How to begin talking of God, about God. As I begin please forgive my tendency to speak of God in masculine gender terms as if he were firstly human and secondly male. The God 'divinely human' as we speak of him when speaking of Jesus is also the God whom we speak of as heavenly Father and for those obvious reasons my habit and probably my preference has been to speak of God in terms of ' He '. The Genesis account of creation speaks of the God who created us male and female in ' His own image '. Genesis 1:27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Thus we deal immediately with limitations of language and terms but I have no problems at all speaking of God in feminine or neutral gender terms and I warmly welcome and encourage the use of inclusive language. I guess I am like many people a bit lazy, not too worried about being politically correct, but not wanting to offend anyone who is sensitive to these things so please forgive.
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My experience has shown me that the more deeply we think, the more widely we read, the longer we travel on the spiritual pilgrimage of life, the more diligently we seek to ' know ' .. ' Him ' .. then the more mysterious may our God become. All the adjectives, all the creeds, all the pronouncements, all the libraries, all the anthropomorphisms cannot entirely and do not of themselves satisfy the mind. There it is though, if an answer is to be found or if answers are to be found to these spiritual searchings it is not necessarily going to be by a process of the mind, the intellect, the rational pursuit of knowledge or rational enquiry. We can know God in the heart as a child may and we can have a deep relationship with God that satisfies us personally and feeds our faith and helps us to grow in grace and wisdom. When we come to share that heart-felt rather than head-filled knowledge of God it is not an easy matter. It is centred in a relationship and every seeker has to establish that relationship and foster that relationship in order to come to know this God. In other words I can only seek to introduce you to this God who reveals himself most clearly to me in Jesus, who communes with me in my spirit, my soul, my inner being, but I cannot relate to him on your behalf. You will have to grow to love God on your own account. That said, we can all encourage each other and share with each other and offer insight to each other and guide each other and pray with each other and journey on with each other. God is a multimedia God who shows himself in myriads of ways and the tools of discovery which we use to fathom him are truly multimedia, the bible, prayer, preaching, testimony, not to mention the whole created universe .. but all of these tools do not in themselves establish the first relationship they only point to it, declare it to be available and nurture it. Somehow it seems that in the quest to know him we may even unwittingly contrive to shrink him into a God-shaped slot and in that quest he defies all our efforts and in fact he expands. Just when I think I've got him cornered, I haven't ! Have you noticed how annoying God can be in that way ? It is as if in our attempts to define the divine we almost unconsciously seek to domesticate the divine and the elusive Spirit of God, (as symbolised by the dove .. ' [Mark 1:10] And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; ) ' becomes a man-made substitute god who fits into the most recent of our newly adapted theological cages like some kind of pet parrot. God is made thereby in our own image to conform to our likeness and to confirm our latest doctrine, our preferred theology, even our fiercest bigotry. When that happens we should not be surprised if we imagine God to be saying " Who's a pretty boy then ?" and tend to become like one of the pious and self-righteous Pharisees whom Jesus was opposed to, parroting dogma about a God they reckoned to know a lot about but whom in fact they did not really know. We may all too easily make the false assumption that what can be known about God is related to our own capacity for knowledge, that what is there to be comprehended is within the limits of our ability to comprehend. If that were true a child might not know God and God might only be known by the highest intelligence. That would call into question the words of Jesus who said ; "[Mark 10:15] Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." I have been a Christian now by deliberate choice, by faith, by conviction, by determination, by grace, by compulsion for more than 45 years. Even prior to that I was nominally a Christian but not in terms that would have qualified me with those evangelicals who knew I was a ' sinner ' who needed to be 'saved', 'born again', 'converted'. In their terms I became and I still am all of those things and in those 45 years I guess I have pretty much used all of their arguments. I began firmly in the evangelical tradition with the personal assurance of salvation, ' justification by faith ', a rigorous pursuit of personal holiness, the desire to be ' entirely sanctified ' [1 Th 5:23] May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. '. Even in my teens I studied Christian doctrine and read my bible as if I were trying to reduce it to confetti. I am older now and I cherish the hope that I may be just a little wiser and I recognise the limits of tidy answers to untidy questions. I recognise the genuine difficulty people may encounter in coming to faith. I accept that there may be many valid approaches to a God who wills us to know him and wishes to be in relationship with us. Therefore I am glad to be a Methodist. Glad to belong to a tradition that welcomes people to a journey of adventurous discovery which leads us to God. I well remember a serious discussion a number of years ago with an evangelical colleague who at the time was still in pastoral charge of his first church. A sincere and lovely man for whom I have great affection and respect but who, at that time at least, was seriously concerned for my orthodoxy. I undertook a brief correspondence with him hoping to generate some light and mutual understanding. In response to some of my bible study notes, (published only on a humble church web page like this), he said... he; .... " would love to know what I regard as the message of the gospel ? ".. Here's a fragment of my somewhat over long and detailed reply. Quote. ' To this community I am saying that God our God, yours and mine , one and the same, is the ineffable one, that he is still greater than anything we have heard about him thus far, that he is still to be encountered in the mystery of His Spirit, that he is still to be encountered in the outrageous generosity of Jesus. That he loves all men and women and children equally and calls us to share in that love. That our service and care or neglect of each other is the measure of our service and neglect and our care of our Lord. That inasmuch as we did it, or did it not, to one of the least .. we did it or did it not to him. To this community I shall continue to explain that I believe that there is no presupposition-less exegesis. That I believe that all theological understanding is provisional. I shall welcome the honest and faltering approach to God in Christ from all who come to seek him and I shall proclaim that the yoke is easy, the burden is light, and that the grace of God is free. I shall challenge the Church to lower the threshold to the level of the gospel of Christ from the heights of its own self righteous exclusivism and dogma. I shall then look forward with joy to meet my Lord because I have been obedient first to him and not the institution. Unquote. Why not read The Methodist Conference report Time to Talk of God, which can be found in full by clicking here and can also be purchased in a user friendly format from Methodist Publishing House. Definition of obscure term .. anthropomorphism = Attribution of human characteristics to things that are not human, the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, describing God in terms of human qualities (Return to your earlier place in the text) |