\u201cThere was \u201can unwavering commitment to an extreme theology of church authority combined with a strong desire to control the narrative and maintain control of the situation.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Yep, sounds like American Christianity, er, Churchianity, to me.<\/p>\nSame Shit, Different Day (pardon the scatological reference).<\/p>\n
THIS is why we must begin our theology with a theology of the cross. A theology of the cross would never do church this way; it would be a place of mutual self-giving, empowering, giving authority to the other not lording it over the other. In other words church would look a lot like Jesus on the cross, forgiving without measure, peacemaking, reconciling not from a place of power, BUT from a place of powerlessness. Imagine that if you will.<\/p>\n
Want to really know why modern Christianity looks the way it does? Because it has turned the cross into nothing more than a transaction between the Father and the Son or the Father and the satan. Either one stems from an economy of exchange.<\/p>\n
The cross is so much more than that. The cross was the place where God chose to be powerless and to be known as powerless. God reveals God\u2019s self, not as a deus ex machina, but as a God who is willing to suffer and die at human hands.\u00a0 THIS God is pure love in this event. THIS God is shown by the character of Jesus, by his prayers, by his nonviolent resistance, by his forgiveness, by his trust in God, whom he believed to be all-loving, pure love shown even here.\u00a0 Rejected and hated for suggesting that God is love and in God there is no dark side, no shadow of turning. Living out that vision to the very\u2026last\u2026..breath. The greatest of all was great\u2026at being a servant of all. God made peace on the cross, that day, on that hill far away from The Holy Place. WITH ALL. EVERYBODY. NO EXCEPTIONS.<\/p>\n
God took that last breath of Jesus, which was God\u2019s last gasp. God had shown, revealed, proclaimed a life that only knew his Abba\u2019s goodness, gentleness, giftedness, compassion, mercy, and blessing. Even at the very end. If you really want to see God in action, demonstrating God\u2019s self, revealing God\u2019s self, the inner heart of the Abba, then look at Jesus on the cross. THAT is where God is.\u00a0 Right there.<\/p>\n
Now imagine a Christianity that looked like that. Whose ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) was grounded in the real Second Adam, the True Adam, really the First Adam, in other words a solid anthropology that connected Jesus\u2019 life with the cross thus grounding Christian ethics in the cross, in the character of Abba. Can you imagine having the character of God as the rationale for your ethics? Now imagine what that would do to all of the nonsensical discussions around the Torah and legalism. Imagine setting Torah free from the constraints of religion?<\/p>\n
When you begin your ecclesiology from a theology of the cross (theologia crucis), you automatically nullify and completely deconstruct:<\/p>\n
The Prosperity Gospel
\nAuthoritarianism
\nPatriarichalism
\nEnlightenment anthropology
\nEternal Conscious Torment view of eternal punishment (eschatology)
\nPenal Satisfaction
\nAll Deus Ex Machina God concepts<\/p>\n
On the cross God spread out his hands, threw them up in the air as it were, and gave up the human project. Just gave it up. Admitted that a mistake had been made.<\/p>\n
Oops.<\/p>\n
Time to be done with it all. End the project. Be done with it. Give up on it. Surrender to it. Bye. Bye.
\nAnd when Abba gave everything Abba had, and began sweeping up the remnants of the creation and toss them into the bin of eternal forgetful memory, Abba found a piece of the creation worth salvaging. God found Jesus. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. One in whom Abba recognized The Face, the Face of God.
\nGod took that piece of creation, that piece of \u2018clay\u2019 (adama) and breathed (ruach\/pneuma as wind, breath or spirit) into that piece of the Creation. And through him God created all things new.
\nNow imagine the church living this out.
\nIt is time for each of us to live this way everyday with everyone we meet.
\nWe are the seeds of a new world, for we are seeds that know we must be planted in the ground\u2026to let go even as Jesus let go\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026and let Abba.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was yesterday\u2019s post.<\/p>\n
I would like to exegete this part:<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the cross God spread out his hands, threw them up in the air as it were, and gave up the human project. Just gave it up. Admitted that a mistake had been made. Oops. Time to be done with it all. End the project. Be done with it. Give up on it. Surrender to it. Bye. Bye.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is hard for most Christians to think that God could make mistakes. If that is the case then life feels all topsy turvy and God really can\u2019t be counted on and totally trusted. I get that. A god who had a habit of making mistakes would be untrustworthy. However, when you read the whole paragraph, you can see how I frame the term \u2018mistake\u2019 in the previous two sentences. On the cross God died to the whole creation. In other words (so to speak), there was a time the creation was without its Creator.
\nBut this could not be, for a Creator that \u201cloved\u201d its creation, would find a way to restore that relationship. That lost, betrayed, unjustly accused, persecutory abusive relationship we had formed with God, as a species. God dies on the cross so that we might live. God could show us by dying for us, how much we were loved. God could do that.<\/p>\n
That which God assumed is that which God healed.<\/p>\n
The Logos did not (just) become an Anthropos (a man), the Logos became \u2018sarx\u2019, flesh, the Johannine term for skewed reality (not just physical skin and stuff). The Logos became broken creation (\u2018born at the right time, born under the Law\u2019) in order to bring about a new logic to a skewed reality. The Logos, by revealing only the heart of the Abba, and structuring all reality (kosmos) around it, shows that reality is grounded in love. (By the way, a great book on this is Ilia Delio\u2019s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being).<\/p>\n
I used the term \u2018mistake\u2019 for all of this because our tendency is to view space time creation as a finished process in the Genesis texts. God created, spun everything into motion and then, quite satisfied, and became a pompous over-ruler. This is how many read this text. Folks this is the philosophical way of reading that text. It is Platonic. It begins with assumptions about perfection and idealism and associates them first with God, then with creation. Furthermore, because perfection is the model by which one reads Genesis 1, then to say God made a mistake flies in the face of this text, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Not at all. In fact the reading of Genesis 1 through a Platonic reading flies in the face of the text.<\/p>\n
Recall that after each day of \u2018creation\u2019, God says that it was \u2018tov\u2019 and after creating the Sabbath day that it was \u2018tov, tov.\u2019\u00a0 Hebrew, unlike Greek, doesn\u2019t have comparative and superlative endings. Like certain Australian aboriginal dialects, it will double or triple an initial adjective (or noun) in order to make comparatives and superlatives. Thus, holy = holy, holy, holy = holier, and holy, holy, holy = holiest.<\/p>\n
Had the text wanted us to begin with a Platonic reading it would have used three \u2018tovs\u2019 not just two. Creation was good and the creation of the Sabbath was better, but nothing is yet tov, tov, tov. Nothing is yet called \u2018best.\u2019<\/p>\n
It is the \u2018tov, tov\u2019 that creates a space for God to throw his hands up (\u2018give up the ghost\u2019) and not so much give up\u2026as to continue. To take the truly \u2018tov\u2019 tov, tov\u2019 of the creation, Jesus Christ, and through him and in him and with him, to make all creation a promise to be conformed to his image and likeness. It means that all creation, starting in the heart of the Trinity, is headed towards a goal, an Omega point, and that is Jesus. Who he is, how he relates, how he lives and how he dies. It is all about his life. His Life is the light in our darkness (Genesis 1 and John 1). The \u2018first\u2019 creation is darkness, the second creation, the promise of God to do it \u2018right\u2019 (as it were), is light, for the second creation is Jesus, the firstborn from the dead. In him the whole first creation died, and in his resurrection the whole first creation was redeemed. In his ascension, the whole first creation is seated at God\u2019s right hand, and there a name is exchanged and everything is \u2018tov, tov, tov\u2019 and God becomes all in all.<\/p>\n
We can learn from this that the question is not \u201cDoes God make mistakes?\u201d, but rather can we conceive of this creation, as \u2018tov, tov\u2019 as it is, as not the final process? Can we see that this creation is a growing one, an expanding one, yes, even an evolutionary one? Can we understand creation as process rather than an event? In other words rather than saying the Creator created, the Son reconciled and the Spirit redeemed ought we not to have a more dynamic view of God (rather than such a static one)? Should we not confess that The Creator is creating, the Son is reconciling and the Spirit is redeeming. Why do we leave Papa in our past or in some \u2018space above us\u2019? The Creator is related to every aspect of creation from the micro to the macro. Yes, to you and to me also.<\/p>\n
In the Fourth Gospel chapter 5, Jesus says that his \u201cAbba is a working-man or laborer to this day\u201d and that he too (Jesus) is a working man. Does not this also suggest that creation is still in process, that it is not just to be seen as a totally done deal? Surely it does! Creation, as we experience it in our lives and as our human history, is still in process, it is going somewhere. Where is the creation going? It was headed for \u2018tov, tov, tov.\u2019 It found that destination on a cross. On the cross, the true human life was complete. This man, this clay, was \u2018tov, tov, tov\u2019 or perfect if you will. This life, this human life and giving of life in death, matched the Abba\u2019s heart and mind down to the smallest jot and tittle. On the cross, \u201cIt is finished.\u201d Creation has been completed. [And you can see how, for the Johannine writer, the end of creation is atonement or the goal of creation is reconciliation, and how these two themes are so inter-connected in his\/her thought.]<\/p>\n
God dies to the old in order to bring in the new. The cross is the beginning of the turning point of the ages. The resurrection of the dead ahead of us all in time is the end game. The Divine Reboot is the goal. This is also known as eschatology. Here you can see how the implications of this more robust \u2018cosmic\u2019 understanding of the death of Jesus changes the way we may also frame how we understand the end of all things or eschatology.<\/p>\n
Did God make a mistake? Only if you are a Platonist. I only want to be a Platonist when I read Plato. I don\u2019t like to read Plato onto Moses or Jesus or Paul. If, like me, you understand creation from the cross, then you also understand why it is I have such hope for humanity, indeed, all creation. We may live and dwell in \u2018tov, tov\u2019 but we know and yearn and look for \u2018tov, tov, tov.\u2019<\/p>\n
[You might also be able to see why I also don\u2019t need a literal six-day creation, or a literal Adam and Eve, or a perfect paradise. You can also see how viewing creation as process, rather than as past event opens up the possibility of being able to not have a conflict with the sciences and affirm the current theory of evolution of how life on this planet came to be.]<\/p>\n
I hope that this post has been helpful to Benjamin and those who may have wondered why I suggested that on the cross \u201cGod admitted that a mistake had been made.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Facebook friend Benjamin Benjamin Hall asked me a good question (and he phrased it beautifully and kindly). He is seeking to understand what I meant when I said in yesterday\u2019s post that the creation as we know it was a mistake on God\u2019s part. When I was writing that yesterday, I was as surprised as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2016,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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