Archive for the ‘By John Stonecypher’ Category
Sermon: Reality is Relational
Filed under: By John Stonecypher, Gospel, Ministry, Perichoresis, Relationships, Sermons, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity, Trinity | Tags: einstein, physics, quantum, relational ontology, relationality, science, sermon, torrance, Trinity
Comments (5) It was science that first drew me in to the theology of T. F. Torrance. I didn’t even believe in God at the time, but when I heard our new theology professor John McKenna had studied under Einstein, I had to give him a listen. The rest is history.
But it’s the science side of Torrance that has been the hardest for me to articulate to others — how the theologians the world needs right now are theologians who are also scientists, and how post-Einsteinian science has a lot of help to offer theologians as we attempt to dig ourselves out of our Augustinian ditches.
Anyway, I tried to communicate that in a recent sermon, and I think it went well, so I wanted to share it with my Trinity and Humanity family. My topic is what Torrance liked to call “onto-relations” — relations between things that make those things what they are. I talk about how science impacts our ways of thinking about God, and how that affects our ability to love God and love our neighbors.
The sermon started with a video clip, so I thought I’d include that too:
Proposal: An eschatology where God is more present than absent
Filed under: Bible, By John Stonecypher, Gospel, Ministry, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity, Trinity | Tags: apocalypse, Bible, Christ, end times, Incarnation, parousia, Prophecy, revelation, second coming, tribulation, Trinity
Comments (40) When Jesus talks about “the Son of Man coming on the clouds” (Matt 16, 24, 26; Mark 13; Luke 17, 21), I believe he is using well-known metaphors to warn of a socio-political catastrophe that some of his first-century hearers would live to see. I also believe in the future event usually called “the Second Coming,” but I believe these texts (and others like them) are not talking about that.
This is not the most important doctrinal distinction in the world. The creeds, for example, don’t address it. But I am coming to believe it is a distinction that matters and is worth talking about. More on that in a bit. But first I want to give some background…
First, T.F. Torrance points out a problem in how we talk about the Coming of Christ:
It is important to recall that the apostolic witness to Christ did not speak of his advent (parousia)…in the plural, for strictly speaking there is only one saving parousia of the Son… The term parousia was used in the New Testament to speak of all three: the coming, arrival, and presence of Christ… His presence is an advent and his advent is a presence. “The hour comes and now is,” as Jesus once said [John 4:23]. The plural word, “advents” or parousiai, was not found in Christian literature for more than a century after the ascension of Christ… In one revealing statement, however, Justin Martyr spoke of what takes place in the midst of Christ’s parousia. In other words, here and now in the on-going life of the Church we live in the midst of the advent-presence of Christ, already partake of the great regeneration of the future, and share in its blessings with one another (Thomas F. Torrance, The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church. Edinburgh: 1988. pp. 299,300).
Our deistic culture believes in few things so profoundly as it believes in the absence of God. We Christians seem to believe that he was present once and will someday be present again, but for now we mostly go along with the broader culture in saying that God is certainly not here now. Except for being “present in the Spirit,” which we mostly use as a euphemism for “not really present.”
N.T. Wright explains:
When God renews the whole creation, as he has promised, bringing together heaven and earth, Jesus himself will be at the centre of it all, personally present to and with his people and ruling his world fully and finally at last… And since the ascension is often thought of in terms of Jesus ‘going away,’ this future final moment is often thought of in terms of his ‘coming back again,’ hence the shorthand ‘second coming.’ However, since the ascension in fact means that Jesus, though now invisible, is not far away but rather closely present with us, it isn’t surprising that some of the key New Testament passages speak not of his ‘return’ as though from a great distance, but of his ‘appearing’ (e.g. Colossians 3.4; 1 John 3.2)… For the early Christians, the really important event—the resurrection of Jesus—had already taken place, and his final ‘appearing’ would simply complete what had then been decisively begun (N.T. Wright, Revelation for Everyone. John Knox: 2011. pp. 224-25).
The Trinity and Humanity blog is part of a larger theological community that emphasizes the twin mysteries of Trinity & Incarnation, and the universal character of the Atonement which flows from them. This magnificent vision lives and breathes the good news of the Real Presence of the Triune God. As such, our theological project includes re-formulating doctrines which teach or imply God’s Absence. The popular eschatology of our day is one such doctrine that requires our attention.
Jesus and the New Testament writers have quite a lot to say about the impending destruction of Jerusalem “in this generation,” and the dark and difficult times leading up to it. And when we take those texts and impose them upon our doctrines about the future Glorious Appearing of Christ, it has consequences.
It produces a worldview of fatalism and pessimism, because it makes us think we know what the world will look like immediately before Christ appears, and it looks awful. When the beasts and tribulations of the first century get pasted onto our own future, it produces a vision of the world forever getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse until Jesus comes back and fixes it, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it in the meantime, so don’t even try making the world a better place, because we already know it won’t work.
Is this our vision of the world where the life of the Father, Son, and Spirit is earthing itself in human life in the world? Where Christ is already present and becoming more present all the time? Do we really want to be telling people to forget the prophetic visions of a world where swords get pounded into plowshares, where everyone has their own fig tree, where it will be considered unusual for someone’s lifespan to be less than 100 years, where water will flow in the wild places and flowers will bloom in the desert? Do we really want to be telling people to forget all that because those are visions of a world where God is present, and we don’t live in that world, at least not yet?
The Gospel is better than that.
What do you think? Have I gone off the deep end?
Some questions for a Trinitarian eschatology
Filed under: Bible, By John Stonecypher, Christian Living, Church, Evangelism, Gospel, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity, The Plan of Adoption, Trinity | Tags: apocalypse, eschatology, Hell, parousia, presence, return of christ, revelation, second coming
Comments (19) 
I was raised in an apocalypse-centered religion. Since my years of teenage rebellion, I have mostly ignored eschatology, and it’s been a good re-centering experience. But nowadays I find myself less and less able to keep saying “Eschatology doesn’t matter.” Because it does. The ancients were right to put “He will come again to judge the living and the dead” at the end of the creed rather than the beginning. But they did include it, and I have begun to agree with their choice. The future of the Triune God deserves a greater-than-zero level of attention.
Now as I seek to taste eschatology again for the first time, I approach it from the perspective of the One who has given me a future—the Triune God of Grace—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; this perspective changes everything. What I am finding has little in common with the vision I was raised with. For one thing, I am asking different questions than I used to, and today I want to share some of those questions with my Trinity-and-Humanity family, so we can all start to think this through together:
Question #1: Where is God?
I think this is the most important question that requires our voice, because I think the standard Christian message distorts the gospel. People flock to the churches of the world, asking “Where is God?” and the fundamental answer they get is: “Not here yet.” I don’t usually hear it said in exactly those words, but that is what it boils down to. Why is there so much evil in the world? Because Christ hasn’t returned yet. Right? People are being taught that the world is unpleasant because God is absent. But the “good news” is that someday his absence will cease, he will smite the wicked (more on that later), and then everything will be fine for us good people. In the meantime, we say that oh yes, Jesus is already present through the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? When we say “I’ll be with you in spirit,” what we really mean is “I won’t be there.”
Our answer to this question needs work. Yes, we want to affirm that the future of creation is New Creation, a world where the Triune God will be present in a way more intense and obvious than now. But we must find ways of communicating this without giving the impression that God’s current location is anything other than Right Here, Right Now, Always and Forever. I believe one good path is to start using fewer spatial metaphors (“Christ went to heaven and will someday return to earth”) and start using more epistemic metaphors (“Christ’s presence is now hidden, visible only to the eyes of faith”). We can make more use of Paul’s metaphor of Christ’s “Appearing” (Greek: “Epiphany”) (Colossians 3.4; 1 Timothy 6.14; 2 Timothy 4.8; Titus 2.13). Spatial metaphors are fully biblical, but I find that in our deistic cultural context, they are easily misunderstood. We cannot allow the gospel of God-With-Us be misinterpreted as the bad news of Us-Without-God.
Question #2: Is human history a predetermined downward slope (Or, “Is Greek eschatology right”)?
The Greek philosophical vision of time is simple—the eternal timeless ideal world is the real world. What we live in now is an illusory world of evil disgusting things like matter and time, and that’s why the world is getting worse and worse and worse all the time. When the Greek mind looks to its future, it sees enlightened people being liberated from their bodies, re-joining the eternal timelessness, while barbarians are banished to Hades. Hmmm. How much has this philosophy polluted the Christian vision? The eternal Triune Life is being earthed in the world, and the gates of Hell are not prevailing against it. The darkness cannot put out the Light. In what ways is this compatible with the idea that the world will inevitably get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, until God decides to dispense with this “Grace nonsense” and start kicking bad-guy butt, because we all know that violence is the only real solution to evil. Right?
God has already given his answer to the badness of the world; he sent his one and only Son to be one of us, to make us one with Him. But we Christians talk about the future as if the solution has not yet arrived, that the real solution is that someday God will stop loving his enemies. I have more questions than answers here. We need our best minds working on this. Messages that don’t make sense get ignored.
Question #3: When Christ appears, how will he treat non-believers?
The Koran says that Allah will one day come to earth and slaughter all the infidels like me, and that my Muslim friends will help. This is…ahem…distasteful to me. But do I believe the same basic idea, just with a different deity? Christian culture is awash in a schizophrenic vision of God—with the kind merciful Jesus on one hand, but behind his back a vengeful Father who wants/needs to destroy us. I believe this schizophrenia finds one of its greatest expressions in our eschatology—where we preach the grace and kindness of God, but then preach a coming apocalypse where God’s face will have changed somehow, where he will behave toward “the wicked” with something other than kindness.
I believe most of us Trinity-and-Humanity folks agree here that the Triune God has one and only one orientation toward us—Love—and that whatever “judgment” and “wrath” are, they belong to this love and must be defined in terms of love. Can the Father, Son and Spirit’s presence be abhorrent and painful to those who hate them? Absolutely. I can testify to that from personal experience. The Bible often gives us a very limited human perspective of what God’s presence can be like to those who wish he were absent. It’s like my baby telling the story about the time I took him to the doctor to get his shots. I don’t come off as a very kind person in that story, but that doesn’t change who I am as his dad. Our stories about the pain of unbelief need to be less about torture chambers and more about hospitals.
One related bonus question: Does grace expire after “The Judgment”? I was raised with a vision of a sort of timeline of the future where there will come a day when God says “I’m not gotta take it anymore!” and he separates the good people from the bad people, and that’s that. Period. Forever. But with my new understanding of what judgment is—Medicine, not Punishment for law-breaking—this requires re-thinking. The whole point of the tortures of chemotherapy is the hope that it will eventually cease being necessary. As Trinitarian worship musician Caleb Miller reminded me this week, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable” (1 Corinthians 15:19). We must rehabilitate “eternal punishment”—by #1). Paying closer attention to the meaning of Jesus’ idea of “aionian kolasin” (“age of discipline”) as distinct from the Pharisaical notion of “aidios timoria” (“endless torture”), and #2). Listening to the early church’s take on this issue. The patristics were not of one voice here, and that’s okay. Just like it’s okay to pursue diverse notions now.
In case you can’t tell, I haven’t figured all this out yet. But I hope I’ve started having some almost-coherent questions. What do you think? What are the theological and biblical arguments for or against what I’ve said here? Perhaps even more importantly, what are some other, better questions?
Love thy neighbor with a sign on his lawn
Filed under: By John Stonecypher, Christian Living, Love, Relationships, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity |
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I believe politics are part of God’s good creation. Humans are created as social creatures who pool their resources (time, energy, wealth) to accomplish things, and to this I believe Father, Son & Spirit say: “It is good.” When we say “God doesn’t care about politics,” I think we are succumbing to a kind of dualism in which politics (people’s ways of working together) are too earthly for God to touch with his delicate spiritual hands. The human condition is home to the glorified incarnate Christ, and the human condition involves people who think their own thoughts and have their own unique perspective on things. I suspect this diversity is part of how we are beautiful, a beauty that may not fade as Christ increasingly becomes “all in all” in his New Creation.
If that is the case, then I would argue that a robustly Trinitarian theology has something to say to how we go about politicking. Or in other words, in the fullness of God’s kingdom when the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, how will people deal with the diversity of human thought and action? And how can I join with the Spirit in stepping into this good future that our Father has already created in Christ Jesus? How can my 2012 political life become an hors d’oevure of the heavenly feast?
The first answer I’ve come to has nothing to do with “The Issues.” It has to do with “Love thy neighbor.” What I think the Spirit is showing me is that, in the past, I have used political seasons as an excuse to take a break from loving my friends who are politically different from me. Most of my friends are people I know to be basically intelligent, sane, and good. But then a super-PAC comes along. It massages my ego by agreeing with my political views, and then proceeds to tell me that my friends (the ones who disagree with me) are either evil, crazy, or stupid. In the past, I have pretty readily believed the PAC. After all, they have more money to spend on ads than my friends do. And that’s why every Autumn, I feel the stress of interacting with friends who seem sane but intend to vote in ways that obviously mean they are crazy.
So in the past year, I have tried a simple experiment: I have tried to resist every impulse to believe that my good/intelligent/sane friends are evil/stupid/crazy, regardless of their political ideas. This experiment has borne some surprisingly great fruit. I have been more able to listen and learn. I have learned to refrain from using political “zingers” because zingers are all about exposing the evil/stupidity/insanity of political “others,” and some of those others are my friends whom I respect and admire.
Most of all, here it is November 1, and I’m feeling quite at peace. My body is not vibrating in fear or anger about which Caesar gets elected emperor. It’s nice!
Some people will tell me I *should* be afraid and angry because of this or that crucial issue and the national darkness that awaits us if [ Insert name ] gets elected. I do agree that there really are issues that are extremely important–Life-and-Death important. We have problems that will take our best humanity and intelligence to solve. But none of that trumps the fact that I know and trust my friends. And that my knowing/trusting lives within the embrace of the perfect knowing/trusting shared between Father, Son, and Spirit. I am happy you and I are citizens together of that Place.
Of merit badges and fruit
Filed under: By John Stonecypher, Children's Ministry, Christian Living, Love, Relationships |
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In my ongoing process of learning to raise my kids in the light of the Triune God of grace, I am starting to rethink the Boy-Scouts model of character formation. You know what I’m talking about:
- I want my child to embrace values like Service, Honesty, Citizenship.
- He won’t embrace these values on his own, so I provide an external motivator (like a merit badge).
- He performs the necessary tasks in order to earn the merit badge, but in the process also (presumably) builds the character traits I wish to see.
- As he matures, he will (presumably) grow to value character more than merit badges.
I’m not bad-mouthing Scouts here. There are probably several contexts where that model of training works great. But I am beginning to doubt its usefulness in the area of spiritual formation, and for parenting in general. Then again, my doubts could be wrong; Christian lists have been around a long time:
- Saint Paul (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, etc.)
- The medieval church (prudence, temperance, fortitude, etc.)
- The monastic tradition (poverty, chastity, obedience)
- The Puritans (submission, fidelity, industry)
- Purpose-Driven Church (worship, fellowship, discipleship, service, evangelism)
Because of this long history of Christian list-o-philia, I have toyed with ideas of defining a list of Stonecypher Family Virtues, and then being intentional about promoting and pursuing these virtues as a family. I even looked into non-Scout merit badges that you can buy, for anything from Bible-Reading to Dishwashing.
Here’s the rub: These are all ways to manipulate people’s insides so that they will match an external standard. But what if it’s true that Christ is already inside them? What if it’s true that the Incarnation has already put the Triune Life into the basic human equipment my children were born with?
I’m still figuring all this out, but here’s how I try to parent these days: I live among my children and I keep my eyes and ears open. I look for what’s going on in their lives. I listen for whispers of the Divine Triune passions getting expressed in their feelings and thoughts and actions. I try to fan the flames when and where they arise.
Yes, we still read the Bible together and pray together and all that. We still talk about why patience and honesty and self-sacrifice are good. But I would say these activities are secondary rather than primary.
Trees don’t produce fruit because it gets them merit badges. Tree produce fruit by simply being trees.
Good fences make good neighbors
Filed under: By John Stonecypher, Christian Living, Gospel, Love, Relationships, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity, The Plan of Adoption, Trinity |
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“Good fences make good neighbors.” It’s an old maxim which expresses the intuition that good relationships require strong personal boundaries, clear lines of who is responsible for what. I believe this flows neatly from the nature of God—the differentiated intimacy shared by Father, Son and Spirit. Because of this, I believe a properly Trinitarian theology must challenge the way “Grace” is sometimes preached—as a Gospel-of-Mushy-Boundaries.
It goes something like this: God has declared certain boundaries (rules) to guide human behavior, and the consequence for crossing those boundaries is death (including a one-way post-mortem trip to Hell). But Jesus, by going to the cross, has shielded us (or at least those of us who hold to the right beliefs) from the consequences of our bad choices. In other words, it’s the “good news” that God doesn’t take his boundaries seriously, at least not in any way that significantly affects us.
No wonder we’re so messed up! Because this vision of God affects more than just our theology. It teaches us that to love is to surrender boundaries, to take responsibility for others’ lives, and to shield them from the consequences of their decisions:
- “My wife drank too much last night and is now passed-out on the couch, but I love her unconditionally, so I will call her office and tell them she’s sick this morning.”
- “My husband beats me, but I love him unconditionally, so I will put make-up over the bruises so no one will find out.”
Codependent theology results in neurotic (and mutually injurious) relationships disguised as love.
Now, as a Trinitarian remedy to the above, here’s how I think it really works:
The Trinity made the choice to create me and adopt me, and is now experiencing the consequences of that choice. If you have ever chosen to love someone who has problems, then you have an idea of how much pain can result from such a choice. In God’s case, the choice to be with me required that He join me in Hell, but He seems to think the pain is worth it. It’s His decision to make, and that’s what matters. God’s choice in this matter is what forms the context in which I make my own choices, with the properly human freedom I possess in Christ.
Now, I can’t choose to be hated by God any more than I can choose what family I was born into. I can’t make any choice that will cause him ever treat me with anything other than a Father’s kindness. But I am free to choose to believe in a hateful god. I am free to experience the pain and alienation that comes from such a belief. I am free to engage in the anti-social behaviors that naturally spring from those feelings. And I am free to experience the increased levels of pain that result from such behaviors. This freedom (and the pain I am capable of inflicting on myself) continues post-mortem, but it would be a great act of un-love if God were to rob me of the consequences of my bad decisions. How else can a person learn to make better decisions?
Some more trinitarian theory of history
Filed under: By John Stonecypher, Perichoresis, Relationships, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity |
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[My “trinitarian theory of history” was originally posted on The Adopted Life in November 2009, and I want to re-post it here today, and then update it with some new thoughts at the end]
Whether our theology is good or bad, it illumines (or darkens) every field of human knowledge. For example, take History…
Human theologizing tends to be preoccupied with Power—who has it and who doesn’t. The main consensus has been that an individual named ‘god’ has all or most of the power in the universe, and that humans have little or none.
When we approach history from this angle, the relevant question is: “Which historical individuals have been the most successful at bearing this god’s image—hoarding and wielding power over and against other individuals?” For this reason, our history books are chronicles of people who more-or-less succeed at using violence to control other people. Our children learn history as a mind-numbing progression of kings, armies, weapons, and treaties, and the dates on which each one occurred.
But what if history’s true God is not as preoccupied with power as we are? What if the true God is not an individual seeking to subdue other individuals? What if the universe lives and moves and has its being in the field of self-giving love shared between free persons?
If we approach history from THIS angle, we would surely be aware of wars and kings, but we would understand these intrigues as part of the SETTING of the human drama, but not as the drama itself. Notice how many lines in the gospels are devoted to the Caesars.
When we understand where the true drama lies, different questions become relevant: “In what ways have human communities imaged the Triune Life over time? In what ways has their many-ness danced with their one-ness? In what ways did the great live in solidarity with the small? In what ways was this community ‘haunted’ by its true self in Christ? In what ways did the Triune Life earth itself in this or that human community? In what ways did the human community resist this earthing? What consequences did they experience as a result? What can we learn from their experience?”
I still like this take on history, but I’d like to add a little bit to it… Because the question arises: Which communities are worth looking at, thinking about, and talking about? The most natural answer to me is: “The big communities.” That tells me I’m still falling into the same old trap of believing that Power is what it’s all about, because big communities are powerful communities.
For example, if I were to write a history of how the Triune Life was earthed in Orange County, California in the 1990’s, my first impulse would be to write about Rick Warren and Saddleback Church. But I think if I had my head on straight, I would see that it would make at least equal sense to write about Mrs. Betty Johnson on East Birch Street who spends her days taking care of her mother-in-law with Alzheimer’s. That two-person community matters as much as Saddleback’s umpteen-thousand-member community.
I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps a properly trinitarian history should be able to zoom in as well as it zooms out. Both micro and macro. Both the many and the one. The best example I’ve seen of this kind of “micro-history” is National Public Radio’s “Story Corps” project, where everyday people tell the stories that are significant to them.
I believe that if we are to think properly about history in a world in which Father, Son and Spirit are earthing their life-together, the “little” stories must be as prominent as the big ones.
What do you think?
Paul, Bible Butcher?
I used to think Saint Paul was a really bad interpreter of the Old Testament. Because whenever he uses Old Testament passages to make a point in his writings, he totally butchers it. He does everything we’re taught NOT to do.
Let’s take Romans 15 as one example, where Paul is making an argument that God cares about Gentiles. He supports this with some Old Testament passages:
For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth, so that the promises made to the patriarchs might be confirmed and, moreover, that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written: “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles; I will sing the praises of your name” (Romans 15.8-9, quoting Psalm 18.49).
Paul is implying here that these Old Testament texts support his idea that God is on everybody’s side, not just Jews. The problem is, these texts really seem to be saying something different. Notice what Paul leaves OUT of his quotes. Psalm 18 is about God killing Gentiles, not saving them. The psalmist is singing about “crushing” Gentiles (v.38), “beating them into dust,” “trampling them like mud” (v.42), and “destroying” them (v.40). Basically, because the psalmists feels secure in God’s ability to kill Gentiles, he is able to praise God even in their midst (v.49).
What are we to make of this and the many other examples of Paul’s “bad exegesis” of the Old Testament? I asked my Hermeneutics professor about this, and he replied: “Paul is an apostle, so he can get away with it. You’re not, so you can’t.”
I’m no Saint Paul. Granted. But is it possible that Paul is using a hermeneutic better than the one I was taught in seminary? I am beginning to think the answer might be Yes.
Quite simply, Paul knows God better than the Old Testament writers did. The Old Testament seems to be of two minds about how God feels about non-Jews. There seems to be a long tug-of-war between different visions of God—the tribal Proprietary God Who Will Crush Israel’s Enemies versus the Universal God Who Saves the Whole World. Paul, as a disciple of Jesus, seems to think this tug-of-war has ended. And he has no qualms about reinterpreting the old texts in that light, even to the point of flatly contradicting the intent of the original authors.
What does this mean for my understanding of what I’m doing when I study the Scriptures? Is my goal to be faithful to the original biblical authors? Or is my goal to be faithful to God?
~ John Stonecypher
[By the way, much thanks to Derek Flood and his recent article that prompted me to start thinking in this direction].
Epiphany for a gentile
Filed under: Bible, By John Stonecypher, Fiction, Gospel, The Plan of Adoption |
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Imagine you are a member of an ancient tribe. The earth is chock-full of gods, but the one who lives in your area is the one who affects your life. You have carefully groomed this deity with gifts and flattery (a.k.a., “worship”), so that he will think positively of you and grant you occasional favors. If you have been really diligent in your flattery, you can have some reasonable expectation that your god will save you from your enemies (who, coincidentally, have the same arrangement with their gods).
As far as you can tell, the nearby tribe of Jews seems to have a similar relationship with their “Yahweh.” Just like you, they work hard at stroking their god’s ego, and they feed him lots of whatever food he likes (Yahweh seems partial to blood and meat), and they expect him to send them a “Messiah” to crush their enemies. Good for them.
But one of the Jewish splinter groups believes that Yahweh has already sent their Messiah, this Jesus. Okay, whatever. But here’s the weird part: They are saying that their messiah is your savior, that their Yahweh has crushed your enemies. That Jesus is not only the Messiah of the Jews, but is also the Savior of the whole world and all the people in it. Huh?
Here’s their logic: They say Yahweh is not just their local deity, but the Creator of everything, the God of gods (including yours). They say Yahweh’s kindness to them is a gift, not dependent on the quality of their sacrifices and worship. Taking the weirdness even further, they say Yahweh has been kind to them for the express purpose of extending his unconditional kindness to all people, including you. They call this “the mystery of the ages” (Ephesians 3.6). It’s a mystery alright…
But if they’re right, if this Jesus is what they say he is, it means the world does not work the way you think it does. This is worth thinking about more…
Drowning in pictures
My 7-year-old, Ian, gets theologically frustrated with me. He asks me why Jesus died and how it saves us, and I reply with the various metaphors for how atonement works. My 5-year-old, Brendan, enjoys the metaphors, because he thinks in pictures like I do. Because of our conversations, he paints some odd pictures, which we sometimes discover strewn about the house. There is one I especially like, a finger-painted picture of “Death Jail” next to a picture of the key that unlocks our jail cell. There is also a helicopter in that picture, but Brendan says it has nothing to do with the atonement; it just seemed a good space to put a helicopter.
Anyway, these talks are not entirely satisfying to Ian, who is very left-brained and can spot illogic 10 miles away. When I float off into word-pictures about the atonement, he says “DAD, I don’t want to know what it’s LIKE; I want to know what it IS.”
Can I give him what he wants here? I honestly don’t know.
Back in the day, Anselm had a similar issue. He dealt with it by taking one of the metaphors (the legal courtroom drama) and saying “This is not a metaphor. This is what’s actually going on in the atonement.” The thing is, I don’t think that turned out very well, because that metaphor breaks down in several important places. Just like how my “Death-Jail” (Christus Victor) metaphor breaks down. Just like any metaphor would.
In my reading of Torrance and others, I sense they are trying to talk about the atonement beyond mere pictures. Torrance is a scientist, after all. Whatever metaphors and images he uses, he uses them so that we will stop looking at the picture and come face-to-face with the Reality.
When we talk about Jesus adopting us by assuming our humanity and healing it from the inside-out, is THIS the Reality that the various word-pictures are trying to describe? Or is this just another metaphor?
I’m trying to stretch my my mind today, but I may be getting a cramp. Help!