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Jim's PERSPECTIVEMay 07, 2015So the LORD spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. Exodus 33:11 (NKJV) The God of both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible is a personal God. From the very beginning God deals with individuals long before dealing with groups of people. In the Genesis creation stories, God has a relationship with the man and woman he forms. In various times and places God makes himself known to certain chosen ones, from Noah to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Moses to Joshua to David to the prophets (and many others in-between and beyond). When Jesus, in the gospels, refers to God as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” he is declaring God as a God of individuals, despite the fact that they come from different generations. Jesus evidently is suggesting that the Kingdom of God is not bound by time and does not reckon time in the same way as those who are limited and bound by it. One thing they all do seem to have in common is that they all have character flaws. Not only is God in relationship with individuals; the relationship is always with imperfect ones. What a relief it is to know that. You and I still qualify. Many in today’s world do not believe in a personal God. There are a lot of reasons offered for unbelief, nonbelief, or disbelief, but in the end, none of them are very convincing to me. Many of the objections/arguments against the existence of God, or his providential nature, are based on philosophical and cultural grounds. If one happens to be a Pantheist, a Monotheist (or monist), a Dualist, or, in addition to any number of other Modernist or Post-Modernist philosophies, this will tell the tale regarding whether one believes that a personal relationship with God is even actually possible. The fine people in the East, meaning Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist-minded folk (mainly India and China) are against the idea because a personal God does not comport with their cosmological view of the world. For many of them, God-is-All, and All-is-God. That’s Pantheism, and for the most part, it’s an Eastern perspective. Because the Eastern Mind (and we’re painting with broad stokes here) thinks of life as a circle, that all of life is continually re-cycled within it, and that there are no “created” beings. The East conceives of God—what it would call Ultimate Reality—as “Vishnu” or “Brahman” and the individual soul as “Atman,” and that the goal in life is not to seek union with God, but rather, to reach the point of self-awareness such that one realizes that the Atman (the one) is identical with the Brahman (God, the Ultimate Reality). It’s not difficult to see, in this world-view, that seeking union with God is incoherent. It would be to seek union with one’s own self, and that would be absurd. Because there is no Creator in that scheme, there are no created beings, and therefore there is no place for a personal, individual Deity, who is All. Consequently, there could be no personal, individual relationship characterized by union with God. The Eastern perspective is considerably different than the “typical” Christian position, which holds that we are created by God for relationship with the intention of experiencing loving union with the Divine Himself. However, because of the presence of sin in the world—and in ourselves particularly—we are separated from God (rather, we separate ourselves), which necessitates some form of restoration/redemption, resulting in a change Christians refer to as the “New Birth.” By the way, “Born again,” “born of the Spirit,” and “born from above” are equivalent ways to express this “change.” But within a pantheistic world view the notion of “separation from God” would be a foreign concept. Further, a “new birth” other than the kind they embrace—transmigration, or, reincarnation—also would be incoherent, absurd, and unnecessary. In the words of one of their thinkers/writers, concerning the need to be born anew: “Thou art already that.” I put a “typical” Christian position in quotes because there is no typical Christian position in terms of the nature of the change/transformation, or even in terms of how one understands or articulates that change. That said, most Christians believe that a change for both the world and for individuals is necessary, and that only God, through the Son, by means of the Spirit, makes it happen. Those in the Middle East largely are Monotheists. That’s Islam in a word. The Shahada, the creed declaring the oneness of God, says, “la ilaha illa’llah” (there is no god but God). Their doctrine of the “oneness of God” is called Tawhid, which is not only a creed/doctrine, it is a philosophy/world view as well. Monism, speaking philosophically, is the belief that all things in reality stem from one substance. Islam, philosophically and especially theologically, is opposed to any system that allows for anything polytheistic, which should help to explain their understanding—or, rather, mis-understanding—of Christianity. For them, the Trinity is unacceptable because it divides God up into three parts, despite Christian objections to the contrary. We say, as do the Islamists, that God is one. The difference lies in our belief that God is one-and-the-same nature in three persons. Islam does not agree. I can imagine that the Muslims would be horrified if, even for the sake of argument, a Trinitarian understanding of Islam—though nonexistent, of course—were hypothetically applied to their belief system. By way of example, suppose one possibly conceived of Allah—not in the sense of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—but rather, in the sense of God the First Time, God the Second Time, and God the Third Time. Because of one’s monistic orientation, one could not conceive of Allah as anything beyond God the First Time. Christians believe that Jesus allows us to know God as Father, and not merely an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Holy Creator. “God the First Time,” although we may have a sense of the Holy and of Awe, or, the “numinous,” and “mysterium tremendum,” as Professor Rudolph Otto calls them in his book The Idea of the Holy. However, the intimate, loving nature of God is made known by the Son. One comes to know the Fatherhood of God through the Son-ship of Jesus. The individual aspect of the relationship, because it is experiential— hence personal—in nature, is by means of the Holy Spirit, who happens to be the Spirit of the risen Christ. For me, the question related to Islam becomes, are persons who worship Allah as God the First Time, but do not give the same credence to God the Second Time, and God the Third Time included in the Will of God as Christians understand Him? I believe that the answer is yes. And, also, I think that some less inclusive Christians would be bent out of shape with me because I would stake this claim. But consider the implications of Hagar, the mother of Ishmael— the founder of Islam—in the Genesis 21 account of her expulsion by Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Can you imagine that God, from the very beginning, did NOT know in what direction Ishmael and his descendants—including the future Mohammed—would go and what would be their fate? The account, in part, reads as follows:
Some Christians (such as myself) are of the opinion that God the First, Second, and Third Time, as well as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit provides for his children who do not yet know Him as God-in-Three-Persons. In knowing Allah as God the First Time, they simply do not grasp the other two vital natures of God expressed in the Son and in the Spirit. Consequently, and at least as long as they remain unaware, they miss out on knowing God personally—and individually— in the realms of His love, intimacy, fatherhood, and power. In fact, that would true for all people, anywhere, who, in their minds, do grasp a sense of God, but do not grasp a sense of the Son or of the Spirit. A so-called “Dualist” position thinks of reality as comprised of two independent polar opposites. Dualism is not limited to East or West because there are Dualists in both hemispheres. Good vs Evil, or Light vs Darkness, Ying and Yang (Taoists, remember, tend to see things pantheistically, so that these forces—although irreconcilable—are nonetheless part of the One Reality), are a few of the more familiar “dualisms.” I have mentioned Dualism in other Perspective articles (e.g. see November 20, 2015). The problem with the concept of Dualism, philosophically and theologically, is that one has two a priori and self-existing entities that are equal in power: one Good, one Evil, or, one Light, and one Darkness. Christians, as well as all other monists who believe that everything comes from one substance, believe that the evil, or dark, side of reality is derivative from the Ultimate Good, and therefore is not “equal” in power. It is an aberration, or a distortion, or the absence of the Ultimate Good. It is contingent because it is created, not a priori and self-existing. It exists because the one God-in-Three-Persons exists. If Dualism were true, that would imply that one side of the two-sided equation is no better, or more powerful, or preferable, than the other. I could choose the Evil just as freely as the Good, or the Dark just as freely as the Light. In point of fact, people right here and now—and not just dualists—are free to choose the darkness, and they sometimes do. It’s just that Christians believe that those who end up choosing Evil and Darkness have embraced a lesser reality, and one that is judged and doomed to fail. Furthermore, it will be exposed in and by the Light, and all will know its true nature. Even should one think of one’s self as dualistic, I can see the possibility of wanting to align one’s self with the side of Light and Good. That would be a step in the right direction; however, it still falls short of grasping the reality of the personal, intimate, and experiential aspects of God expressed in the Son and in the Spirit. I believe that perhaps the biggest obstacle to personal and individual fellowship with God is related to one’s understanding of belief. Positive belief is expressed in basically three ways: I CAN believe; I DO believe; I WILL believe. The negative counterparts to belief are expressed also in basically three ways. Unbelief says, “I CANNOT believe it.” Non-belief says, essentially, “I DO NOT believe it.” Disbelief contains an element of decision, or, willfulness. That’s when someone says, “I WILL NOT believe it.” It is not difficult to see how one’s cultural, or philosophical, or theological position can be a determining factor concerning the form of belief in which one finds oneself. Christians believe that faith is a big-ticket item in the provision of God for all of his people. The writer of Ephesians points out, in chapter 2, that “by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God…” “The just shall live by faith,” is how Paul states it in the first chapter (and the overall thesis statement) of the book of Romans. And as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “…without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (ch.11, v.6). Both the saving parts and the believing parts are gracious gifts that come to us by and from a personal God. - Jim Radford |
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©2013 Jim Radford. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
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