Skip to main content

An Elusive God

I was having a discussion the other day about the concept of God found in the Old Testament. “God is found in a burning bush,” said my friend, “and in the wind. God is experienced as a formless voice and also in the words of the prophets. It seems to me that to the writers of the Old Testament, God was elusive.” God wasn’t experienced the same way by everyone.  The prophets couldn’t even agree on what the message was. In fact the Old Testament writers refused, or perhaps couldn’t, put God into a box.

Jesus, in the New Testament, is also portrayed through the eyes of others. To Matthew,  Jesus is Jewish and so he wrote to a Jewish audience living nearby.  Mark presented Jesus as an elusive figure, while Luke paints him as an ethical figure in the Hellenistic culture . John’s is a spiritual gospel which tells the story of Jesus in a symbolic way, Paul’s mission was to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to the gentiles. So once again no over-arching portrait occurs, but rather a series of portraits that represent both the writers’ worldview and experience.



 The creeds and doctrines of the church addressed just this issue of non-conformity  with the Council of Nicaea [325], which was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom From this came the Nicene Creed which is still used in our churches today. 

So whatever happened to the unknown God of the old Testament, and the stories of Jesus, told from different world views to people with different life experiences in the New Testament?  The church councils have created statements about God for us to all agree with, and these statements are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. [Hebrews 13.8] And so we are now faced with a hodgepodge of stories which we try to fit into one mold.

Where is God for you? In his book, “The  3 Colours of Your Spirituality”, Christian  A. Schwarz, the founder of NCD or Nature Church Development, talks abut the different ways people experience religion. He breaks these down into 9 specific spiritual styles, or how one most naturally connects with ‘God’. Once you have discovered your personal style, you are then challenged to grow towards a more balanced approach in your spiritual life. it is in this growth, in learning to appreciate and understand a style opposite to our own, that we approach spiritual maturity. According to Schwarz then, my path to understanding and experiencing ‘God’, is not necessarily yours, just as your path might well be different then mine. However, they are both innate and valid. Could this explain just why the various people involved in the writing of the Old Testament scripture saw God in a variety of ways…

If that is the case, where does that leave us today? How do you experience God in your day-to-day life? Are your experiences of God seen by the organized church as being valid and having merit, even when /if they contradict a teaching of that church? Are you perhaps afraid to talk about those experiences in case you are ridiculed?

 'In the early 1960s, Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904-1984) stated that if Western Christianity did not rediscover its mystical foundations, we might as well close the doors of the churches because we had lost the primary reason for our existence. Now don’t let the word “mystic” scare you. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions at their mature levels agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and even available to everyone.' Richard Rohr, Jan. 24, 2017

So my question to you is, “Is this why the God of both the Old and New Testament, and also the God of today seems elusive?” 





Comments

  1. pdrsjJanuary 25, 2017 at 11:57 AM

    Because we must actively access the creator within ourselves in order to see and experience the power that is always there.

    Just a thought

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Sadness of Geography"

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” I  have to admit that when I first read this quote by  Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer, my immediate response was ‘What sadness?’ Geography is all about climate, geology, topography, the names of lakes, rivers, mountains and seas, isn’t it? It is about things, about memory work. It is not about emotions! At least no geography course I ever took was. But then I started to think….. What are those things that divide us? What are the causes of people being unhappy, persecuted, denied their basic human rights and freedoms, being ostracized in society? Those causes are the things that make people different; things like the colour of their skin, their customs and religion, how they dress, the language they speak. These things for the most part are decided not by who they really are, but by the geography of where they are born. And they persist ‘unto the fourth and fifth generations’ no ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ash Wednesday Musings, 2018

‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Genesis 3:19 Most scholars agree that the texts found in Genesis began to be written down sometime in the 10th century BCE and were based on oral and written traditions. It is this verse that is referenced in the Book of Alternative Services during the Ash Wednesday service, ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return’. A few years ago now we attended an Ash Wednesday Service where the words had morphed to ‘Remember that you are stardust and to stardust you shall return’ moving into the cosmology of the 21st century, connecting our bodies with the whole universe. These express the beliefs of a different world view. They both call us to remember that life on this earth is impermanent and fleeting. They call us to pause and to ponder our lives. Which one resonates with you doesn’t matter. What does matter is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Nudgement"

As we progress through the season of Lent, we are urged by the lectionary aa well as by the words spoken from the front of the churches to consider how we live and what we do with our lives. Many of us take up a new spiritual practise perhaps denying ourselves something we enjoy or adding something to our daily routine that we think will benefit our spiritual growth in the long run.  What we can seen to be doing is in fact judging our lives and then trying to make them  better by doing ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’. Quite a while ago I received a note from one of the readers of this blog and it has stayed with me over the time since it landed in my inbox. ‘I just coined the term "nudgement" for myself this morning.  I was thinking of how EFM interprets "judgement" as something that surprises you or that you weren't expecting, which is a gentler notion of "judgement" than some of us grew up with, something that is enough out of the ordinary to urge us ou...
2 comments
Read more

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

‘…and there is no new thing under the sun’   Ecclesiastes 1:9 [KJV] I imagine most of you already recognize this saying as being from the bible when you hear hear it repeated as  “There is nothing new under the sun”. It came to mind again for me recently when in conversation I happened to mention a magic lantern that had been use in my Sunday School days to project words onto a screen and was met with a blank look. Now when you go into a modern church, you might well see the words still being projected on a screen at the front, with the only change being in the method projection. But I bet you will hear people saying, “I don’t like the words projected up there. Why can’t they do it the old way!” My answer would be “They are.” What has been is what will be,  and what has been done is what will be done;  there is nothing new under the sun.   Is there a thing of which it is said,  ‘See, this is new’? It has already been,  in the a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Moments of Happiness

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them…“ Matthew 6:26 NRSV Right now the colouring app that I use daily is running a series of pictures called ‘Moments of Happiness’. What are these pictures about you might wonder. Celebrations? Family gatherings? Attending  a concert? All things we have missed over the last two years. The answer would be NO, NO, NO!  The pictures to date have shown instead getting a good night’s rest, enjoying a morning cup of coffee, making time for some self-care, cooking, and for today, exercising at home. All things that were part both of our lives both before and during COVID… and will be afterwards as well. I was once told as an adult that not only could I not sing, but that I never would be able to. Immediately I stopped singing (even in the shower). For the most part conductors in the various choirs I had sung in over the years had left me alone. So I had had that!...
Post a Comment
Read more

An apple a day...

I’m sure we all have heard the old adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. The original phrase ‘‘Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread” had its first recorded use in the 1860, but the concept is quite old going back to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times. I know I heard it many times during my growing up years.  And I must admit that in late years I have tended to relegate apples to an occasional rather than a daily fruit. That, however, is about to change! The following landed in my inbox not long ago and made me rethink my relationship to the lowly apple. Any one of these claims is certainly a reason to add apples back into my daily diet. “Did you know that –according to Medical News Today, which ranks apples as the Number One healthiest food based on research studies– apples can potentially: * Have the same effect as statins in preventing vascular deaths… * Improve neurological health… * Prevent dementia… * Reduce risk of st...
Post a Comment
Read more

Great Joy

“Repeat the sounding joy, repeat the spending joy   Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy” I was thinking this week of that well-loved carol, “Joy to the World” and in particular the refrain at the end of the verse 2 where nature is called upon to  ‘repeat the sounding joy’. I think that joy is missing in a large part from my Christmas preparations. As Christas Day draws ever nearer, the list of things that ‘need’ to be done grows longer instead of shorter. Tempers are short as we try to fit too many things into too short a time, worried that we won’t get it all done. The Christmas cards might not be delivered by the post office in a timely manner, especially with the rotating postal strikes that have been ongoing all fall! Did I choose the right Christmas gift for everyone? Did I spend too much on that gift … or maybe not enough? Will everything be perfect on Christmas Day? Then I have the memory of my childhood when my mother would wash the kitchen floor on Chris...
Post a Comment
Read more

Look After Yourself!

“Look after yourself!” Oh those words, so well meant and heard so often this past summer! Words that I have used often in the past myself. They are well meant words, said by those who are concerned and want to show that concern. I know that! But after hearing them said so often, in so many difference voices over the last 8 months, I find myself reacting differently on hearing them.  At first I was stunned, then dismayed by my reaction. I felt ungrateful. What was wrong with me? Why was I beginning to resent hearing these words? But then I took some time to think about just why I was feeling the way I did, and also why, if this was such good advice, why did no one ever take it - or so it seemed. To me, these words “Look after yourself’ deny the basic principle not only in Christianity but all the major world religions. Christians call it the Golden Rule - to do unto others what you would have them do to you, or ‘To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all y...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Choice...

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. - Genesis 9:11 If you were in church on the first Sunday of Lent this year, you probably heard this read from the lectern and maybe even preached on. This covenant between God and God’s people was so important to the writers of the Old Testament that there are actually two stories of the flood both intertwined in Genesis 9.   Martin Luther King Jr. took this story and updated it to his time, the 1960s, a time of racial unrest in America. “ It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” He saw that the threat of violence had become overwhelming. If anyone tried to meet violence with more violence, they would in all likelihood be killed. And so the choice for violence would lead to nonexistence while the choice of nonviolence had a greater cha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dark with Mystery

‘There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.’ Neil deGrasse Tyson - an American  astrophysicist , author, and  science communicator   I drove out of the parking lot in the mysteriously reduced sunlight during the recent solar eclipse. I knew why everything was looking different, why the light was muted, having that eerie glow. Yet still it  bothered me. When we reached home and turned on the television to watch what was happening elsewhere, the full majesty and mystery of this natural phenomenon became clear. I can well understand why there are people who travel great distances each time a total eclipse cones around, just to experience it again and again. The pictures of this ev...
Post a Comment
Read more