the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the faithful "must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically."
5. Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Colorado Springs: Shaw, 2001), 28, speaks of "the faithfulness of doubt," quoting Unamuno: "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God himself."
6. Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 37. Jaroslav Pelikan (Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition [New Haven: Yale, 2003], 65) writes, "When in the interest of the authenticity of the 'experience of Christ as my personal Savior' . . . faith is drained of its doctrinal content, neither the personal Christian experience nor its authenticity can long endure."
7. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 1995), 5.
8. Ibid., 44.
9. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 8.
10. Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (London: SCM, 1991), 4, refers to Cyril of Jerusalem, who said, "Since all cannot read the scriptures, some being hindered from knowing them by lack of education, and others by want of leisure, we comprise the whole doctrine of the Bible in a few lines."
11. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper, 1959), 23.
12. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 9.
13. Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale, 2003), xiii.
14. Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 1991), xiii.
15. Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostles' Creed in Light of Today's Questions (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2000), 10.
16. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, 7.
17. Pelikan, Credo, 187, a comment recorded at the fifth ecumenical council at Constantinople in the sixth century.
18. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 4 vols. (books and CD-rom) (New Haven: Yale, 2003).
19. Pelikan, Credo, 7.
20. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 38f.
C h a p t e r T w o
GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY
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LESSON 5
I BELIEVE IN GOD
I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 9:24)
I wish I could devise the ultimate, compelling proof that God exists. Belief in God has always been hard, but we live in especially perilous times, as cynicism is in cahoots with apathy, with godlessness sprayed all over our culture. I have rational proofs in mind, but you can never compel another person mentally to believe, because belief is not merely mental. When we profess, "I believe in God," we cannot mean simply, "I think a supreme being exists," or even, "I have spiritual feelings in me." We mean something more all-embracing: we mean, "I commit myself to God."
In Old Testament times, if you asked someone on the street, "How many gods are there?" she would have answered, "Well, plenty, but we serve only one." Plenty of gods clamor for our attention, but what then do we mean by "god"? Martin Luther suggested that "whatever your heart clings to is really your god." To what do you cling? What ultimately matters to you? What motivates you? What can ruin your day? The question is: are you attached to something that is big enough to be God? or are you hooked on a mere pretender, or what in Bible times they called an "idol"?
Idols abound; John Calvin suggested that the human heart is a factory of idols. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that "there is so much frustration because we have relied on gods rather than God. We have genuflected before the god of pleasure only to discover thrills play out and are short-lived. We have bowed before the god of money only to learn there are such things as love and friendship that money can't buy."1 The false gods in our crazed culture peddle their wares, promising us the moon, but leaving us hollow, luring us (like the sirens of mythology) into shipwreck.
In the Bible, the one true God brooks no competition; God is a "jealous" God, not because God is small-minded and petty, but because God's love for us is so immense that God cannot stand idly by while we squander ourselves on what is a mere idol, on what will only chew away at whatever is good in the soul and leave us as superficial people with pointless lives. Belief in God excludes other loyalties. To believe is to make a choice, a real-life choice, about our priorities and about where we invest our time, our energy, our money, our heart. Lash zeroed in on this issue: "Christianity is an educational project, in which we may learn, however slowly . . . some freedom from the destructive bondage which the worship of any creature, however large or powerful, beautiful or terrifying, interesting or important, brings."2
How might we prove God's existence? No greater proof could be advanced than the changed lives of those who say they believe in God. Many disbelieve in God precisely because they look at believers and see nothing but a mirror image of the world that cares nothing for God. "I believe in God" is subversive, countercultural, life-changing. Because of God, I am different, you are different, we are different. Perhaps the problem today is not that people cannot mentally believe in God. Perhaps, instead, they would prefer to live without God. The problem isn't a lack of belief, but an unwillingness for our lives to be changed.
But then, our resistance to change is the most self-destructive stupidity of which we are capable, for the God who pleads for our belief, for our hearts, is the God who promises us the moon, but then gives us the stars, the God who is "the Father Almighty," the subject of our next lesson.
LESSON 6
. . . THE FATHER ALMIGHTY (PART 1)
When you pray, say "Our Father." (Matthew 6:9, AP)
By definition, God must be all-mighty, and the Bible goes to great lengths to persuade us never to underestimate the omnipotence of God. "For with God nothing will be impossible" (Luke 1:37). Yet, omnipotence can feel impersonal, maybe even intimidating; before raw power, we cower. "Omnipotence can be feared, but never loved" (Jürgen Moltmann).3 God could not bear to be known as merely "Almighty," so God decided, "I will be their Father." We believe in God "the Father Almighty."
Of course, many modern people question how a good God could be all-mighty, with all the agonized suffering that goes on. We will not dodge these questions, but we will need to wait until chapters 6 through 8 to think through where exactly God turns up in the face of suffering.
Many modern people question calling
