Setting the Stage

Allow me to share with you three passages of Scripture which I find astounding: The Creation account in Genesis 1-2, the “I AM” statement in Exodus 3, and John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

These three passages of Scripture fascinate me because they seem misplaced. They shouldn’t be there. A fisherman with simplistic Greek, attempting to maintain a religion among slaves and Jewish exiles, should not have spoken of the Logos. And an itinerant Jewish rabbi by the name of Jesus, shouldn’t have said anything like, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Exodus 3 is shocking as well. “I AM the I AM” is perhaps the most philosophically sublime statement in history, and it comes to us in a narrative about an exiled member of the Egyptian royal family working as a shepherd for the priest of Midan talking to a burning bush in the desert. Plato refers to God as “the Being,” which is a more than responsible translation of the Hebrew and identical to the Septuagint’s translation and Revelation 1:8. And if you don’t find it shocking, read a bit of Heidegger as he tries to work around Being-in-itself.

And then we have the creation account; it’s orderly and grounded on this planet and in history. Our current science agrees with the creation account that all life on this planet came from this planet. Human beings and apes and bacteria were all made out of the same stuff. And when it is compared to the Babylon creation myth, where rain is the spit of a god and the earth is the carcass of a god, the Genesis account is an elegant and rational narrative, even to a degree scientific.

None of these passages of Scripture ought to be there. The creation story is too elegant and too reasonable. Plato and the Hebrews should not agree on the existence of a God who is the foundation of being. And John and Jesus should never have taught about the Logos and a human being who called himself the “I Am.” But there they are. Oddly anachronistic statements about this God that Christians worship.

When human beings make up a god, he, she, or it is rather like us. And so Muhammad’s god informed his followers not to bug the prophet during supper (33:53). The Greek gods bickered, raped, battled, and got drunk just like the Greeks. And Spinoza and Einstein’s god wasn’t demanding, yet provided sufficient explanatory power for the order of the universe. But the God of the Bible isn’t like us. He is the Other, the foundation of being He is God.

And this is part of the reason why I have entitled my blog “Faith seeking understanding.” The knowledge of God unfolds; it is not a cultural accretion. His necessity can be discovered by the philosophers, but his person is only revealed through his word. The Christian experience does not begin with an exhaustive understanding, but with a belief in the God who creates the universe from nothing, who is the foundation of being, and who speaks to humanity through His Son Jesus Christ.

John Owen has put it well: “Imagination creates its own object; faith finds it prepared beforehand.” The Christian thinker is not attempting to make stuff up, but to understand what has been revealed. And we must attempt this with fallen, finite, free, and fallible minds. Our finitude before an infinite Being requires the use of the imagination as a tool of analysis—testing, probing, and thinking together in the community of faith with abject humility. Because our minds our fallen, we must seek illumination from this great God and his revelation. Because we are fallible, we must come to conclusions with modesty, worship, and wonder, and because we are fallen and free, we must struggle against sin.

When a Christian begins the theological task with the posture of “I will believe what I understand,” they have begun the descent into non-Christian thought, because they have become the standard of judgment rather than God and his revelation of himself. As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6). The faith begins with believing in the God who has spoken and who is good. Understanding is the way that we deepen our appreciation and worship of our God.

The purpose of this blog is to think together by stepping out of the bedlam of the moment and to reason about texts and nature carefully. Our partners are the Lord who speaks through his word and world, the church of all ages, and the critics. And my hope is that by thinking carefully, assisted by God, the godly, the ungodly, and the cosmos, that we will be better able to worship the God who is as he is.

And so, I extend the invitation of a friend, “Come now, let us reason together.” Unlike the person who first made that offer, I will be mistaken, even sometimes stupid, often prideful, but let’s speak of the important things and make a bold attempt to understand the truth of things. And, as you read my attempts, remember the plea of Horace, “If you know something better than these precepts, pass it on, my good fellow. If not join me in following these.”

In Christ,

Pastor Shane Walker