Reconstructing our Beliefs about God and Jesus
Part Four: Moving from Toxic Beliefs to Transforming Ones
I begin again with the reminder that the participants in ICN cover a wide range of beliefs and nonbeliefs about Christianity. While we have some understandings central to ICN, we have no official statement of beliefs, and no particular ones are required to be a part of ICN.
I hope that this series can be helpful as an opportunity to model and practice the integral approach of valuing all perspectives. As others share different or similar beliefs in our discussions, we can listen with curiosity, genuine acceptance, and delight in our diversity!
In this series, I am pointing out that what Christians commonly believe must be discerned as to whether they reflect God’s love or human shadows projected onto God. Do they make us more like Jesus —selfless, integrated, and socially responsible?
We continue from last week, looking at the Apostles’ Creed, a widely used statement of belief from historic, traditional Christianity. Now we explore the often raised question of why a good, almighty God allows bad things to happen to good people.
God Almighty
The Apostles’ Creed begins with “I believe in God, the Father almighty.” At first glance, the phrase “Father almighty” may appear a reasonable way to view God. After all, God is “almighty,” or omnipotent, as theologians say. God is in charge and can do anything God wants.
But perhaps it’s not that simple, as I consider this more than a limiting belief. Why does the God in charge allow all the terrible evils in the world to exist? Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people.?
Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
Let’s look at this differently. What if, first of all, God is love? Real love! (1 John 4:16). People who love others do not try to control them because that is oppressive, not loving. Perhaps God’s love works the same way. God loves us and will not control us because God values our freedom. If God is love and love is not controlling, then God loves us with “uncontrolling” love.
Thomas Oord is a well-known theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is a best-selling author, having written or edited over twenty-five books. In his award-winning book, The Uncontrolling Love of God, he says, “God’s loving nature requires God to create a world with creatures God cannot control. God’s preeminent attribute is uncontrolling love.” For this reason, “God cannot create controllable creatures.”
This means that God cannot stop the evils we humans create because God is unable to do so. Divine love does not allow God to control us. God is only limited by God’s own love. Love is the preeminent divine virtue, which is why God is essentially uncontrolling.
God’s love means that God does not choose to be almighty!
The God of love cannot prevent the evil that free creatures do, from rapes to mass murders. Oord notes that “God could not have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing by acting alone.” Divine love limits divine power.
However, when we cooperate with God’s initiating and empowering love, we are the ones who can do something about evil. Instead of praying for God to do a miracle, we are the ones who must do the miracles!
We can still speak of God’s goodness and love in light of random and genuine “evils” without reverting to trite platitudes that do not comfort and actually make light of human suffering. “God is in charge, and it’s all okay.” “It was God’s will.” “It happened for a reason.” Not helpful or true!
Theologians have long recognized that God can’t do all sorts of things—like create a rock too heavy for God to lift, make a round square, or lie, or be faithless. This simply expands the list of divine “cannots” to the reality that love cannot make human beings who are made in the image of God, controlled by God.
In Genesis 1:26, God looked at creation and said that we are in charge.
God’s Part in Co-Creation
One of our ICN themes is that we are co-creators with God. So what part does God have in co-creation? When we are willing, God inspires us, motivates us, and guides us to make the world better. When it comes to action in the world, we are the divine physical hearts and minds, hands and feet in the world. We are God’s action in the world.
We can make far more sense of life when we understand reality as created, sustained, and transformed by the uncontrolling love of God.
No more God as the weather maker: “Oh God, make it rain.” O God, make it stop raining.” N0! The word from God about our weather is, “You can’t pray climate change away. It’s up to you to stop polluting the earth and fouling your nest so the weather will return to life-sustaining!” Humans are the ones to do that, not God.
Belief in a God who controls everything is a limiting and sometimes even toxic belief. We can move to owning our divinely created power to change things.
“And hell if you break them!”
Religion that Controls
There is another problem with an Almighty God who controls everything. It produces a religion that also wants to control everything! We create a religion of rules and limiting, dogmatic beliefs. We Christians have “the truth” and are quite willing to force “the truth” on others for their own and society’s good. Our current breakdown of democracy may be directly attributable, at least in part, to this.
We can move from a controlling religion to the freedom-loving, liberating one Jesus lived and taught. He was selfless, integrated, and socially responsible and taught us to be, too.
Virgin Birth?
The Apostle’s Creed makes a big deal about Jesus being born of a virgin, giving it two lines:
“who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.”
However, Jesus never mentions a virgin birth, neither do the two of the four Gospels written after Mark or the Gospel of Thomas, nor does the Apostle Paul.
If Jesus was a unique creation of God without genuinely being born the human way with a human father and mother, then he has no real relationship with humanity. Moreover, the lineages of Jesus that are given in the gospels of Matthew and Luke traced from his parents would be false.
A virgin birth would mean Jesus avoided inheriting any aspect of humanity that the rest of us with human mothers and fathers face all the time.
Therefore, I take the virgin birth as a beautiful metaphor for the specialness of Jesus. If I were to take it as literally true, then his greatness came about by divine cheating! That is not beautiful. It is limiting.
I am incredibly impressed with Jesus because he was who he was without any “divinity genes,” except for the ones we all have (Click here for an extensive further inquiry into this).
We can move from the limiting view of a Jesus who inherited a God gene that made him different from all others to a liberating Jesus who was born just like us, with ancestral trauma and learned, the hard way, as we can, to manifest his True Self, his divine identity.
Great Comma
Notice the comma in “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate.”
That is sometimes called the “Great Comma” because it covers the enormous gap of everything Jesus said and did between his birth and death! His teaching, mystical practices, healings, interactions—all left out, unworthy of importance compared to a suspect theological belief — “born of a virgin.” The world’s greatest life — reduced to a comma!
The Apostles’ Creed demonstrates that religion is an excellent place to hide from God. We can move from concealing oursevles from God in religion to authentically following Jesus on the path of awakening and living a life of healing and love.
Does Jesus Judge or Save Us?
The Apostles’ Creed section about Jesus ends with, “From there, he will come to judge the living and the dead.”
The New Testament gives us a mixed picture about judgment. In John 3, we see Jesus saying: God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but so that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). Ah, good news, a vote for no judgment.
Jesus said, “Whoever hears my words and does not believe them, I am not judging him, for I have come, not to judge the world, but to give life to the world” (John 14:47). Another vote for no judgment.
Then there are these statements: “Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. Whoever disobeys the Son will not see life but must endure God’s wrath.” (John 3:18,37). Oh no! Even before they die, some are already condemned because they didn’t believe the right thing or obey Jesus! A vote for judgment and God’s wrath!
Jesus tells a dramatic parable about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 which is commonly taken to be about him presiding at the “last judgment.” In a “second coming” picture, Jesus sits on a throne with all the nations before him. He separates the nations into two groups. The “sheep” who cared for the needy are on his right. The “goats” who did not are on his left. He says to the sheep that they will inherit the kingdom. And to the goats, he says, “Depart from me, you that are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mat 25:41). Sounds like a big-time vote for judgment at first glance.
However, notice this is aimed not at individuals but at a nation’s policy and actions. Nations are not condemned for what they believed but rather for what they did in not caring for the oppressed. What if Christians actually applied that today in your nation’s political divisions? A vote for social justice!
Even when understanding this parable not being about Jesus judging us based on our beliefs about him, the New Testament gives us a mixed picture of Jesus as a judge.
I do not believe the Bible is a totally beautiful revelation of God. Beginning with ancient Judaism to early Christianity, the Bible is the story of the progressive evolution of one spiritual path. Making the Bible inerrant, with every word as historically and literally true is a traditional stage belief. The next stage is to see that the Bible is not the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God and the stunningly beautiful revelation of God for Christians.
However, this also means we must not accept all the words attributed to Jesus as his actual words. They have gone through many tellings, writings, and viewpoints. So we must decide how the real Jesus shines through all the words attributed to him. That’s easier to do if we look at his life and actions. Paraphrasing Brian Zahn in Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Jesus is the only wholly true theology. True theology is not a system of theology; true theology is a person. True theology is not found in abstract thought; true theology is found in the Incarnation. True theology is not a book; true theology is the life that Jesus lived.
Jesus as Judge or Friend?
I consider Jesus as Judge to be a toxic belief. Liberal Protestant English pastor and theologian from the early 20th century, Leslie Weatherhead, wrote about how judgmental and complicated Christianity must seem to many people. His answer to that perception was, “I think the essence of the matter might be stated by saying that Christianity is the acceptance of the gift of the friendship of Jesus.”
The amazing Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and inspiring writer says, “The nondual paradox and mystery was for Christians a living person, an icon we could gaze upon and fall in love with. . . .The Christian notion of God’s great self-emptying (kenosis) in a personal Jesus is such a huge gift to our humanity.”
We can move from the toxic “Jesus our judge” to the transforming “Jesus our friend” because Jesus himself gave us the invitation when he said, “I call you friends” (John 15:15).
