“You believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe-and shudder.” James 2:19. So, demons believe and they shudder, that played large in our sermon this past Sunday.
But there is an even more powerful bit in that verse. “You believe God is one…” James was pressing on the understanding of God.
This is a complicated bit for Christianity. Perhaps our largest presuppositional
differences with our fellow religious siblings of Abraham, Islam and Judaism,
is “One God” versus “God is One”. It is
a new thing for James. He is writing to
the twelve tribes of Israel in the Diaspora, those Jews dispersed beyond the Promised
Land. And he is pushing the accepted
boundaries of how to understand God.
If I were going to attempt a scholarly treatise, I might say
something like this is ‘a Theological consideration of the proto-Trinitarian
understand of the Christian God.’ Almost
sprains my brain to say that out loud.
Well, a theological consideration, that is code to tell us that in this moment,
we are thinking about our faith, considering something about our faith.
I am particularly proud of “proto-Trinitarian”. Our understanding of God is well established
in the Nicene and the Apostle’s Creeds, God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Spirit. We draw that
understanding as we think through how our God reveals Godself to us in the
Bible. And I say the Christian God,
because this consideration is different from how I understand God to be understood
in Judaism.
Maybe this is the place where Judaism and Christianity broke
ranks. We know that the church began among
the Jews. That it spread to Gentile
believers. I have always thought of that
as the reason for the breaking point, that the Gentile ‘wing’ of the church became
far larger than the Jewish ‘wing’, that in the opening up of the traditional
laws of Moses, things became untenable between the two communities.
Maybe this is the point of breakage. A fancy title like “proto-Trinitarian” simply
means “before Trinitarian”. Before there
was a full development of the theology of, the thinking about God in God’s
revealed form, that we understand as “Trinity”, three-in-one. Maybe what James is getting at in this understanding
that “God is one” is the expanded revelation of God, from only God the Father,
to God the Father and God the Son. This
is not to dismiss the person or importance of the Holy Spirit, but to
understand how Christianity grew away from Judaism, in stages.
Which connects us to where our preaching comes from this
month, from the Gospel according to John.
We, okay-I, Bible nerd, am going to have a lot of fun with origin stories
about the Gospels. John “versus” the Synoptics,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Yes, I will
elaborate on that in the future. But I
want to look particularly at the opening of the Gospel of John, the ‘creation
story’ of the New Testament.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the
beginning with God. All things came into
being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and
the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1: 1-5)
The Word is Jesus.
Jesus was in the beginning. Jesus
was with God. Jesus was God. Jesus was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through
Jesus. And it goes on from there. The gospel writer is not laying out a
specified “Duality” of God (first God is two and then three-when we add the
Holy Spirit in John 14). That kind of
organizational thinking comes later.
No, what is happening here, what James is pushing on, is the
expanded understanding of God. Jesus the
Messiah? That works in the theology of
the Old Testament-how the Old Testament presents its thinking about God. Son of David works. Even Son of God, although that is skating
near the edges of a Unity understanding of God (JUST God the Father).
But Jesus was God.
That is the gauntlet thrown down.
That is the dividing wall between Christianity and what came
before. This is what we believe the Old
Testament points toward but it is only here where it becomes such a bold statement
of intent.
The other gospels have their own introductions to set Jesus
in context. The most explicit introduction
to set things up comes in Luke. He is
writing to someone named Theophilus to give them the rundown on this new thing
that is happening. Luke is Book 1, Acts
is Book 2. Matthew sets the context by
laying down Jesus’ lineage, his genealogy back to Abraham. Mark begins where the narrative portion of
John begins, at the baptism of John.
But John backs it up.
Takes his cue from Genesis. In
the beginning… The first chapters of Genesis
are often seen as a Divine Prologue, huge displays of God’s power, people lived
for centuries, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all coming off the Creation. The human story begins with Abraham. John sets up his Divine Prologue in 6
verses. This is what we will find in his
Gospel. The human story begins with John the Baptist (ANOTHER John-and ANOTHER post). Jesus was, is, and ever shall be
God.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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