Dan Kimball, N.T. Wright, and the Definition of "God"
Dan Kimball has posted an article on his blog today regarding the importance of definitions in our theological conversations. Here's a brief excerpt:
For example (and these all come from real discussions) - someone may say they believe in....
"the church" - but is their definition of church is more of a building and a place. People who say they "go to church" theologically really can't do that since we are the church. It normally means a building when you say you go to church. So you may hear someone say "church" but they are more defining it by the worship gathering that happens in a building vs. the people wherever they may be.
"the Gospel" - someone may say they believe in the Gospel, but what is their specific definition of the Gospel? There may be very significant differences in how one defines that.
"missional" - someone may say they are missional, but to them it means focusing most of their time on serving the poor and needy or getting involved in service projects in their community. To another it may mean putting on a large evangelistic event with Christian pop bands and lights and having an altar call where you raise your hand and pray. (In this case, I guess it sort of could be both, but I wouldn't necessarily think these are holistic ways of defining missional or emerging-missional).
"Virgin Birth of Jesus" - someone may say they believe in the Virgin Birth. But is the Virgin Birth they believe in a parable or allegorical understanding of it, or a literal, it really happened understanding of it?
"hell" - someone may say they believe in hell, but it is an eternal punishment/separation hell or is it referring to more of the hell on earth people may go to in this life?
"inspired Scriptures" - someone may say they believe in the inspired Scriptures, but it is the inspiration as in the Holy Spirit guiding the human authors so that exactly what God wanted in the Scriptures are there - or is it more of inspiration as in human beings writing out their own best thoughts and efforts to write about God, more like a person is "inspired" to write a song today or write a novel?
"Jesus" - someone may say they believe in "Jesus", but as I know fully well from writing the They Like Jesus but not the Church book - someone can believe in the Jesus who is more like a Buddha or a Gandhi and follow their teachings, but it is a different Jesus than the Jesus who is the Son of God, died, came back to life, divine, Judge, Savior, coming back bodily one day etc.
So people can use these terms, but what they actually mean to people in the definition may totally vary. I have been really coming to conclusions about how incredibly important asking people be to define what they mean with terms like this. It is so easy to assume we are saying the same thing, when we may have drastically different definitions of the words. I try now to actually ask for specific definitions from people. It really helps me understand what others mean by certain terms where I am have assumed we had the same definition until I asked.
I would completely agree with Dan that in order to properly dialogue with someone about these issues, we must first clarify what the participants mean when they use these terms. But I was surprised to see absent from Dan's list the most important term of all, the one that is foundational to all the ones listed, as well as to all theological terms we use.
The term is "god."
Unless we understand what someone means when s/he says the word "god," we may not only be having a different conversation when we talk specifically about "God," but also when we are talking about "church," or "missional," or "Jesus."
N.T. Wright has written and lectured extensively about the importance of the proper Judeo-Christian understanding of the word "god." Here is an excerpt from an article published in 1998 where Wright starts with what Jesus and His followers meant by the word "God," and goes to articulate where we, as Christians, should look for our definition:
When people ask “Was Jesus God?” they usually think they know what the word “God” means, and are asking whether we can fit Jesus into that. I regard this as deeply misleading. I can perhaps make my point clear by a personal illustration.
For seven years I was College Chaplain and Worcester College, Oxford. Each year I used to see the first year undergraduates individually for a few minutes, to welcome them to the college and make a first acquaintance. Most were happy to meet me; but many commented, often with slight embarrassment, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in god.”
I developed stock response: “Oh, that’s interesting; which god is it you don’t believe in?” This used to surprise them; they mostly regarded the word “God” as a univocal, always meaning the same thing. So they would stumble out a few phrases about the god they said they did not believe in: a being who lived up the in the sky, looking down disapprovingly at the world, occasionally “intervening” to do miracles, sending bad people to hell while allowing good people to share his heaven. Again, I had a stock response for this very common statement of “spy-in-the-sky” theology: “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god. I don’t believe in that god either.”
At this point the undergraduate would look startled. Then, perhaps, a faint look of recognition; it was sometimes rumored that half the college chaplains at Oxford were atheists. “No,” I would say; “I believe in the god I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.” What most people mean by “god” in late-modern western culture simply is not the mainstream Christian meaning.
The same is true for the meanings of “god” within postmodernity. We are starting to be more aware that many people give allegiance to “gods” and “goddesses” which are personifications of forces of nature and life. An obvious example is the earth-goddess, Gaia, revered by some within the New Age movement. Following the long winter of secularism, in which most people gave up believing in anything “religious” or “spiritual,” the current revival of spiritualities of all sorts is an inevitable swing of the pendulum, a cultural shift in which people have been able once more to celebrate dimensions of human existence which the Enlightenment had marginalized. But one cannot assume that what people mean by “god” or “spirit,” “religion” or “spirituality” within these movements bears very much relation to Christianity. I even heard, not long ago, an Italian justifying the pornography which featured his high-profile wife on the grounds that its portrayal of sexuality was deeply “religious.” The Pope, he thought, would welcome it.
Eros has of course been well-known to students of divinities time out of mind. But only when a culture has forgotten, through long disuse, how god-language actually works could someone assume that the deeply “religious” feelings, evoking a sense of wonder and transcendence, which serious eroticism (and lots of other things) can produce, could be straightforwardly identified with anything in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Did they ever hear of paganism?
It is vital that in our generation we inquire once more: to what, or rather whom, does the word “god” truly refer? And if, as Christians, we bring together Jesus and God in some kind of identity, what sort of an answer does that provide to our question?
...
What did first century Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, mean by “god”? This is obviously the place to start. Their belief can be summed up in a single phrase: creational and covenantal monotheism.
Some theologies, e.g., ancient Epicureanism and modern Deism, believe in a god, or gods, but think they have nothing much to do with the world in which we live. Others, like Stoicism, believe that god, or “the divine,” or “the sacred” is simply a dimension of our world, so that “god” and the world end up being pretty much the same thing. Both of these can give birth to practical or theoretical atheism. The first can let its “god” get so far away that he disappears. This is what happened with Marx and Feuerbach in the nineteenth century, allowing the “absentee landlord” of eighteenth-century Deism to become simply an absentee. The second can get so used to various “gods” around the place that it ceases to care much about them. This is what happened with a good deal of ancient paganism in Greece and Rome, until, as Pliny wryly remarks, the arrival of Christianity stirred up pagans to a fresh devotion to their gods.
The Jews believed in a quite different “god.” This god, YHWH, “the One Who Is,” the Sovereign One, was not simply the objectification of forces and drives within the world, but was the maker of all that exists. Several biblical books, or parts thereof, are devoted to exploring the difference between YHWH and the pagan idols: Daniel, Isaiah 40-55, and a good many Psalms spring obviously to mind. The theme is summed up in the Jewish daily prayer: “YHWH our God, YHWH is one!” Classic Jewish monotheism, then, believed that (a) there was one God, who created heaven and earth and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (b) this God had called Israel to be his special people. This twin belief, tested to the limit and beyond through Israel’s checkered career, was characteristically expressed through a particular narrative: the chosen people were also the rescued people, liberated from slavery in Egypt, marked out by the gift of Torah, established in their land, exiled because of disobedience, but promised a glorious return and final settlement. Jewish-style monotheism meant living in this story and trusting in this one true God, the God of creation and covenant, of Exodus and Return.
...
What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Isa 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures, the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people, the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young” (Isa 40:11). It is the OT portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove.
Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself “Well I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!” Rather, “as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.” I commend to you this category of “vocation” as the appropriate way forward for talking about what Jesus knew and believed about himself. This Jesus is both thoroughly credible as a first century Jew and thoroughly comprehensible as the one to whom early, high, Jewish christology looked back.
...
All this leads, in conclusion, to the area which, it seems to me, is just as vital a part of the contemporary christological task as learning to speak truly about the earthly Jesus and his sense of vocation. We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God. I have no time or space to develop this. What follows is an attempt to summarize material that could easily turn into a whole other paper, or more.
Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god. It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it. Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained. That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge. My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.
We could only ask the “kenotic” question in the way we normally do—did Jesus “empty himself” of some of his “divine attributes” in becoming human?—if we were tacitly committed to a quite unbiblical view of God, a high and majestic God for whom incarnation would be a category mistake and crucifixion a scandalous nonsense. The NT, on the contrary, invites us to look at this Jesus—the earthly Jesus, the Jesus of Second Temple Judaism, the kingdom-movement man, the ambiguous double revolutionary, the parabolic teaser, the healer, the man who wept over Jerusalem and then sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane—to look at this Jesus and to say with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only “Ecce Homo,” but “Ecce Deus.”
Is this your definition of "god," or do you you have another one?
You can also hear an N.T. Wright lecture based on this article here.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
For example (and these all come from real discussions) - someone may say they believe in....
"the church" - but is their definition of church is more of a building and a place. People who say they "go to church" theologically really can't do that since we are the church. It normally means a building when you say you go to church. So you may hear someone say "church" but they are more defining it by the worship gathering that happens in a building vs. the people wherever they may be.
"the Gospel" - someone may say they believe in the Gospel, but what is their specific definition of the Gospel? There may be very significant differences in how one defines that.
"missional" - someone may say they are missional, but to them it means focusing most of their time on serving the poor and needy or getting involved in service projects in their community. To another it may mean putting on a large evangelistic event with Christian pop bands and lights and having an altar call where you raise your hand and pray. (In this case, I guess it sort of could be both, but I wouldn't necessarily think these are holistic ways of defining missional or emerging-missional).
"Virgin Birth of Jesus" - someone may say they believe in the Virgin Birth. But is the Virgin Birth they believe in a parable or allegorical understanding of it, or a literal, it really happened understanding of it?
"hell" - someone may say they believe in hell, but it is an eternal punishment/separation hell or is it referring to more of the hell on earth people may go to in this life?
"inspired Scriptures" - someone may say they believe in the inspired Scriptures, but it is the inspiration as in the Holy Spirit guiding the human authors so that exactly what God wanted in the Scriptures are there - or is it more of inspiration as in human beings writing out their own best thoughts and efforts to write about God, more like a person is "inspired" to write a song today or write a novel?
"Jesus" - someone may say they believe in "Jesus", but as I know fully well from writing the They Like Jesus but not the Church book - someone can believe in the Jesus who is more like a Buddha or a Gandhi and follow their teachings, but it is a different Jesus than the Jesus who is the Son of God, died, came back to life, divine, Judge, Savior, coming back bodily one day etc.
So people can use these terms, but what they actually mean to people in the definition may totally vary. I have been really coming to conclusions about how incredibly important asking people be to define what they mean with terms like this. It is so easy to assume we are saying the same thing, when we may have drastically different definitions of the words. I try now to actually ask for specific definitions from people. It really helps me understand what others mean by certain terms where I am have assumed we had the same definition until I asked.
I would completely agree with Dan that in order to properly dialogue with someone about these issues, we must first clarify what the participants mean when they use these terms. But I was surprised to see absent from Dan's list the most important term of all, the one that is foundational to all the ones listed, as well as to all theological terms we use.
The term is "god."
Unless we understand what someone means when s/he says the word "god," we may not only be having a different conversation when we talk specifically about "God," but also when we are talking about "church," or "missional," or "Jesus."
N.T. Wright has written and lectured extensively about the importance of the proper Judeo-Christian understanding of the word "god." Here is an excerpt from an article published in 1998 where Wright starts with what Jesus and His followers meant by the word "God," and goes to articulate where we, as Christians, should look for our definition:
When people ask “Was Jesus God?” they usually think they know what the word “God” means, and are asking whether we can fit Jesus into that. I regard this as deeply misleading. I can perhaps make my point clear by a personal illustration.
For seven years I was College Chaplain and Worcester College, Oxford. Each year I used to see the first year undergraduates individually for a few minutes, to welcome them to the college and make a first acquaintance. Most were happy to meet me; but many commented, often with slight embarrassment, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in god.”
I developed stock response: “Oh, that’s interesting; which god is it you don’t believe in?” This used to surprise them; they mostly regarded the word “God” as a univocal, always meaning the same thing. So they would stumble out a few phrases about the god they said they did not believe in: a being who lived up the in the sky, looking down disapprovingly at the world, occasionally “intervening” to do miracles, sending bad people to hell while allowing good people to share his heaven. Again, I had a stock response for this very common statement of “spy-in-the-sky” theology: “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god. I don’t believe in that god either.”
At this point the undergraduate would look startled. Then, perhaps, a faint look of recognition; it was sometimes rumored that half the college chaplains at Oxford were atheists. “No,” I would say; “I believe in the god I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.” What most people mean by “god” in late-modern western culture simply is not the mainstream Christian meaning.
The same is true for the meanings of “god” within postmodernity. We are starting to be more aware that many people give allegiance to “gods” and “goddesses” which are personifications of forces of nature and life. An obvious example is the earth-goddess, Gaia, revered by some within the New Age movement. Following the long winter of secularism, in which most people gave up believing in anything “religious” or “spiritual,” the current revival of spiritualities of all sorts is an inevitable swing of the pendulum, a cultural shift in which people have been able once more to celebrate dimensions of human existence which the Enlightenment had marginalized. But one cannot assume that what people mean by “god” or “spirit,” “religion” or “spirituality” within these movements bears very much relation to Christianity. I even heard, not long ago, an Italian justifying the pornography which featured his high-profile wife on the grounds that its portrayal of sexuality was deeply “religious.” The Pope, he thought, would welcome it.
Eros has of course been well-known to students of divinities time out of mind. But only when a culture has forgotten, through long disuse, how god-language actually works could someone assume that the deeply “religious” feelings, evoking a sense of wonder and transcendence, which serious eroticism (and lots of other things) can produce, could be straightforwardly identified with anything in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Did they ever hear of paganism?
It is vital that in our generation we inquire once more: to what, or rather whom, does the word “god” truly refer? And if, as Christians, we bring together Jesus and God in some kind of identity, what sort of an answer does that provide to our question?
...
What did first century Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, mean by “god”? This is obviously the place to start. Their belief can be summed up in a single phrase: creational and covenantal monotheism.
Some theologies, e.g., ancient Epicureanism and modern Deism, believe in a god, or gods, but think they have nothing much to do with the world in which we live. Others, like Stoicism, believe that god, or “the divine,” or “the sacred” is simply a dimension of our world, so that “god” and the world end up being pretty much the same thing. Both of these can give birth to practical or theoretical atheism. The first can let its “god” get so far away that he disappears. This is what happened with Marx and Feuerbach in the nineteenth century, allowing the “absentee landlord” of eighteenth-century Deism to become simply an absentee. The second can get so used to various “gods” around the place that it ceases to care much about them. This is what happened with a good deal of ancient paganism in Greece and Rome, until, as Pliny wryly remarks, the arrival of Christianity stirred up pagans to a fresh devotion to their gods.
The Jews believed in a quite different “god.” This god, YHWH, “the One Who Is,” the Sovereign One, was not simply the objectification of forces and drives within the world, but was the maker of all that exists. Several biblical books, or parts thereof, are devoted to exploring the difference between YHWH and the pagan idols: Daniel, Isaiah 40-55, and a good many Psalms spring obviously to mind. The theme is summed up in the Jewish daily prayer: “YHWH our God, YHWH is one!” Classic Jewish monotheism, then, believed that (a) there was one God, who created heaven and earth and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (b) this God had called Israel to be his special people. This twin belief, tested to the limit and beyond through Israel’s checkered career, was characteristically expressed through a particular narrative: the chosen people were also the rescued people, liberated from slavery in Egypt, marked out by the gift of Torah, established in their land, exiled because of disobedience, but promised a glorious return and final settlement. Jewish-style monotheism meant living in this story and trusting in this one true God, the God of creation and covenant, of Exodus and Return.
...
What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Isa 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures, the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people, the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young” (Isa 40:11). It is the OT portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove.
Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself “Well I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!” Rather, “as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.” I commend to you this category of “vocation” as the appropriate way forward for talking about what Jesus knew and believed about himself. This Jesus is both thoroughly credible as a first century Jew and thoroughly comprehensible as the one to whom early, high, Jewish christology looked back.
...
All this leads, in conclusion, to the area which, it seems to me, is just as vital a part of the contemporary christological task as learning to speak truly about the earthly Jesus and his sense of vocation. We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God. I have no time or space to develop this. What follows is an attempt to summarize material that could easily turn into a whole other paper, or more.
Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god. It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it. Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained. That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge. My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.
We could only ask the “kenotic” question in the way we normally do—did Jesus “empty himself” of some of his “divine attributes” in becoming human?—if we were tacitly committed to a quite unbiblical view of God, a high and majestic God for whom incarnation would be a category mistake and crucifixion a scandalous nonsense. The NT, on the contrary, invites us to look at this Jesus—the earthly Jesus, the Jesus of Second Temple Judaism, the kingdom-movement man, the ambiguous double revolutionary, the parabolic teaser, the healer, the man who wept over Jerusalem and then sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane—to look at this Jesus and to say with awe and wonder and gratitude, not only “Ecce Homo,” but “Ecce Deus.”
Is this your definition of "god," or do you you have another one?
You can also hear an N.T. Wright lecture based on this article here.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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