Where Everybody's Crazy

Look, I realise this might be seen as trying to provoke a reaction. I'm not. I've just had three thoughts hit me at once, and found a common strand in them.

I've always been struck by the thought from Leslie Newbigin (in "The Open Secret") that

the working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess - shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.

Now I'll admit up front I'm not enough of a historian to judge how that happened and what effect it actually had; I have no idea, so I'm going to trust Newbigin on that one and assume that it is true, that Islamic theology has affected Christian thought in a profound way. (Let's be fair, it would be very strange if it hadn't!) There were three areas I recently came up against where I detected perhaps a hint - perhaps not - of this influence.

Trinity

This was Newbigin's original point. We don't, on the whole, think of God as Trinity. Well, at least I don't, so I'm a representative sample of what he was talking about. Although I'm (fervently) trinitarian, my day-to-day experiential view of God is dominated by God the Father, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as useful adjuncts to perform His work for Him. I don't think of God as three persons; I don't pray to God as three persons; it's a less natural concept to get your head around.

And if it's less natural, then it's harder to preach. Much easiest to start with the concepts of God that people have already, and "tweak" them a bit! But if God is fundamentally three-in-one, then that ought to be what we preach, ought it not?

The Bible

I've been discussing with Custardy about the role given to the Bible in evangelicalism, the concept of "the Word of God" and charges of bibliolatry - worshipping the book. There's a cruel but somewhat understandable joke about a local church that it is trinitarian, but its Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Scripture. But as Custard points out, the supreme revelation of God is not the Bible, but Jesus the Messiah.

It was that phrase that God me thinking about the Islamic concept of the supreme revelation of God, which is of course the written scripture. Did Islamic thinking on relevation - "at the beginning of the High Middle Ages" - affect our own? My personal view is that, of course, the exaltation of Scripture was the result of a need brought about by the lack of a magisterium post-Reformation, but as usual it is difficult to separate all the elements. But however it came about, the tendency to make the Bible (a static thing) "the Word of God" (which is generally a dynamic thing when used in the Bible itself) and to declare it infallible, inerrant, and all the other in-s - and thereby to reduce it to pure revelation, to decontextualize it and to dismiss the questions raised by its human transmission - is most certainly Quranic.

Is that an influence we should be swallowing wholesale?

Sin

OK, I don't have my thoughts fully worked out on this one, but a recent discussion with H reminded me of the fabulous EMQ article "The Gospel For Shame Cultures" which pointed out the abhorrence in which Muslim theology holds the Christian incarnation, the idea that God participated in and identified himself this world. How can God do this? He is pure and holy, and hates sin. Now I have to affirm that. God is pure and holy, and He does hate sin.

But at the same time He does not shy away from it. The common idea that God "abandoned" Jesus on the cross because He could not bear to look upon the sin is utterly heretical. It is heretical because it repudiates the Trinity; just like my (equally heretical!) common workaday concept of God, it regards Jesus as a separate entity dispatched by God to do His work, rather than as God incarnate. If God could not bear to look upon Jesus' sin, how could Jesus, who is God, bear it himself? How could Jesus, who is God, take upon himself such sin?

It is also heretical because it repudiates the Incarnation. Jesus, who is God, entered this world. He lived among us, dealing with the sin of our society. He enjoyed hanging around with prostitutes and drunkards; they were his people. He spent very little time rebuking them for their sin, even though he had plenty of opportunity. Instead of talking about it, he did something about it. (In fact, thinking about it, he fairly clearly told us not to rebuke others' sin, because we're always worse ourselves.)

But this, after all, the whole darned point of Christianity: that God did not leave us to fight our sin on our own in some holy arrogance, keeping Himself pure and unsullied, but He got His hands dirty - very dirty - and joined us in that fight. He who had no sin became sin for us. It's a paradox but there it is: God hates sin so much he filled himself with it.

Should we try to avoid sin? Of course. Did God avoid sin? Of course not. God abhors sin, but at the same time, He embraces it, and through embracing it, overpowers it. This is obviously not something we should emulate! His goodness is enough to conquer sin, but ours is not! But it is, at any rate, something we should not deny.

And here's where I haven't got it all worked out. I want to affirm the idea that God is pure and holy and hates sin. But I do not want to fall into saying that sin is utterly abhorrent to him, and to overemphasise His hatred and separation from sin, because I think I know where that idea comes from. God did most certainly not separate himself from sin, and that is what is so offensive to Muslims about Christianity! And I see their point. It's a complete scandal. Why aren't we offended by it? God became sin! It would be blasphemous if it wasn't what the Bible teaches... Maybe our overfamiliarity with the story has blinded us to how scandalous it really is.

I don't know. I haven't got it worked out. Both are true. Perhaps what God actually hates is not the sin itself, but the knowledge of what that sin has done to His beloved people.

I've always found the Trinity an awkward doctrine. It offends my aesthetics, more than anything else - from a programmer's point of view, I don't like arbitrary numbers, or anything that violates the Zero-One-Infinity Rule. Heck, for a while they didn't know whether or not Sophia was a fourth hypostasis, and if you're going to allow three, why not allow four?

I suspect that many other missionaries have problems with it; I remember a church planting seminar we did at WEC, and the doctrine wasn't even considered as a useful thing to teach. But the idea of the Trinity is not that this is another way to understand God, but that it is His fundamental nature. You'd think that would be worth teaching, in that case. Leslie Newbiggin made an interesting point in The Open Secret:

It has been said that the question of the Trinity is the one theological question that has been really settled. It would, I think, be nearer to the truth to say that the Nicene formula has been so devoutly hallowed that it is effectively put out of circulation... The church continues to repeat the Trinitarian formula but - unless I am greatly mistaken - the ordinary Christian in the Western world who hears or read the word "God" does not immediately think of the Triune Being - Father, Son and Spirit. He thinks of a supreme monad.

The working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess - shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.

Part of the reason for this in mission is the desire to work within the frameworks of the local understanding of God - in most cultures, particularly in Africa where most mission work has been done, there is a monadic "High God", which missionaries equate with God the Father and work from there. It makes it easier, I admit. But not in India, where Newbiggin worked, or in Japan, where I will work.

Another reason, I suspect is the desire for simplicity and opacity: pretty much anyone can get the idea of "God", but when you get talking about one God and three persons, people start bugging out at you. No, the ice-water-steam analogy isn't useful. The Trinity is not three distinct "states" that God morphs between.

But there's some good news. Thanks in part to Newbiggin, there has been more of an interest in having the Trinity as a starting point for theology and missiology, rather than as an uncomfortable addition. So in Iguassu we have papers like "Rethinking Trinitarian Missiology". In the Declaration of that conference, it said:

We commit ourselves to a renewed emphasis on God-centered missiology. This invites a new study of the operation of the Trinity in the redemption of the human race and the whole of creation, as well as to understand the particular roles of Father, Son and Spirit in mission to this fallen world.

If a missiologist is someone who reflects critically on missionary activity, I've been acting as a meta-missiologist and reflecting critically on missiologist activity. I've been wondering why this is - why the renewed emphasis? Partly, I suppose as a necessary consequence of an expanded understanding of the missionary task. Where the Gospel is brought to countries outside the European-African worldview of a "High God", the ability to work within that framework is removed and a new mode of operation needs to be found.

But I think another reason is the old claim of the "uniqueness of Christianity". As we encounter and dialogue with people from more and varied religions, we realise that all those times we've said "Christianity is the only religion with property X", we've merely displayed our own ignorance. "Only religion based on self-sacrifice"? Try Mahayana Buddhism. "Only religion based on grace"? Ask a Sikh.

So we look at the Trinity, and fair enough, I expect we can reasonably confidently say that Christianity is the only religion which has one single God with three distinct modes of operation. But I don't think any of the other religions want one.