Jesus’s connection to the historical crisis of his time was obscured throughout much of this century by the portrait of him as the eschatological prophet. In that role, he was not seen to be concerned about historical matters. The crisis that he announced was the end of the world, not a historical crisis in the life of his people.
But almost without realizing it, recent scholarship has undermined the eschatological understanding of Jesus. That view was founded on the “coming Son of Man” sayings (e.g., Mark 13:24–27) as authentic to Jesus; yet New Testament scholars now routinely (and, I think, correctly) deny that the “coming Son of Man” sayings go back to Jesus. For the most part, however, the undermining goes unnoticed; the portrait of Jesus as eschatological prophet remains, despite the disappearance of its foundation.
But if the crisis that Jesus announced was not the imminent end of the world, what was it? It was a coming historical catastrophe, probably not yet inevitable, that would result from the combination of Rome’s imperial needs and insensitivity to the cultural direction of his own people. Like an Old Testament prophet (to whom he was compared by his contemporaries), Jesus criticized the present path and threatened destruction if it did not change.
As a prophet and renewal movement founder, Jesus called his hearers into “an alternative community with an alternative consciousness,” to use Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann’s illuminating phrase.1 The marks of his renewal movement stand out sharply against the background of his time. His acceptance of the outcasts—one of his most radical acts—pointed to an identity defined by one’s relationship to God rather than by cultural standards of performance. He proclaimed the way of peace instead of war, both in his teaching and in the deliberately dramatic manner in which he entered Jerusalem on an animal that symbolized peace rather than war, an action very much in the tradition of prophetic acts in the Old Testament. The Jesus movement was the “peace party” within Judaism, as Gerd Theissen puts it.2
In place of “holiness” as the imitatio dei followed by the other renewal movements (“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy,” Lev. 19:2), Jesus substituted a different blueprint for the life of the community: “Be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). Moreover, this directive was intended for the earthly life of the people of God. Jesus’s intention was the transformation of his people in the face of a historical crisis.
These are potent themes for our own times. They invite us to take very seriously the two central presuppositions of the Jewish-Christian tradition. First, there is a dimension or realm of reality beyond (and beneath) the visible world of our ordinary experience, a dimension charged with power whose ultimate quality is compassion. Second, the fruits of a life lived in accord with the Spirit are to be embodied not only in individuals, but also in the life of the faithful community. In short, God cares about the shape and texture of historical communities—and sometimes “hands them over” to the consequences of their own blindness.
Yet these themes are also threatening to us. The first threatens our sense of normalcy. What if it is true, as Huston Smith argues, that the world of our ordinary experience is but one level of reality and that we are at all times surrounded by other dimensions of reality that we commonly do not experience?3 Such a view challenges the practical atheism of much of our culture and church. The claim that there really is a realm of Spirit is both exciting and oddly disconcerting.
The second theme threatens our comfort within contemporary culture. The historical Jesus, with his call to a countercommunity with a counterconsciousness (including consciousness of another realm), challenges the central values of contemporary American culture. Increasingly, our understanding of reality is one-dimensional, even within the church; our quest for fulfillment seeks satisfaction through greater consumption; our security rests in nuclear weapons; and our blindness and idolatry are visible in our stated willingness to blow up the world, if need be, to preserve our way of life. We are called to become the church in a culture whose values are largely alien to the Christian message, to be once again the church of the catacombs.
Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on the truth of those claims. Loyalty becomes belief in the historical truthfulness of all the statements in the Gospels. The absence of an image—the most common fruit of mainstream theological education—leaves us with no clear notion of what it means to take Jesus seriously, no notion of what loyalty might entail, no rudder for the life of discipleship. But the image of Jesus as a man of Spirit, deeply involved in the historical crisis of his own time, besides being more historically adequate than either the popular or the dominant scholarly image, can shape the church’s discipleship today.
* * *
Originally published in The Christian Century, August 28–September 4, 1985, pp. 764–67.
Chapter 11
Healing Our Image of God
TODAY I WANT TO TALK ABOUT the character of God, about how we see the character of God and the effects of this on the Christian life. Or to turn it into a question, “What Is the Character of Your God?”
I want to explain a bit more about what I mean when I speak about the character of God. The character of God has to do with the very nature of God. It is deeper than the will of God, for will flows out of character. So my question is: What is God’s character? What does God care about? What is God’s passion? Our sense of God’s character, our perception of what God is like, is conveyed by our images of or metaphors for God. I typically distinguish between concepts of God, which I see as more abstract, and images of God—images or metaphors are more concrete, more visual. Indeed, I sometimes think of metaphors as linguistic art or verbal art. Some of the biblical metaphors or images for God include the following: God is like a king, like a judge, like a shepherd, like a father and, less commonly, like a mother. God is like a lover, like a potter, like a warrior, and so forth.
These images for God matter, to repeat my foundational claim. They matter because they shape how we see the character of God. I want to talk about two primary images or metaphors for God’s character that have dominated the Jewish and Christian traditions throughout their long history, reaching back into biblical times. They are two very different models for the character of God. A model, as Sallie McFague, an author and theologian from Vanderbilt Divinity School, puts it, is a metaphor with “staying power.” To which I would add, a model is a way of constellating or gestalting metaphors. That is, the biblical metaphors for God gravitate toward one or the other of these two models or primary images for God. Both of these have been present throughout Christian history. Both are alive in the contemporary church. But they are so different from each other that they virtually produce two different religions, both using the same language.
The first of these models or ways of imaging God’s character sees God as the lawgiver and judge who also loves us. This is the one that I grew up with and the one I suspect that many of you grew up with. It is probably also the most common or visible image of God within the Christian church today. As lawgiver, God gave us the Ten Commandments and other laws about how to live. God told us what is expected of us.
As judge, God was also the enforcer of the law; there would be a judgment someday. (I took all of this very much for granted when I was growing up in the church.) And God also loved us. Because we weren’t very good at being good, we weren’t very good at keeping God’s laws, God provided an alternate means of satisfying God’s law—of becoming right with God. In Old Testament times this was accomplished through Temple sacrifice as a way of atoning for disobedience. In New Testament times, God sent Jesus to be the sacrifice, to die for our sins, thus making our forgiveness possible.
God did love us, but it was a conditional love. Namely, God would accept us if—and here again you can fill in the blank—if we were good enough, if our repentance
was earnest enough, if we believed in Jesus. So, even though God loved us, the system of requirements remained. God as lawgiver and judge in a way triumphs over the love of God. The dynamic of sin, guilt, and forgiveness and doing or believing what we needed to were the central components of the Christian life.
It is striking to me how pervasive this dynamic of sin, guilt, and forgiveness is in even liberal Christian settings. A couple summers ago, I was at a weeklong event in a classically liberal Christian institution. Each day began with a chapel service at nine o’clock in the morning attended by several hundred people, and every day that chapel service began with a confession of sin. I thought to myself, “Dear Lord. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and we’ve already been bad.”
Now, I have no illusions about our being perfect or anything like that. I’m just commenting that this dynamic of sin, guilt, and forgiveness is directly correlated with imaging God as the lawgiver and judge who also loves us. I have since learned to call this model of God the monarchical model of God, from the word “monarch,” or king. I owe that phrase to the theologians Ian Barbour and Sallie McFague. This monarchical model of God takes its name from the common biblical metaphor of God as lord and king.
As king, God is both lawgiver and judge, and we don’t measure up very well in our relationship to God as lawgiver and judge. Who are we in relationship to God as shepherd? We are sheep, of course. Who are we in relationship to God as lawgiver and judge? Well, we’re a defendant. We’re on trial, as it were, and this life, the life we have right now, is about getting it right or doing what we need to do. Depending upon the particular form of Christianity with which we grew up, getting it right might be some combination of right behavior or right belief, with the mixture put together in various ways.
This model is softened somewhat, but not much, when parental imagery is substituted for king imagery. Of course, it’s usually father imagery that gets substituted for king imagery. But when the monarchical God is imaged as a parent rather than as a king, it is as the critical parent. It’s God as the disappointed parent, the parent who loves us, yes, but who on the whole isn’t all that pleased with how we’ve turned out. The monarchical model is thus God as the divine superego in our heads. That voice that ranges along a spectrum from “You’re no good” to “You’re never quite enough.”
This way of imaging God’s character, this model, has several effects on the Christian life. I will very briefly mention four. As I mention them, ask yourself if you have known forms of Christianity like this. The first of these is that the monarchical God is the God of requirements. It suggests that the Christian life is about measuring up, of doing or believing what God requires of us.
Second, this way of imaging God’s character leads to an in-group and out-group distinction. There are those who measure up and those who don’t. There are those who are saved and those who are not.
Third, ultimately the monarchical model of God is a God of vengeance. It’s a strong statement, but think about it for a moment. In this way of thinking about God, God is going to get all of those people who do not measure up, who do not meet the requirements. There will be a judgment, either after death with the prospect of heaven or hell or at the second coming.
To cite a memorable and provocative phrase from my colleague John Dominic Crossan: the most common Christian vision of the second coming is as “divine ethnic cleansing.” Of course, those who hold to this model would never speak of it that way. But think of those visions of the second coming that basically amount to “God is going to get all of those people who are not like us.”
Finally, fourth, rather than liberating us from self-preoccupation, this is the God who focuses our attention on our own salvation, on making sure that we have done or believed what we’re supposed to.
There is another image of God, another primary model for imaging God’s character in the biblical tradition as well as in the postbiblical Christian tradition. To give it a shorthand label, I call this one the divine-lover model. The image of God as lover is very interesting when you think about it; and it’s deeply rooted in the biblical tradition. It occurs frequently in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. To cite just one example from the prophets, from Isaiah 43, that wonderful chapter of gospel in the Hebrew Bible, God is portrayed as saying to Israel, “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you. . . . Do not fear” (43:4–5).
The image of God as lover is the central image in the Song of Solomon, that collection of erotic love poetry also known as the Song of Songs. By the way, a phrase like Song of Songs or Holy of Holies is the Hebrew way of phrasing a superlative. The Holy of Holies is the holiest place. The Song of Songs is the best song, understood by Jews and Christians alike through the centuries as an allegory of divine love. It is striking that the Song of Songs was the single most popular biblical book among Christians of the Middle Ages. More manuscript copies of that book survived than of any other book in the Bible.
The image of God as lover is also widespread in the New Testament. It is found in the best-known verse, John 3:16, which as you all know begins, “For God so loved the world . . .” God is seen as lover, and Jesus is the embodiment, the incarnation of the love of God. To image God as lover changes the dynamic of the Christian life dramatically. God is “in love” with us. We are precious in God’s sight and honored. We are the beloved of God. That’s who we are in relationship to God as lover. God yearns for us.
As the author and theologian Roberta Bondi, from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, puts it in one of her books, “God is besotted with us.” That single five-word sentence stood out in neon lights for me when I first read it. “God is besotted with us.” For just a moment think how your life would be different if you knew, at the deepest level of your being, that God is besotted with you, that God yearns for you, yearns that you turn and be in relationship with God as the beloved of God.
It’s very different from the monarchical model. The monarchical model puts us on guard. There are requirements to be met, rewards and punishments to be considered. We are defendants on trial. But the divine-lover model changes the way we see the character of God. Rather than being the one we need to please, whether through good deeds or earnest repentance and faith, God as lover is passionate about us, yearns to be in relationship with us. Yet there is a danger to the divine-lover model. The danger is that it can become too individualistic, too sweet, as it were, as if the focus was primarily on me. We need to guard against sentimentalizing and individualizing this image, for the image of God as lover means that God loves everybody, not just me and not just us, but everybody.
So the image of God as lover is very much associated with a concreteness and particularity of life in this world. As lover, God is liberating. This is the central theme of the most important story that ancient Israel knew, the story of the exodus from Egypt, which meant liberation from an oppression that was simultaneously economic, political, and religious. Images of God as liberator continue through Israel’s history and into the New Testament. It is not God’s will that we be slaves in bondage, whether internally or externally.
As lover, God is compassionate. This is God’s character. Compassion, as many of you know, is an unusually rich metaphor in the Bible. It’s related to the word for “womb.” To say that God is compassionate is to say that God is like a womb or “womblike,” life-giving, nourishing. Compassion in the Bible also has resonances associated with the feelings that a mother has for the children of her womb. What are the feelings that a mother has for the children of her womb? Tenderness, of course. She wills their well-being and is filled with hope and concern.
And feelings from the womb aren’t simply soft. They can become fierce, as when the children of a mother’s womb are threatened or badly treated. Just as a mother feels compassion for her children, wills their well-being, and can become fierce in the defense of them, so God feels compassion for us as God’s children, wills our well-being, and can become fierce in d
efense of us all.
As lover, God is not only compassionate, but also passionate about social justice. God as lover is passionate about social justice with a simple reason that its opposite, systemic injustice, is the single greatest source of unnecessary human social misery, of unnecessary human suffering in history. Social justice is the way our well-being is attained in this world. Indeed, God as lover is “in love” not only with us as human beings, but even with the nonhuman world, with the whole of creation. Thus both a passion for justice and a passion for the environment flow out of imaging God as lover.
Depending upon which of these ways of imaging God’s character is emphasized, the character of God is seen very differently, and the Christian life is seen very differently. Is it about meeting requirements so that we might be saved someday, or is it about a relationship in the here and now with God as lover? The ethical imperative that goes with each is quite different. For the monarchical model the ethical imperative is, “Be good, because you will be called to account. There will be a judgment.” For the divine-lover model the ethical imperative is, “Love what God loves.” So what is the character of your God?
One of the most wonderful postbiblical expressions of God as the divine lover is from George Herbert’s poem “Love Bade Me Welcome,” which some of you will recognize. Herbert was a seventeenth-century Anglican poet, one of the great Anglican lyrical spiritual poets. I want to close by reading this relatively short poem to you, “Love Bade Me Welcome.” The poem is set up as a dialogue. One partner is Love, which is Herbert’s word for God, so when you hear the word “Love” here, you might think “God.” The other partner in the dialogue is an imaginary person, perhaps Herbert himself.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Days of Awe and Wonder Page 12
