In What Ways Do You Look Like God?

Reading Genesis 1-11 in the 21st century is difficult. It's as hard as reading Revelation, and for the same reason. If I wrote, 'And I saw an Orange Man, coming out of the water, and he devoured the Mexicans, and the socialists, and he destroyed everything in his path,' you would have some idea of what I was talking about. But in 2,000 years' time, how would people take it? Perhaps they would start a new religion waiting for The Orange Man.

Both the early, 'mythical'* chapters of Genesis and the later, 'mythical'* chapters of Revelation use ideas and images (nowadays some people would use the word 'tropes') that were common currency when they were written. Comparing the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 with other creation stories that were written around the same time can yield incredibly exciting and fruitful revelations. By finding out how the Israelites' stories are different from their neighbours', we can see what they were trying to say that distinguished them from all the other national religions of the time. (For a great little book exploring these ideas, click here.)

In the 1970s a statue of King Adad-It'i was found in Syria. Written on his cloak was an inscription in Aramaic that uses the phrase, 'This is an image (selem) and likeness (damut) of [the king]', the exact same wording used in Genesis 1:26 when God says that humans are God's image and likeness. Wowsers. Here's my take (thanks initially to Crispin Fletcher-Louis): we humans are like statues of YHWH, we are YHWH's idols! It's not that God bans idols - physical representations of God in creation -because God hates them, it's that WE are the idols and God doesn't want any distractions!

I love this idea, but this week I've pushed it on another step.

Let's face it, if God never changes, what's wrong with a regular statue? In fact, wouldn't a solid, unchanging statue be a better representation of a solid, unchanging god? Why bother making living, growing beings that change over time to be your image and likeness, unless you, too, are a living, growing being that changes over time?

Why is this important to someone who is trying to develop a model of human maturity?

Well, firstly, because our dominant model of the Abba of Jesus was imported from Greek philosophy. According to Plato, God isn't worth much unless God is perfect in every way, and that includes being completely unchanging. If God could change, so the argument goes, either God's former state or new, changed state must be less than perfect. This doctrine of immutability prevents God from ever feeling anything (because that would be a change in God), from ever learning anything, from ever changing a plan or a decision.

It should be clear that this Greek, philosophical God is not very much like the passionate, loving, involved and, yes, changeable God of the Bible. Yet the doctrine of God's immutability sits behind a lot of other Christian doctrines. It may make logical sense, but it doesn't make sense of why God's supreme revelation is a learning, growing, feeling, changing person called Jesus of Nazareth. And it doesn't make sense of why God would choose us to be their image and likeness. (You can find out more about this perspective here.)

Secondly, this static view of God can often bleed over into a static view of Christian faith. Either you are or you aren't a Christian. Whether it's baptism, confirmation, 'praying the prayer' or something else, we have created static (and boundaried, and policed) definitions of faith and church and belonging. Perhaps it is in becoming that we are most godlike, not being (and certainly not doing). We, like God, are an unfinished story. Our past (in)forms us and our future calls us, but here in this moment we have the option to choose becoming or unbecoming.

A lot of the motivation for my study has been a dissatisfaction with two things:

(a) Measures of church 'success' that focus on raw numbers and take no account of whether being part of a particular church is transformative of the individual, the church itself or the local community

(b) Meeting people in (and out of) churches who have been Christians for many years but are still really, um, un-Christlike.**

So if becoming is baked into the being of God and humans, surely we need to think about what it is that we are becoming? That takes us back to last week's post on telos, and me on the road to discovery...

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*By mythical, I don't mean to say that these passages don't have any factual/historical content, only that the truth they're communicating is more symbolic and not primarily factual/historical.

**This is not an academic measure! As I have got older, I have come to appreciate the biblical idea of the fruit of the Spirit - that if we are giving way to the Spirit of God, then slowly but surely our character will change. 

Image by Wayne Pitard - https://vici.org/image.php?id=14085, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94522226

God Just Wants Me to be Happy!

Every now and then I'm going to share a bit that I'm thinking from my reading. Hopefully over time you will see the pieces fit together.

The Shorter Westminster Catechism, a founding document of English Calvinism, starts in a really interesting place. You might expect a Christian movement's core teaching to start with its doctrine of God or something about Jesus, but no. It starts with us.

'What is the chief end of man?'

'Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.'

Wow. Enjoyment is our chief aim (OK, along with glorifying God)!

You wouldn't think that Calvinists would provide the theological underpinning for the 20th century's turn towards pleasure and self-fulfilment.

Yeah,

But

Nah.

In traditional philosophy there are two kinds of pleasure: hedonistic and eudaimonic. It's telling that you've probably only heard of one of those words.

Yesterday my neghbour helped me build a garden structure using his vastly superior (to mine) DIY skills. I learnt today that he did a six-month carpentry and furniture-making course, so I don't feel too bad. What felt like an uphill struggle for me turned into a relatively quick and pleasurable experience as Chris did something he was good at. Eudaimonic pleasure is the pleasure gained from fulfilling our purpose, whether that be the short-term purpose of building a pergola or the longer term purpose of being a carpenter. Or the even longer-term purpose of being caught up in God and God's purposes.

The catechism starts by asking a question about our 'telos', which means our purpose, our reason for being. Or maybe just our reason for getting out of bed.

When Jesus delivered one of his most terrifying sayings, 'Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect' (Matt 5:48), the word which gets translated as perfect is actually 'teleios', which elsewhere in the New Testament is translated as 'mature'. Perhaps a better translation would be, 'Live towards your purpose, just as God lives towards God's purpose.' (Maybe the Aramaic 'Abba' describes God's telos as well as God's identity?)

This helps me understand a lot of things, including the kind of joy being alluded to in the catechism. To find one's place in the universe, the gift one has to give and the pleasure one can give God by giving it, goes beyond mere hedonistic pleasure. It provides a much deeper context to the word joy, which can sometimes come across as 'Being really happy whatever the circumstances.'

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