Sarah's post has challenged my thinking and moved me to give consideration to the question,"Does your understanding of who God is include a biblical anthropology?"
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Truth and Experience. Those are the two balancing arms of how we gauge reality. 'Truth' that is incongruent with any experience of reality, or experience that finds no basis in verifiable facts of the same reality of tangible existence... we can trust neither fully, and they are mutually testing each other in our ability to know what is real.
Theology at its most basic is the application of what we know of God to what we experience of Him. For Christians this comes from outside of us, in the written scriptures, which we believe have come directly from God, Himself. Without experience, the ideas of theology are mere intellectual exercise in abstractions. Amusing stretches of the imagination. Somewhere theology and experience touch in order to be what we may indeed call "truth". Personal experience has no qualifying unifying universality to claim truth except in its smallest denominator; it cannot judge the veracity of theological doctrine in the larger spectrum of reality. Without it, however, we are unaware of the integrity of the ideas presented to us. For an idea to be accepted as truth it must be tested; does it work in the "what is" ?
We have to meet in the play of the balance of the two. In this delicate dance we strongly favor the subjectivity of what we know by experience and even that which we say is objective standard can be colored by that bias. Which is what I think lies at the foundation of our many struggles with one view of theology over another. To find truth we have to be willing to allow the less obvious (to us) raise the questions which we need to find our equilibrium.
Here we find ourselves at the crossroad of dissension between the Evangelical "personal experience" of Jesus Christ and the objective "Sovereign" trump card of canonical standard orthodoxy. Is the latter 'theology' while the former mere subjective culturally colored 'feeling'? I think the case can strongly be made for the theology of the "personal relationship". So strongly, in fact, that I have to - for the sake of blog brevity- restrict illustration to a few outstanding pictures in the thread throughout scripture.
Back in the very beginning of Genesis, where man's theological history is given synopsis, we find that the result of sin has God walking in the garden calling "Adam, where are you?". It has been taught that this is God highlighting to Adam his now sinful separated state. I think this is so, but in light of thinking about the view of God and man having "personal relationship" (which is more than just the fact that man cannot escape God), I drew a conclusion. I don't believe it was just a teaching point, but a mourning of loss that had God calling, "Adam, where are you?" - I find it infused with pathos of a Loving Creator. "Where now is our face to face meeting time, our intimate relating... Oh Adam, Where are you, my Friend?"
Much later through time we find Abraham, who in relationship to God is called "Friend of God". This term "friend" holds a specific definition of relating. I don't think it needs elaboration, but it does need application. What did it mean to be a friend of God? More than knowing Him as Lord Adonai... this is, again, that face to face knowledge that goes beyond recognition of authority or obligation that is often construed as what God requires.
Then we find Moses, meeting in that face to face relationship, so that he becomes permeated with the presence of God in such a way that the light of glory radiates from his face. The veil hiding the fact that it fades over time, and must be a constant in order to truly reflect the "Imago Dei". It is this constant personal relationship that the Evangelical message calls us to in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We can know God in this personal face to face way without ever needing to "walk away", for He now walks with us. "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. You have heard Me say to you, ‘I am going away and coming back to you.’" -John 14:26-28
For what purpose did Jesus Christ come to save us from our sin? If not for the restoration of this personal relating to God the Father, then what? To complete the pieces of the original creation? I do not believe this explains the great pain, at such great cost, that motivated God to suffer so much for our sakes. There are specific central truths that I believe are at the core of what God has done and shown to us in Christ Jesus; one of these is this personal relationship with God, which we call friendship.
John 15:15
No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.
Further, a strong point is made in the place where Jesus taught this:
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
A type of personal relationship is implied within that warning... where many will think themselves in association and good standing with the Lord, Jesus says otherwise. Words are cheap, and assenting to theology, even orthodox theology, is cheap. The valuable and cherished is an interaction congruent with the character of the claimed love. We know our friends by how they relate to us, not their party affiliations. Here is where the theology and the experience meet, where the truth is lived out in the life.
The reason I think this point is so critical to our theology is that it touches upon where we most deeply respond. Our thinking processes are in a constant state of flux, our understanding is always edited and revised, but at our most basic core is this desire to be wanted and accepted...loved. And that is the language of the personal relationship. Are we in or are we outside the circle? The family relationship that is named in our fellowship within the person of God and His fellowship of the church, this is where we are called and where we will live for the remainder of eternity: in personal relationship. The knowledge we have of theology is now partial, in that day, whole; but the personal relationship is the seed of the perfect. The experience of love in Christ Jesus is never different whether we know Him a few seconds or an eternity- it changes in amount of experience only, not in essence.
Feelings are involved, but feelings are not the definitive of relationship. This is where I believe we find the need for qualification and what I believe Sarah calls us to in her challenge to "move away from the clichés and stereotypes". What have we reduced the personal relationship to? Is our picture the full picture that scripture outlines for us? with Sarah, I have to voice my disappointment in what we've made of it.
But it remains that this personal relationship that is preached to us is certainly at the core of the Good News of Jesus Christ. I wouldn't want to throw that aside in the revision of our blithe and light cliché and stereotype.
