The Insecurities of God

In a recent blog roll started by Scot McKnight about Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity, a comment made by John Sylvest (comment #60) had this to say mid way through...

"As Brian put it to me, for the gospel to incarnate into a culture is very different from a culture co-opting the gospel." 

They are discussing Scot's critique of Brian and his neo-liberation theology.  John's response is that Brian is proposing more of a Theology of Liberation that is faithful rather than a resurgence of liberation theology.

In his own words he writes, "I would counter that Brian has not embraced a subversive liberation ideology but has articulated a sound theology of liberation, as systematically consistent with his other Franciscan sensibilities ( see Leonardo Boff's Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor)"

We are faced with the temptation every day to domesticate God and the Gospel for our purposes and to allay our fears.  Our culture's greatest fears look to the answers which are most readily available - the ones that offer the path of least resistance.  The Good News that God has always been telling and that Jesus told best (better than Paul?) is part of this process of God's incarnational activity to introduce the Good Virus of the Gospel into our sick and broken culture in order to heal it.  The culture is good but broken and is being redeemed but how does God do that?

In reference to Sylvest's prior comment, I would say God actually co-opts human culture to incarnate the Gospel.  The problem for a lot of people of faith is that this does not allow God to be a strict purist or an originalist (He doesn't have any insecurities so he has no need to be wholly original as he communicates).  We want him to come up with most of his revelatory methods and rituals apart from co-opting the cultures that form our identity as humanity.  We want him to be completely other when he defines who He is to us.  We can't have that - it's impossible but we want it because of our innate human insecurities.  We need him to be original, not to hi-jack or borrow from the "world."   On the other hand, we do need fixed and formal categories to move forward in our understanding of who God is but as we do so, our moorings can tend to shift under our feet and we find more incomprehensibility than anything else.

The path of discovering God is a lot like someone being born in a sunken ship that has water which leaked into the ship as it sunk.  It rests at the bottom and lays there for years untouched.  A baby is born in the sunken ship and as it grows, the child learns about the water, its properties, its temperature, how it changes temperature, its taste, etc...  Those in the ship are in control of the water and can transfer it throughout the ship when needed but can never remove it.  One day the child decides to open the hatch to go outside and discovers that they are engulfed and crushed by that same water that was so tamed and tempered inside the sunken ship.  God knows that our capacity to understand him is a process of discovering more of his incomprehensibility.  Keith Yandell says that mystery is not a good category for describing God's incomprehensibility.  Though that may be helpful we can still use mystery as a category for describing God but only loosely.

God, therefore cannot be original because his originality would require too much of him for us to handle in our finite, fallen and I would add, infantile status.
 

Kenton Sparks presents this view extremely well in his book, "God's Words in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship" with the Scriptural view of Accommodationism.

He writes, "Accommodation is God's adoption in inscripturation of the human audience's finite and fallen perspective.  Its underlying conceptual assumption is that in many cases God does not correct our mistaken human viewpoints but merely assumed them in order to communicate with us." (p.230-31).

Later he points out that the need to think this way is because there are obvious errors in the Bible, but not errors that actually challenge its authority but point to a doctrine of inscripturation which he labels - Accomodation.

Accommodationists, he says, "are as interested as anyone else in allaying impressions of divine error in Scripture, they are uncomfortable with slavishly equating the mind of God with the mind of the human author, and have no fixation whatever on rescuing the Bible's human authors from error...God has accommodated his discourse to us, not by instructing the human author to express things simply, but by adopting the simple viewpoints of that human author, whose perspectives, personality, vocabulary, and literary competence were well suited to the ancient audience of Scripture."  (p. 245)

Taylor College and Seminary in Edmonton, AB held their Faith and Culture Conference in September of 2007 where Kenton presented the lectures that formed his aforementioned book.  The MP3 files are titled, Epistemology, Biblical Criticism, Accommodation and Path of Wisdom.  These lectures give a fantastic overview of the subject matter in his book. 


Our fear is that if our God isn't original to categories that we define him with then we, as Christians or Evangelicals, aren't out in front of the "world" and they might be "original" than us.  So we project our fixed and purist notions of God onto him while he's busy incarnating himself into the mess of the world.  We end up with a God that is shaped by our insecurities rather than by his mysteries while the world moves forward.  He is not unfaithful to his promise to work through us - so he does (another form of Accommodationism) but the goal is to become more faithful to the way in which He is doing his work of redemption rather than to what makes us "feel" the most safe or comfortable.  We all have insecurities and because security is in the top 3 needs of humanity if not the top need, we will generally design our approaches to God based upon those insecurities more than He would have us do so.  Though He is patient, he will eventually remove those in order to draw us to who He really is.  

Because idolatry is really our projection onto God of that which we believe will meet our most pertinent needs, we posture a God who meets those needs and does so to allay our fears (which are sourced in our insecurities).  To worship a God like that is idolatry, but he because he's patient, he works with what we give him.  Over time, the good virus of the Gospel should constantly reform our view of who God really is and at times cause radical shifts in that process.  So the question remains?  Will I approach God today more out of my insecurities or will I come to him in his mysteries.  Both require dedication but only one requires submission.