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Learning My Name

Feb 10th 2009

By: tom cottar

5 comments

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Several months ago, through one of my most trusted and most ragamuffin Pirate Monks, I met author/speaker Pete Gall for some Rudy’s BBQ and soul baring. He very generously gave me a copy of his book Beautiful Idol–which I gobbled up (and have since given out several copies to friends). If you haven’t read it, you can read my reviews and thoughts…and get your very own.

A week or so ago, Pete Gall sent me some audio files to his forthcoming book Learning My Name. As I sat listening, I remembered what I fell in love with in Idol. It’s beautifully dirty and honest. It struggles and exposes. As Gall presents himself in Learning My Name, I secretly wonder if he’s been spying on me. Stalking my thoughts. Reading my mail.

In the preface, after quoting from Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Gall says:

Most days, I’m not searching for an omnipotent God. I don’t need ‘all-powerful’. Just a little potent…say ‘medium powerful’ will do. …just a little heavenly chiropractic care… But most days, even with my lowered expectations, He isn’t showing up to fix me like I want him to.

Ashamedly, that’s me.

I don’t expect or search for a truly omnipotent God like I should. Just a God that’s moderately powerful enough for my mundane, commonplace issues of my own egocentric humanity. Just an adjustment here and there. Nothing major really, thanks. I show up for a little spinal adjustment, a good massage, and some muzak. Nevermind the busted femur pierced through my leg and the fact that I’m bleeding out. (Truth be told, I probably don’t even know where my real injuries are…)

So, be on the lookout for Learning My Name. And if you get the offer to chow down some Rudy’s with Gall (or any of the Pirate Monks, for that matter), be careful. You might unknowingly tap into a better opiate: grace with a shot of brotherhood.

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- michaelmcminn
  
  February 10th, 2009 at 11:31
  
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  Wow, this floored me. We make God so little, so small and impotent, rather than Omnipotent when we make him in our image instead of letting him make us into his.
  
  I suck and maybe that is why my little, impotent god sucks too.
  
  So right about not “knowing where my real injuries are…” We turn a blind eye to the big stuff in fear that it will hurt to much to let God actually do something about it. Or be too big a blow to my ego to think that God wants to change something about me that I actually thought was good, right, cool, noble, heroic, etc when really is just a mask for sin, wretchedness, weakness, or something else.
  
  I just want a god powerful enough to fix the easy stuff, the stuff I don’t like about myself which may actually be the thing God wants to use most in my life for Him.
- Jimmie W Kersh
  
  February 13th, 2009 at 14:19
  
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  Marx was right philosophically about our wanting of a God. Our white God fits into our little bibles which fit under our arms which are mostly for show and never for reading or expounding upon.
  
  How often do we dumb down believers or even ourselves with our fairy tale God and His nice little stories. We serve a “single serving” God apparently. A single verse here and a single verse there and that is all we want from Him for as long as we can stay away from Him.
  
  Watching my Mother In Law die one day at a time has given me such a deeper appreciation for who God is. He is the God who created the universe. He is the God who loves me so much He brutalized and destroyed and killed His only Son so He could adopt me as a Son. He loves me so much that He pursues me to love me while I am the most vile of sinners.
  
  Our love should be so strong that the world wants to know why we love and what is our basis for love. Our honesty and integrity should be so strong that people will trust us to give them honest answers to lifes problems.
  
  But we still strive to have a limp wristed, emasculated God who is powerless in every setting because we do not want that kind of God in controll of our lives. We either hate an all powerful God or we despise and all powerful God because He is all powerful. Look at our churches, and how small we make God. He fits into our hour long services whether He wants more or not. He fits into 3 points and a poem and some God is Love, Kumbaya mish mash songs.
  
  I want to serve the God of Elijah who burned up the offering. I want to serve the God who was the Creator of the Universe. I am sick and tired of serving an emasulated God.
- scott
  
  February 14th, 2009 at 21:10
  
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  He is the God who loves me so much He brutalized and destroyed and killed His only Son so He could adopt me as a Son.
  
  It’s fair to say that I would sooner offer bloody sacrifice to Tezcatlipoca than worship such a god as the one described in that sentence.
  
  Fortunately, that god is a fairly recent perversion and bears no resemblance to the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and recorded in Holy Scripture.
- tom cottar
  
  February 16th, 2009 at 14:34
  
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  Mkay…I’ll bite.
  
  Would you unpack that for us? To say there’s “no resemblance” in Scripture to a god who brutalized/killed his own son for the sake of our adoption/ingrafting into the Kingdom seems like a bit of a leap if I’m reading it correctly.
  
  Scripture clearly says it pleased Abba to send Jesus to the earth to be wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53), to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). And that His brutal death (and subsequent resurrection) was the vehicle for our atonement. (Heb. 9:22). As a result, it is only via the vehicle of Christ that I we are able to be called ‘Sons of God’ (John 1:12).
  
  guess i need some expansion of your comment..maybe I’m missing it.
- scott
  
  February 17th, 2009 at 07:21
  
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  OK. Since you kindly provided some passages framing the thought, I’ll start with them.
  
  First, by ascribing the experience of the Son on the Cross to the Father in the terms Jimmie used and which I suppose you are defending, you are making exactly the mistake implied in Isaiah 53:4. (I do think the NCV gets some of the flavor right. The English translation of the Septuagint reads: He bears our sins and suffers for us, yet we considered Him to be in pain, suffering, and ill-treatment.) Whichever one you prefer the sense is clear to me. If you look on the Cross and see God causing the suffering, you are making the mistake of those who don’t understand in Isaiah 53.
  
  Next, I find it strange that you would inject Mark 10:45 into the discussion. (Of course, you really have to go back to at least verse 35 to get the sense of what Jesus is actually saying, but that’s a discussion for another post.) Certainly Jesus was a ransom for ‘many’ (almost certainly used in the Jewish sense meaning ‘all’). But to whom or to what was the ransom paid? To God? We were in bondage to an angry God who required a ransom in order to free us?
  
  I think not! We were in bondage to death. The ransom was paid to the powers and ultimately to death itself in order to give us life. C.S. Lewis got this one exactly right. But then, he would have. There’s not much evidence that he read the Greek fathers extensively. His specialty was medieval and later. But he did read and love Athanasius. And that image of ransom in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes straight from Athanasius. That image also gets it more right than not. It is not the Emperor killing Aslan on the table. It’s the White Witch.
  
  So. To whom or what do you believe this ransom was being paid? Do you believe Jesus was our Promotheus, stealing fire from the distant and angry God and suffering punishment from that God on our behalf?
  
  I don’t grasp your intended usage of the passage in Hebrews at all. The larger passage (9:15-23) is contrasting Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, with the final atoning work of Christ. The word translated ‘covenant’ or ‘testament’ in the passage is intriguing because it carries the meaning of both. However, 21-23 is explaining why the earthly temple ritual was established the way it was. Hebrews 9:27-28 would seem to be more appropriate for this discussion. The issue then is our death. And to resolve it, Christ was offered once for the sins of many (again, should probably be understood in the Jewish sense of all). And as Scripture says repeatedly, he offered himself. None could have forced him.
  
  There’s an entirely different rabbit trail to chase in John’s prologue, but Christ is not a ‘vehicle’. ‘Receiving’ and ‘believing in his name’ are ideas worth unpacking, but nothing I said denied the central idea of theosis in our adoption. I did intend to say that I wouldn’t care to be adopted by the god depicted in that sentence.
  
  And I certainly meant it. Although Steve Chalke intended the phrase that has garnered him so much attention as a caricature in order to make a point that has largely been lost in the ensuing discussion, sentences like the one against which I reacted do, in fact, reduce the Cross to an act of divine child abuse.
  
  The issue reaches very deep. Let’s start where we must start. One fundamental issue I have with the most popular late-developing ideas about the atonement is that they all ascribe a problem to God that God must solve. I’ve studied a lot about medieval thought. I see where Anselm garnered his ideas about honor and God’s infinite honor. The flaw in Anselm’s theory, though, is that God has never experienced his honor being besmirched as a problem. What is Hosea but a type of Yahweh? Good Lord, what is the Incarnation? God doesn’t require any satisfaction. If you make that statement, you are essentially ascribing to God a problem originating from external forces. God is totally self-sufficient. And from the way he acts, he seems to have no interest in protecting his ‘honor’.
  
  The later concept is even more pernicious in my view. It ascribes to God a problem with forgiveness. That’s the deep flaw in specifically the view of penal substitution shaped primarily by the modern perspective of Natural Law. It creates a god who must be paid and cannot forgive without payment. Bah. Again, just as we see a God in Scripture generally unconcerned about his honor and acting in ways that in the ancient world were considered ‘shameful’ up to death on a cross, so we see a God overflowing with forgiveness.
  
  If all we needed was forgiveness, our debt erased, there would have been no need for the Cross. God would have just forgiven us. He has no problem forgiving. The problem is that we have never primarily needed forgiveness. We need life. And life can only be found in the life of the Triune God. We needed to have our nature reunited with the nature of God. That’s what the Incarnation does.
  
  That’s one serious flaw in both perspectives. They ascribe problems to God that God simply does not have and cannot have. If anything, the other central flaw is even worse.
  
  Because God has a problem that must be resolved in these theories, they set the Son and the Father in a form of opposition to each other. The Son on the Cross satisfies the Father’s honor. Or, as the sentence against which I reacted puts it, the Father brutalizes the Son in order to extract payment for the debt he’s owed. (Note that this theory is all about payment, not about forgiveness.)
  
  Don’t you see what you have done in both instances? You have shattered the triunity of God. You now have the Trinity (or at least the Father and the Son) at opposing ends of the work of the Cross. If that doesn’t tread dangerously close to the ultimate Christian heresy, I don’t know what does. And it’s so untrue. We see revealed in the explicit theopanies at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration, the Triune nature of the Incarnation. But the entire Incarnation was Triune. Yes, there was a single human nature and will in the man Jesus of Nazareth. And it is that singular human nature and will which is tempted and which stays aligned always with the divine will. But that human nature and will is joined to the divine nature and will. Isn’t that the whole point? And the divine nature and will, though the person of the eternally begotten Son, is fundamentally and unbreakably triune in perfect perichoresis.
  
  So there is no opposition on the Cross. The man Jesus submits to the powers who could never touch him otherwise and is brutalized and executed by them. But in his divine nature, the work of the Cross is the work of the Trinity. Through his death and resurrection, the undivided and indivisible Triune God enters into death through the human nature of Jesus and destroys utterly the power of death. There is no God doing anything to Jesus on the Cross as if God could somehow be divided and separated. It is God suffering and dying on that Cross. It is God taking our place and delivering us from the powers, especially the powers of sin and death in the only way we could truly be delivered. For after all, there is only one source of life.
  
  Moreover, with the ‘good news’ reduced to such utterly repellent statements like the one I quoted, I understand perfectly why Christianity is collapsing in the West. I’m not of an atheistic bent myself, but no god is preferable to that god. Why in the world would anyone want to worship, much less love a god like the one described in that sentence? Every caricature of Christianity I’ve ever heard springs to life in that sentence. If I actually believed that was the God made known in Jesus of Nazareth, I would certainly go elsewhere myself. Almost any god (or no god) is preferable to that one.
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