God Language
One of my professors, Dr. Hal Knight helpfully boiled the issue down – “It is contentious because it is important.”
Much of the commentary I’ve read on language for God and names for God in liturgy is from a theological perspective. Not a pastoral perspective. The “how” for this specific congregation and individual isn’t there. I think the most important aspect missing in these discussions is personal experiences in the presence and works of God.
Theologians have written on so many details and facets of this millennia-long discussion.
What is a metaphor?
Does the metaphor define God, or does the very fact that God is included in the metaphor undefine the thing being metaphorical?
God is our Father in Heaven. So now all fathers on earth are redefined according to this standard but are never comparable. Is literalism in thinking of God as Father – like our “dads” and only in that model idolatry?
Is referring to “Father” in liturgy always appropriate because it is shorthand for longer biblical and narrative titles: Creator – Creator of Heaven and Earth, Lord – Lord of Life, Prince of Peace, Father – Jesus Christ’s Father in Heaven – Everlasting Father?
Is limiting our liturgy to God the Father as creator, Jesus as the Son redeemer, and the Holy Spirit as presence, eliminating the relationship between the three, the Economic Trinity? (The Economic Trinity is the relationship among the three within the Godhead: the Father’s presence in redemption, Jesus' presence in the Spirit’s works, and the Spirit’s role in creation.)
Does “tinkering” with names, images, and metaphors for God distort God’s meaning in scripture and lead us away from the meaning?
Does changing the names and characters in a story but retaining the same narrative of redemption remain true to the Gospel?
The lion the Witch and the wardrobe?
Jesus Sutras?
Keltic art books and texts?
What about Eastern Orthodox Icons?
Theologians, all have an answer and exactly zero of them will be right for each individual.
Much of what I’ve learned about wisdom, is testing the wisdom, defined here as a collection of experiences synthesized into a prescriptive common experience, that you test against your own personal experience – the testing of this type of wisdom will often lead to the continuation of what has been done before – sometimes, like Job, we need to draw wisdom from other sources – Jobs friends imparted wisdom, which Job tested against the nature of God that he knew from his experiences with God. Job found the wisdom of his friends lacking in his experience. Job observed the difference between his experience, and the wisdom imparted by his friends, and employed nuance in the Spirit to discern where God was in his situation. Job was pastoral in this. Wisdom is tradition – a collection of experiences, we test against our own. Job said, “well, that’s not my experience.”
I think the most pastoral, evangelical, and theologically sound way to name God and expand names and images for God is to share your experiences in seeing God differently with expansive language and images.
I recently learned that our commonly known John 3:16 – begotten and born here could either be used and as someone who has given birth, the birth language lands differently. I see the works of God and the miracle of Jesus embodied as a human man here very differently. The complete humility, pain, physical work, spiritual division, exhaustion, and sheer joy that God must have felt betting God from God, light from light, true God from true God via the birth of the eternally birthed Jesus, is much more personal to me using that one change in language.
When I related my experiences with my children, True God from True God, embodied in the same infant experience on Mary’s chest as my tiny, vulnerable, completely reliant, slick, and slimy, beautiful, perfect children on my chest.
Thinking of God as birthing, not begetting, triggered by my own personal experiences, bloomed a completely different much more embodied vision of Christ. My experience tells me that love that is birthed is the same love that makes one willing to break their body for their children in birth and for Christ in our re-birth.
Christ who was so human but still begotten before and involved in creation, who was so willing to come and BE the Word, the Light of the World, the very presence of God on Earth, in human form, and not just to be so humbled to be in re-creation with Mary in birth but to submit to the very human, un-God containing forces of time and death.
All for the purpose of showing how, we as humans, in communion with God, by God’s grace and redemption and sheer selflessness in salvation can also conquer death. Jesus as the very human, born of a woman, went through puberty, and got man-splained by his spiritual leaders. Because Jesus was Fully human and Fully divine, we as fully human, and divine in our communion with God can too.
Which of those was more compelling?
The verse alone “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whoever believeth in him will not perish but have everlasting life” or the passion and vulnerability that I put in evangelically telling why that verse is important to me?
The why is important to, is the why it will be important to our message. There are ways to maintain liturgy language and still paint ungendered images of God. The Bible does it. We need to as well.
To me the solution of how to both maintain the integrity of the scriptural portrayal of God, while keeping language and images relevant and inclusive and applicable is personal. Through our personal experiences with seeing God.
Feeling God.
Knowing God.
It requires a lot more vulnerability as Christ demonstrated in full humanity.
Our human stories are the point. Our experiences with God are the point. How we see God in the scriptures, in the Gospel, and in our lives is the Gospel. Our lives in Christ and sharing those is the whole point.
Want to use only Father, Son, Holy Spirit language, ok … but that’s not my experience of God.
Would you like to hear about how I have experienced God?
