Divine Meditations - Part 1, Prologue

I would like to share my thoughts on a loose collection of topics which might best be described as spiritual or religious in nature - meditations about the divine, that is, thoughts about God and his works. The topic is so broad that it is hard to choose where to inscribe the boundaries of discourse. For now, it will suffice to say that the central focus is on the divine and the heavenly, however far afield the considerations of these may take us.

I will be focusing primarily on the Bible as a basic foundation for getting a definite sense about God. But my hermeneutical approach is decidedly eclectic -- it might be best described as a "flow of consciousness" hermeneutic. In Psalms 19:1ff, David says,

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

David is explaining that God speaks through Nature. David is merely elaborating on what God himself said about the visible heavens in Genesis 1: "Let [the lights of the firmament] be for signs and seasons, and for days and years" (v. 14) Theologians call the revelation of God in Nature the general revelation, and they call the Scriptures the special revelation.

The fundamentalist view of scripture paints a very black-and-white picture of the relationship between the Bible and all other texts. The Bible (alone) is the Word of God and all other texts are false, unless they happen to agree with the Bible. But agreeing with the Bible is only a conditional form of truth, it cannot make the text authoritative in itself.

Now, things get complicated as soon as we challenge this notion in the most obvious and direct fashion: please define what is or is not "the Bible." This simple question sends the whole train of fundamentalist reasoning hurtling off its tracks into the abyss. That is because the fundamentalist notion of the Bible is all about reducing the work and Word of God to a set of well-defined parameters that are suitable for hitting other people over the head with (metaphorically, though sometimes quite literally). It will not do to suggest that the Torah might be a splice of four, separate corpi, nor to suggest that the synoptic Gospels may be more like editorial anthologies than actual books, each written by a single, named author. No, we must banish any such thoughts from consideration because this could undermine religious authority and that is the thing that really matters!

To be clear, I am not espousing religious anarchism. The Gospels capture Jesus's message of the Kingdom of Heaven in crystal clear language. There can be no mistake that Jesus meant to (and did) establish a kingdom on Earth, a kingdom whose provenance is not of this world. Nor is the goal of this kingdom to "take over" the world, as though God has any reason to attribute intrinsic value to material substance which he can create ex nihilo, at will. No, the coming kingdom will wipe the slate clean and start over, from scratch (Matthew 24:35, Revelation 21:1-5)

But let's strip away the historical complexities of the question at hand, which often obscure more than they reveal, and get to the heart of the matter. Here is the central question: Does God reveal himself through other cultures? The obvious answer is given, implicitly, in Psalm 19: God speaks through all things, because he created all things. I will not defend this claim (though I could) but I hope that it is not controversial to anyone who has set aside the bigoted attitudes of the past. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)

The question of authority -- that is, the question of law and order in God's kingdom -- is more nuanced. Jesus said to Peter, "on this rock I will build my church" after Peter understands that Jesus is the Messiah. The Church of Rome has (incorrectly) taken this passage as a reference to itself but there is no doubt that the essential interpretation of the passage is correct. Jesus was explaining to the disciples that he was going to build his church on the Rock, which is himself and, by implication, his literal, physical presence in the world through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in all believers (all who profess that Jesus is the Messiah). The mistake of the Roman Church is in extrapolating the passage to be establishing some kind of New Testament priesthood that, bizarrely, happened to find its locus in the epicenter of Christian persecution: Rome. The existence of the Eastern church, alone, is sufficient to quash this obviously fallacious line of reasoning.

Jesus placed authority in the church itself (Matthew 16:19). The church, in turn, consists of all believers and also in all the manifold variety of well-ordered forms of organization that the church has adopted through the ages and throughout the world. When the Corinthians were bringing their lawsuits to be heard in secular courts, Paul challenged the church of Corinth:

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! (I Cornithians 6:1ff)

Jesus did not come to polish the brass on the Jewish temple religion, keeping its substance while redecorating its form. No, he came to establish power on Earth and this power is that of the direct relationship between man and God, unmediated by human priests. We all have just one priest, who is Jesus. He single-handedly replaces the mediation of the priestly order, from now to the end of the Age. This is why those who follow Jesus will be imparted such authority as to judge the angels themselves.

But what of other cultures? What of the sacred writings we find in other parts of the world? Are these all the works of the devil, as many Christians have believed, destined to be burned up at the end of the age? In Philippians, Paul says,

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
And gave him the name that is above every name,
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
In heaven and on earth and under the earth,
And every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
To the glory of God the Father. (2:9-11)

This passage is immensely important because it gives a simple, direct explanation of the entire point of God's work in the world. The Heavenly Father intends to glorify himself. (In theology, it is held that God's highest aim and purpose is his own glory.) In order to glorify himself, he has enacted a plan. This plan is to bring about a heavenly kingdom on Earth. And the king who sits on the throne of that kingdom is Jesus. All the world are Jesus's subjects and will bow to him, acknowledging the greatness of his name, having been exalted to the highest place of honor and having been given the name above all names. In the course of performing this worldwide, history-spanning miracle, the Heavenly Father will glorify himself.

This passage doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for other cultures. It doesn't seem very diversity-sensitive or multi-cultural. But this is a shallow and incorrect reading. It is the reading of the anti-Christ Crusaders, those rabbles of blood-thirsty European blasphemers who somehow managed to twist the teachings of Christ around from "love your enemy" and "turn the other cheek" to "thrust the infidel through with the sword and pike."

Jesus said to the disciples, "You are the salt of the earth." Elsewhere, he points out that salt is unique among flavoring ingredients because it has its flavor within itself and imparts that flavor to other ingredients. Salt imparts flavor, but nothing imparts flavor to the salt. "The earth" refers to all the world's inhabitants. The disciples of Christ -- those who follow his teachings in both word and deed -- are the salt of the whole world. They impart flavor to what is already there. Culturally, the gospel is an infusion that amplifies what is already present, not a transfusion that wipes away what came before. We put salt on bland food to bring out its natural flavor but nobody wants to eat a plateful of salt.

God speaks to us in Nature, God speaks to us through Scripture, God works in the world through the agency of the church body -- but does God speak to each of us, as individuals? It would seem to be a necessary condition for a relationship, that God speak to us. What human relationship consists in only one side speaking, while the other remains eternally silent? The Bible explains that the Holy Spirit is the person who speaks to us, as individuals. But the Holy Spirit speaks in a way that is different from human speech. In I Corinthians 2:11ff, Paul says,

No one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, "Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.

Notice the phrases "words taught by the Spirit" and "Spirit-taught words". Paul is saying at the end of the paragraph that, since those who believe in Jesus have the mind of Christ (through the Holy Spirit), they are able to make judgments about all things for the same reason that it is said in Scripture that no one has known the mind of God to instruct (correct) him: we have the mind of Christ.

Human beings are created in the image of God. Stated more theologically, man bears the image of God, he has the imago Dei. Look at the canvas on which this image is painted. Countless billions of humans down through the ages to today, each an image-bearer. The immensity of the canvas speaks to the immensity of the image itself, which the canvas merely bears. Racism -- which is explicitly renounced in the New Testament -- is a denial of the image of God in man, and is founded on a human desire to shrink the immensity of God down to a size more comfortable and convenient for the racist. Cultural ethnocentrism is different only in which parts of the canvas it seeks to cut out with the razor knife, but has exactly the same motive: to make God smaller, less immense, less transcendental, less glorious.

In Acts 2, the famous outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, a large crowd of unbelievers hears the disciples speaking, each man in his own mother tongue. This was a miraculous event, since no one can simultaneously speak two languages at once, let alone the dozen or so languages mentioned in Acts 2. This miracle also has massive symbolic importance -- it symbolizes the inherently global nature of the work of the Holy Spirit. "We are [all] God's offspring", says Paul.

In this series of meditations, I plan to look across many disciplines, many cultures, and to consider sacred writings from many historical backgrounds. The purpose of this is not to be hip or to bow to the misguided activism of certain groups who take multi-culturalism as a rallying cry for political action. Rather, I see the work of God pervading throughout all Creation, including the peoples he has created, and the cultures that have sprung out of them. Like his image, God's work in the world is too immense to be restricted to one part of global canvas. The work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the individual believer is called sanctification, a word that is nearly synonymous with, and well pictured by, consecration (the setting aside of temple grounds, utensils and garments for priestly use). It is through this process of sanctification that the Spirit teaches us its way of speaking through all things, because God is over all. But it is not only the individual life of the believer that God is sanctifying; ultimately, it is the entire world. This process of sanctification will one day culminate in a terrible rending asunder of the heavens, prophesied in Matthew 24, Revelations, and elsewhere. The elements will dissolve, the mountains will flee and the entire creation will be engulfed in fire. In its place will be a New Heavens and New Earth. Note that all the beautiful Christian church buildings will be destroyed in this blaze, alongside the beautiful mosques and other temple structures in the world. The coming destruction will be universal because the sanctification of the world itself - that is, all who are resurrected or remain and enter the New Heavens and New Earth - will be universal. The question of authority has to do with God's living work in the world and God is not so delicate and feeble that we must worry that we might throw his whole plan into confusion with the slightest inquiry into the wrong sacred text! But it is to the traditional Christian canon that I will appeal for final questions of authority.