Posts Tagged ‘Genesis’

The Trinity and Paul – some thoughts

May 30, 2015

Trinity Sunday – 2015

Romans 8

Marian Free

In the name of God who created us, died for us and enlivens us. Amen.

The Apostle Paul gets a lot of bad press. From the time the author of 2 Peter wrote: “There are some things in them (Paul’s letters) hard to understand”, there have been those who accuse Paul of being difficult, culture bound and chauvinistic. As a Pauline scholar I would of course, contest all such negative comments and claim them to be misrepresentations at worst and misinterpretations at best by those who have not taken the time to study and understand the genius that is Paul[1].

I am not saying that the letters of Paul are immediately transparent, or that there are not some parts that require a certain amount of effort to understand, but I would claim that what Paul has to say is absolutely essential for our understanding of the gospel and that he says it in a way that is quite masterful and compelling.

One of the difficulties that we face when we read either Paul’s letters or the gospels is that they were written in the first century for a first century Mediterranean audience. The letters are even more specific. Paul was not writing for our edification. In fact I think that he had no more idea of his letters being turning into Holy Scripture than we would imagine that our assignments in theology would one day be accepted into the canon.

Paul was writing to specific situations that had arisen in communities that had come to faith as a result of his teaching or, as is the case with Romans, a community that he wished to visit. His intention was not to write theology but to set the recipients straight on matters of faith or behaviour. The communities to whom he wrote consisted by and large of people who had had no grounding in the Jewish faith and who therefore had considerable catching up to do in order to begin to understand the gospel.

What I find remarkable is, that in this context and within twenty years of Jesus’ death, Paul – who never met the earthly Jesus – was able to distil the significance of Jesus’ life and teaching and to give them a meaning that continues to inform us today. The gospels give us the story of Jesus (albeit with interpretation). Paul, writing considerably earlier, tells us what it all means. In so doing he foreshadows ideas which later scholars turned into theology and into doctrine.

Take the notion of the Trinity for example. Over the centuries much ink has been spilt in trying to elucidate the nature of God and what it means for God to be both one and three. Paul simply assumes a Trinitarian God – Creator, Son and Spirit. This is particularly evident in Romans 8:9-11. “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” Paul is making an argument about life in the Spirit, but in order to do so he also speaks of God and Christ as if they were all one God.

In verse 9 Paul speaks of “being in the Spirit” because the “Spirit of God dwells in you” and adds “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. He goes on to say “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you”, “the Spirit dwells in you.” The Spirit incorporates believers into the life of Christ that in turn incorporates them into the union between Christ and God. It seems that it is perfectly natural for Paul to think of God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead, as Jesus and as Spirit and that as a result he is able to use the expressions interchangeably.

The notion of God being known as God, as Spirit and as Word is not new to Paul. Genesis 1 introduces the Spirit in the form of ruah or breath and in Ezekiel (37:5) it is God’s ruah (breath) that brings life to the dry bones. The same Spirit animates Ezekiel, transports him to the valley of bones and will give life to the people of Israel. (This is not dissimilar to Paul’s idea that it is the Spirit that gives life to the believer (Rom 8:11)). Proverbs introduces Wisdom (sophia or logos) as co-creator with God. So in the Judeo-Christian from the beginning of creation there has been an implicit notion of the complex nature of the One God.

It would be the Incarnation that would give this idea flesh both literally and figuratively. God in human form proved much more challenging than the less concrete ideas of God as breath and wisdom. How could Jesus be both human and God? How could Jesus be pre-existent? Where did the Spirit fit in all this? It would take the church close to four hundred years to express the idea of the Trinity in theological and doctrinal terms that were universally accepted[2] and many more centuries for scholars to continue to explore and name what it means for God to be both one and three and how to express this without diminishing one of the persons of the Trinity.

For Paul and the early church the nature of God was not something to be intellectualized or argued. It seems to have been taken for granted that God could be known as Father, Son and Spirit, the one who sent Jesus, the one sent (Jesus) and the one whom Jesus sent (Spirit), the one who raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus who was raised from the dead and the Spirit.

Instead of worrying about how the Trinity works and which analogies are heretical or not, let us take a page out of Paul’s book and assert that God simply is – Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

[1] When I speak of Paul’s letters I refer to the seven letters that are considered genuinely Pauline – Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon.

[2] Some would claim imposed was a better word.

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Thirsting for God’s word

July 20, 2013

Pentecost 9

Amos 8:1-12

Marian Free 

Loving God, give us such a thirst for your word that we may read, learn and inwardly digest it and so share it with others. Amen.

I wonder how well you know your Bibles – the word of God. There are some things that you will know well and others that you may not know at all. For example, I am sure that if I asked you how many gospels there were you would all say “four” and that if I asked you to name Jesus’ disciples that you would be able to name at least three. Similarly, I am guessing that you could tell me the first line of the 23rd Psalm and that most of you would know where to look for the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. How would you go though if I asked you to explain why the four gospels differ from each other? How many of Jesus’ parables would you be able to repeat? Do you know in which book of the Bible you would find Satan in the court of heaven? In which book of the New Testament would you find the Golden Rule? And where in the Old Testament would you find the expressions: “How the mighty have fallen” or “keep me as the apple of your eye”[1]?

Many of the churches in this Diocese are participating in an audit that has been developed to measure the health of the church. A key finding of “The Natural Church Life Survey” is that across the Diocese, our knowledge of the bible is very poor. The central document of our faith, the book which records our stories and tells us how God has been a part of human history, is, for many of us, a book which remains largely unknown.

This is a pity for a number of reasons, most of all because the Bible is God’s love letter to humanity. We discover in its pages the story of creation’s propensity to turn away from God and the story of God’s patience which, over and over again, overlooks all our failings and shortcomings and continually restores us. The bible is filled with words of wisdom and comfort to encourage and sustain us – to give us guideposts along the way and to tell us something of the love and presence of God.

Just to give you a few of my favourite examples: Psalm 56:8 tells us that God keeps all our tears in a bottle. Isaiah and Revelation insist that God will wipe away all our tears (Is 25:8, Rev 21:4). In John’s gospel Jesus says: “I have come that you might have life and have it in abundance” (10:10. Elsewhere he says that all the hairs on our head are counted (Luke 12:7). God’s love continues to be poured out on us no matter how little we have done to deserve it.

The list is endless. From the proclamation in Genesis that God created humankind and it was very good, to the promises of heaven in Revelation, the Bible constantly affirms our worth in God’s eyes and God’s love for us – no matter how far we stray or how much we let God down.

On the other hand, the bible is a very human book and its pages expose the very worst of human nature. Between its covers you will find accounts of fratricide, genocide, infanticide, murder, adultery, rape and betrayal. There is no escape in our holy book from the reality of human existence and its potential for and propensity to sin. There is no glossing over or white washing the behaviour of even our most revered biblical heroes – with the exception of Jesus, they are all as flawed as we are.

The reading from Amos today is one of those bleak passages which discourage many from reading the Bible and the Old Testament in particular. This is one of the reasons that it is important to know our Bibles. We have to remember the context in which such accounts were written. In the time of Amos, the people of Israel had abandoned God, they were oppressing the poor and engaging in dubious and dishonest trading practices. Amos is expressing God’s frustration and sorrow at such a situation and God’s distress that the people no longer pay any attention to God’s word. God’s anguish is such that he threatens to withdraw the word from them in order that they should hunger and thirst for it, that they should long to know God again.

So we do an injustice to the text if we don’t take the trouble to understand its historical context, but we also judge it unfairly if we do not read it in the light of the whole book. If we persist to the end of the book of Amos, we see a different story – God does not remain angry, but relents:

9: 13 The time is surely coming, says the LORD,

when the one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps,

and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;

the mountains shall drip sweet wine,

and all the hills shall flow with it.

14             I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,

and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;

they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,

and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.

15             I will plant them upon their land,

and they shall never again be plucked up

out of the land that I have given them,             says the LORD your God.

The book of Amos was written in and for times very different from our own, but it can still speak to us. We are living in an increasingly multi-cultural and secular society which means that it is our responsibility to keep the word of God alive – to ensure that it is known not only to us but to generations to come. We may not experience a famine of “hearing the words of the Lord”, but the world at large does. It has less and less opportunity to engage with God and with God’s word. For that reason, it is incumbent on us to know and to share what and why we believe, to know our story so well that we can tell it to others, to be so enthusiastic that others will thirst to hear more.

I would like to end today with a challenge for you to begin to read the bible for yourself. Don’t set your target too high, begin with something that is manageable. Decide for example to read the bible for just five minutes a day or to read your way through one book of the bible. Develop your curiosity, ask questions: “What does the bible say about ….” Where can I find the parable of the Good Samaritan? What verse or what Psalm would I suggest to a friend who was going through a difficult time? Where would I find passages that talk about God’s limitless love? Give it a go and see what you can discover.

Let us be those who so know God’s word that we are able to make it known, those who so thirst for the word of God that we are ourselves equipped to slake the thirst of others and so familiar with the word, that it is like our second nature.

[1] The differences in the gospels relate to the writer’s intent, the community for which they were written and to other reasons which I can’t go into here. In the Book of Job, Satan plays an important role in the heavenly court. The Golden Rule is found in Luke and Matthew (6:31, 7:12). ‘How the mighty have fallen” is part of David’s Lament for Saul and David in 2 Samuel 2:19,27 and “keep me as the apple of your eye” comes from Psalm 17:8.

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