Speaking prophetically

I just got back from a presbytery meeting this afternoon at which the most significant piece of business was the discussion of a proposed overture from one of our churches. It was a well-intentioned overture aimed at reducing the tension between the left and right wings of this denomination; it wasn't, however, all that well written, and many speakers raised the argument that it simply wouldn't do what it was intended to do. It failed by quite a large margin, and I think that argument was the main reason why.

The vagueness and imprecision of the proposed overture wasn't the only argument offered against it, however; several speakers objected on the grounds that it would prevent the denomination from speaking "prophetically." I've heard that sort of language so many times already in my scant few years in the PC(USA) that at first this just passed over my head; but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me.

The truth is, any suggestion that this denomination speaks prophetically on anything is just so much yammering nonsense: prophetic words don't emerge from majority votes. What's more, prophets don't have professional lobbyists and Washington Offices; they don't get favorable coverage in the New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, for that matter); they don't show up as talking heads, whether on CBS or on Fox News Channel; and they most emphatically don't support elite opinion or echo the words and positions of powerful people, even if those powerful people happen to be the opposition party at the moment.

Honestly, how on earth can anyone flatter themselves that the PC(USA) speaks prophetically when its leaders haven't had an original thought on public policy in decades? All these supposedly "prophetic" statements and stances are straight off the Democratic Party platform. This isn't prophetic, it's what past generations would have called the Babylonian Captivity of the PC(USA) – its complete alignment (on the national level) with the agenda of one political party. If the PC(USA) were truly being prophetic, would it be hard on the Republican leadership? Yes – but it would also be hard on the Democrats, and (who knows?) maybe harder. When prophets unlimber their rhetorical guns, only the humbly repentant survive; nobody gets off unscathed, not even their own "side" – indeed, they often get hit the hardest, because "judgment begins in the house of God." Go back and read Amos if you don't believe me.

Of course, maybe that's the problem: have all these folks who yammer on about being prophetic really read the prophets? Anyone who can stand there and talk calmly of such-and-such a pronouncement or some individual being "prophetic" has no more clue what they're talking about than does the guy down the street who can calmly suggest nuking Iran. Prophecy is not comfortable, even for the prophet (or perhaps especially for the prophet; just look at Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea), and the self-determination of many self-righteous folks in the PC(USA) – in my experience, mostly on the left – that they're on the side of the prophets suggests that they don't understand that. Anyone who can read the prophets without shaking has never understood them; anyone who can read Isaiah 6 without crying out in fear and shame, "Woe is me, for I am a person of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips!" just isn't paying attention. Prophecy is not about social justice, though that's certainly a major concern – it isn't about the Democratic Party agenda – prophecy is about God. It's about his holiness and his goodness, and his demand that we live up to his standards – all of them.

Therein lies the great difference between the so-called "prophetic" voice of the PC(USA) and the truly prophetic voice: the PC(USA)'s public pronouncements uphold those standards where its liberal elite agree with them (or, at least, where they can find applications of them with which they agree), but feel free to set those standards aside when they don't. Thus on the one hand, the "prophetic" label is claimed when the denomination is "speaking truth to power" – but only when that power is Republican, or otherwise acting in a politically conservative manner – and on the other, it's claimed as a justification for setting aside the word of God on the grounds that "God is still speaking," to borrow the UCC slogan. Well, yes, God is still speaking, but what justification is ever offered for the idea that he's started contradicting himself?

The root problem here, I think, is that the left is trying to slap the "prophetic" label on what is actually a very old problem, common to the whole church: the desire to believe what they want to believe. I tell my congregation sometimes, "If you think the Bible is telling you what you want to hear, look deeper – you're missing something." I realize that's an overstatement, but there's a large kernel of truth there, not about the Bible but about us: as Francis Bacon put it, we prefer to believe what we prefer to be true, and so that tends to be what we prefer to hear the Bible telling us. We don't listen anywhere near as eagerly for the things which challenge us, which contradict us, which convict us; and so one of the key disciplines for the serious student of Scripture is to listen harder for what we don't want to hear than for what we do. This is necessary as a way of balancing out our natural tendencies and cultivating the virtue of exegetical humility.

To take the issue of homosexuality as one example, conservatives should examine every pro-gay argument from Scripture seriously, considering it to see if it stands on its own merits; and on the flip side, liberals should listen to conservative arguments in the willingness to be convicted that they're wrong. After all, none of us are perfect; we all make mistakes as we interpret scripture, and we all have biases and blind spots which skew those interpretations, lining Scripture up to tell us what we want to hear rather than allowing it to convict us of our errors. It's only if we take arguments and interpretations with which we disagree just as seriously as if we wanted to believe them that we can hope to remedy that problem; and we're not going to do that if we insist, in our spiritual pride, in labeling our side as "prophetic."

After all, to the self-anointed prophet, the rest of the world divides into two camps: the righteous (those who agree with me) and the unrighteous (those who don't), which leaves only the question, "What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?" There in a nutshell is the state of things in this denomination: for too many folks, the presence of people who disagree with us, instead of serving as an opportunity for learning and self-correction, merely hardens us in our own positions, because "we" are light and "they" are darkness. This wouldn't be a problem for someone whose life and beliefs were already 100% in accordance with the will of God, but that isn't any of us; we all have areas where we need to grow, and beliefs (sometimes cherished ones) which are simply wrong, and we can't afford to set those in stone. As a denomination, we need to set aside this self-aggrandizing nonsense that we're speaking "prophetically," which sets us above those with whom we disagree, and learn instead to approach them in a spirit of humility and grace. Our motives and vision just aren't pure enough to justify doing things any other way.

Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil

A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?

R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.

A: I don’t understand this. Let’s back up and try a different line of approach. If God exists, if he is completely good, all-powerful, and in complete control, then why is there evil?

R: That is an important question. Shortest answer: I don’t know. Even at the very beginning, if you look at Genesis 1, creation is portrayed as God’s victory over evil—not moral evil, but what Dr. Waltke, one of my Old Testament professors, calls surd evil: the power of chaos. Where does that come from? And what about the Devil, who tempted humanity into sin? Where did his evil come from? I really don’t have answers to those questions.

A: You referenced the Devil a minute ago, too. Do you really believe in the Devil?

R: Yes, I believe that there is a personal agent of evil who is at war with God; he’s already lost, but he won’t admit it yet.

A: Huh. Well, I suppose that if you believe in God, there’s no reason not to believe in the Devil as well.

R: No. What I’m getting to, though, is that the fact that I can’t explain evil isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You see, evil isn’t a positive reality, but a negation. Are you familiar with Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time?

A: I’m sorry, no.

R: Oh, well; that would have made explaining this a little easier. It was Augustine’s insight, I believe—he was one of the great theologians of the early church—that if God is the one who is and the creator of all that is, if he is the source of all good, and evil is the opposite of good, then evil is ultimately the negation of being, uncreation. As Henri Blocher, a French theologian, put it, “evil is disruption, discontinuity, disorder, alienness, that which defies description in creational terms (except negatively!).” Blocher makes the point that human reason is designed to understand the order God created, to trace out the patterns. A rational explanation of the existence of evil could only be possible if evil had a place in the rational order of creation; this could only be the case if evil were in fact an original part of creation. This in turn would mean that God was the source of all evil as well as of all good, and thus that evil, too is eternal. But this is not the case: evil is outside the rational order of creation, and has no part in God.

Blocher goes on to say that evil is not there to be understood, it is there to be fought, and that God has in fact already defeated it; we are living with the death throes of an enemy that has not yet accepted that it has lost.

A: So what you’re saying is that evil is as incomprehensible as God is.

R: Yes. God is beyond the ability of our reason to comprehend because he is too big, great and good beyond the scope of our reason; evil is beyond our reason because it is fundamentally opposed to the created order, and thus fundamentally arational.

A: Intuitively, that makes sense to me; but I think that answer leaves a hole, because it doesn’t address the continued existence of evil, to say nothing of its continued success. If, as you say, God is perfectly good and all-powerful, once evil came to be—or to not be? on your terms, I’m not sure how to phrase the question—why didn’t he simply defeat it at the beginning? Why leave evil to do all the damage it has done?

R: Again, I don’t know; I can’t answer that. I’ve heard one preacher suggest that once the Devil rebelled, God decided to let his rebellion play itself out in order to ensure that no one would ever try it again; I don’t know that I would offer that as an answer, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Origen, another of the Church Fathers, held that in the end, God would redeem all of creation, that even the Devil would eventually be restored. He was condemned as heretical by later councils of the Church, and I won’t offer that as the right answer either, but again, it makes some sense; and I’d like to believe it, whether or not I do.

In the end, though, the only answer I can offer is this, that God is a creator and a lover, not a destroyer, and that he chose to fight evil accordingly by bringing good out of evil. In the end he will bring the curtain down on evil once and for all, but for this time he has chosen to answer evil with self-sacrificing love; and he has given this world time while he carries out his plan, spreading his word throughout the world to claim all those who belong to him. The number of those to be saved has not yet been completed.

What the question of evil comes down to, then, is the question posed by another of my professors, John Stackhouse: can God be trusted? Can we trust his wisdom, that he does indeed know what he is doing and why, and can we trust his heart, that his love is indeed unflawed? To me, the answer is clearly yes, we can; the fact that the Father was willing to go so far as to send the Son to the cross, and that the Son was willing to go so far as to endure it, and that the Spirit was willing to bear that loss—that is proof enough for me. But it’s a question everyone has to answer themselves.

A: This still leaves the question of human evil; if we grant for the moment that evil is allowed for whatever reason to exist and that we are limited beings, then certainly bad things are going to happen. There will be errors in judgment, which will lead to accidents, things we have made will break, which will produce more, natural disasters will occur. The forces of chaos, as you referenced a few minutes ago, are at work—fine, we’ll accept that for the moment. But what really concerns me is why we humans do so much evil to each other and our world, and I don’t think you’ve answered that. Why is evil allowed so much influence over us?

R: That’s partly a question about God, but it’s also a question about us—after all, human sin comes out of human nature—so I think there are a couple of things that need to be said before trying to answer that. In case you’re interested, the formal terms theologians use here are anthropology, which is the doctrine of human nature, and hamartiology, which is the doctrine of human sin.

A: Every field has its own jargon, I suppose.

R: And the jargon has its uses—at the very least, it helps you keep track of what part of the discussion you’re in. Now, God created Adam and Eve in his own image.

A: So you believe there really was a literal Adam and Eve?

R: I do. I’d rather not get sidetracked into a discussion of possible interpretations of Genesis 1-2, which I read as a poetic and liturgical text, rather than a scientific description of creation, but I will say this: if one believes as I do that God created everything, then there is no reason not to believe that he created human beings in the way that the Genesis text recounts; I’ve already said that I have scientific as well as theological reasons for rejecting the various theories of natural evolution, and again, I’d rather not get off into that discussion. What’s more, from a Christian perspective there is good reason to believe that God created the human race directly, even if one does accept evolutionary theory. Namely, there is the biblical statement that God created human beings, male and female, in his image. This separates us from the animals.

A: Come now. We’re animals, too, after all.

R: Physically, yes, but we’re more than that. We’re spiritual amphibians, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, a fusion of body and spirit like no other animal.

A: Ah, yes; when we die, our souls go to Heaven or Hell, is that it?

R: Umm, no.

A: No?

R: I didn’t say we’re spiritual Oreos—screw off the top, eat the filling, and leave the chocolate cookie behind. We are embodied souls, ensouled bodies, the union of the two, we are in total made in the image of God, and we don’t separate out; we aren’t just our bodies, but we’re not whole without them, either. The face you wear is as much you as the thoughts you hide behind it. That’s why I say we’re spiritual amphibians, because we belong to two worlds at once, that of cats and dogs and that of angels and demons.

A: Angels always seemed so wishy-washy to me. But if you don’t believe that your soul will live on after death and go to Heaven, what do you believe?

R: We’ll get there. As for angels—well, Western culture tends to sentimentalize them something awful these days; I think we have the Victorians to thank for that one, with their simpering fainting-girl angel paintings. Not at all the biblical idea. But as I was saying, we were made in the image of God, which means both that we were made like God and that we represent him in the world—we were made to be his agents. Like I said earlier, part of that is that we reflect his communicable attributes: we are personal beings; we are moral agents; we were created good; we are capable of love; we are creative actors, and we have the ability, to some degree, to carry out what we plan to do. As Tolkien would say—

A: Tolkien? What does he have to do with this conversation?

R: Besides being a devout Christian—

A: He was?

R: I believe he was Catholic, to be precise. In any case, Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” called human beings “sub-creators,” because God has given us the ability and the right to create within his creation. We cannot create out of nothing as he did, but we can create much from the materials he has given us, and we were meant to do so to his glory. Dorothy Sayers—yes, the mystery writer, she knew both Tolkien and Lewis—argues in her book The Mind of the Maker that this is what Genesis means when it says that we’re made in the image of God, because at that point in the biblical story what we know of God is that he creates.

I think, actually, that there is more to see than that from the beginning of Genesis; God is presented as rational, personal, and capable of relationship—after all, God is quoted as saying, “Let us make man in our image.”

A: “Us”? Interesting. I hadn’t thought the doctrine of the Trinity was that old.

R: It isn’t. This passage allows for the Trinity, but whoever wrote it had no such conception. There are arguments about what the author was thinking, but I don’t want to get into them. Anyway, we can also see from the creation story that God is good, since he is creating everything good, and that he rules over everything. So in part, to say that we are in the image of God is to say that we reflect his character, and in part it is to say that we reflect his activity as creative beings; and in part it is to say that we represent him in this world, that we are not only small creators but small rulers, responsible for managing the world which he made and which therefore belongs to him.

A: I can’t help thinking that this would be a very different world if Christians actually believed what you’ve been saying; from what you’re saying, pollution is a sin.

R: I believe polluting the earth is a sin. But seeing that isn’t enough, even if everyone in the church did. After all, even if our understanding of God were perfect in every respect, we would still be sinful people; and given that self-deception is a sin, and one that we as a race are pretty good at, the contradiction between our beliefs and our behavior would corrupt the purity of our understanding in short order anyway. We were created perfect, but we didn’t stay that way.

Skeptical conversations, part II: What is God like?

R: Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.

A: Everything? What about sending people to Hell?

R: As regards Hell in particular, I’d like to come back to that later; but to speak more broadly, yes, I think God’s judgment and wrath are very much consistent with his nature, which is love. Stop and think a minute. If someone was trying to undermine your relationship with your wife and daughter—to take the extreme case, think Iago—what would your reaction be?

A: I’d be furious. I love them, I would never let anyone come between us.

R: And if someone tried to hurt them?

A: Just the same. I would defend them to the best of my ability, and whoever had threatened them would deserve whatever happened.

R: Well, that’s how God reacts to sin. He is perfectly good—the Bible says that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”—and he made the world good; he made us good. The Father made us so that he, the Son and the Holy Spirit could expand the circle and share their love with us, and he gave us the world as a gift so that we might enjoy its beauty and care for it.

A: Now you’re getting close to environmentalism.

R: I am, and I think rightly so; I think our theology needs to address environmental questions. (I’m not the only one, either; if you’re interested, look up Steven Bouma-Prediger or Loren Wilkinson, for starters.) We were given the earth to be its stewards, and I think we will be held accountable for what we have done with our charge; but the threat to the earth from which we must defend it is our own sin. Sin, you see, threatens everything that God has made, and most especially all of humanity, whom he loves; sin mars his creation, and hardens our hearts against him. His response is jealousy and wrath against sin—the same jealousy and wrath you would show to anyone who tried to hurt your family or your relationship with them.

A: Jealousy? Come now, I’m not a jealous person.

R: Jealousy is a threat reaction. In people we think of as “jealous,” it’s set off by anything and everything, causing all sorts of unjustified behavior; but when someone really is threatening your relationship with your wife or daughter, jealousy is the appropriate response, as long as it is within bounds.

A: It sounds rather like antihistamines in the body; when they’re set off by false threats such as pollen, they give us allergies.

R: But when germs set them off, they are an important part of the body’s defense system. Exactly. And they will not stop until the germs are dead, and the same is true of God’s reaction—something akin to an allergic reaction, I suppose—to sin: his wrath is ferocious and uncompromising. He does not tolerate sin in any way, shape or form, and he will not settle for anything less than the absolute defeat of sin. Which is where Hell comes in.

A: That I can accept. It’s the absolute defeat of sinners I find hard to take.

R: Well, as I said, we’ll come back to that. In any case, God is love, which makes sense because he is three in one. I suspect you’ve thought of God as egocentric, to demand our love and worship?

A: Yes.

R: It would be a fair charge, were he just a single person; and in fact, I’ve heard a preacher defend God against that charge by admitting it and then saying he’s justified in being egocentric because he’s so wonderful. But in truth, it isn’t that God is all wrapped up in himself, some sort of cosmic Narcissus—rather, the Father, Son and Spirit are all wrapped up in each other. Except that they invite us into their circle, to share their love, which is the reason why he created us.

The fact that God is perfect, self-giving love is the root for everything else that we can say about the character of God. His love is unflawed, and so he is good in everything he does. His wrath against sin arises out of his love, as I’ve said, as does his command that we be holy just as he is holy—he does not want us to settle for less than what he intended for us. At the same time, though he hates sin and is perfectly just, he shows great grace and mercy and patience in dealing with sinners, because even in our broken, sinful state, he still loves us greatly. He is perfectly faithful to those who follow him, for the same reason. And note that all of these statements describe him as a personal, active God; he is no impersonal force (this isn’t Star Wars, no midichlorians here) nor a distant, uncaring, uninvolved God, but three persons who relate to us on a personal level out of love for us.

A: Sounds like you see God as pretty involved in your life.

R: Not just in mine—in everyone’s, in one way or another. He is Lord over everyone, in every moment, whether they acknowledge him or not; he created everything, and he sustains it—the universe only continues to exist because he keeps it so.

A: I might have to come back to that last statement of yours. But this all reminds me of an essay I read recently called “Why Smart People Believe in God”; the author is a smart man who doesn’t, and poses the same question I asked you. Along the way, he sets out two poles: either God is a God “who pokes his finger into the muck of human experience”—I think that’s exact—who tests people, makes strange demands, tells his follower to kill his son and takes vengeance on those who cross him, or he is infinite beyond imagining, “a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” as someone said; and if he is the latter, then why would he pay attention to us? As I recall, the author concludes that most people who believe in God believe in the little one who cares about us, not about the big one who, it would seem, shouldn’t. You were talking earlier about God in cosmic terms, but now you’re using much more local terms, for lack of a better phrase; do you really try to hold those two together?

R: Yes. God is infinite—without end, without limits, and utterly uncontrolled by anyone or anything—and so, as theologians will say, he is transcendent, going far above and beyond our limited being and understanding; as such, he is also incomprehensible to us. We can’t understand God solely through our own reason, but only as far as he reveals himself to us, though our reason has a part to play in that. At the same time, God is immanent—

A: “Imminent”? He’s arriving shortly? By train, perhaps?

R: No, not “imminent,” but “immanent”—it’s a term coined by some past theologian: it means that God is right with us, that he is present with his creation.

A: Well, yes, if God is everywhere, then logically that would include here.

R: I don’t just mean that he is present in that sense; I also mean that he is emotionally present, that he cares about all his creation, and most especially about people. As I said, God is love. It really is a staggering thought, that a God who can hold a universe billions of light-years across in the palm of his hand would care about us; but he does.

A: It’s incomprehensible, in fact. Which you just said is one of God’s attributes, so at least you’re being consistent.

R: Yes. Of course, trying to conceive of God as both infinite and personal at the same time—it’s harder to be consistent on that. But anyway, you used the word “attribute” a moment ago; the attributes of God can be broken up into two kinds, according to my theology professor. The attributes I’ve been talking about, those which relate to the character of God and what he is like, are called communicable attributes because they are attributes he can share with us. He is personal, powerful, good, loving, faithful, etc. So, too, we are personal; we have a certain amount of power to do what we intend to do, though we are limited; and while we are sinful, we were created to be good, loving, and generally like God in character. This is part of what the Bible means when it says we were created in the image of God, but I’ll come back to that.

The rest of God’s attributes are called incommunicable attributes, and they have to do with what he is in himself. A lot of these are statements of negative knowledge—we can’t grab hold of what God is, because he’s too big for us, so we define him in part by what he is not. For instance, he is atemporal, which is to say he is not within our time stream. Does he experience time? I don’t know for sure, but I am quite certain that he is not bound to ours; he is in the past, he is in the present, and he is in the future, he sees all times at once, and all are the same to him. God is immutable—he does not change and cannot be changed; he is who he is, yesterday, today and forever. He is also impassible, which is to say that he does not experience fluctuating emotional states, nor does he feel sinful passions. This doesn’t mean that God is emotionally inert, however—after all, he is love.

More positively, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful. This goes back to his being the author of all creation; even in human terms, the author (or authors) of a book can be omnipresent and omnipotent to their characters, though even such limited omniscience eludes us. As well, he is self-existent, as I said before, and self-sustaining; he is completely independent, needing nothing and no one else to be complete—which makes the decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to create us and love us all the more significant, because they were complete in and of themself and did not need us for anything.

A: “Themself.” Now there’s a word I never thought I’d hear.

R: God isn’t limited by our grammar, either. After all, he are one God.

A: All right, enough already.

R: I find it helps on occasion to say things like that—it jars the ear, and so jars the mind out of its ruts, which is an important thing to do whenever one is thinking about God. Anyway, I’d add one other attribute: simplicity. God is never at war within himself the way we are; he may be three persons, but in anything God does, they are totally integrated and interinvolved; the Father, Son and Spirit are each fully present and completely of the same mind and purpose in anything they do. There is no self-doubt, no disagreement, no indecision, no double-mindedness and no second-guessing.

The last thing to say about God is to go back to a couple of points I touched on earlier, that God is sovereign—he reigns as Lord over all creation—and active. This leads to the statement that everything that happens in the world happens through the providence of God. He created everything that is, and it is his will that keeps all of it in existence; he is at work in everything that happens, and nothing happens apart from his will. As the Belgic Confession, one of the confessions which my denomination affirms, puts it, he “leads and governs [all things] according to the holy divine will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God’s orderly arrangement.” Nothing happens by chance, nothing takes God by surprise, nothing happens apart from his will, and nothing happens despite his work; he is sovereign in everything.

A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?

R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.

Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God?

A: I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now. As we’ve discussed baseball and life and other minor issues, your Christianity has come up now and again, but we’ve never pursued that issue very far for its own sake; and it has always puzzled me why intelligent, educated people believe in God. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve always wanted to ask why that should be. The problem is, you have to be careful who you ask that sort of question, since it’s a very personal matter; but you seem to me to be someone who wouldn’t mind. So tell me, why do you believe in God?

R: What do you mean?

A: For one thing, your belief seems so unnecessary. Since Darwin, we have no need of that hypothesis, as someone said. More importantly, though, if you don’t need him to prop the system up, how can you believe in him? The Christian God, so far as I can tell, wants to restrict your freedom to think and your freedom to act; he wants to rule certain lines of thought and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment out of court before you ever get the chance to consider them. It seems to me that all believing in God does is narrow your life and your mind. Why on earth would you? Is what you get in return really worth it?

R: Do you really want answers to your questions, or are they just rhetorical?

A: If you have good answers to offer, I’m interested to hear them, if that’s what you mean.

R: Have a couple hours you aren’t using? Because I think the most basic thing underlying your question is that you don’t really know what I believe; if you want an answer with any depth, you need to understand where I’m coming from before you understand why.

A: Well, I have the time, and I’ll admit I have more to learn about Christianity; but I don’t have a great deal of patience with theology, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” and that sort of thing.

R: Theology gets a bad rap, unfortunately, from people who associate it with those kind of abstracted discussions. But really, theology is a pretty practical thing. It’s just whatever you believe about God; a friend of mine calls theology the science of God, and I think that’s a good way to put it. If you don’t believe there is a God, that’s the center of your theology—or atheology, I suppose—and then whatever your belief that there is no God does to your view of the world would be part of your theology as well. If you say that because there is no God, we human beings need to work our hardest to take care of each other and the world because we’re on our own, we’re all there is––

A: I do believe that, you know that.

R: Yes, I do—well, that’s a theological statement. That’s your theology, or part of it.

A: I hadn’t thought of my beliefs in those terms before.

R: And mine begins at a very different place, with the belief that there is a God, and a very particular God at that, and that God stands in relation to us and to the world in a very particular way. Specifically, it begins with the belief that God created all of everything, and that as a result he is God over all of everything.

A: Interesting. You say he’s God because he created everything, not just because he wants to play God.

R: Right. Think of a novel for a minute. The person who wrote the novel created those characters––

A: Even if they only cut them out of cardboard.

R: True. But the author created those characters, wrote every word that comes out of their mouths, set every decision they make, and determined how the book would end. You might say that the author was God to those characters. But does that make that author any more Godlike anywhere else? No. His authority, or hers, comes from the fact of authorship. In the same way, only in a much bigger way, God has authority over everything and is in control of everything that happens because he is the author of everything.

A: I’d never noticed that word linkage before. But are you suggesting that God might be just a member of a race of gods?

R: Umm, no. In fact, that’s an important point. God is not one of a race of anything; he is unique. One of the names for him in the Bible is “I Am”—as it’s rendered in Greek, “The One Who Is.” He is the one who was not created by any other, and he is the source of everything else that exists. He didn’t come from anywhere; he has always been.

A: So the universe started out with God, surrounded by nothing. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense. God must have come from somewhere, and he must have been someplace.

R: But then where did that place come from? Who made it? Who came before God, and where did they come from? No, if you stop and think about where everything came from, you only have two possible answers: either the universe has always existed, in some form or another, in which case it has no beginning or end, or there was a point in time when the universe did not exist and there was nothing—in which case there must have been someone there to create it out of nothing, and that someone must have always existed, without beginning or end; and we can argue back and forth, but we can’t wrap our minds around either possibility. Either way, our minds aren’t that big.

The point I’m trying to make is that our relationship to God begins with the fact that he created us, and the whole world in which we live. Wait, I can see you wanting to argue that point, but if we head off on the whole Darwin-evolutionism-creationism argument, we’ll never come back to your question. That’s an argument for another hour. I believe, for reasons both biblical and, yes, scientific, that God created all that is and as such has both complete authority and complete power over all that is. Having said that, you hit the question: who is this God?

First and foremost, he is triune—three in one.

A: Ahh, the Trinity. I never have understood that.

R: Well, that’s partly because it isn’t all that understandable by our limited minds. We do the best we can to explain the Trinity and understand how God can be both three and one, but in the end it’s a mystery.

A: Isn’t that just like a Christian. You get hit with a question you can’t answer, you just say, “It’s a mystery.”

R: It makes sense, though. We are limited creatures, after all; if God is big enough to be God over the whole universe, wouldn’t you expect him to be too big for us to completely understand? And if he were small enough for us to wrap our minds around, would he still be big enough to be God?

A: I’ll have to think about that.

R: Anyway, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to our understanding of God, for a lot of reasons, so it’s essential to come to some understanding of it. I like the way Stan Grenz, one of my professors, explains this doctrine in one of his books. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in four statements: “God is one,” “God is three,” “God is a diversity,” and “God is a unity.”

First and most basic, God is one. We worship only one God, not many, and we assert that there are no others. But second, God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn’t just how we perceive him, it’s how he is; the one being of God exists in three distinct persons.

A: That doesn’t make any sense.

R: Like I said, our minds aren’t big enough to understand it. But then, you’re an educated man, you have a solid understanding of science for a non-scientist, right?

A: Yes, but I don’t see your point.

R: You know what physicists have determined about the nature of light, that light is both a wave and a particle? Can you explain how that can be, since the two seem to be mutually exclusive?

A: No, I can’t, but that’s what the evidence says. And yes, I see where you’re going; I’ll grant that the nature of light presents similar problems to the doctrine of the Trinity.

R: Reality is bigger than we are; someday we may be able collectively to understand how everything in the world fits together, but even then no one person will be able to grasp more than a small part of that understanding. And it’s entirely possible that we will never fully understand the nature of light, or quantum mechanics, or other such ques­tions. But whether we do or not, God will still remain orders of magnitude greater than his creation in which we live, too great for us to control.

A: Control?

R: Knowledge is power, right? I think the reason we aren’t content with a God we can’t fully understand, analyze, and describe in comprehensible terms is that any such God is beyond our ability to predict and control. That’s much of the drive behind the hard sciences, after all—the desire to reduce all the mysteries of the universe to things we can identify, label, explain, and control. I’d say it’s most of the drive behind psychology, the desire to extend our control over ourselves and others so that we can fix whatever we decide is broken. But if God remains beyond our understanding, he’s a threat, because we can’t control him—we can’t predict what he’ll do next.

A: Fine; point taken. Back to the subject, please?

R: Sorry for the digression. God is one; God is three. He is one being; he is three persons. It’s important to keep those in balance. Sometimes those of us in the Western church—Catholics and Protestants—tend to talk as if “God” is a single person, the “real” person above the three members of the Trinity. I knew a man in my denomination, a candidate for ordination like me, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity for just this reason: he asked, “If there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then who is ‘God’?” The answer is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, but he couldn’t find that balance; he concluded that “God” must be a fourth person and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a result.

Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.