasis in the original).
“God so loved the world”, as recorded in John 3: 16,17, spoken to a Reform-minded cleric in Jesus’ time, stands out as one of the most poignant sayings of Jesus, who then already knew that he would offer his life for Creation’s redemption. By sacrificing his very body as payment for its perfect restitution, he made it possible for us to have eternal life there.
A church community that does not make this fact its cardinal centre, does not represent the Body of Christ.
Simple faith in the New Creation is seldom mentioned in the church. To be part and parcel of God’s work of art, is seldom mentioned in the church. To call oneself a daughter or brother of the trees and birds, of the lion and the lamb, is seldom mentioned in the church. “To love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind”, is left hanging as an empty slogan, without connecting this love to the creation in which God placed us as responsible creatures.
My dear friend. Christianity has only one key word: “LOVE”.