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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819232595 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/10/2016 |
| Series: | Church's Teaching for a Changing World |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.70(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Faith for the Future
Volume 3 in the Church's Teachings for a Changing World Series
By Jesse A. Zink
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2016 Jesse ZinkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3259-5
CHAPTER 1
God
On Sundays in most Episcopal churches, just after the sermon, the priest invites the congregation to stand and "affirm our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed." The people rise and say together a string of sentences that begins, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth."
This is the Nicene Creed, the product of a series of church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries. Over many years, early Christian bishops and leaders came together to sort out (and resort out) some of the most basic theological beliefs about the God they believed to be Triune — literally, three-in-one. They structured the creed to reflect the three divine persons who make up one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We'll return to these relationships in later chapters. This opening affirmation about God orients the Christian faith.
There is a God. This God is a being who is both uniquely and definitively other to our human existence, and at the same time intimately involved in our lives. God is both the Almighty, Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, and also so lovingly attentive to us that we relate to this God with the familiarity of a parent.
Moreover, the Christian God is the "one" God. In the cultural ferment of the Roman Empire, there was a raft of competing religious traditions, all demanding fidelity to their particular god or gods. But Christians asserted faithfulness to a particular God, the God who was revealed in and through Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ was not new. Jesus's God was the God of the Jewish people, the God known as Yahweh, who had called a people named Israel into being and sent them into the world to make God's glory known. When early Christians affirmed that they, too, believed in this "one God," they affirmed that the history of God's dealings with the people of Israel in the Old Testament was about them as well.
Creator and Covenant-Maker
The collection of laws, historical accounts, prophetic testimonies, poetry, proverbs, and much else that make up the Old Testament offer a place to begin thinking about the one God of the Christian faith. The Old Testament teaches us that God is not distant and removed. Instead, God acts in the world.
The first of these actions is creation. Out of nothing, God created the earth, the heavens, and all that is in them (Genesis 1–2). Nothing forced God to create. God created out of God's great love. And when God created, God looked at this new creation and said it was good. God acts out of love and God's love results in deep and profound goodness. Humans are made in the image of this God, which means we are made to be loving, good, and creative forces, too.
God also acts to create covenants with the people God has created. From ancient ancestors like Noah and Abraham and Sarah, to Moses, David, and others, God makes agreements. While the details are different, the basic idea of covenant is summed up in what God says through the prophet Jeremiah: "you shall be my people, and I will be your God" (Jeremiah 30:22; also Exodus 6:7 and Leviticus 26:12). God lovingly chooses a particular group of people through whom God will act in the world, first by promising Abraham that he will become the father of a multitude of descendants. That promise is realized in the Hebrew people who settle in Egypt, and yet again when Moses leads them out of Egypt with the promise of a new land and a better home. By worshipping God and working to bring about the kind of society God desires, these chosen people will be blessed by God.
Christians adopt this belief in the particularity of God's people. The first letter of Peter calls Christians "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" (1 Peter 2:9). Such language doesn't seem to square with the belief that all humans are created in the image of God. How are we all equal if some people are chosen and others are not? God chooses people not simply to bless them and set them apart from others, but so that through them all people may be blessed and know God's love. God calls a people because God needs a whole community of people to make God's blessing known. That tells us something important about God: God cannot be followed alone.
Yet the story doesn't always unfold smoothly. God's chosen people routinely fail to uphold their covenant with God. Their communities fracture and split. The world does not experience God's blessing through them. Through judges, kings and queens, and prophets, God continually calls God's people back to their covenant. This process culminates in the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. In Christ, God takes flesh — the literal meaning of incarnate — and acts in the world in an entirely new way. We will take up this topic in later chapters, but for now notice this: in God's action in Jesus Christ, we learn that God's love is now both particular and universal. It is no longer just a chosen nation that is called by God. Through Jesus Christ, membership in that chosen nation is now open, potentially, to all people everywhere.
Our Father?
When Episcopalians offer the opening words of the Nicene Creed in worship — "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth" — we are affirming the creative power of God, the goodness and love of God, and the covenant and calling of God. But these words pose complications as well. In the Nicene Creed, Christians call God "Father." Some faithful Christians struggle with this language. If God is so completely different from the world, how can God have gender? If God is male, then how can God understand problems women encounter?
The Fatherhood of God is concerned with the intimacy of God's love. When Jesus's followers asked him how to pray, he taught them to begin by saying, "Our Father" (Matthew 6:9). In the prevailing religious ethos of the day, such a practice bordered on scandalous. That is why when Episcopalians pray as Jesus taught us in the Lord's Prayer, we often introduce it with the phrase, "We are bold to say." It takes a scandalous boldness to call this almighty God our Father.
Calling God Father does not have to entail any beliefs about God's gender. God is beyond our understandings of gender. Although Jesus instructed us to call God Father, Jesus also highlighted aspects of God that seem more feminine. In this, he was continuing a trend from the Old Testament, such as when God is compared to a mother who will not forget her nursing children (Isaiah 49:15).
There comes a point where the English language fails us. In conversation about God, it is often helpful to use pronouns. But there is no pronoun in English that is beyond gender, meaning people are forced to choose between "him," "her," and "it." None of these is sufficient to talk about God.
The trouble with language and names for God reveals a basic problem in thinking about God. We can learn plenty about God from God's actions in the world. But God is also so completely different from what we know that we can never fully comprehend God. At some point, our speaking, talking, and reasoning about God reaches its limits — but God keeps going. It is a helpful reminder when thinking about theology: our knowledge about God is always limited because we are not God. It's not for nothing that Episcopalians say praying shapes believing. In prayer, we can come to deeper realizations of the loving, creative goodness of God, even if we cannot always put those realizations into precise words.
Trusting in God
The knowability or unknowability of God may mean little to a person saying the Nicene Creed in church on Sunday. Forget the finer points of God's creation; the bigger obstacle is in the first two words: "We believe." The world The Episcopal Church ministers in is marked by skepticism, cynicism, and a lack of firm commitments. To state something so clearly and firmly is to invite attention, questioning, even ridicule. "How can you believe there is a supreme God," I've been asked, "when we have seen natural disasters and disease, poverty, and illness raging out of control?" Or, "You believe in God? I believed in the tooth fairy — when I was six years old." For some people, the "We believe" begins to sound untrue. "Do I have to believe this to belong to church? What if someone finds out I'm just mumbling along or crossing my fingers behind my back?" These are real and honest concerns that make us consider what Christians mean about belief.
In English, the word belief has two meanings. On the one hand, belief is connected to existence. When we say of a child that she believes in the tooth fairy, we are saying the child believes the tooth fairy exists. On the other hand, belief can also be connected to trust. When I say that I believe in my friend, I'm not saying I believe my friend exists, I'm saying I trust my friend. The Latin word credo — the root of our English word creed — has these latter connotations. When Episcopalians say, "We believe in one God," we are expressing a belief in the existence of God. But the full force of the creed is as an expression of trust. We trust in one God.
Even this can be too far for some people. Why place our trust in a God who apparently allows bad things to happen to good people? Why trust a God whose existence cannot be proven? Why not just forget all about it?
God was not the only god the people of Israel knew. Indeed, at times, they worshipped some of these other gods. The early Christians also lived in a world with no shortage of other gods. At times, some Christians abandoned the worship of the God of Jesus Christ for these other deities. Few of them questioned the existence of God or gods. Rather, it was about trust. Early Christians who worshipped other gods, for instance, did not trust that they would be safe without worshipping an official Roman god.
We may not often think in these terms today, but we also live in a world with no shortage of other gods competing for our trust. Forces like money, sex, individualism, consumerism, and a whole host of others act like gods that vie for our trust. They lure us with the seductive belief that, if we only put our trust in their solutions, our problems will be solved. If only I had more money, my life would be secure. If only I could break free of this community that holds me back, I could be who I am meant to be. If only I could buy more stuff, I would feel better about myself. Through painful experience, many of us have learned that none of these gods offers the sustaining depth of goodness and love we find in the God of Jesus Christ.
To walk in the Episcopal way of following Jesus is to begin by making a basic statement of trust: we trust in this one God, who has created this good world out of love, who calls us into an intimate covenant and sends us out to make God's love known. We may not always understand God's ways. We may be tempted by other gods in our world. But we believe in a God who is worthy of our trust and who is calling us into a deeper and more full life both with God and with one another.
TO PONDER
• What words, phrases, or images help you understand God?
• What other gods in the world most frequently compete for your trust?
• In what ways have your relationships with others helped to teach you something about God? In what ways has your understanding of God taught you something about people around you?
CHAPTER 2Creation, Humanity, and Sin
There is a lot of talk in Christianity about life. Jesus promised "abundant life" (John 10:10) and called himself "the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Baptism, as we shall see, is about new life. A key Christian belief is that God is interested in offering people a new way of being. It is so central to God's love that it is part of God's very first action in the world, Creation. In Creation, God creates human beings to live in full and whole relationships, with God, with one another, and with the whole created world.
Genesis, the first book of the Bible, opens with two accounts of Creation. The first tells of how God created the world and all that is in it in seven days. The second focuses on the creation of the first two human beings. But both are clear that when God creates human beings, God intends to be in a special kind of relationship with them. Humans are the final act of creation, made in God's image. They are to oversee what God has created. The first man — now called Adam, in reference to the Hebrew word for "human" — names animals and tends the Garden of Eden. The special relationship God shares with Adam is marked by the fact that they walk together in the Garden of Eden and speak to one another in a way that God speaks to no other creature. Adam is naked before God, a symbol of their closeness: Adam and God have nothing to hide from one another. The life that God creates for humans is marked by what we can call a vertical relationship — a deep relationship with God.
Relationship with God is good — but it is not enough. After creating Adam, God says, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner" (Genesis 2:18). God creates a woman we know as Eve who becomes Adam's partner in the work God has given them. Adam and Eve are unashamedly naked in front of one another. The closeness of their relationship is summed up in the phrase the Bible uses to describe it: they became "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). In addition to a vertical relationship, God also makes humans for a full and whole horizontal relationship.
The vertical and horizontal relationships in Eden share an important characteristic: they cross boundaries of difference. God is divine, and Adam and Eve are human. Adam is male and Eve is female. Yet these differences do not prevent them from being united in a single relationship. Difference is part of Creation. Indeed, in many ways, Creation is a process of differentiation. God distinguishes light from dark, earth from heaven, land from water. Our relationships are an invitation to bring together the difference of Creation into a new kind of wholeness.
Many Episcopalians read these Creation stories as revealing the kind of life God creates for God's people. It is a life marked by a particular kind of relationship: full, whole, and complete relationships both with God and with one another. The Old Testament repeatedly uses two Hebrew words to describe God's relationally focused vision for the world. The first is shalom, a word that means wholeness or completeness. Such wholeness comes about when the relationships that God enacted in Creation are restored. If you imagine a web of relationships running between all people and between all people and God, shalom describes the state of affairs when that web is unbroken.
The second word is hesed, or steadfast love. Hesed is the loyalty and love of God that characterizes God's covenant relationships with God's people. God's people are called to live that same love in their own relationships. Not only are horizontal and vertical relationships whole and complete — shalom — they are marked by an unwavering love — hesed — that is rooted in the deep, passionate commitment God makes to God's people in Creation and covenant.
shalom and hesed describe an ideal state that varies from person to person and relationship to relationship. It is not God's vision that all people share a sexual relationship with one another as Adam and Eve did. Nor are we called to be so close to one another that we walk around naked. Just as there is difference in Creation, so is there difference in how shalom and hesed are embodied in relation with God and one another. But the vision of deep horizontal and vertical relationships grounded in God's love remains central.
Falling into Sin
The Creation stories in Genesis do not end with Adam and Eve dwelling in the Garden of Eden. Instead, tempted by the serpent, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though God has commanded them not to. As a result, the relationships God created begin to break down. First, Adam and Eve sew fig leaves together and hide themselves and their nakedness from God. If not broken, the vertical relationship is significantly impaired.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Faith for the Future by Jesse A. Zink. Copyright © 2016 Jesse Zink. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 God 9
Chapter 2 Creation, Humanity, and Sin 17
Chapter 3 Jesus of Nazareth 23
Chapter 4 Jesus the Christ 31
Chapter 5 The Holy Spirit and the Trinity 39
Chapter 6 Baptism 47
Chapter 7 Church 53
Chapter 8 Eucharist 61
Chapter 9 Mission 69
Chapter 10 The End 77
Conclusion 85
Additional Resources 89
The Nicene Creed 89
Further Reading 91