My religious upbringing cautions me to not even venture into
the realm of suggesting that certain of our religious teachings, held up by
years of theological discussion, and seen as divine truths, ought to be
considered in any light other than that of literal understanding. Yet I shall dare to do so anyway, because I
believe that the value of our religious truths may actually be found in their
symbolic meaning, rather than in their literal interpretation. (Or at the very
least, it’s found equally in both, regardless if the truth is seen as metaphor or
literal fact.)
I do want to provide the caveat that I am merely trying to think outside the box, and this series is not a statement of my faith (or lack thereof), but rather a train-of-thought deliberation, the likes of which I've often had in the past but failed to capture in words. Since such philosophical wonderment occurs to me periodically and never fails to somehow deepen my conviction and clarify God's will for me, I am confident that by being open to the moving of the Holy Spirit, anything contrary to righteousness will be made evident to me in the course of this exercise.
I do want to provide the caveat that I am merely trying to think outside the box, and this series is not a statement of my faith (or lack thereof), but rather a train-of-thought deliberation, the likes of which I've often had in the past but failed to capture in words. Since such philosophical wonderment occurs to me periodically and never fails to somehow deepen my conviction and clarify God's will for me, I am confident that by being open to the moving of the Holy Spirit, anything contrary to righteousness will be made evident to me in the course of this exercise.
The Personification
of God
Let us start with the most difficult concept for many
non-Christians to wrap their minds around – the personification of God in the
person of Jesus, especially as part of a divine trinity of persons. If God is One, how can there be three persons
of God? I think the problem begins
already with the personification of God as a “being” rather than as an abstract
concept.
* God is Love
We often hear it said, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, et al). Yet love is an abstraction. Love is not a person, like Cupid or
Aphrodite. Love is an experience of
affinity towards another being, a sense of drawing near and desiring the
company and welfare of a given individual.
Love is that which keeps us together and links us into units of couples,
families, groups of friends. What do we
all have in common? Love!
Yet for some reason, it seems terribly inadequate to the
modern ear (perhaps more accurately: to the modern, western, Christian ear) to
define God as “just” an abstraction.
Already, we are faced with an undeniable truth of human nature: we are
self-centered. Original sin, after all,
is nothing more than the putting of our own interests first! (More on that later.) Therefore, if we are to believe in a God,
that God must be bigger and better and more impressive than we are – somehow
“more than” human, but certainly not “less than” human, and we see
abstractions as lesser than persons.
And so we personify God as a “He”, likening Him to a Father. There is definitely value in so
doing. Because we share love with other
people, we want to feel closeness to God in the same way we experience
closeness to family and friends. What we
fail to remember is that God isn’t at the other end of that which connects us
to each other; rather, God is actually the “thing” that connects us. Connections can be severed; individuals can
be separated. But nothing from the
outside can interfere with a person’s experience of love. Once felt, a person will forever reminisce
over specific instances when it was most obvious, and long to experience it again and again. So we personify God because we cannot think
of Him in terms that are not familiar to us, and abstractions are not very
familiar to us.
* What we knew as babies
But if we allow for the lines to get blurry between what
constitutes a person and what constitutes an experience (this may take a lot of
effort and imagination), we begin to catch glimpses of what Jesus must have
meant when He said “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30). We don’t remember this, but we actually do
have human experiences that mimic what Jesus is talking about.
When a baby is newly born, she does not yet have a concept
of self. She doesn’t understand that
there’s such a thing as “not-I” versus “I”.
She doesn’t have object permanence, so what she is currently
experiencing is the only thing that exists for her. There is no hoping for the future, no
regretting the past, no comparing self to others. Where is the baby before birth? Is she not literally one body
with the mother? Doesn't the mother experience the baby's presence and
isn't the baby directly affected by what the mother does? Everywhere
the mother goes, so goes the baby. There is no separating them. And
yet, we know that they are two persons in one body. After birth, the
baby initially maintains this understanding of reality as evidenced by
the breastfeeding relationship God instituted as a transition for both
into separate people.
Therefore, from the baby's point of view, "baby and momma are one". I
think this is parallel to the way Jesus saw Himself and God-the-Father
as one.
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