It is no surprise that people do not see things the same way. Several months ago at our house we repainted some dining room chairs. Dana said the previous colour was light blue. I said it was light green. I knew better than to push the issue…so I asked the kids. Alice also said light blue and William said light green. There may be a difference in the way women and men see colours; regardless, we were looking at the same chair and seeing two different colours.
Two people can behold the same sunset but not perceive its beauty the same way…and so it is with the way we regard God. Some people will boldly say, “I experience God to be like this…”. Another person will say, “I have had no experience of God. How can we know there is a God?” One person will say, “This is what I believe about God.” While another will say, “That’s nice, I believe this.” While another will say, “You believe the wrong things about God. My beliefs are right. Believe like I do and God won’t get you.”
People understand God differently and so it is not a stretch to say that what a person believes about God will have an affect on how that person treats other people. Let me ask a rhetorical question. How will I treat people if I believe that God is the Almighty Creator who gave order to his creation by putting in place rules that must be heeded or the consequences are grave; that the rules are revealed in the Bible and, therefore, people owe it to the Almighty God who made them to study the Bible; and that as part of God’s ordering of his creation he endowed civil authorities with the power of the sword to keep order and therefore civil authority must be obeyed – how will I treat people if that is what I believe about God? How will I treat people if those are my beliefs about God? Many of you may be saying, “That’s what I believe.” I grew up believing that.
Here’s an example from history and I apologize for bringing him up. Adolf Hitler readily made references to god Almighty in his speeches. He seems to have believed what I just outlined. The majority of German churches supported him. Then, he added to these beliefs that as part of God’s ordering of his creation God made a superior race of people, the Arian race, whom all other races must serve. The majority of German churches apparently accepted his thoughts on that as well and stood blindly by as he systematically exterminated the Jewish people in Europe.
Nazi Germany teaches us a hideous lesson: It is incredibly easy to get good people – good, church-going people – to do atrocious things by appealing to belief in god Almighty. Moreover, they will do those atrocious things believing that they are serving that god Almighty’s purposes by doing what civil authorities ask them to do believing that serving a god Almighty makes a nation great.
I want to go on record as saying that I don’t believe in god Almighty. Yes, there are occasional references in the Bible to God being almighty and one of the Old Testament names for God is El Shaddai which many Hebrew scholars say we mistranslate as God Almighty. El means God. Shaddai most likely means “of the mountain”. Jewish rabbi’s have traditionally taken it to mean “sufficient in oneself” to make it correspond to the name God gave Moses to call him by; Yahweh, which means “I am who I am, I will be who I will be.” The word “Shaddai” has nothing to do with power the way we seem to understand power: “the capacity to get others to do what I want.”
If we want to stick with the word almighty to describe God then we need to check our definition of power with God’s definition of power as the power of the love he showed in the weakness of Jesus dying on the cross once and for all. Jesus could have called down the armies of heaven to annihilate his enemies and set up the Kingdom of God…but he didn’t. He died and from death he was raised and by that death and resurrection God defeated all of the so-called powers that make claims to be almighty.
Let me tell you the God I do believe in. I believe in God the Trinity. I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I know it is more difficult to conceive of God as Trinity – Three-in-One, One-in-Three – than to just go the easy route of believing in god Almighty. But, hey, scientists tell us that our universe basically consists of energy and matter. Oddly, we can only see 1% of the energy that’s in our universe meaning that what we presume to be empty space is full of something called dark energy that’s causing everything to accelerate away from everything else. They also tell us that we see only about 8% of the matter in the universe meaning that what we think of as empty space is also full of stuff we can’t see or interact with. That’s weird and incomprehensible. So, should we expect that the God who created this universe out of nothing should be any easier to understand? Just asking. Thinking about God requires work.
As the Bible attests, God revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth who died on a cross. From that self-revelation we garner that Jesus called God in heaven, Father. This God in heaven called Jesus ‘my Beloved Son’ and poured the Holy Spirit upon him, and the Holy Spirit remains present with us now as God we know and encounter. These three separate persons are somehow (and we will never understand how) all the same God. They are the same stuff whatever God-stuff is. So, to say that God is Trinity is to say God is not a single individual with all power. Rather it is to say that God is essentially a relationship of three persons who are the same God-stuff. God is relational in himself as opposed to simply being individual.
Looking at ourselves, to say that we humans are created in God’s image does not mean that at the core of our human nature we are autonomous, rational, decision making individuals patterned after god Almighty. When we go behaving like that we do monstrous damage to ourselves and to each other. Rather, being made in God’s image means we too are relational beings. We need to have relationships with God, with others, with the creation, with ourselves even to know who and what we are. We do not exist apart from relationships. We are relational beings whom God made in the image of God’s own relational self.
I know that’s some thick theology and I apologize for taxing your brains. But, we need to start perceiving God as Trinity, as relationship rather than as this individual god Almighty. My belief in God as Trinity culminates in understanding God as the communion of the Three co-equal Persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another so completely in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are One. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another in the same way that Jesus loved us on the cross: an unconditional and sacrificial giving of oneself for the good of others. In and as this love The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is One.
Back to my basic assumption that our beliefs about God will affect how we treat other people. If a person believes that God is the loving communion of the co-equal persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love so completely that they are one, how will that person treat other people? Well, as we are all made equally in the image of God, there is no room for societal structures that allow one person or one group of people to oppress another. There is no room for racism, for bigotry, for poverty, for extravagant wealth, for weapons, for abuse of power. People who believe that God is Trinity and love as Jesus loved will give themselves to others so completely in love that through them God will heal humanity of these evil blemishes. These people will stand against these abuses and selflessly involve themselves in the Trinity’s work to overcome these energies of darkness that pervade human relationships and communities. What we believe about God matters and these beliefs will become evident in the way we relate with others.
Being an American abroad I too have watched in horror and consternation at the events of the past week with a very sad heart at what my homeland has reverted to. I firmly believe that what is going on down there is the direct consequence of pervasive cultural belief in god Almighty. It reared itself as the idol of civil authority declared himself the emblem of law and order and then cleared a path through a peaceful protest with rubber bullets, flash grenades, and chemical control devices just so that he could walk from the people’s house to a boarded up house of God where he stood in front of that boarded up house of God with a Bible in hand for a photo op all after having previously made speeches about calling down the power of the military on American citizens and calling the governors of the states weak and foolish for not arresting people en masse for protesting against racism. Did he not realize that the God who revealed himself in that Bible he was waving around liberated slaves, stood on the side of the poor and oppressed, demanded justice for widows, orphans and immigrants, healed the sick, ate with sinners, said the love of money is the root of all evil, spoke the Truth, and demonstrated his power by emptying himself of power and dying in weakness on a cross accused of being an insurrectionist?
Church, God is not god Almighty. God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves so completely to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are one. Who we believe God is has dire consequences…dire consequences… particularly for us people of faith. We are the ones the Triune God of grace, mercy, love, peace, and justice has summonsed to come and faithfully serve him and be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. We need to ask ourselves whether we serve the God who’s power is self-emptying love or are we simply in league with the raw, coercive power of god Almighty? Who is your God? Amen.
