Sav on Saturday

I'm going to try to explain a little more about the book “A History of God” this week. Last week was just crazy because I was in Wisconsin and had poor internet service and no time! But now I'm back in Michigan. In fact, my cousins from Tennessee have been visiting this week. They are going back home on Sunday. Then, my mom and I are going to a little bed and breakfast (probably in Toledo) Monday and Tuesday night to have some mother-daughter time. :) Work is going well. I love it! I'm going to miss working when school starts. I'm a little crazy in that regard! Oh, - and I just sold my first Kobo e-Reader today!!!!! (which are way better than Kindles or Nooks, just ask me why :P )

Anyways, so I'm half way through my huge book, and it's going rather slowly just because each sentence has so much information packed into it. I found the chapter on the Christian trinity to be especially fascinating. To make things short, the idea of the trinity was not original to the Christian movement. Two different camps were in conflict on whether Jesus was God by nature or divine by selection. The first went with the idea of original sin that humans need divine intervention to be saved. The second went with the more optimistic view that humans can attain divinity and perfection through obedience to God.

The Greek church solved this tension with a rather brilliant theological proposal. They made a distinction between God's essence and God's manifestations. We see God as three in one, but God's eternal essence is in unity. There is one divine self-consciousness, but when God lets humans glimpse him, he has three different faces.

In contrast with Eastern Christianity (Greek), the West has tended to take the Trinity very literally. The original purpose of the trinity was to understand how Jesus could be divine and how to describe the Holy Spirit. It was not meant to be a literal description of God, rather it was meant to help us retain a sense of the mystery and incomprehensibility surrounding God. The idea of the trinity was hard to understand on purpose! The Greek Christians believed strongly that one cannot describe God or theology, and any attempts to do so are purely symbolic and meant to instill awe in the worshippers.

In fact, throughout Christian history, people have viewed God in different lights. Some viewed God as personal, some as impersonal. Some saw God as highly involved in human life, others saw God as too high above to notice humans. Some saw God as the ground of all being, some saw God as a supernatural being himself. Some believe God can be described, many believe that to try to describe God will only cause us to create a God in our own image. Anthropomorphism is a very real threat. I love finding out that there have been many diverse views held by Christians. It is comforting to know that what one group defines as heresy, another defines as truth. There has never been a unified Christianity, nor will there ever be one.

Additionally, some (religious philosophers) believed that God could be understood and proven to exist rationally through logic exercises. Others, the mystics, believed that while logic was important, the religious experience was more central to the person's development. They saw God as quite beyond our knowledge, and thus only a transcendental kind of experience can connect us with the divine. I think a balance of both viewpoints is important. We should be able to ask questions and think logically, but we should also realize that few answers exist and that God is beyond our comprehension. I think understanding this creates a healthy tension.