Sunday
November 29
Have Courage
By Marsh Chapel
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When I was a young adolescent, I thought the following was an outrageously funny joke. A man saw three holes in the ground and said, “well, well, well.” Nowadays, I suppose, nobody thinks of wells as holes in the ground, but it was very funny back then. Today I want to talk about holes in our intellectual ground. I’m going to speak of these holes abstractly, but they are not only abstract. As Christians we recognize them as holes in the Trinity: of the Son, of the Spirit, and even of the Father. Other religions have alternative means of expressing these, but I am going to focus on Christianity.
Isn’t it astonishing, however, to refer to the Trinitarian Persons as “holes”? After all, those Persons name the basic contours of the faith. All the other doctrines, stories, songs, and celebrations are elaborations of the Persons of the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Father. The usual order to list them is Father, Son, and Spirit. But I am going to change that to start with the Son as the most distinctive doctrine of Christianity, the Spirit as the pervasive presence that animates the religious community, perhaps even many communities, and the Father as the universal Creator acknowledged by many if not all communities. Instead of seeing these Persons as the most positive general doctrines of the faith, I see them as holes. How astonishing! But consider.
Belief in Jesus as the Son of God is the most distinctive of Christian doctrines. Of course, it is extremely varied. The Gospel of Mark treats Jesus as adopted by God for a larger purpose and made special in that way. The Gospel does not even have a proper post-resurrection scene and makes the calling of Jesus by John the Baptist extremely important. The Gospel of Matthew was addressed to the Jews who surrounded Jesus and focuses mainly on how Jesus amended the Jewish teachings. It traces Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham and calls attention to spreads of fourteen generations to David, fourteen more to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen more to Jesus. The Gospel of Luke was addressed to gentile followers of Jesus and traces his ancestry back to Seth, Adam, and God, with claims for Jesus universality. The Gospel of John tells a very different story from the first three Gospels, beginning with a metaphysical sermon on the creation that claims that the Word or Logos that God spoke was itself incarnate in the person of Jesus, but then moving to a very personal account of Jesus’s friendships and enemies, ending with a very long sermon, Jesus’s crucifixion, and then his appearances first in Jerusalem and then at the Sea of Tiberias. Paul wrote about Jesus almost exclusively as a metaphysical antidote to the judgment of the Jews, the Second Man Adam responding to the First. He said almost nothing about the biographical details that interested the Gospels. The other New Testament writings depicted Jesus in the large cosmic roles given credence in Jewish thought, often extending beyond Judaism. In Post-Testamental times, Jesus was interpreted in the terms of Greek thought with many variations in how he could be both God and man. Augustine recognized the difficulties of giving a straightforward interpretation of the scriptures and interpreted Jesus according to his own categories. Aquinas adopted many of these strategies of interpretation and embedded the highly interpreted Jesus in his dense fabric of ethics. Schleiermacher treated Jesus as the best example of a God-intoxicated person. Bultmann thought of Jesus as an historical figure who was given a highly sophisticated interpretation by the thinkers of his context. But in all of these, from the Gospellers to the twentieth century, Jesus was interpreted as the Son of God, whatever that might mean. Some of you long-time members of this church have heard my interpretations of Jesus over the years, drawing heavily on Tillich though set in a much wider context.
Without for a moment suggesting that a consistent story is true about Jesus, I want to make clear that I have a consistent story, beginning with John’s Gospel that swings from metaphysics to friendship and that has nearly always two story-lines: one that is for the masses and one for sophisticated Christians. I follow that through history to our own day. But is this not still only speculation? So I have an interpretive point of view, for which I can argue vigorously, is it still not merely an argument? Don’t I recognize the power of many other interpretations, particularly more fundamentalistic ones? Don’t I recognize that the finer my interpretations, the fewer people agree with me? Of course I do.
Moreover, the existential meaning of Jesus is itself speculative. How many people have believed that faith in Jesus will get them into Heaven? I don’t even believe in Heaven as a place for after-life experiences. How many people have believed that Jesus is the judgment of God, rewarding the good and punishing the evil? I don’t believe that evil is something worth punishing. How many people have believed that everyone is saved in the end through faith in Jesus? I’m a little shaky even on salvation. How many people go along with Jesus’s rather apparent pacifism? In the short run I’m dead set against it.
Now I’ll bet a lot of you share my doubts about Jesus. In church, everything is fine because we know that the language of the liturgy, even of the preaching, is mainly metaphorical. But when pressed, how much can we affirm that Jesus is Son of God? Not much. And this is where the doctrine of Jesus as Son of God has holes in it. Your holes might be different from mine. Nevertheless, at some point, when pressed, or at night, or when faced with Covid 19, I bet you just get quiet and say someone else had better figure it out.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is equally full of holes. It began with the Gospel of John’s introduction that took the form of a special midrashic sermon based on two texts. The primary text was the first part of Genesis that said that the universe was created by God speaking. Was God whole while silent but also while speaking? That gives rise to a rather simple view of God as a person. Or was God whole prior to speaking so that the creation of speech was the beginning of creation? This gives rise to a very sophisticated view of God prior to speaking and then a determinate situation once speech began; on this view the speech was divine and was that through which all things were made. This was the view held by John and the Christians, and it was acceptable within Judaism up until the Babylonian Talmud in the fourth century; then the Jews defended more strongly the first interpretation according to which God is like a person, first silent and then speaking. John’s second text was the reference to Lady Wisdom in Ecclesiastes and the intertestamental writings as being around and ready for heeding but being neglected. Finally God made his speech or Logos incarnate in the person of Jesus who was himself treated very badly. But then John’s text shifts to the biographical details of Jesus’s life. Nevertheless, Jesus promised to send the Logos, or divine speech, or the Holy Spirit to guide the disciples after he had died.
The Book of Acts records how on Pentecost day the Holy Spirit descended to the disciples in tongues of fire on their heads, giving them wisdom and the power to speak in all the languages represented in their audience. This marks the beginning of an association of the Holy Spirit with the Church that has come down to the present day. All sorts of stories exist in which the Holy Spirit comes to individuals. But mainly it is to the Church that the Spirit comes. Paul Tillich went so far as to say that the Church is not the real Church, but is a phony church, unless the Spirit is present, which leaves him with the problem of identifying the true Church. If you eliminate the separation of the Holy Spirit and the Church, don’t you have only the Holy Spirit?
If you have only the Holy Spirit, what are its marks? How can you tell?
The holes in the Person of the Holy Spirit have lapped around the doctrine since its beginning. It is easy to claim the Spirit for the side that wins the debate, which is what happened. But then the losers of the debate also claimed it. Schleiermacher had perhaps the best version of the doctrine insofar as he gave a theoretically rich interpretation of the experience of the Holy in nearly (or in fact in) every person. But his interpretation rested upon a metaphysical distinction at the root of experiential process between the passive and the active, and not many people agree to that. I think Schleiermacher’s tack is good so far as it goes, but it needs to go much farther, and perhaps will turn around and prove that just the opposite is the true, that the confusion of the passive and active proves there is no Holy Spirit. When we look to the Holy Spirit to give us a divine authority for something we want to say, it is full of holes.
The Person of the Father is the most universal of Christian doctrines. Backing off from the Son and the Holy Spirit, it is extremely general. The adoption of Greek thinking gave the Christians plenty of room to speculate on God as Creator. Aquinas defended the Neo-Platonic view that God is infinite and that the creation is finite and made from the infinite. Calvin too said that God is infinite. Schleiermacher and Tillich were somewhat vague about whether God is full or empty, limiting himself to God’s creation. West Asian religions have tried to carry over the personal characteristics of intentionality and wisdom to God, even when God is beyond real characters. South Asian religions have taken the intentionality line to be unfavorable and have pushed for consciousness in some pure state to be the nature of God, even when God is beyond nature. The East Asians have given up just about all uses of the metaphor of the person for God and have talked about nature giving rise spontaneously to determinate things. The Chinese have been naturalistic rather than theistic in their theology. All have admitted that some line of finite characteristics remains with God, even when substantial form is denied it. At least, this is the way I read the intellectual progress of religions.
I don’t know how far you want to go with me on this adventure of conceiving God. Most Christians want to hold on to some kind of intentionality in God and are reluctant to give up a vague claim that God acts with purpose or has hopes for us.
But remember the intellectual pressures pushed to an extreme, remember the dark night, remember Covid-19. Perhaps you would be willing to give up the view that God is a being, a thing, however infinite, and consider God to be an act of creation. God as act is known only with the creation and could not be considered anything before the act. The act is eternal because all time is created. But any thing to be honored, prayed to, or located as present or absent is part of creation. God is God only because of creation.
To my mind, God is good only because the act creates determinate things, all of which are good, each in its own way. God is the source of evil only because these goods inhibit one another and conflict. The goods and evils of human life are all rather local and we do the best we can, although what we can do and fail surely counts. But we count only proximately, not ultimately. Ultimate we all are good in just the way we are.
So I agree with John that God’s speech is separate from God’s reality, though God’s reality is nothing unless he is speaking. All that is metaphorical.
Mine is a fairly extreme view. If you go with me, welcome. If not, I encourage your belief. But remember this is all just speculation, however sophisticated. It is the best that I can do. I presume on the basis of past experience that it is an hypothesis that will be superseded by a better hypothesis some day. From my standpoint, all previous hypotheses have fallen short and been superseded. Why not mine?
Surely there are holes in my hypothesis of the Father as the ultimate sheer act of creation, inseparable from the creation itself. I do not know what they are, but I fear them. By happy days I work on my hypothesis. But when pressed ultimately, in the ultimate dark, or even ultimately depressed by the virus, I am ultimately afraid. Of course, now it is daytime and light, and so I am only referring to my fears, not exhibiting them.
What did Jesus say about this situation? He said, “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” According to John, he said this toward the end of his long speech at the last supper, a speech so complex and contradictory no one understood him. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it after warning that his disciples would face persecution, as we all do whether we believe anything or nothing. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it whether or not we believe in his later resurrection after crucifixion. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it whether or not he actually said it, which he probably did not. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it even if the whole story of his life, even if the rumors of the Holy Spirit, even if his belief in the Huge God beyond all reckoning is false. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it even if there are holes in our best theories, even if there are holes in the roots of our life’s determination, even if there are holes in the God beyond gods. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.”
Even if there are holes in every theory we have thought, in every theory we now think, in every theory anyone shall ever think, Jesus says “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” “I have conquered the world” refers to the past to what Jesus has done and endured. Whatever happens in his future, including crucifixion and resurrection, and looking down from Heaven on his Church, count as nothing because he has already conquered. “Take courage” refers to his disciples, to us, and to everyone from then on: it means that whatever happens comes from God and is good, and that we should anticipate it with joy. Even if the world is ultimately destroyed, we have had enough. Even if my ultimate hypothesis according to which God is the act of creation and the creation is ultimately good is mistaken, we have had enough. We have had enough in our local circumstance, even if we are locally evil, and we have had enough in ultimate perspective. Do not give up when things go bad. Have courage.
Well, well, well. Three holes in the ground. Three holes in our best understanding of what is ultimately real. So we should be modest in our claims as Christians. We should be strenuous in our attempts to do better. We should engage our local projects with determination and our ultimate end with thanksgiving. “Have courage; I have conquered the world.”
Amen.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel
