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God as She-He-They

Originally posted at Homebrewed Christianity as “She Who is Not”

Earlier this week I had a post about language and God talk that incorporated C.S. Lewis’ poem “A Footnote on All Prayers”.  Part of what came out of that was an exchange with J.W. about pronouns, the Bible, and Inspiration. I wanted to transfer some of that over here (I have edited it for clarity) in order to open up the conversation to more people.

J.W.: So, what does your god look like? And how is that look any different from Piper’s or Driscoll’s?

Me:
Thanks for asking! Actually there is quite a substantial difference. Let me point out just a couple of things to start:
A) I don’t believe that language about God is univocal (as I have said). SO we begin in humility understanding that all our words, metaphors and concepts are OUR best attempt.
B) I believe that langue (since it is not univocal) functions relationally. When Jesus uses ‘Father’ language, he is talking about the WAY in which relates to a father. Not that God’s ontological being is Father in an exacting and representative way. It is an expressive use of language. That is the nature of language.
C) The way that Scripture is expressed is historic. I believe that the Bible is Inspired by Holy Spirit. That means that Holy Spirit was at work in the authors and ultimately in those who collected and validated the canon. (I confess this by faith). Those authors were historically situated and particularly located. They expressed their thoughts in their best language in their best frameworks. We see that historical locatedness and account for it when we engage their writings.
D) Whether you call it ‘original sin’ (I don’t) or ‘human nature’ or (my favorite) relational brokeness and conflicting biological impulses … humans have a problem. We are not 100% whole. Something is wrong (we don’t even do the good we WANT to do). That means that in every epoch and era there are things in place that are not perfect. Those show up in scripture – since it is a snap shot of its environment. The Bible is fully human (and I believe fully divine in a Process sense) but it is not ABSENT of humanity. It is full of humanity.
So If you take just those 4 things in contrast to Piper and Driscoll, then my God talk is:

  • in Humility not certainty or pushy
  • Relational not static or exacting
  • Historical not trans-historic
  • Human not un-human

Does that help? SO that is my starting point. From there I diverge wildly from the other two.

J.W.
Well, first of all, thanks for a response.
Second, no offense, but you use an awful lot of words to not say too much. Or, to say the same thing over and over while denying that you are saying one thing, yet actually affirming another. Since I don’t have any real idea what you believe Piper and Driscoll believe, I still don’t know that you are painting a different god or not.
You start out saying that all expressions of God are only a best attempt, but then you claim to believe the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, which is it? Our best attempt, or Holy Spirit inspired? See the problem there. It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.
Certainly the Bible is written situationally. God could have inspired men to write it so it only made sense at one point in the entire course of time, or He could have inspired it so that it meant the same thing from beginning to end, from the beginning of time to the end of time. And written so that ordinary people could figure it out with a little help from His Holy Spirit. Which is what I believe. You seem to believe that only post-modern thought with a lot of help from certain philosophers can figure out this whole humility, relation, human thing. Sorry, way too many creeks have flowed over their banks throughout history for me to believe that only recently have we been smart enough to figure this whole mess out.
God (Holy Spirit) inspired the whole Bible. He could have very easily caused His writers to use words that wouldn’t mean anything to their (at the time, current) readers, but would only matter eons later. IF that is what He intended.
Again, you haven’t showed me anything but dichotomies, and nothing of substance that disproves anything Piper et al believe-which I still don’t know what you believe they believe.

Me:
1) I did use a lot of words, but it was to say quite a bit. Unfortunately it was not what you were looking for so you think I didn’t say much. I assure you that I say quite enough in my 300 words to get in a lot of trouble in many circles!
2) You are 100% wrong that “It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.” Inspiration is not the OVERriding of human intent – it is the filling UP and expanding of human intent. Inspiration does not make something inhuman. You are thinking of something else not inspiration. Then you accuse me of dichotomies? Weird. I am talking about a participatory-relational model that transcends either/or thinking. You must be confused.
3) Here is an example of the difference (which you apparently were not able to pick up on): It is equally a valid to call god She as it is to call god He. Because in the end, god is neither. Those are pronouns that stand in for their antecedent but which do not entirely explain god or contain god’s ontological reality. God did not give Christianity a masculine feel. We did. God is God that is beyond our biological categorizations and anatomical classification. God is not defined by those – we simply conceptualize God and these terms and portray those conceptions in our language.
This is the nature of language. It is symbolic – analogical – and metaphorical.  That does not mean that we are not saying anything when we talk about God. We are. It does not mean that there is no inspiration. There is. Those are not mutually exclusive.
To quote Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is :

Words about God are cultural creatures, intwined with the mores and adventures of the faith community that uses them. As cultures shift, so too does the specificity of God-talk.

To call God She is just as accurate and as inaccurate as calling God ‘he’.

 

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Language, God Talk, and Prayer

I never struggle to believe in God. I believe in the deep core of my being. I have faith in my bones. I breath this stuff. I am filled with Holy Spirit and that gives purpose to my day and direction to my life.  I never doubt the reality of the Christian faith … until I listen to a conservative like John Piper or Marc Driscoll talk. Then, it is all too apparent to me that we are (at least partially) projecting our greatest hopes and dreams onto the screen of the heavens. We are outsourcing our fears and evils onto a cosmic bad guy called the devil. We have created a galactic father figure in the sky (paging Dr. Freud).

It is so clear when Piper talks that it makes me want to retreat into the post-liberal work of George Lindbeck!  

Xenophanes is famed to have said:

“If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.”

It gets boiled down to “If horses had gods – they would look like horses.”

Most days I can stave that off. I can avoid the haunting suspicion and nagging doubt … but what Piper does is create a God in his own image – there is no other way to say it – it is idolatry.

So what? you may ask. Why even bother with it?  Because, I believe that there really is a God.

C.S. Lewis wrote a poem one time called “a footnote to all prayers” (it references Pheidias who was  a legendary statue maker in the ancient world)

Footnote to All Prayers
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

This is why we must acknowledge what it is we are doing when we pray, when we preach, and when we practice. We are doing the best we can with words, symbols, sounds and images. But if those images are solidified and codified past their point of original artistry, mysticism and metaphor – then it becomes something deadly to the soul and dangerous to the one seeking the real and living God revealed in Christ.

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Signs that make you Wonder

Let me just say how much I have enjoyed the conversation this week. One of the dynamic elements of a conversational blog is that sometimes that conversation takes longer or goes in a different direction than expected – this is the nature of dialogue (vs. a monologue). I was supposed to write on allegory today but that can wait till Friday – today we get talk about miracles, the supernatural and signs that make you wonder.

It seems to me that there are two main things to get on the table here.

The first is the phrase ‘super-natural’ comes from specific worldview that came to ascendancy in the seventeenth century. It is very mechanistic. It says that God set up the natural world to work a certain way (like a clock) and the debate was really between folks like the Deists who said the God stepped away after creation and is letting it run like clockwork. The other group believed in intervention and held that God did – from time to time – interfere with the normal mechanisms and do something … super-natural. The activities of angels and demons were outside the perceptibility and predictability of the ‘natural order’ and so on.

That is the supernatural and that is exactly what I do not believe in.

Now, I do believe in the miraculous. The miraculous in this sense is that which is extra-ordinary, outside the expected normality of human experience. Since I am a believer, I attribute that to the power of God who is at work in the world in Holy Spirit.

I want to say again that I do not believe in a solely transcendent God who in ‘his’ holiness can have nothing do with fallen matter and thus resides ‘up’ in the heavens and intermittently ‘breaks through’ the veil of reality in order to intervene in human affairs.

The second thing that we need to get on the table is Biblical language repeated so often in the Gospels of “signs”. What we calls miracles are often referred to as signs. I have even heard them called ‘signs that make you wonder’. This is sacramental language – which is why so many of us are not familiar with it.

A sign, by being fully itself, points to something that is beyond itself. Think of a road sign. A symbol, similarly, is something that participates in that which it signifies without being totally that thing. So in communion, we might say that the bread points to the body of Christ while remaining fully bread. Or that the church is not the Kingdom of God even though it participates in the it. It is a sign that points to a greater reality.

What we would call miracles, what the Gospels often refer to as signs, are activities of God’s presence that point to something beyond themselves while – or by – being fully themselves.

Once these two understandings are in place the conversation takes on a whole new set of possibilities. Once you say goodbye to predictable formulas (mechanistic) then you can move to a conception of a dynamic relationship with a living God. Once you move away from a super-natural mentality (which is often superstitious), you can move to a sacramental participation with the natural world.

God is at work in the world. As Christians we say this proudly and confidently. (I understand those in the Enlightenment who rejected the interventionist view of god and who explained away the miracles in the Bible by simply saying that ancient pre-modern people only interpreted things that way – but that is not where I am at).

If you are into Process Theology, there is a whole second conversation that takes you into all sorts of fun places!  But today I just want to point people to Chapter 7 in the Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren called “the Demonstration of the Message”.  It is wonderful.  I will close here with the words he closes with there.

… this is in large part what I believe the signs and wonders of Jesus are secretly telling us: that God, the good King, is present – working from the inside. The King is in the kingdom, and the kingdom is among us here and now – for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The King is present in the mess and chaos of everyday life on earth, bringing healing, sight, perception, liberation… The incursion of the kingdom of God has begun. We are under a gentle, compassionate assault by a kingdom of peace and healing and forgiveness and life.

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>Communing thoughts

>This week we start a new series for the New Year.  Each week will be broken into 3 acts.
Act 1 will look toward a Big Tent Christianity perspective.
Act 2 will outline where I am currently at on the issue.
Act 3 will introduce a new idea that I got from somewhere else.

Act 1: Sometimes it is good and helpful just to know that there are other perspectives out there and to know what those perspectives are. Here are four quick snapshots of the historical landscape (as I currently understand it).

Transubstantiation is the famous catholic position. The belief is that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ – which still remains bread and wine**. This may seem confusing or like a contradiction to some but those who hold this position are comfortable with “mystery”.  It is the same way that they believe in Jesus being fully God and fully man at the same time… it is mystery. The same would go for Mary (Jesus’ mother) being a perpetual virgin and also exalted mother.
      ** late edition: it turns out that most catholic thinkers hold to a more historic position whereby it does not remain bread and wine but only appears to. Here is a link to an explanatory note about the physics debate. I hope my confusion can be forgiven – it is a very elaborate topic even for those within the fold. **

Consubstantiation is the Lutheran position. The concern is not that anything happens to change the bread and wine but that Christ’s “real presence” is in and around the elements. The important part of this idea – and related ideas – is that something special happens in this meal and that is why you have to be careful with WHO is allowed to take it and also who is allowed to SERVE it (often called sacerdotal).
     * my friend Dave S. (who holds something like this view) says that something does happen to the elements but that the bread and wine are now mysteriously not just bread and wine.*

Both ‘Tran’ and ‘Con’ would hold to the idea that communion is a  “means of grace”. That  the grace of God comes to you in a unique or special way through eating these special elements.

A third perspective on this ceremony holds that the meal is a Symbol. This is what I grew up with. The idea is that the meal is a Sacrament (meaning that we use concrete things to represent spiritual or abstract ideas) and that the bread is just bread but that it represents (symbolically) the meaning that Christ gave to it at the Last Supper.

The fourth snapshot is of the Quakers. This group holds the communion meal in such high respect that they don’t celebrate it!  They hold that since the spiritual body of Christ (the church) is so fractured, that it would be unimaginable (and maybe blasphemous) to participate in a ceremony that exalted the body of Christ broken that we “may be one” (as Jesus prayed in John 17).

All four of these groups would be ‘sacramental’ at one level or another – seeing them as ‘outward signs of an inward truth’ or some other formulation. Some refer only to the first two ( Tran and Con) as sacramental since they have a “high” view of the sacraments and then others would be seem as only symbol or ceremony.

Act 2: I grew up with the Symbol understanding and that has always been the way that I have participated in communion.  I am still primarily there but with a few modifications : one in the positive and one in the negative.

In the negative, I do not believe it to be a “means of grace”. I think that the grace of God will come to you just fine without a special meal of special elements. I do not believe in that sort of meta-physics anymore. I think the presence of Christ is the same during that meal in a church building as it is having coffee with a friend. I love taking communion at church! I just don’t think that it is a means of God’s grace nor that Christ’s presence is thicker there and then than it is at any other time or place.

Some may think that this seems very unreligious but actually it is very religious! I think that the presence of Christ is with us every time we break bread with someone (this is my positive change). Every time you sit across the table from an “other” you are reconciling in Jesus’ name and bridging the gap – this is the ongoing ministry of Christ through you! And the important thing is that Jesus is just as present when you have lunch with your co-workers and a pint with your mates as Jesus is at church when the bread and cup are up front!   Jesus is with you all the time.  For me, it does not get much more religious than that.

Act 3: Richard Kearney proposes the idea that the early church was so focused on substance and status (which were very important to establish in those early centuries) that it may have missed something vital in the teaching of Christ. By over focusing on whether the bread became the body and blood of Christ,  it missed something possibly even more profound. Christ’s body became the bread.

The implication for this is that Jesus is saying “what they are going to do to me, do not do this to others”. That the big deal with communion is not whether the bread becomes the body, but that Christ’s body becomes the bread. Jesus is saying eat together–I have given my life for every one so that no one needs to be killed like this in God’s name.

The everyday theology application:  Communion  is not about ceremony and ritual during a worship service at a grandiose cathedral owned by the religious establishment, served by professional clergy and robed priests to those who have been approved and indoctrinated.  Communion is a meal that those who love Jesus and live in Christ’s way share with those who are both near and far from the church.

When we break bread together, that is communion.  It is not so much about whether the bread becomes the body, but that Christ’s body has become bread. No one is to be killed because of their opinion or belief about God–for Christ’s sake!  This is the exact reason that Jesus changed that famous Jewish Passover ceremony for his followers.  Within 300 years of Christ’s death and resurrection, we were back to religious ritual, robed priests, militarized religion, and violence done in God’s name. People being killed over this continued into the 1800’s.

 I am comfortable going out on the limb and saying A)  it’s almost as if Jesus never came.  The only thing that changed was who was doing the violence.  Now they did the violence in Jesus name instead of some other god’s name. B)  this is not what Jesus wanted.

Here is the thing: 
 I am for a Big Tent Christianity. So I want to break bread with those who believe that the bread becomes the body, with those that believe that Christ’s presence is with the bread, and with those – like me-  who see it as a beautiful symbol and metaphor.

 Do I believe that in the age of physics that it is silly to say that the bread becomes the body? No – it is consistent with a historical position.
In a post-Christendom world is it tenable to have a “means of grace” controlled by religious professional and distributed to only the approved members? No.

But I do think that it’s tenable for us to continue to participate in the metaphor if the body becomes bread – it is a symbol of sacrifice and reconciliation that anyone is free to participate in no matter what they believe about it.

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