image from Steve Goad

1. How can we express confidence in our confession of faith without alienating other people?

I often struggled with "being ashamed of the gospel" in my younger years, and then the resulting guilt because I was ashamed and not confident in it. Looking back, I think what I was ashamed of was the narrow constraints of the interpretations I was given. It's hard to confess a faith that you haven't found freedom in for yourself. So I think the challenge for me now, which I find easier, is to be honest about my struggles and the way I've been met in Christ, as well as the larger vision of a salvation and abundant life together found in the community of Christ. A personal account like this is less alienating, and I think more genuine, than a certain and "packaged" formula and understanding of what it means to be on Yahweh's side. God's hiddenness helps us remain humble and seeking rather than proud and self-serving.

- Penny

Religious exclusivism doesn’t merely strike my reason or my intellect as offensive. My faith and trust in God also take a deep hit when I consider this perspective. Those who propose it seem arrogant to me; worse that than that, the God assumed by exclusivism doesn’t jive with the Father or our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus’ God is the one who “causes the rain and sun to shine on the just and the unjust.” The disturbing doctrine of exclusivism and my response to it as a pre-teen contributed to my spiritual detour and distraction. How could or can I believe in such a god?

As I have been reading Isaiah, I have come up against this doctrine again; after fifty-five years I still am shaken. I love so much of the prophet-poet’s insights, especially his desire to liberate and comfort his depressed and despairing people, who feel so utterly abandoned and surrounded by those who disdain them and their spirituality. Yet, immediately after Isaiah’s encouragements toward faith, we read that Israel is not just a carrier of the message of God, but God’s “favorite” among all nations. That jump, to be honest, tempts me to detour again; to doubt the very basis of my faith and opt for a more universal, gracious religious perspective like Stoicism or Bahá'í. I can’t leap in that direction after experiencing the love and accompaniment of Jesus in my life and the amazing way that God has expressed himself through community in Christ. So I searched for a solution.

I am not completely prevented from acknowledging that the Bible generally supports exclusivism, but I have discovered some partial explanations that soothe my doubts. One is that the Bible is indeed an ancient book written over centuries of human development. (Thank-you Pete Enns.) If the Bible’s revelation is progressive, as the early Anabaptists believed, then development, even progress is possible. Revelation moves from a lesser embrace of God’s truth to a greater one perceived by humans. 

So one solution might be to embrace a developmental interpretation. Simply put, when you and I were children we might have thought our mom and dad where the “Best” ones (hopefully we thought this, and were not otherwise convinced). Good o’l innocent love-language. Birds of a feather flock together and we love our own. However, as we mature we come to see most people believed this about their family. Ethnocentrism, family-ism, and narcissism later get replaced by global second person perspectives. 

John Dominic Crossan has a unique and helpful hermeneutic. He suggests that it is not uncommon for the Bible to be written in a back and forth way between the unique, radical perspective of the Kingdom of God, and the pull toward cultural accommodation and conformity. Blessing of all nations is assumed but is immediately followed by restriction of truth to one nation and faith. This approach affirms that the Bible is both an inspired book, authoritative in faith and practice, and on the other hand is a human book written by human, culturally restricted authors. God speaks by challenging culture and yet adopting culture as a vehicle that adjusts to our limited minds.

Lastly, the text of Isaiah suggests that Israel is a means of promise to other nations. I appreciated Brueggemann’s view that instead of a “command,” the phrase that “all shall bow a knee to Yahweh” recognizes that there is a God beyond humanly constructed god images. Constructed god images are the idols the poet is talking about. These idols may be tangible objects or graven images, or maybe even imaginary, intellectual god-images. The God revealed to Israel is not such a god; God is  a hidden God, not to be constructed, a God who reveals progressively as redeemer of humanity and creation. 

Here is Brueggemann’s hopeful suggestion:

“The anticipation of total deference to Yahweh is perhaps a command, telling the summoned nations what must now happen. Or perhaps it is a promise, anticipating what must inevitably happen because the nations will come to see that any alternative choice is a bad choice. The rhetoric of the summons that moves between promise and command is not unlike the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3). Although this assertion is conventionally taken as commandment, H. Graf Reventlow has nicely shown that it is not a command, but simply a promise for the commands that follow.” 

It might be best to confess the hiddenness of God and not be too sure of who God decides to favor, who God saves, and who reveals God best. We people of the Book (Jews, Christians and Muslims) believe in our mandate to reveal God to others faiths but we must not become idol-makers with tottering concepts of God that do not do justice to God as humanly revealed in Christ and those who stand alongside him as God-followers and seekers. Karl Barth might have been right suggesting that all religion is idolatry. 

- Paul

2. How have you experienced God’s hiding and/or God’s speaking?

I really like this question because it gets to the heart of a perceptual problem that is endemic to the human condition. If God is Love and for us, why does God sometimes seem so silent, distant and hidden, and so present at other times? 

I don’t think it’s because God is not caring. I think that God cares for us best by hiding himself from us at times. I remember reading a book by Gerald May on addiction that talked about the human propensity to get addicted to experiences and processes that meet our needs. If God was always meeting our needs in the way that we wanted them met, we would become addicted to God and very demanding of God. It wouldn’t be a relationship of love but one in which we were always going to God as a cosmic bellhop to meet our needs. 

If God is hidden, then God is sovereign and free, a power beyond both our understanding and our desires. In coming to deal with a free God, we learn something new because God’s perspectives on reality are often so different than ours. “Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my plans than your plans.” Isaiah 55:9

I also liked how Hanson talked about God’s hiddenness: “God’s hiddenness is a hiddenness of mercy, making God’s presence available only to those whose hearts are properly prepared. The God who “hides himself” is thus the God who is discovered by the humble and contrite, those broken in spirit and open to God’s gracious deliverance.” So ultimately God’s hiddenness is a way of relating to us in a way that offers a way of healing us of our demanding-ness and making us more human.

- Cal

3. Reflect on the tohu parts of your life that need to be filled/shaped by God.

I have a strong aversion to wires. Yes, literally wires, especially if they are out in the open. Visually, the jumbled mess on the floor or those long black cords that snake across my counter clutters up any aesthetic sensibility that I attempt to create. Please God, let Heaven be wireless. Maybe that’s the ultimate iCloud.

As much as I crave order and structure, I also struggle with order and structure, both in the physical world (misplaced keys and important papers are not an uncommon occurrence) and the mental world (I lose words, often feel sequentially challenged in the area of thought and logic and my memory feels more fleeting.) To compensate for this experience of floundering I think my strong need for control and planning is just another unconscious attempt to keep the waters of Tohu at bay.

Of course, the wires are only the messenger, telling me that there is a deeper chaos that I feel threatened by. In my youth, I struggled with anorexia and would often describe myself, in a teenage angsty kind of way, as insubstantial and invisible. Interesting that anorexic tendencies are often equated with a heightened need to control; the means starvation and a hyped-up form of micro-management through exercise and caloric calculations.

“Because it is unformed by God, it is outside of God’s sovereignty…”. Insubstantial and invisible. Sounds like a description of what “unformed” is. Maybe at the centre of this storm of mine is the lie that God never formed me but rather I came to be as an afterthought, as the family story goes. What my pattern of mistrust did with that origin story was to misinterpret it as “me being a mistake”. How I chose to respond to this sense of being an accident was by becoming my own sovereign. Maybe if I took charge of my own very small kingdom whether it was cutting calories in my earlier life or compulsively keeping lists of required and orderly tasks, I could somehow establish a dominion of safety and predictability that the world around me could not provide. Fortunately I discovered how flawed this kingdom based on fear was. In this bleak landscape I was missing out on God’s kingdom which is ruled by the ultimate sovereignty of suffering and attentive love’.

The key to stilling the waters is in the last line of the question. “Reflect on the parts of your life that need to be filled/shaped by God.” This past weekend Paul and I had a “Bickerson” moment … something about “wires” I think. Go figure. I will cut to the chase. One of our Xmas gifts to each other was a “HomePod” mini and in trying to figure out how to best set it up, Paul had some ideas of where to put it that would put my cherished surfaces and aesthetic spaces in jeopardy. Like a protective Sovereign I went into defensive control mode and over-reacted in a spirit of blame and blind fear. At that moment I was filled and shaped by an irrational sense of losing my territory and a suspicion of Paul as invader of my domain. I was driven by the Tohu of extraction and the chaos of antagonistic aggression.

I am so grateful that through the spirit that flows through Christ I am being invited into a bigger trust that is not just my own self-created safety net. It is a filling and a shaping that, like Creation, evolves slowly over time and always in the form of re-connection, re-tangling, and restoring. My prayer is that my memories of being birthed will be told in a new origin story where I, with community are being made visible and substantial through our life with a Father who lovingly sees us, a Brother who shows us the way and a Comforting and Wise Spirit that never tires of re-energizing us for discipleship and covenant.

- Bev

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