on Hamburger Helper and Christian doctrine
Velvet Elvis (2005, Rob Bell) has a great take on Christian doctrine, doctrine being the task of putting the concept and character of God into language, the task of describing God. Bell says, "[Doctrine] is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations" (23). ...the following is an intermingling of ideas on Christian doctrine from this book and from my own thinking...
God tells Moses His name is 'I AM.' "The name's origins come from the verb meaning "to be," so some read it as 'I will be who I will be.' Others suggest it should be read like this: 'I always have been, I am, and I always will be,' Perhaps this is God's way of saying, 'If your goal is to figure me out and totally understand me, it's not going to happen. Even my name is more than you can comprehend' " (24 Bell).
...and so if God is more than we can comprehend, the first question we must ask is whether God is describable in the first place. Moses describes the Israelistes' encounter with God at Mt. Sinai, saying that they 'heard the sound of words but saw no form' (Deut. 4.12, also 15). "In Moses' day, the way you honored and respected whatever gods you followed was by making carvings or sculptures of them and then bowing down to what you had made. These were gods you could get your mind around. Moses is confronting people with an entirely new concept of what the true God is like. He is claiming that no statue or carving could ever capture this God, becuase this God has no shape or form.
"This was a revolutionary idea in the history of religion" (23).
"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more" (25).
And so God is indescribable. So why pursue doctrine in the first place?
Again, it is because God is indescribable that God is God in the first place. "This truth about God is why study and discussion and doctrines are so necessary. They help us put words to realities beyond words. They give us insight and understanding into the experience of God we're having. Which is why the [doctrines] only work when they serve the greater cause: us finding our lives in God" (25).
And so describing God is possible when we're aware of God's indescribability, when we're describing not for the sake of explaining God but for the sake of articulating our own experience of God. Doctrine is for our sake, not for God's sake.
"Take, for example, take the doctrine... called the Trinity. This doctrine is central to historic, orthodox Christian faith. While there is only one God, God is somehow present everywhere. People began to call this presence, this power of God, his 'Spirit.' So there is God, and then there is God's Spirit. And then Jesus comes among us and has this oneness with God that has people saying things like God has visited us in the flesh. So God is one, but God has also revealed himself to us as Spirit and then as Jesus. One and yet three. This three-in-oneness understanding of God emerged in the several hundred years after Jesus' resurrection. People began to call this concept the Trinity. The word trinity is not found anywhere in the Bible. Jesus didn't use the word, and the writers of the rest of the Bible didn't use the word. But over time this belief, this understanding, this doctrine, has become central to how followers of Jesus have understood who God is. It is a spring, and people jumped for thousands of years without it. It was added later. We can take it out and examine it. Discuss it, probe it, question it. It flexes, and it stretches. In fact, its stretch and flex are what make it so effective. It is firmly attached to the frame and the mat, yet it has room to move. And it has brought a fuller, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God" (22).
"[For some, faith is] a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines ...is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger.
"What if ...the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the follwers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that wre hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? What if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first centruy being 'born of a virgin' also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? What if that spring was seriously questioned? ...Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? ...Does the whole thing fall apart?
"I affirm the historic Christian faith, which includes the virgin birth and the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible and much more. I'm a part of it, and I want to pass it on to th enext generation. I believe that God created everything and that Jesus is Lord and that God has plans to restore everything.
"But if the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn't strong in the first place, was it?
This is because a brick is fixed in size. It can't flex or change size, because if it does, then it can't fit into the wall. What happens then is that the wall becomes the sum total of the beliefs, and God becomes as big as the wall. but God is begger than any wall. God is begger than any religion. God is begger than any worldview. God is bigger that the Christian faith" (26-27).
Afterall, this God is the 'I AM.'
Personally, I like to think of doctrine as Hamburger Helper, but never as the hamburger itself.
God tells Moses His name is 'I AM.' "The name's origins come from the verb meaning "to be," so some read it as 'I will be who I will be.' Others suggest it should be read like this: 'I always have been, I am, and I always will be,' Perhaps this is God's way of saying, 'If your goal is to figure me out and totally understand me, it's not going to happen. Even my name is more than you can comprehend' " (24 Bell).
...and so if God is more than we can comprehend, the first question we must ask is whether God is describable in the first place. Moses describes the Israelistes' encounter with God at Mt. Sinai, saying that they 'heard the sound of words but saw no form' (Deut. 4.12, also 15). "In Moses' day, the way you honored and respected whatever gods you followed was by making carvings or sculptures of them and then bowing down to what you had made. These were gods you could get your mind around. Moses is confronting people with an entirely new concept of what the true God is like. He is claiming that no statue or carving could ever capture this God, becuase this God has no shape or form.
"This was a revolutionary idea in the history of religion" (23).
"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more" (25).
And so God is indescribable. So why pursue doctrine in the first place?
Again, it is because God is indescribable that God is God in the first place. "This truth about God is why study and discussion and doctrines are so necessary. They help us put words to realities beyond words. They give us insight and understanding into the experience of God we're having. Which is why the [doctrines] only work when they serve the greater cause: us finding our lives in God" (25).
And so describing God is possible when we're aware of God's indescribability, when we're describing not for the sake of explaining God but for the sake of articulating our own experience of God. Doctrine is for our sake, not for God's sake.
"Take, for example, take the doctrine... called the Trinity. This doctrine is central to historic, orthodox Christian faith. While there is only one God, God is somehow present everywhere. People began to call this presence, this power of God, his 'Spirit.' So there is God, and then there is God's Spirit. And then Jesus comes among us and has this oneness with God that has people saying things like God has visited us in the flesh. So God is one, but God has also revealed himself to us as Spirit and then as Jesus. One and yet three. This three-in-oneness understanding of God emerged in the several hundred years after Jesus' resurrection. People began to call this concept the Trinity. The word trinity is not found anywhere in the Bible. Jesus didn't use the word, and the writers of the rest of the Bible didn't use the word. But over time this belief, this understanding, this doctrine, has become central to how followers of Jesus have understood who God is. It is a spring, and people jumped for thousands of years without it. It was added later. We can take it out and examine it. Discuss it, probe it, question it. It flexes, and it stretches. In fact, its stretch and flex are what make it so effective. It is firmly attached to the frame and the mat, yet it has room to move. And it has brought a fuller, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God" (22).
"[For some, faith is] a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines ...is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger.
"What if ...the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the follwers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that wre hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? What if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first centruy being 'born of a virgin' also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? What if that spring was seriously questioned? ...Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? ...Does the whole thing fall apart?
"I affirm the historic Christian faith, which includes the virgin birth and the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible and much more. I'm a part of it, and I want to pass it on to th enext generation. I believe that God created everything and that Jesus is Lord and that God has plans to restore everything.
"But if the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn't strong in the first place, was it?
This is because a brick is fixed in size. It can't flex or change size, because if it does, then it can't fit into the wall. What happens then is that the wall becomes the sum total of the beliefs, and God becomes as big as the wall. but God is begger than any wall. God is begger than any religion. God is begger than any worldview. God is bigger that the Christian faith" (26-27).
Afterall, this God is the 'I AM.'
Personally, I like to think of doctrine as Hamburger Helper, but never as the hamburger itself.
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