Lecture 2

Questions in Theology

What does it mean to talk of God?

• Too often theology isolates God and becomes cold and tame talk about a distant being.

• “God is greater than his works of creation. God is outside of his creation, yet, at the same time, is present to it.”

• Catholic Essentials, p. 23

Stories and language about God are not meant to be looked at

but looked through.

To make statements about God is also to speak about being human.

To speak of one implicates the other.

God is not an object. God is not a character in the stories.

God is the plot.

Theological stories have a self authenticating aspect:

The story (and language) is believed because it has grasped the person and mediated to him or her the sacred.

The Baal Shem Tov - Martin Buber

A word about creeds:We are going to use the creed as a structure.

Creeds are crystallizations of experience. They are the meaning in a statement form for the ease of remembering. They are important, but not end points. They are beginning points, and they are also a base to which we can return.

I believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is visible and invisible.

Five themes:

1) Existence of God 2) God is One3) Creation4) Trinity 5) Grace

Each theme has an implication:

• Existence of God – Sacredness of life• God is One – Reality is unified: radical

interconnectedness• Creation – God needs images• Trinity – God as relationship• Grace – Love is the pattern of life

Theme 1

Existence of God

To make the statement: God exists

is not a simple statement about the reality of some object. It is not the same as saying “a teapot exists.”

The statement God exists “is a fundamental posture toward everything else that exists… It suggests that the world we see and touch points to a power beyond our own and outside our control…”

(Luke Timothy Johnson, Creed, p. 67)

St. Thomas Aquinas saw God as sheer being.

God’s very essence is to be existence, to be the ocean of life itself.

The cosmologist Brian Swimme refers to the mystery underlying everything as the

all- nourishing abyss. There is a creating and sustaining foundation to the universe, and also an aspect to that mystery which absorbs and contains all things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEg9GuhD9Y

He gives the example of what is called “the space time foam”.

Particles just jump into being. From apparently nowhere. And

then disappear. It is happening all the time.

“I am asking you to contemplate a universe where, somehow, being itself arises out of a field of fecund emptiness… The base of the universe seethes with creativity…”

- Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, p. 93.

The affirmation of the existence of God is the affirmation that there is something that gives existence

to everything.

The essence of this mystery is to bring things into being.

The other side of this affirmation is the statement that

I am not God.This is not a trivial

acknowledgement of lack of superpowers, but a spiritual stance toward creation, and toward myself.

It is a stance against idolatry, against the idea that somehow the only thing I am responsible to is myself, that the only thing that is real is my life.

Idolatry is granting ultimate

importance to something else beyond the ultimate.

In our longing to experience ultimate meaning, we give that place to other things – possessions, power, greed.

The Biblical critique of idols is that they only take life – they cannot give it.

• Idols are things you sacrifice yourself to – but they cannot give you anything back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEIM16NuPg

To say God exists is somehow an affirmation of the reality of reality.

It is an affirmation of a sacred context.

Luke 15: 8 – 10

The lost coin parable reveals sacred context: the reality of God is where we find ourselves.

As human persons, each of us is a living thirst for meaning, for love, for wholeness. And although we may try to escape the question, life itself sooner or later forces it to our consciousness: is there an answer to our ache for love and meaning?

… in this, their central proclamation, they utter a glad and resounding yes… yes, there is a wholeness for our personal brokenness, and yes, there is love that is healing enough for the wounds and thirst of the entire world.

(Mary Ann Fatula, The Triune God of Christian Faith, p. 16)

We can be at a disadvantage in our contact with reality

Because our technology and wealth give us an insulated experience of reality.

We are used to mediated reality… and I think this can inhibit our experience of awe that makes it possible to be open to the presence of God.

Theme 2

God is One.

We take for granted monotheism.

Historically, the revelation of Yahweh to Abraham took place in the context of polytheism.

Polytheism actually seems to create a terrifying world.

In practice, it is a universe that is at war, with many gods, or powers, battling for dominance.

To say there is one God, and that God is one, is to affirm

the unity of existence.It is this idea that promotes

human equality.

Acts of the Apostles 10: 34-35“I truly understand that God

shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

The dogma that God is one - called radical monotheism -

Reveals to us a radical interconnectedness:One sourceOne destinyWe are all related,

connected, equal.

This is a very different stance

Than that of warring parties – my God versus your God.

God is One. There is no my God and your God.There is only God.

Theme 3

God as Creator

Think of being Adam or Eve

And waking up in the garden.Looking all around you, you see “every kind of

plant and tree, every kind of bird and cattle and beast…”

Why does God create?

Why is there life? And why is it the way it is?

Richard Rohr, in his series Great Themes of Scripture, has a segment called God needs images.

The energy of the mystery toward uniqueness, toward complexity, toward multiplicity.

HopkinsAs kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;As tumbled over rim in roundy wellsStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell'sBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not hisTo the Father through the features of men's faces.

Because God created all things, all things are capable of revealing God.

The creation story is not a tale about how things came to be in the past, but about how things are now.

All things reveal the sacred by their existence.

The mussel and the mountain equally reveal the mystery.

We find ourselves as created beings.

We were born.We have bodies.We need to eat.We need to sleep.We need to go to the bathroom.We need love, and touch, and relationship.

To call God the creator of all things

Reminds us of our connectedness to all things, and also of our dependence.

We did not decide to be born on this earth, to need to eat other things to live, to grow, to get old, to die.

These are all given to us.

Our life is given.

To call God creator is to experience this radical given-ness of things.

Imago DeiImage of GodThe experience that

human beings are reflections of the divine. In the human experience we will see the divine face.

This is a remarkable statement about human life.

Genesis 1:27“And so God created humankind in his image,

In the image of God he created them,Male and female he created them.”

There is something about being a human being

That is a privileged experience in understanding the mystery.

And it is in our relationality

Being male and female – that this privilege is experienced.

Our longing for each other, for companionship, for intimacy, for family life – these are revelatory of the divine.

The Genesis story relates these as God’s desire in creating.

Our relationality and dependence are part of our privilege in knowing God – they are part of the way we know God.

Theme 4

God is Trinity

The Trinity is not a mathematical formula.

It is not some secret confusing code about God, separate from our lives and existence.

It is the nature of Godand the nature of reality. Remember – all of

these statements about God are stances toward reality, and toward ourselves. They are about our experience.

The understanding of the Trinitycomes out of the life and experience of Jesus.Out of his experience with the ultimate mystery, he calls it

“Abba.”To Jesus, the mystery that completely named him was a loving,

fathering energy.

For Jesus’ followers, they experienced the full presence of God when they were with him.

After the resurrection, they still had this experience, even though he was not fully present with them. Somehow – the relationship between Jesus and the Father was still available. They were still part of it. It was this experience that they called God’s Spirit – or the Holy Spirit.

We often view the dogma of the Holy Trinity as one among many.

But if you look at the creed, it is the CENTRAL doctrine. The creed is shaped in Trinitarian terms.

Even the word Christian is a Trinitarian word.(Christos = Messiah = Anointed)

Michael Himes:

We say that God is the peculiar kind of love known as agape, perfect self gift. To put this in other words, the First Letter of John claims that if one wants to know how to think about God, God is least wrongly thought of as a particular kind of relationship among persons, specifically the relationship of perfect self-gift.

Now that is a remarkable claim: God is least wrongly to be thought of as a relationship, as what happens between and among persons.

Himes thinks that statement attributed to Jesus: “For where two or three are gathered in my

name, I am there among them”should be taken seriously. Jesus does not mean what

whenever people get together and think about him, he is there. What it means is that whenever people come together in true, mutual love, in genuine concern and care for one another, in short, in agape, Jesus will be discovered in what happens among them.

Himes, The Mystery of Faith, p. 6

God is not the object of love.

God is the love that exists within community.

One discovers the presence of God by discovering the love that unites a community.

St. Augustine used this language for the Trinity:

Lover, beloved, and love.The Father is pure love, pure

self gift.The Son is sheer acceptance

of love, total willingness to be loved.

The Spirit is the love between them.

Trinity reveals the shape of our relationship to God.

We are invited into the same experience that Jesus spoke of when he called God “Abba.”

Life is also revealed as utterly relational.

There is nothing that exists independently.

In physics, all particles exert pull and push on each other. The energy is the space between them.

The idea of being independent is illusion.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh8uZUzuRhk

God as three persons?

The idea of God as person can seem challenging because it is easy to fall into seeing God – the mystery – as just another person.

What does it mean to call God a person?

We experience God as personal. Somehow – in the experience of the mystery – human beings experience God in a personal way.

And personhood – as we experience it – is part of reality.

Personhood is not artificial, and so it is not unreasonable that the grounding mystery of reality could be experience by persons as a person.

In the Biblical experience, God is more of a “you” than an “it.”

Genesis 32:22-32

Theme 5

Grace

Few words have had more importance in Christian theology as the word grace.

Himes defines grace in this way: the love of God outside the Trinity.

Theologians have been interested for centuries on how God interacts in our lives.

If God is present everywhere (omnipresent) in all things, how can anything be particularly graceful? How can certain things be sacred – like sacred places – or confer grace – like sacraments?

The experience of grace may be best thought of as a revelation in a moment of what is present everywhere.

We have sacraments because we need to remember . We need to encounter it.

Himes again:

If something is always and everywhere the case, it must be noticed, accepted and celebrated somewhere sometime. Himes calls this the sacramental principle.

The experience of grace is our experience of what is always true of God’s love.

Grace is how we talk of our experience of this love.

grace (n.) late 12c., "God's favor or help," from O.Fr. grace "pardon, divine grace, mercy; favor, thanks; elegance, virtue" (12c.), from L. gratia "favor, esteem, regard; pleasing quality, good will, gratitude" (cf. It. grazia, Sp. gracia), from gratus "pleasing, agreeable," from PIE base *gwere- "to favor" (cf. Skt. grnati "sings, praises, announces," Lith. giriu "to praise, celebrate," Avestan gar- "to praise").

The experience of being truly loved feels like this, and the experience of giving love also feels this way:

It feels free, flowing, natural, gentle, open. We feel a part of something, rather than the source of it.

It is the deep realization of this love – the understanding that love is already present – that we call grace.

We are born into a world where we are already invited, loved, wanted.

The mystery beckons us, and when we become aware of it, we respond.

But even our response is just love flowing through us.

The word grace is a stance towards being a part, or participation in something greater.

It is the experience of the initial affirmation of God’s existence – that something other than me is responsible for this love.

Jessica Powers

I have naught but my will seeking God;

Even love burning in meIs a fragment of infinite loving

and never my own.