The Trinity is a concept developed a long time ago by early Christian thinkers to describe their total God experience consistent with their observation of the world around them as well as viewing their own lives and relationships within that world. They used words and language of that time that do not always speak to us today. To some, the Trinity is no longer helpful, or at the very least, is a vague concept trying to describe who God is.
Eugene Peterson, in his book, Christ Plays in a Thousand Places, argues strongly that Trinity is even today the most satisfactory way of understanding the Christian life even in modern times. It still describes our own total God experience in this post Galileo, post Newton, post Darwin world of ours. Peterson is comfortable with the terms Father, Son and Holy Spirit as different aspects or persona of God realized in our daily lives. But he ties those terms to Creation, History, and Community as corresponding areas in our experience where God shows himself to us today.
I welcome Peterson’s emphasis on the now. To me, what Peterson is saying is that the God experience is not just something that happened to the disciples two thousand years ago. It is in the present tense. And it still has three aspects. First, rather than say that God is IN creation, God IS creation. God IS the universe of galaxies and stars and atoms and quarks and energy and motion and mass, including even (some people would say especially) our small planet with its myriad evolved life forms that include at this moment even ME! God is not the creator who wound things up some billions of years ago and then deigned to intervene now and then. God is creation itself, a current process happening now, even within me. And that is what I understand – however dimly – when I say God the Father.
Second, God is also in those sequences of happenings that we call time. And as human beings we write stories of our experiences and call it history. Stories that include pain and suffering, sin and death, with grim stories of war and conflict as well as stories of heroic and sacrificial behavior – stories of love. Our stories of Jesus tell us that God is in all those stories, that each of us has the potential to transcend our human origins as we live our own stories. God is very much a part of our humanity as we live day by day – if we will only recognize and accept that presence. And that is what I understand when I say God the Son.
But, third, I am not alone. I live in community with others. My life has meaning only in relation to other human beings, with other life. We are all related to and dependent upon one another. Husband-wife, parent-child, friendships, loyalties, commitments, on and on. It is in relationships and dependencies that we begin to sense the meanings of life and the potential we have of becoming more fully human. And God is a part of those relationships and the communities that develop. And that is what I mean when I say God the Holy Spirit.
So the Trinity is not an old-fashioned description of God. Trinity is a present guide to living a Christian life. It reminds me that I must live my life (1) as a part of God’s glorious creation, (2) as a living God-connected human being within my lifetime (that’s my history), and (3) with loving spiritual connections within the communities of other human beings.
Loren Bullock
April 6, 2011
Following is an extract from Christ Plays in a Thousand Places, by Eugene Peterson, Eerdmans (2005) pp. 6-8
“Early on the Christian community realized that everything about us – our worshiping and learning, conversing and listening, teaching and preaching, obeying and deciding, working and playing, eating and sleeping – takes place in the “country” of the Trinity, that is, in the presence and among the operations of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
“‘Trinity’ has suffered the indignity among many of being treated as a desiccated verbal artifact . . . Trinity is a conceptual attempt to provide coherence to God as God is revealed variously as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Scriptures. God is emphatically personal; God is only and exclusively in relationship. Trinity is not an attempt to explain or define God by means of abstractions . . . but as witness that God reveals himself as personal in personal relationships. Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him, but by being loved by him and by loving in return. . . . The personal and interpersonal provide the primary images (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) for both knowing God and being known by God. This is living, not thinking about living; living with, not performing for.
“So [we] are set in this Trinity-mapped country in which we know and believe in and serve God: the Father and creation, the Son and history, and the Spirit and community.
“There is far more to Trinity than getting a theological dogma straight; the country of the Trinity comprehends creation (the world in which we live), history (all that happens to and around us), and community (the ways we personally participate in daily living in the company of all the others in the neighborhood). Trinity isn’t something imposed on us; it is a witness to the co-inherence of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and the co-inherence of our lives in the image of God ( where we are, what is happening, and who we are as we speak out and act and engage in personal relations with one another).
“Trinity maps the country in which we know and receive and obey God. It is not the country itself, but a map of the country. And a most useful map it is, for God is vast and various, working visibly and invisibly. Left to ourselves we often get lost in blind alleys, get tangled up in thickets, and don’t have a clue to where we are. The map locates us: it provides the vocabulary and identifies the experience by which we can explore God when there are no signs pointing to him, when there are no clearly lettered labels defining the odd shape or feeling that is in front of our eyes.
“There is also this to be said about a map. Even though a map is an artifact, something made, it is not arbitrarily imposed on the land. It comes out of careful observation and accurate recording of what is actually there. It is required that maps be honest. And there is also this: maps are humble – they don’t pretend to substitute for the country itself. Studying the map doesn’t provide experience of the country. The purpose of the map is to show us the way into the country and prevent us from getting lost in our travels.”
“inhere” to dwell, exist, belong
“inherence” one’s innermost being: elemental, essential, inborn, indwelling, innate, integral, intrinsic
“co-inherence” the integral parts of or the co-existing parts of one’s most innermost being.
Bishop Spong writes a weekly essay available online by subscription on the internet, johnshelbyspong.com. In two of them, he has has given succinct expressions of his understanding of the Trinity.
On August 18. 2011, he wrote:
“The Trinity was a conclusion to which the Christian Church came after a long journey through history. It was not a part of early or original Christianity. If you read Paul closely, you will find that he is not a Trinitarian!
“I think what people fail to understand is that the Trinity is not a description of God, it is rather a description of the human experience of God couched in the language of 4th century, Greek-speaking Europe. We experience God as the source of life beyond any limit that the human imagination can impose on anything, and we call that God “the Father.” We experience God as the ultimate depth of life, deeper than our own breath and we call that dimension of life “Spirit.” We experience God coming to us through the lives of others, and, for those of us who are Christians, coming to us uniquely through the life of one called Jesus of Nazareth, and we name him “Son,” offspring of the “the Father.”
“Have we in this manner defined God? No, of course not. We have defined only what we believe is our experience of God. In that sense, I have no trouble with Trinitarian language. I do not believe that I can say that God is a Trinity without becoming idolatrous. On the other hand I can say that I am a Trinitarian for that formula helps me to make sense of the God I experience as real and the God to whom I am drawn.”
Then on August 15, 2013, he wrote in answer to an individual question:
“The Trinity is a human definition of God, and since the human mind could never fully embrace the mystery and wonder of God, to literalize a human definition of God borders on the absurd. For human beings to worship their own creation is the essence of idolatry. The Trinity is a definition not of God, but of the human experience of the divine and is, therefore, an attempt to make rational sense out of that human experience.
“We experience God as other, beyond anything our minds can grasp. This is what we mean when we say that God is Father – the Ground of all Being.
“We experience God as an inward presence, so deep within us that we cannot name the reality we know is there. This is what we mean when we say that God is Spirit, ineffable, life-giving, inward, and real.
We experience God in the life of others. Sometimes to lesser degrees, sometimes to what seems like a total degree. This is what we mean when we call Jesus, “the Son,” and why we frame doctrines like “the Incarnation.” Our experience was and is that in Jesus we saw the presence of God flowing through his human life.
“Is that who God is? No, but that is what our experience of God is, and so we claim it. The Trinity is not a definition of God; it is an experience into which we live.”
My Personal Creed – 1979
I am humble, full of awe and wonder before God and His universe of creation with its distances, its minuteness, its incredible order and system and beauty, its apparent directedness in time, and in its patient evolvement of life, including even me.
I am grateful that Jesus, in his life and death, has shown me that God is sharing in my own sufferings and griefs and struggles, and that God is loving and forgiving and at all times is reaching His hand out to me, offering strength and comfort and guidance.
I am trustful that God will direct and use me as part of His plan and purpose, and I must respond by giving Him my love, my will, my self.
My Personal Creed – 2012-2016
I am humble, full of awe and wonder at the mystery of God in Creation, that I see happening now all around me – in new life each spring, in the birth of a baby, in the warmth of the sun and the glory of the night sky – a constantly changing universe with its distances, its minuteness, its incredible order and system and beauty, and in the patient and persistent evolving of life – including even me. Seeing God in Creation, I must respond with awe and respect and love as a participant in the evolution of the cosmos, including our planet Earth as a home for all of life.
I see Jesus as God in History. Jesus was a living human being within whom the holy was so intimately and totally present in the human that they were as one, thus revealing what it is to be fully human, embodying love and forgiveness, servanthood and sacrifice, and thereby redefining my understanding and experience of God. I must therefore live each ordinary day as a holy day with God’s presence in me defining who I am.
I rejoice that I am not alone but a part of God in Community, bound in the relationship to all of life, and especially in the relationships of those closest to me. God is an integral part of that community. I experience God as the love both within me and from others, providing purpose and comfort and guidance, urging me to act with compassion and justice and love, and showing me my own potential to become fully human by transcending my inborn self-serving survival instincts. My own response must be to live in oneness with God’s world, to love extravagantly, to wash more feet.
[Note: I use the terms, Creation, History, Community, following Eugene Peterson’s description of the Trinity in his book, Christ Plays in a Thousand Places.]
My Comments on My Personal Creeds
As my thinking evolved over the years, I found that I constantly needed new words to express my own perceptions and feelings about God and who I am – those fundamental questions in life. The Christian church has created several concise answers over the years that we call Creeds, and it is important to realize that even though the words may be hard to understand in our time, there is behind each such creed and statement very real human experiences of the transcendent God in words that had real meaning to those who wrote them. All such answers over the years are a precious part of our Christian heritage. But I think that each generation must develop its own answers in its own words consistent with the constantly changing and growing understanding of the world. It is too easy to make icons of our statements of faith and thereby fix their descriptions of the Ultimate for all subsequent generations.
My Personal Creed – 1979 was written as a part of an adult class on Creeds I was teaching – the Hartwell Class at Bethesda United Methodist Church, Bethesda, Maryland. It reflected the Trinitarian form of the Apostles Creed, but was stated in words that to me were consistent with my scientific background especially for God the Father. While it does not articulate clearly who Jesus and the Holy Spirit were and are., it does express my experience with God at that point in my life at age 55.
My Personal Creed – 2012-2016 I wrote this 33 years later, at age 88, and with various rewordings, it now reflects the evolution of my thoughts and experience during these recent years. It too is in a three-paragraph form, representing the Trinity. As a Christian, I still accept the Trinity, not as defining God (that’s beyond our words), but as describing how we humans can experience God. I found Eugene Peterson’s discussion very helpful [see my earlier blog post, The Trinity as a Guide to Christian Living]. I experience God, first as Creativity, a transcendent presence that shows itself as an active process that I see happening all around me and within me. I don’t see God as a noun, a distant creator that started things ticking a long time ago, but as an active present-tense verb demonstrating change and growth and creativity all around me in life and in the stars and in me. This is what I mean by God as Father. Second I see God in History, in Jesus, a particular human being at a particular moment in time. And God’s presence within Jesus was such that our experience and understanding of God was forever changed. This is what I mean by God as Son. And third, I see God as Spirit, being an integral part of all life and which seems to be the only way the first disciples could describe their new experience of God within them. And significantly, that conscious experience of God as Spirit has been a part of every generation since. This is what I mean by God as Holy Spirit.
These words in no way explain God, but they point to real human experiences, and for me they are consistent with our present understanding of our post-Darwinian, post DNA world with our current cosmology of galaxies and stars and space-time. And in all of this, there is still great and wonderful mystery. I am grateful and excited to be a part of that mystery with its awe and wonder. For we are still evolving and are still incomplete human beings – not yet fully human. But we can recognize our potential to be more fully human as we grow more and more in the likeness of Jesus.
Loren Bullock
July, 2012, revised October, 2012, August, 2013, September, 2014, and January, 2016
I see Jesus as a man who was so God-centered in his life that people saw in him what the full potential of being human was, to glimpse what it is to be fully human. And after his death, the disciples first, and then others, experienced his living presence , which was described in the subsequently written Gospels by the term, “resurrection.” In that experience, those early disciples recognized and realized (i.e., it was real) that the love that is God was in Jesus. In addition, they experienced that this love was also in them! And that experience and realization has been repeated over and over within each succeeding generation. Moreover, now, at this moment, the love of God that was in Jesus is also within each of us – even me! As John has Jesus say, “Know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).
So the Eucharist is first of all a recognition of that experience, a celebration of God in Jesus. It is also a liturgical reenactment of Jesus’ resurrection, a worship experience that we share with Jesus’ disciples themselves from that time after Jesus death. It was well established by the time of Paul. But the Eucharist is also the repeated affirmation that “God is within me.” God is in my very being. I go forward and take the bread and wine as recognition of the reality of the divine presence within me that allows me to glimpse what it is to be fully human. I am a creature of an amazing and continuing evolution, and I have all the animal instincts of that evolution, but Jesus showed us that we are more than animal instincts, that we are a part of a love that binds us all together in all of life. And we should be living together not as a pack of animals, but as God-infused, love-infused, living human beings that we are. I think this is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. And we can experience that Kingdom now. Each time I participate in the Eucharist, therefore, I experience the affirmation of God’s presence within me, and I consecrate myself anew to live up to my potential – to reach toward being fully human every day in every way. That is why I say, “Amen,” when I take the bread, and again when I take the wine.
One of the prayers just before communion in our Methodist liturgy ends with this petition, “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to partake of this Sacrament of thy Son, Jesus Christ, that we may walk in newness of life, grow into his likeness, and may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”*
Loren Bullock
August 5, 2011, revised November 19, 2017
*This “Prayer of Humble Access,” from my Methodist The Book of Worship (1964), is not heard so often any more. It is in one of the communion rites in the current The United Methodist Hymnal (my version is 1989). Its previous version in The Methodist Hymnal of 1905 has the literal and vivid imagery of earlier times: “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may live and grow thereby; and that, being washed through his most precious blood, we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us.” This, of course, comes from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1545.
The cross is our central Christian symbol. For me its meaning has changed over the years. I had understood the church’s long held explanation that it represented Jesus’ death as an expiation for the our human sins, the deep imperfections within our humanity despite our originally perfect creation by God at the beginning of time. I could never quite accept that “Jesus died for my sins.” I was disturbed by the idea that God would allow his own son to be killed. I understood the Jewish symbolism of the Yom Kippur lamb being sacrificed for the sins of the people. But I also came to recognize how most of the stories of Jesus as told in the Gospels are retellings of the Old Testament stories about Moses and Joshua and Elijah and Elisha, but those stories now being applied to Jesus. And this was interpreted to mean that Jesus was fulfilling many of the hopes that the Hebrews wrote about. Jesus is the new Moses, etc. That suggested very early for me that these stories were not to be understood literally.
More recently I have come to appreciate John’s Gospel as the writings of a mystic. It is an interpretation of Jesus that is full of symbolism and reflects how the early Christians of John’s time (about 100 AD) mystically experienced Jesus within their lives It has spoken to Christians in new ways throughout the centuries. Reading John now gives me a new way of looking at Jesus and of looking at myself.
For me, Jesus was first of all a human being living a human life at a particular time and place in history. But in Jesus there was a fusion of the holy and the human that were as one. His compassion, his love, his call for justice demonstrated and redefined what God is like. The disciples could only describe this as “God was in Jesus”. And after Jesus’ death, Peter and then others experienced that same presence within themselves, a life-changing experience that they could only describe as Jesus’ presence now being totally alive within them. It was God’s experienced presence. This presence gave a freedom to their lives, a purpose to their lives, and an understanding of God that transformed their lives and changed our history. It is a presence that is within me, within all life, all creation. Awesome!
In our post-Darwinian world, we now know that humans were never created at a moment in time with a perfection that later degenerated to imperfection. Rather the gradual and steady evolution of all life has resulted – only recently in geological time – in our own species, homo sapiens, with so much of our life’s predecessors’ DNA within us – giving us our animal instincts of survival that also generate so much of the selfishness and suffering and evil in our world. Just look at how humans have treated other humans over the centuries and still do today! Yet Jesus shows us that we humans have a potential to move beyond our animal instincts, to become more fully human, to live with each other more humanely, in a new relationship with the holy. This is what Jesus envisaged as the “Kingdom of God.”
The cross to me is the symbol of Jesus’ sacrificial death. But it is more: the empty cross is the symbol of resurrection, that mystical release of Jesus’ love into the disciples’ lives after his death. It is the symbol of Jesus’ presence within me. It is a symbol of what my life can become. It is a symbol of sacrifice, a symbol of freedom, a symbol of service, a symbol of love. Jesus’ very suffering and death loosened his love to become a part of his disciples very beings, and then to others on through the generations, and even to me.
So the cross is still the signal symbol for me on my Christian path in life.
Loren Bullock
July 20, 2012, revised October 23. 2012
Being human means that we are part of an evolutionary development that still includes in our DNA a huge heritage from our animal lineage. But what seems to set us apart from other animals and life forms is the development of our remarkable brain. Our human brain has given us the capability of imagination – to conceptualize events in time, both in the past and in the future as well as the ability to think symbolically, giving rise to language. Moreover we have developed a sense of awareness not only of our surroundings but also of our selves separate from our surroundings – a self-awareness, an awareness of an inner self, a “me” to a degree that seems unique in humans. With this sense of consciousness of self, we have also recognized that life includes much suffering and pain – plus an awareness that we shall die. Although all living things have a finite life span and will die, we humans seem to be the only ones who are aware of our own eventual death. Coping with that awareness, coupled with our inborn fears and insecurities in life is the probable source of the religions that seem to a part of all human societies. And that human brain also gives us the curiosity to ask the questions “How? and “Why?”
The Hebrews, over 2,000 years ago, answered those questions in terms and language that reflected their understanding of the world of their time. They saw themselves in a world of gods that lived above them just above the sky, of the earth where they and the animals lived, and a nether world below. The stories in the Bible all reflect this cosmology of a three-tiered universe – as does much of our present church liturgy and the words of our hymns. The story of Adam and Eve is primarily their explanation of evil and pain in this world. The first creation story in Genesis tells the story of God creating the world and all in it, including humans – and everything God creates is good. But the second creation story in Genesis explains that the humans – created perfect by God – chose to become imperfect, i.e., sinful, as a result of evil influences and so now humans experience pain and suffering.
But we now know that the universe is one of galaxies and vast distances and that life has evolved gradually over long stretches of time. And when we look at life in all its varied forms, we see that the primary drive in every unit of life – whether a strawberry plant, an oak tree, an amoeba, an ant, an elephant, or a human – is one of survival. And it is not easy. It is a struggle. One result of this struggle for survival has been the instinct of fear and distrust of strangers. Animals developed herd instincts for protection. Tribal instincts developed in humans. And it is this struggle for survival that is the source of much suffering and pain. Pain and death is certainly an integral part of being an individual human being. But in human interactions with others, our individual and tribal instincts too often take over, and we react with suspicion and rejection and violence. We humans even go to war! How can this be anything but evil in action!
I see evil as a human construct. To many it is still considered a separate being in the world – the Devil – causing all the trouble and suffering we experience as humans. To me that’s a cop-out. Evil is the direct result of our own human capacity to let our animal instincts take over, both in our individual lives and in our social and political societies. We humans create the evil in this world. That is our real sin. We can not blame evil on an outside being. No longer can we say, “The devil made me do it.” We ourselves do it to others as well as to ourselves. Letting our survival instinct take over, we discriminate, we exclude, we hate, we hurt, we kill. Is that what it means to be human?
No! Because our sense of self-awareness has also provided us with sense that there is more to the “me” within each of us than just animal instincts. Our brain has evolved with a capability to experience more than just sensory stimuli to which our instincts react. Human language is inadequate to express fully in words the experiences of that “more”. We use words such as compassion, justice, steadfastness, love to describe those experiences. These are words that express some of the feelings that make us more fully human than just letting our animal instincts control us. And these are the same words that we use to describe God. That is the God that is within me, that is the “me” inside me. And it is the human Jesus that showed the disciples those same attributes of God so that they could only respond by saying that “God was in Jesus!” And after Jesus death, they experienced within themselves what they could only explain as “Jesus was still alive in them.”
So I must accept pain and suffering as companions to my being human, and part of my charge to be more fully human is to assuage and alleviate pain and suffering in others wherever I can. But I cannot accept that the pain and suffering that we humans inflict upon other humans is anything but evil itself, and that only by each of us living up to our potential of becoming more fully human will the Kingdom of God truly come on this earth.
Loren Bullock
July 20, 2012
Life is precious. We as individuals are born, created at a moment of conception. Yet death is an inevitable companion to that conception. All living things die eventually. That is a part of life. Yet death can come at any time through accidents, illness, even murder, of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Eventually death comes with “old age”, implying a life span that varies from species to species, and also varies within a specie. Death happens to all living things. Yet, while we humans are not alone with death, we humans are perhaps unique in that we keep asking the question, “Why?”
Especially puzzling is how do we explain to ourselves an early death. It is even more poignant when a child dies from illness, or is killed by a car when darting out into a street, or by a random bullet. Our life can be “cut short,” at any time, suggesting that “it’s not fair,” that we are somehow “meant” to live out a more or less average life span. We have interjected purpose to our being born. And does that mean that when we have lived our life span and die, that we have fulfilled our purpose? And what is that purpose?
Also puzzling is why pain and suffering are a part of life as we experience it. Yet it seems to be. A few are “lucky.” Some are born with “good genes” or are born to parents with lots of money, and are healthy and can live a “full life” without want. Yet others are born with imperfect genes, or into a life of want, both of which can lead to much pain and suffering. But we all know those who in spite a great suffering nevertheless still lead a “full life” in that they contribute both to themselves and to those around them. But must pain and suffering be a part of life? And is death the final event to end the pain and suffering? Living life itself is surely part of our purpose in being here.
I have never been comfortable with answers that describe pain and suffering as punishment from God.. God does not play favorites, curing some cancer sufferers for example and leaving others to die. Pain and suffering seem to be part of our humanness. But through it we can relate to other life. We can become sensitive to other people and their own pain and suffering. We can recognize and accept – even celebrate – our humanness. We can begin to recognize and experience that we are part of something outside of ourselves, even outside of our humanness.
It must be recognized, however, that much of the pain and suffering we experience we do to ourselves. It is caused by other humans or by the society that we humans have created for ourselves. We hurt each other. We kill each other. We go to war. In our relationships we often bring hurt and pain to those around us. Is this all a part of being human? It certainly seems to be a part of much of our human history and culture. Maybe even asking these questions is a part of our humanness. And just maybe one of our purposes in being here is to help alleviate and assuage the hurt and pain and suffering that our fellow human beings are experiencing – and maybe by extension to all living things.
Grief is a particular form of pain and suffering that happens only because we have loved. Grief is always a companion to love. Grief comes when we lose one we love. Do we truly grieve over something or someone we do not love.? Does this not tell us something? That we are reaching our highest in life when we are in a love relationship. That love is the purpose of our living. The breaking of that relationship is of course a time for grieving. But also a time of gratefulness for the experiencing of love. Because it is in loving that we grow and we fulfill our greatest potential to be alive, to be a part of life in this universe. So we must never stop loving! Even with pain and suffering, we must never stop loving.
Loren Bullock
June 3, 2007
Under Roman law, “the idea of citizenship had enabled people of various classes and backgrounds to have a sense of common membership,” but by medieval times, with the rise of the Frankish kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire, “the Germanic polity was not based on law, as Rome’s had been, but on undefined tribal customs which emphasized loyalty over justice.” In this “culture of Germanic tribalism . . . as the basis of social structure, the category of ‘stranger’ had taken on new force in Europe. According to Germanic custom, a stranger was an object without a master. Insofar as he was not protected, either by a powerful individual, or by inter-tribal or international agreement, he did not enjoy the most elementary rights. He could be killed, and his murderer could not be punished . . . His property was ownerless, and his heirs had no rights of inheritance.”
– Quotes from Constantine’s Sword, by James Carroll (2001), pp. 240,242
Carroll is describing the development of anti Semitism within the Christian church. But in a larger sense, being a stranger to God – being estranged from God – means being shut out, being separated from God’s love and protection. But how can we be a stranger to God? What could cause us to be separated from God? Is it God’s punishment upon us for our wrongdoing? That was how the Hebrew prophets explained the calamities befalling their nation. But we do it to ourselves. We separate ourselves from God by our choices, our selfish willfulness – that’s our “sin.” But instead of punishing us, perhaps God is grieving at the broken relationship. For no matter how much we have made ourselves strangers to God, He never lets us go. He never shuts us out but is ever ready and is ever working to reestablish the relationship to Him – that’s God’s grace.
His love of us, therefore, must show in us by our love of others – even strangers.
Trust steadily in God,
Hope unswervingly,
Love extravagantly.
1 Corinthians 13:13 (Peterson)
Loren Bullock
November 22, 2009
Why I can still say the Nicene Creed without believing all the words
In trying to articulate my understanding of my relationship to God or to ask, “Who is Jesus?” in modern, non-traditional terms that I can embrace, I am confronted with words and terms and ideas that no longer seem to be relevant in our modern understanding of the world. Certainly we recognize that the three-tiered cosmology of Bible times has been replaced with our new understanding of our universe of space-time, evolution, DNA, etc. But our Christian vocabulary is full of terms like Incarnation, Atonement, Son of God, Resurrection, Trinity, Salvation, Grace, and so on – terms that John Shelby Spong describes, “like church furniture – monuments in place around which one walks with respect. They do not demand to be understood nor do they require more than a proud salute.”
We tend to forget that these words are from other times and from other contexts. They were meaningful religious terms that thoughtful men and women found useful in their attempt to describe their very real experiences of God and Jesus in their own historical times. For example, the first generation of “Christians” were Jews, and they worshiped in their Synagogues, and the first Gospels were written to tell the story of Jesus as the Messiah of the Jewish scriptures but in a new context. As such they took the stories of the Old Testament and recast them with Jesus as the participant. For the Jews, this was not an attempt to use the Old Testament as prophesy foretelling the New Testament, but was a common way of telling their stories (e.g., in the Old Testament there are three “parting of the waters” stories: first for Moses, then for Joshua, and then for Elijah). It was the later church that reinterpreted the stories of the Old Testament as all pointing to Jesus. For the early “Followers of the Way”, they were simply telling the story of Jesus in the contexts of the familiar stories read in the Synagogues.
[What follows is mostly quoted from an essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong from his web site. It articulates my own thoughts and understandings as they have developed over the years.]
In this way the early Christians (quoting Spong) “looked at Jesus through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when the sacrificial lamb was offered for the sins of the people. They also described Jesus as the Paschal Lamb of the Passover celebration, slain to spare the Jewish homes from a visit from the angel of death. The Jewish families celebrated their redemption and freedom by reenacting annually these two sacrifices: the lamb of Yom Kippur and the lamb of Passover. In time these two images created a lens through which they began to look at Jesus. The death of Jesus thus came to be seen as analogous to the deaths of these two sacrificed lambs, the one creating atonement and the other breaking the power of death. That was why Jesus began to be called ‘The Lamb of God.’ This imagery dominated that book we call the Epistle to the Hebrews. The popular evangelical phrase, ‘Jesus died for my sins,’ also arose directly out of these original interpretations of the cross.
“Other early Jewish images . . . were incorporated into the church’s growing understanding of Jesus. There was the ‘servant of the Lord’ image drawn from II Isaiah, the ‘shepherd king’ image drawn from II Zechariah, and the ‘Son of Man’ image, drawn from the writings of Daniel. In this way the early supernatural interpretations, so prevalent in first century Judaism, began to fasten themselves onto the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
“Then as the Christian Church separated itself from its Jewish roots, it developed its own understandings and interpretations of Jesus and what it meant to be his follower. And we today are a part of that long historical process, which means that we “walk in the company of Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Whitehead, Tillich, Kung, John Robinson, and James Pike, just to name a few of those who built that tradition. Those heroic, spiritual ancestors of [ours] created tension within Christianity and wrestled openly with its substance. Their goal was to enable their faith tradition and their Christ to be heard through the ages in new accents and in contemporary thought forms. These leaders lived in that stretching between a particular pathway of faith received in a particular historical context and the ever-changing understanding of the faith that was required as the years and centuries rolled by and as the human context changed dramatically. The temptation in all religion is to freeze the faith story in some literal and time-bound form and then to make ultimate claims for that interpretation [italics mine].
“Every Christian generation must sing the Lord’s song in the accents of its day and inside the bounds of knowledge available in its generation. For that song to have depth and intensity, however, it mst be sung in tension and harmony, not with the words of the past, but with the experience of the past. I feel no great need to preserve the words of my religious past, but I never want to reject the experience of the past that caused the words of my faith to come into being.
“As a Christian I seek to separate the experience of God, which I regard as eternal, from the traditional words used to explain that experience, which I always regard as time-bound and transitory. When I reject the traditional interpretation I do not reject the experience that I am certain created the interpretive words. I must, as Solomon did when he built the Temple, take the treasures of the past into the new temple with me. I refuse to turn away either from the hard questions of my day or to ignore the classical Christian symbols of the past. I will wrestle with the scriptures, but I will never abandon the scriptures. I will seek to break open the creeds, but I will never reject the creeds. I will fight with doctrines like Incarnation and the Trinity, but I will never dismiss the truth that people were pointing to when these doctrines were first formed. . . . I walk a fine theological line. I see it as necessary to enable me to ‘sing the Lord’s song in the strange land’ of the 21st Century.”
And so in Spong’s words, I too still “sing the Lord’s song” even using the familiar old words and tunes because they point to the eternal experience we humans can sense as we grow into oneness with that ineffable mystery we call God.
Loren Bullock
May 16, 2009
We have no eyewitness accounts of Jesus from the immediate time of his life, his ministry, or even of the months following his death. The writings we do have – from Paul and the gospel writers – were written much later. I have long tried to describe for myself what those early experiences of resurrection must have been like, and I have found most helpful Bishop Spong’s following discussion of what might be said about the disciples’ experience of Jesus. [From Eternal life: A New Vision by John Shelby Spong (2009) pp.174ff]
“The gospel writers were trying to say something that ordinary human language was not equipped to say, so they stretched that language beyond its normal limits. Surely these gospel writers were quite aware that they were using words and images this way to describe . . . an internal, profoundly real and reorienting psychic and mystical experience that had altered human consciousness and, therefore, human history forever.” [p. 177]
“What was it that these gospel writers were trying to convey? What did “experiencing Jesus alive” mean to them? We know that something happened to their understanding of God. We know that something happened to their understanding of Jesus. We know that something happened to their understanding of themselves. These changes were the things that were objective and real and that had distinct and recognizable consequences. Their experience of the raised Jesus, if not the raised Jesus himself, was an event that did occur in time and in history and that demands an accounting even if we are reduced to using words like “an experience of phychic consciousness.” Jesus had been raised, but into what? Was he raised into their understanding of God so that nothing was able ever to be the same? Skeptics might well call that mass hallucination, because they regard anything that is not objective, or that does not occur in space and time, as unreal. Yet the reality of this shift in consciousness was measurable, undeniable ; and quite easy to document. The meaning of God was forever altered, because Jesus, by the shear force of his being, had imprinted his humanity onto the definition of divine. The external God had been discovered at the heart of the human. God was now “experienced through the filter of Jesus.” [Walter Wink’s phrase, Spong suggests.] Resurrection was an event of inner history at the levels of consciousness where fundamental shifts occur. The disciples who had localized the God-experience in Jesus, found in his death that this God-experience was no longer localized. The presence of the holy that they had found in Jesus they now discovered in themselves. It was as if they saw that what it was that they had met in Jesus had now taken up residence in their lives and hearts. This is what John was trying to say when he had the raised Jesus breathe on the disciples in the evening of the first Easter so that they were later filled with what later Christians would call the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), but which I believe was originally known as the spirit of Jesus, himself. . . .” [pp 182-183].
“The Jesus experience, which I believe was an empowering call to live, to love, and to be, and which had seemed to be unique to Jesus, was now located at the center of their own being. The power of Jesus had entered them, they began to say, just as Jesus had in his resurrection entered into the very being of God. Jesus had in his death stepped aside to let the meaning of self-consciousness, which was at its deepest and fullest in him, expand their consciousness and become both the dominating force and the obvious power of their lives. The spirit that was present in Jesus was the power of his life calling them into a newly expanded consciousness, which expressed itself in the fuller humanity that was now working in them. Jesus had forced them to move away from the fear of life and need to be dominated by an external God, to recognize that the divine and the human were not separate, but that the human was the vessel in which the divine lived.” [pp 183-184]
“Jesus the man, the fully human one, had not been able to loose his spirit until he died. It was only when the Jesus spirit entered the disciples that the world was turned upside down. In Jesus the values born in our quest for security, values that so deeply shape human religion, were reversed. If the truly human, which was experienced in Jesus, is the content of what we mean by the word, “divine” and is met not beyond life but at the heart of life, then the pathway into eternity is to accept death as natural and to go so deeply into life that all limits are transcended and both timelessness and God are entered. The human quest for life after death is thus not based in any sense on the claim that my life or anyone else’s is immortal; it is based on a new awareness that self-conscious human life shares in the eternity of God and that, to the degree that I am in communion with that ever-expanding life force, that life-enhancing power of love and that inexhaustible Ground of Being, I will live, love, and be a part of who God is, bound not by my mortality but by God’s eternity.” [pp 184-185]
“It is not enough to know the truth of this mystical path; it is essential that we actually begin to walk it. . . The ascension of Jesus into God is thus not a spatial idea that must be believed or embraced; it is rather a pathway that each of us must undertake to walk. . . . The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things our eyes do not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away. It is to live not frightened by death, but rather called by the reality of death to go into our humanity so deeply and so passionately that even death is transcended. That is the call of the fully human one, the Jesus of the transformed consciousness.” [pp 185-186]
Loren Bullock
June 27, 2012
M Loren Bullock 