Some Observations concerning our Thinkingabout God and about Jesus

North Carolina Senior Games 2013

Category: Literary Arts

Sub-Category: Essay

By Michael J. Watts

Title:Sub-Category: Essay

Local Game: Johnston County Senior Games

Michael WattsObservations About God

Artist:

Some Observations concerning our Thinkingabout God and about Jesus

Whenever the Lenten season arrives, I begin to focus my thoughts on spiritual

matters. This year I am meditating on the entire concept of "God" and "Christ." I begin my

journey by setting out some general principles that help me to clear away some of the

underbrush that so often impedes my efforts to understand.

I begin by observing that God is not threatened by our various opinions and beliefs

about Him/Her. Likewise, neither is Jesus Christ threatened. God, in all of God's

manifestations, can take care of HimselflHerselfwithout human help. God does not need me

or anyone else to defend HimlHer.

Furthermore, I must recognize honestly that whenever we humans attempt to describe

anything, we can do so only in terms of our human experience, and using human language.

We must also concede that this-worldly human experience and human languages are limited,

and are inadequate to describe Heavenly- and Other-worldly matters. So whenever we talk

about God we are attempting at the very outset a basically impossible task: to describe the

indescribable and to express the inexpressible. Only metaphors and similes, and perhaps also

parables and myths, are suited to do justice to our descriptions of "heavenly" realities.

For example, we often describe and address God in our prayers as "Father." And

contrary to the "politically correct" concepts of some Christians I know, I think that calling

God "Father" is perfectly OK, so long as we do not do so to the exclusion of other

necessary clarifying metaphors or similes. But to call God "our Father" does not mean we

must believe that God exists in a human body having male genitalia. And it does not mean

that the use of "Mother" or other feminine metaphors or similes for God are excluded or

1

inappropriate, for the Bible itself uses female metaphors. But the use of the term "Father"

does mean that we may perceive God as in some sense being the originator, the begetter,

the initiator of our human existence.

The image of God as "Father" also suggests that we may understand God, not as an

abstraction, but as a kind of "person," as one who cares for human beings as in some sense

members ofa "family." The term also suggests that God is in a role of "authority," setting

guidelines for His/Her children as they grow up within the household of faith. Yet none of

the writers of Scripture would assume that to call God "Father" is to limit the Being, the

essence, the character, or the qualities of God to that one metaphor. On the contrary, the

term "Father" is not adequate in itselfto describe God, and it does not tell us everything

that God is. Furthermore, the term "Father," used without qualification, can be misleading.

My own human father, for example, was the husband of my mother, and he was the

"breadwinner" in my family. He had, along with his good qualities, many imperfections. I

loved him, but sometimes I feared him, and at other times I was annoyed with him, and in

his later years, he was not the caregiver for his family, but rather, the family was his

caregiver. I do not think of God as "Father" in those terms. Indeed, some of us may have

grown up not having experienced in any sense the kind of "fatherhood" that the writers of

Scripture intended to portray by the use of that concept.

Some of us may have grown up in a family with a mother, but no father, in the

household at all, and others may have lived in a household where the father was either

totally uncaring, or even abusive. Thus, many find it difficult to identify with the metaphor

"Father" for God. But that fact does not mean that the term should no longer be used. It

means only that every metaphor or simile for God must be supplemented by other

2

metaphors or similes, and that every person must draw upon the entire wealth of

metaphors and similes used for God in Scripture, and perhaps even envision new ones, and

relate them to their own experiences and understanding of God.

Thus, all of our titles for God and for Jesus, and all of our metaphors and similes

used to describe God and Jesus can be only partial and inadequate. Yet they cannot affect

God's reality. When we pray, we may address God in terms of our personal beliefs, but in

the back of our minds we are (or, at least, we always should be) addressing God, not as

we believe God to be, but as only God knows HimselflHerself to be.

We Christians generally in all of our official creeds have always asserted our

belief in the existence of only one God. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament occasionally

appears to suggest that ancient Hebrews might have assumed the existence of other

"gods," at certain periods in their history. It seems clear, however that the writers and

editors who set down and preserved our Biblical texts always wrote assuming the

existence of only one God, Yahweh, the God of Israel. They considered that any other

"gods" mentioned in the text were not real, but were only idols worshipped by pagan

peoples, or by Israelites who had forsaken the one true God, Yahweh.

When we come to the New Testament, we should remind ourselves that none of

the writers of the Gospels, as far as we can tell, were actual "eyewitnesses" to the events of

Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. (The names for the Gospels were given to them many

years after their writing.) Some of their material may have come from such eyewitnesses,

but there is still a strong interpretive element involved in the Gospels, and the same thing

would have been true of the narration of any eyewitnesses whose testimony was handed

down and utilized in the writing of our Gospels. Oral tradition about what Jesus did, and

3

Who Jesus was, and what Jesus was like, has been filtered through the experiences and the

faith interpretations of those who handed down the traditions. That would be only natural,

and it is not necessarily a bad thing that this is the case.

The various writers of the New Testament, especially in the Gospels and in Paul's

writings, use many different titles for Jesus in order to suggest to their readers different

aspects of the Being or the works of Jesus during the course of His life, including the

stories of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The most important of these include: The

Prophet, the Servant of God (or the Lord), the great High Priest, the Messiah (Greek Christos =

Christ), the Son of David, the King of the Jews, the Son of Man, the Second Adam, the Lord

(Greek: Kyrios), the Savior, the Word (Greek: Logos), the Son of God. In the interest of

space I will address only one of these, the most important one, the Son of God.

A Jewish Rabbi friend once remarked to me, "the trouble I have with Christianity is its

assertion that a man became God. Such an assertion is sheer arrogance." I replied to him that when

you put it that way, I am in full agreement. But that is not the teaching of Christianity, as I

understand it. Christianity asserts, rather, that the eternal God somehow entered into the life of

this man Jesus of Nazareth to accomplish many wonderful things. We call this belief the concept

of "Incarnation." In answer to the question, "Is, or was Jesus 'God,'?" My personal response is

both, "Yes, it is true!" and "No, it is not true!" As a matter of objective human history, I do not

believe that the man Jesus of Nazareth was God in the flesh. But as a confession of my personal

faith experience, I must say that I do conclude with the Apostle Paul that "God was in Christ

reconciling the world to Himself." The following paragraphs will hopefully clarify my answer.

It is probable that Jesus Himself never publicly proclaimed that He was God in the

flesh, and that He never Himself used most of the titles for Himself that later Christians

4

have used to describe Him. For the most part such titles have come from much later

reflections of the earliest followers of Jesus and their descendants in the faith as they tried

to come to terms with His significance. However, that does not necessarily mean that those

titles do not express a part of the truth about Who Jesus was, and about what His work

was. But we cannot now recover from the Gospels exactly what Jesus understood or

believed about Himself, because so much of what we encounter in the Gospels is overlaid

with later faith-interpretation. Yet I do believe that the Gospels provide us a fairly reliable

impression of Him when we study them carefully, with an open mind, and using the best

tools of modem Biblical scholarship.

The letters of the apostle Paul provide us with probably the nearest thing to

"eyewitness" testimony that we possess. But even Paul is very reticent to discuss in detail just

what the risen Christ was like. And as far as we know, Paul was not an eyewitness to Jesus'

earthly life and ministry. Furthermore, even an "eyewitness" can misinterpret what he or she

has experienced. Paul virtually never calls Jesus "God."!However, from the experiences that he

had with the risen Christ, Paul clearly does attribute to Jesus most of the "attributes" of God,

while also clearly describing Jesus as fully human.

The New Testament writers who are most insistent that Jesus was God (namely, the

writer ofthe Fourth Gospel, "John," and of the Letters of "John," and the writer of the

Book of Hebrews), are the very writers who are also most insistent on the full humanity of

Jesus. If pressed, they would probably insist that Jesus was both fully Divine and fully

1 Some interpreters insist that Paul does this in Romans 9:5, but whether Christ is called "God" in thatpassage depends on the way the Greek text is punctuated, and the earliest Greek manuscripts themselves did nothave any punctuation. If Paul did call Jesus "God" here, it would be an unusual departure from his customarypractice. Personally, I believe Paul was too Jewish in his outlook to do that, although, of course, I could bemistaken.

5

human, and not just God "masquerading" as a human being. The writer of the Letters of

John even insists that anyone who denies that Jesus came "inthe flesh" as a human being is

an "Anti-Christ" (1 John 2:22 ff., 4:2-3; 2 John 7)!

Many Biblical interpreters have noted that in the New Testament there appears to

be a "backward trend" in the understandings of Jesus by the various writers. The earliest

writer, Paul, writing about 50-55 CE, seems to hold that, at the death of Jesus, God

"adopted" him as "Messiah"and "Son of God,"And in this view, the "resurrection"is

practically identical with the concept of the "ascension," Of course, Paul eventually seems

to progress somewhat beyond that, yet he almost never actually speaks of Jesus as being

"God"(see footnote 1).

The earliest Gospel, "Mark," from about 70 CE, apparently holds that God

"adopted" Jesus at the time of Jesus' Baptism, and that His disciples did not come to

this understanding until the incident at Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks, "Whodo

people say that I am?" "Matthew" and "Luke," perhaps a generation later than Mark, seem

to hold that Jesus became "Son of God" and "Messiah" at His birth. And then the latest

Gospel, that of "John," written about 90-100 CE, holds that Jesus was Divine from the

creation of the world. It appears that, as people came to experience the Christian faith,

and sought to understand that experience, and reflect upon it, their understandings were

enlarged.

But most of the titles and metaphors for Christ in the New Testament are not

statements about the nature of Christ (Divine vs. human) at all, and they are not related to

the later controversies that led to the definitions of the ecumenical Church councils and the

creeds in the fourth century CE. The titles and metaphors for Jesus in the New Testament

6

are related, not so much to Who and what Jesus was, but rather, to what Jesus did, and to

what those early followers were convinced that the risen and ascended Jesus continued to

do and to be in their lives. Those titles and metaphors were never meant primarily to

describe Jesus' essence, but rather, they were used to describe Jesus' functions and

continuing activity, in light of what those earliest Christians had experienced as Jesus'

followers both during His ministry, and after His death. And the central function that they

described was that Jesus lived, and suffered, and died, and was raised, in accordance with

the will of God, as a mediator for God's love and forgiveness for all sinful human beings.

The various "doctrines" that we Christians have held through the centuries about

God and about Christ did not come first. No one at the beginning just handed out the

"doctrines" about the nature of God and about the nature of Christ, and said to the very

earliest Christians, "First you must believe the truth of these' doctrines,' and then you will

be 'saved.'" On the contrary, first, there were experiences with Jesus during His earthly

ministry. And then, there were experiences of Jesus' living Presence after His death. And

people then reflected on the meaning and significance of these experiences. Only then

came the "doctrines," by which people attempted to explain, however inadequately, their

understandings of the significance ofthose experiences, to themselves and to others.

It may be true that there is a "problem" with the differing metaphors and similes and

doctrines concerning the nature of God and of Christ, and concerning the work of Christ. If

so, that "problem" is the natural result of the fact that different people, at different times in

the history of the Church, have experienced God in different ways, and even when they had

the same kinds of experiences, they still interpreted them differently. This should not be

surprising, and it is not a bad thing, for study about God is like the examination of a finely cut

7

diamond - only more so. Certainly a diamond has a lot of facets and its true beauty is often

known only by examining it from many angles, and in different kinds of light. But how much

more so must it inevitably be with God!

Personally, I am still trying to keep an open mind about just Who and what Jesus was

and is for me. My experiences with God and with Christ grow every day. And often, to grow

means to change. To a certain extent I am sympathetic with the aims and the methodology of

the "Jesus Seminar," and I am very impressed with the color-coded translation of the Gospels

that they have produced. And I look forward to their completion of the entire New Testament.

But I do not agree with a lot of their conclusions. In fact, I believe that many of their

conclusions about the words and acts of Jesus and about Jesus' own self-consciousness were

colored (no pun intended) by their preconceptions about him before they ever began their

investigations as a group. All of us must guard against being prejudiced by our

preconceptions.

Those views are the starting point for my conceptions of God and of Jesus, but I

hope that I always continue to be open-minded and to grow in my understanding of such

matters.

8