Empty Faith

Last week, we looked at a more faithful reading of the Scriptures as relates to the position of Christ within the Godhead (Trinity). This week, let's roll that into a more faithful reading of the Scriptures in general, since what we're doing right now is not quite working for a lot of Christians (or for the world at large).

There are a lot of Scriptures that we turn to in almost immediately in times of trouble. These are the Scriptures we're most likely to know by heart. They are the ones we're ready to offer our friends at a moment's notice. They are the ones that are emblazened on all of the things we wish to use as public declarations of faith - bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs. Football players have them on their eye masks; baseball players on their cleats. They are the fodder for many a tattoo.

They are the signs of our faith, and all we have to do is say the book, chapter, and verse, and these words of comfort and confidence are right there. John 3:16. Jeremiah 29:11. Psalm 23. Romans 8:28. And the list goes on and on.

We know the words, but do we know any more what these words mean? Do we really? 

We really don't.

We know what these words mean to us. What we hope they mean. What we've taken them to mean in our darkest times of trouble when we needed them to mean a certain something. But we don't know what most of these verse really mean because if we did, we would know that these are not words of comfort, but words of calling - they are a call to live a deeper life of faith.

Yet, we have made them such shallow words. 

You know what I'm talking about. You know how easy it is to roll your eyes when some of these verses are brought up. They are so overused, we think. So commonly quoted as to have become trite. We're really sick and tired of Christians using these verses as the answer to everything, particularly when we, as Christians, so easily find them the answer to nothing at all any more. They're just...empty. 

The reason these verses are empty for us is not because they are overused, but because they have been completely removed from their context in order to comfort us. They're not trite; they're troubled. And that makes them troublesome. The way that we've come to use these verses in our modern culture, in both our secular and in our Christian worlds, has done something powerfully perverse to these Scriptures - it has set them up in such a way that, taking them tritely, our faith cannot help but fail us.

Yes, you read that right - our use of these Scriptures out of context almost demands that this faith, on which we rely for comfort, will fail us. How could it not? 

So this week (and a bit into next, perhaps), we'll look at some of these verses and how they set our faith up for failure. We'll put them back into their proper context and reclaim their calling for a life of true faith, a faith that doesn't fail. 

Modern Heresy

Just so that you don't think I'm crazy or proposing some completely weird, out-of-the-box theological reading of the Scriptures, it's important to understand what the church has been talking about, thinking about, and debating about for the past two thousand years.

Hint: it's not the same thing that we're talking about.

See, for most of the church's history, she's been fighting against various heresies that somehow made Jesus less than God, less than the Father, lesser as a member of the Trinity, if He was a member of the Trinity at all. 

There were actually a lot of debates about this. There were camps of Christian faith that were saying that since Jesus was begotten, He couldn't be eternal. And since He wasn't eternal, then He couldn't be on the same par with God, the Father. (These were not dumb guys, by the way. They were very smart theologians, just trying, as much as any of us are, to get it "right." So it would be a mistake to just write them off as fools. Far from it!)

And, of course, this is heresy because it lessens the Jesus story significantly. It takes away the prominent place that the Son has in the Godhead. So, of course, the church decided that this would not do. Jesus could not be seen as lesser than the Father in any way.

Then there were discussions about the exact nature of Jesus. Maybe He's co-eternal with the Father and not lesser just because He was begotten, but are they the same kind of God? There were longstanding debates with a lot of Greek words about whether Jesus and God, the Father were "of the same substance" or "of a like substance." Yes, really. Is the divinity in Jesus the same as the divinity in the Father or is it just kind of similar? 

Well, Jesus Himself says He and the Father are one. Who are we to argue? (But oh, there were arguments!)

There were also debates about whether Jesus and God, the Father, were just really the same God in different forms. You know, like how sometimes, I'm a student and sometimes, I'm a blogger and sometimes, I'm a daughter, etc. Sometimes, God is a Father, and sometimes, God is a Son. Maybe that's what's going on, right? Wrong. That, too, is heresy. 

So for much of the church's history, these were the kinds of questions she was dealing with about Christ and the nature of the Trinity. (She would later add discussions about the Holy Spirit and need to accommodate a theology of the Spirit into everything, as well.) I think sometimes that's how it became so easy for us to swing as far as we have in our day - we spent so much time, as the church, trying to figure out who Jesus really is that we've come to the conclusion that He must be somehow the most special of all. We just haven't had the debates about the nature of God the way that we have about the nature of Christ (and there were more even than these). We've had some about the Spirit, but still, not to the degree that we have about Christ. 

But as easy as it is to trace heresy through this history and to say of course it was wrong to have ever believed that Jesus could be less than the Father or that Jesus could be of some difference substance than the Father or that Jesus could be just one mode of the Father, so, too, is it a modern heresy to live in the way that we do - as though Jesus is somehow greater than the Father. So, too, is it heresy to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction and subject the Father and the Spirit to the Son, which is the line that we're currently dancing with. 

These aren't easy questions, and I have not intended by any means to imply that they are. In two thousand years of wrestling, we still don't have it quite right. And I don't know that we have to settle it, necessarily, because I think there are some things about the Godhead that we're just never going to understand. There's nothing wrong with that. (I love a little mystery about my God.) it's just important to keep these kinds of questions before us so that in all our zeal, we don't just push right past them and miss something important.

Something like the Threeness of our One True God. 

Unfaithful Reading

Reading the Old Testament, or even the entirety of Scripture, as though all things point to Christ is not the most faithful reading of the Word, even though it has become, perhaps, the most popular.

There are actually quite a few theological problems with this kind of reading, probably more than we will be able to cover in one short post.

But let's start here - if the words of David and Isaiah, which are most often brought into this kind of reading, are foreshadows of a Christ that has not yet come and has not yet been promised in concrete terms, then what did David and Isaiah think they were writing? Did they understand their own words, or were they just writing some kind of jibberish that God told them would "make sense one day. promise"? I think it's far more likely that David and Isaiah were writing out of their own hearts, and then our incredible Lord and Savior took the words of the king and the word of the prophet to the Cross with Him. After all, we know that Jesus was versed in the Scriptures that preceded Him. We know that He was considered to be both prophet and king. His audience would have recognized these words as kingly and prophetic, even if they were not considered messianic prophecy. 

And what about when God promises David that he will always have an heir on the throne? If we can only read this promise in light of the Christ that God, but not David, knew was coming, then this is quite troublesome. David thought God was making a promise to him. If it turns out that God was just making a promise, then how can we believe any word that God gives to us, any promise He makes in our lives? It may have nothing at all to do with us, and we can never know what God is mumbling under His breath when He makes it....You will always have an heir on the throne! because I have this secret plan up my sleeves that doesn't really have a lot to do with you, but it kind of starts here, so....

God's story centers on His relationship with His people; we cannot simply be His pawns. That's too difficult a reading.

Or what about the way that God deliberately reveals Himself to His people again and again and again through the Old Testament? If everything comes down to Christ, then whatever was known about God in the Old Testament was just so that we would one day recognize Him in the form of our own flesh. That seems kind of difficult, doesn't it? Especially when Christ Himself declares that He has come as a revelation of the Father. Do we have members of the Trinity working in different directions? If the Father is only trying to reveal the Son and the Son is only trying to reveal the Father, then God is playing some illusionary game with us, is He not? He's playing a game where He only ever pretends to reveal Himself, where He only ever fakes that we could ever truly know Him. 

That's not the God that I believe in. The God I believe in wants to be known. 

In the same way, to read the New Testament (after the Gospels) only in the light of Christ is to miss the incredible work of the Holy Spirit. It's to miss the way that the Spirit reveals God to us. It's to miss how the Spirit was central in empowering the disciples and the apostles not only to preach, but to heal, to persevere, to carry out the mission that God had sent them on. The apostles themselves talk about the power of the Spirit in their lives, how important the Spirit is to their work, how they could not do what they were doing if Jesus's promise was not true and the Spirit had not come to help them. But we read right past the Spirit to turn back to the Cross. 

We miss so much of the real, developing story of God in the Scripture when we read everything with a Christological lens. We have to take a great number of theological leaps. We have to introduce a number of questions that threaten the very heart of what we say that we believe about God. And we have to ignore the testimony of the Father, the Spirit, and the Son to read it in the way that we are. 

And it's also worth saying that this kind of reading - this Christological reading of the Scriptures - is actually quite a new phenomenon among Christianity. For much of the history of the faith, the church and her theologians have been much more focused on figuring out how the whole picture fits together than on trying to fit the whole picture into one scene. We'll take a look at some historical considerations tomorrow. 

Father, Son, Spirit

We have seen that it is perhaps our own limited understanding, along with some theological blinders, that leads us to Christ as the central figure of the Trinity, as the one most pertinent and important to our own faith, religion, and understanding. But what do the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have to say about one another?

The best place to start is, of course, with Christ because He is so central to all that we do as persons of faith. We take our Old Testament and we say, Look! God has been foretelling of the coming of Christ since the very beginning of all things! (This is, however, a very unfair reading of the Old Testament; it dismisses much of the beauty of this section of God's story. More on that tomorrow.) And then we look at our New Testament and we say, Look! The Holy Spirit has illumined all of the things about Christ! 

If the Old Testament God looks forward to Christ (and it does, although not to the extent that we often try to make it) and the New Testament Spirit looks back upon Christ, then wouldn't it seem only natural to conclude that Christ must be the central figure in all of this? If God and the Holy Spirit direct our thoughts to Galilee, should we not do the same?

Yes...and no. 

Because look at what Jesus says throughout His entire ministry. It's because of the Father that I am here. Whoever sees me sees the Father who sent me. I have come to reveal the Father to you. Jesus spends a lot of His time pointing back to God. He wants us to know God, the Father, even as He, God, the Son, stands in the flesh right before us. Jesus would be incredibly disappointed if we never saw beyond His flesh to the Father who sent Him. 

Jesus also says quite a bit about the Spirit. You don't understand now, but you will. I'm sending the Spirit to help you understand. When I am gone, I will send to you a comforter, a counselor, who will help you to keep living in the faith. He spends a good deal of His time pointing forward to the Spirit, promising that the Godhead will not abandon humanity when Christ departs from the flesh. There is still going to be a presence of God that is not flesh and bone, but spirit and fire. 

So it's important not just to focus on how the Scriptures seem to lead to and from Christ as the central figure of all that is our faith because to do so is to neglect the testimony of Christ, who spends so much of His time pointing us back to the Father and promising us the Spirit. 

Again, that is not at all to distract or detract from what Christ has done. Far from it! For we also must recognize that Christ said the same things of Himself that the Father had already promised and that the Spirit would soon reveal; He confesses that He is the one to whom both refer. But in doing so, He reminds us that the testimony of God among us is Triune. It always has been, and it always will be. 

And Christ Himself continues to remind us not to lose sight of the Three for the sake of the One. 

Centrality of Christ

There are some very simple reasons why we have come to put Christ at the center of our theology - He's the one who came to us in the flesh, looking and living and loving like us and He's the one who seems to have done the most for us. I mean, that whole salvation/redemption thing is pretty cool, especially if you happen to be a fallen, broken, sinful human.

But to buy into these ideas and to give them the primacy that we have requires wearing some pretty hefty theological blinders. It's our self-centered/human-centered interpretations that have led us here, not the objective testimony of the Scriptures. 

Take the first claim: Jesus is central because He's the one who walks with us. This is true - Jesus does walk with us. He lives with us. He loves with us. He's in this world just like we are, trying to wind His way through it. 

Go back to the Old Testament for a bit, though. Start at the beginning. In the beginning, there was a Garden, and God walked in it with His people. Adam. Eve. God, the Creator. (God, the Father.) Enoch walked with God. Abraham walked with God. Moses met with God on the mountain, and not just once. God came to Elijah, and we have a recorded conversation between God and Jonah. God, the Father, is very present throughout the Old Testament. He may not (or maybe He did) have had a physical body in the same way that Christ embodied the flesh, but He walked with His people nonetheless.

And after Jesus's ascension, the Holy Spirit came down upon the people. The rest of the New Testament, although it continues to recount the Jesus story in the same way that the Old Testament continues to look forward to it, tells of the Holy Spirit's very real presence among the people. The Holy Spirit provides interpretation and inspiration. The Holy Spirit brings the gift of language. The Holy Spirit is counselor, comforter, just as Jesus promised He would be. The Holy Spirit, who may not (or maybe He does) have a physical body in the same way that Christ embodied the flesh, is present among God's people in the same way that God, the Father and Christ, the Son have been. 

So it takes quite a leap to say that Christ is central because He is the one who walked among us; the whole of the Trinity walks among us. We just happen to recognize Christ's flesh a bit more easily.

Or take the second claim: Jesus is central because He's the one who did the most for us. He came, lived, died, and was raised again that we might have eternal life with Him. He's the one who made atonement for our sins. He's the one who made righteousness possible.

But God, the Father, is the one who made this whole thing possible in the first place. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, God, the Father, made this entire cosmosphere in order to put His special creation - human beings - into it. God, the Father, formed Adam from the dust, bent over, and breathed the breath of life into Him. God, the Father, led His people from captivity in Egypt through the barren, broken wilderness in a column of fire and smoke. 

And let's not forget that God, the Father, sent His Son in the first place, and it was God, the Father, who accepted His sacrifice.

The Holy Spirit is the one who gives us the ability to understand any of this. He's the one who lets us understand what Christ truly means. He's the one who puts it all in perspective and lets us live in truth even in this place of shadows. The Holy Spirit came to keep alive the Spirit of Jesus among the people. If it were not for the work of the Holy Spirit, the story of Jesus would be long gone by now. Nobody would be remembering it because nobody would be living it; it would be a historical event, over and done with. But by the Spirit, we live the grace of God through Jesus Christ - and only by the Spirit - and thus keep the story alive. Without the Spirit, not one word of the Bible would have been preserved for us, but that wouldn't have mattered because without the Spirit, we could never have understood it anyway. 

So tell me again how Christ is the only member of the Godhead who ever did anything super-important for you.... That's just not the testimony of the Trinity. We need all three persons, just as much as we need Christ, for it is through the Three-In-One that we have being, atonement, and understanding. It takes all three.

Again, I'm not saying that what Christ accomplished or what Christ did - His life, His love, His sacrifice - was not important; I'm saying that we cannot let the Son obscure for us the Father or the Spirit. We cannot let our theology rest in some false centrality of Christ when the testimony of the Scriptures, and of Christ Himself, is that there is a Triune God who cares for us. (That's a bit more simplistic than I'd like to leave it, but I'm building on something here, so it will have to do.) 

We'll look more at what Jesus had to say about this tomorrow.