Without Jesus, We Cannot *Really* Believe in God

Without Jesus, We Cannot Really Believe in God

4/28/2024

The other Abrahamic religions approach God through an Old Testament consciousness and depict Him as an incomprehensible, absolute, autocratic master. Well, okay, Christianity does that, too.

The problem is that such depictions are (or should be) irreconcilable and incompatible with Christianity and its emphasis on the reality of an intimate and personal divine-human connection.

Without Christ, it is difficult to comprehend God.

No, scratch that. Without Christ, comprehending God becomes impossible, which, ironically enough, makes God comprehensible.

He is the almighty master, the source of everything, the stern master, the unknowable transcendent, and the all-powerful, all-knowing lord. Although he has no needs, he fiercely demands our submission and punishes us eternally should we refuse.

And so on.

An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to believe in.

Any relationship with God must be inner, intimate, and personal, and this is only possible through God as a person, God as a man — that is, through Jesus.

Christ is not a faraway autocratic commander. He is near us. He is within us, and we are within Him.

With Jesus, God’s absolutism ends, and we are called to immediate participation in the divine life of Creation.

This is easy to comprehend, yet it strikes most, Christians included, as incomprehensible.

bruce g charlton

4/28/2024 20:52:21

Useful.

As I was reading this, it struck me that it is precisely the remoteness, alien-ness hence incomprehensibility of God - that enabled the monotheisms and most of traditional Christianity to respond to the "problem of evil".

So long as the whole discussion of evil takes place in an environment of abstractions on the one hand, and pragmatic social policy on the other - then basic contradictions in theology can be kept concealed, and on a permanent basis.

"An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to believe in."... I don't think this is phrased properly - in the sense that there are many examples of people believing in such a God/ gods. Just as they believe in such tyrants, in this earthly life.

What is difficult or impossible to regarding such a God/god as truly good; and in loving such a God/gods - if love means the same kind of thing as it does among mortal persons.

(Aside: I nowadays think it is quite wrong, and indeed a fudge and evasion, to regard the nature of the love we ought to feel for God as different in kind from that love we feel as earthly mortals. e.g. In the IV Gospel Jesus goes to considerable lengths to equate the love of himself with the Father, and himself with his disciples, and their love between themselves - all are the same kind of love. Of course, earthly love is transitory and may be feeble compared with "in Heaven" and after resurrection - but the same in its nature.)

And I felt (as I read) that the personal nature of a relationship with God, fits with the Heavenly and resurrection emphasis of Jesus. When people try to make the relationship with God both loving and personal and "about" the here and now, then t becomes like a hypothesis that will, sooner or later, be refuted by personal experience.

To explain our mortal lives entails a much more overall kind of scheme - of exactly the kind we experience in our interpersonal and loving relationships.

These are not, and cannot be, segmented into events and optimized on a moment by moment basis, but primarily (first and foremost) from the perspective of shared long-term goals.

Hmmm - too big a theme for a comment!

Francis Berger

4/29/2024 05:30:15

@ Bruce - ""An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to believe in."

Yes, I could have been more explicit there.

I was referring to Christians explicitly and was thinking about believe in the trust sense -- "I believe in you."

Christians may believe in the existence of an abstracted God, but I doubt they trust this abstracted autocratic, entirely different category of being God nearly half as much as they claim.

And that trust ties in love and what you note about the nature of love in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus asks us to believe on him and love him by placing our trust in him. This is an intimate and personal offer, an offer based on a personal, concrete relationship. There is no complusion or force in it. It is an offer we can truly believe in, that is trust, if we are willing to commit ourselves to such love.

4/29/2024 09:28:30

Got it.

Maybe could read: "An incomprehensible God becomes incredibly easy to comprehend, but quite difficult to have faith in"

- and that lack of faith would be shown by mistrust; and mistrust shown by a perceived need to *propitiate* God through various sacrifices, rituals, offerings etc.

It really is remarkable how much of Christian practice through the centuries has been motivated (albeit implicitly, under different names and concepts - nonetheless, pretty obviously) apparently from a felt necessity to propitiate - given that many Christians also believe that Jesus's death was a final propitiation and sacrifice.

Yet, it is easy to imagine an ideal human parent who does not demand (nor even want) propitiating by his or her children - so here, in practice, a quite ordinary human is regarded as apparently superior to the incomprehensible God (and a "God of Love" no less!).

(And what loving parents actively desires for their children to spend attention effort and time *worshipping* them! Apparently including for eternity in Heaven!)

Arkle was helpful to me in recognizing this; and when an error is repeated widely for centuries - it does need pointing-out (and not just by enemies of Christianity!).

But all this time, the philosophical abstract assumptions about "deity" have so clouded and confused people, that "the obvious" becomes regarded as naïve or even wickedly heretical.

4/29/2024 12:54:13

@ Bruce - I can't imagine any sane or loving parent desiring their child's worship. In childhood -- love, a certain degree of obedience, and respect, sure, but worship? And later, when the child is an adult? What then? A higher, more mature form of worship? And after death? Eternal worship?

Honestly, I'm not at all surprised by the level of apostasy/atheism in this time and place.

One thing that has never sat well with me is the idea that church is about worship, not fellowship. That strikes me as the exact opposite of the kind of church or services Jesus would have wanted (although he makes no mention of any sort of church in the IV Gospel). Still, if there must be a church, do we honestly think Jesus would want us to prioritize worshiping Him over forming (potentially eternal) relationships with others and Him, through Him?

Soul

4/30/2024 20:12:19

God is Love, and Jesus knew it. My experience: "God is in our hearts." I was in my twenties when this suggestion came to me outside a church. It took me more than twenty years to understand what it meant. Fear and love are opposite emotions, those who love God are not afraid of Him, and vice versa. And God loves us and so does Jesus.

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