Creating God in our own image… Jesus Wept Part 2
“In the beginning God created man in his own image, ever since we have been returning the favor.”
God is different from us. Let’s get that straight. We are not God!
Let me give an illustration how different God is from us. In Romans 12.19, Paul commands us to not take revenge, but to leave room for the wrath of God, and he quotes Deut. 32.35: Vengeance is mine, I will repay.
What I get from this is that God, because of his infinite perfections, can act righteously in actions which we are not permitted to do… and cannot do without sinning. I suspect that hate is another example. Can we hate someone (or something) without sinning? I don’t think so… But I AM sure that God can hate without sinning (while remaining pure love… see Romans 9.22f). So… Jesus commands us to love our enemies, but does that mean that God must always love his enemies (one root of Universalism)? I don’t think so… Let’s ponder on these matters!! Just because we cannot take revenge does not mean that God must not! Just because we must love our enemies does not mean that God must not! Let me say it again, God can do things that we must not do… God forbid that we exercise wrath! And God forbid that we overlay our experiences and feelings and expect God to conform to those. This is where we get those irrational statements like, “The atonement is like divine child abuse.” Let’s get over it and remember that God is outside many if not all human categories.
God, due to his infinite perfections, is ALWAYS holy and pure in motive and action. We are not. So let’s be careful of elucidating on the nature of God premised upon what we by human experience think he should be like.. Or due to cursory glances at scripture. We need to think! Let us not say in essence, “If I were God, I would… etc etc.” That sounds ludicrous, but in effect we do just that by superimposing our limited existence or experience over God’s. God is beyond our categories and we need to accept that…. because we are not God. Let’s get that point clear. So let’s be careful of declarations that are based upon what theologians call Anthropomorphisms or Anthropopathisms or based upon laws of logic like the “law of contradiction.” Just because God declares that he will reveal his mighty arm does not imply he HAS an arm! Or as in 1 Sam 15.11 (see also 1 Sam 15.35), God declares that he repents doesn’t follow that he changes his mind. Can it be that scripture sometimes “stoops to use human categories to tell the truth about a God far beyond our categories?”
Another way of saying all this is: “Exegesis should control our theology, rather than our theology controlling our exegesis.” Hoehner, Commentary on Ephesians
Let us learn to rejoice in paradox. That God is beyond our catagories….
Chris; your blog reminded me of something I recently read, by you know who:
…He reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person. For – dare one say it? In a book it would need pages of qualification and insurance – God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The door in God that opens is the door he knocks at. (At least, I think so, usually.) The Person in Him – He is more than a person – meets those who can welcome or at least face it. He speaks as “I” when we truly call him “Thou.”….
This talk of “meeting” is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring “Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou.” The abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïf image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?
Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer
CS Lewis
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