God is compassionate and vulnerable to us (any other concept of God is unbiblical)

[The Great Open Dance]

Jesus reveals that Abba is a personal God who loves us. For Jesus, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) is a person who cares about us as persons, and this love is what really matters. God offers no promise that life will be easy, but an absolute promise that God will be with us in all things. Hence, there is nothing to fear, for nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:31–39).

Some people reject the concept of a personal God as trivial. Certainly, it can become so. The personal God can become like Santa Claus, the gift giver who plays favorites. For those who place a high premium on social order, God can become lawgiver, police officer, prosecutor, judge, and jailer all in one, ensuring punishment of those we deem deserving. For the bigoted, God becomes a projection screen onto which we cast our biases, assigning them to God in a covert act of self-deification. For the tribal, those who bitterly demarcate an in-group and out-group, God hates who we hate and loves who we love.

But the capacity for a concept, such as that of a personal God, to be abused does not warrant its dismissal. Human cleverness can always turn good into evil. The majority can use democracy to oppress a minority, but that abuse incriminates the majority, not democracy itself. Political power uses beauty, in the form of propaganda and pageantry, to legitimate its rule, but that abuse incriminates power, not beauty. Prosperity preachers apprentice God to their greed, but that abuse incriminates the preacher, not God.

In such a crafty world, impersonal notions of God as first cause, ultimate reality, truth, or The One may seem more attractive than any analogy to our mercenary humanity. But the cost of such abstraction is too high. These concepts overlook the blessing of personality, the crowning achievement of the cosmos. Billions of years of cosmological evolution have produced us—thinking, feeling, conscious beings with agency who not only exist, but celebrate our existence. We are the universe coming to awareness of itself, and we exult in that awareness.

Science recognizes the source of this process as the physical laws governing the universe (or multiverse). But what is the source of those laws? Could it be a joyful community of persons who wish to produce joyful communities of persons? Faith trusts that our personal God invites us into the fullness of personality by means of a person-creating universe.

Jesus reveals that the personal God is a compassionate God. According to Jesus, Abba our Parent is compassionate. In the story of the prodigal son, the father runs to welcome the prodigal home, because he was filled with compassion (Greek: esplanchnisthē . Jesus himself, as a manifestation of God, displays the same care and concern for those he meets. When he sees the crowd of weary outcasts waiting to hear him preach, he is filled with compassion (Matt 9:36; Greek: esplanchnisthē . In another instance, noting the hunger of the crowd and their need for food, Jesus states, “I am moved with compassion” (Matthew 15:32; Greek: splagchnizomai).

The Greek word for compassion derives from splagchnon, which means bowels or gut. Compassion is not some abstract ethical demand; compassion is something you feel in your “heart” (which is a frequent translation of splagchnon into English).

For Jesus, our compassionate Parent is a unifying symbol. Following Jürgen Moltmann, we can contrast it with the image of lord. The lord is distinct from the servant, above the servant, of a different class and family from the servant. But a good Parent unites their children into one family. The lord may care for his servants but does not concern himself with the ups and downs of their daily lives, while Jesus’s Parent is emotionally vulnerable and unconditionally available. The lord’s estate is a hierarchy, but the family is a unit. Hence, the lord separates, but the Parent unites. Thus, in describing God as Parent, as both Mother and Father, Jesus is inviting his followers to become one household.

Given the omni-gendered Hebraic concept of God, and the Christian interpretation of Jesus as the Child of God, we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus uses explicitly feminine metaphors for God, such as the story of the woman with the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10), in which the woman symbolizes God in her desire for reunion with the wayward. Jesus refers to himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood under her wings (Luke 13:34).

Jesus reveals the divine vulnerability. A good mother or father is emotionally vulnerable to their children, even the most wayward. The word vulnerable derives from the Lain vulnus, which means “wound.” In the incarnation, God risks woundedness.

We have already argued that the incarnation was planned from the beginning, prior to history, as a divine celebration and ratification of creaturely existence. But we have also noted the freedom that God grants us, freedom for kindness and freedom for cruelty. God’s perfect openness allows God to feel more deeply than we do, to participate fully in the life-producing contrasts of pain and pleasure, grief and celebration, sorrow and joy. Given this capacity, our cruelty must have tempted God to abandon the plan, to remain in the safety of heaven. But God has also chosen to be ḥesed, loving faithfulness, and ḥesed always fulfills its promises. So God draws close to us, close enough to be killed.

Infant Jesus reveals our inhospitality to divine vulnerability. He was not allowed to be born in his hometown; empire forced his parents to Bethlehem. Once there, he was not allowed to be born in a house; social strictures forced them into a barn. Once born, there was no crib for him to sleep in, so they laid him in a feeding trough. Then he was forced to flee from his homeland into Egypt, to escape the murderous soldiers of a mad king. The rejection of God in the birth narrative only foreshadows the rejection of God in the crucifixion, yet still God comes, revealing the danger that God hazards for us.

If God is to celebrate creation, then God must do so unconditionally. God must become fully human, open to the prodigious expanse of events, sensations, emotions, and thoughts that God loves into being. God, having chosen to amplify joy through suffering and pleasure through pain, affirms this decision by subjecting divinity to the very contrasts that divinity created. God must delight, and God must sorrow.

Crucially, the Hebrew Scriptures testify to Emmanuel, “God with us” (Isaiah 7:8; 8 ). The incarnation of God in Christ is the flawless consequence of this sentiment. Jesus acknowledges our exposure to the soaring and searing spectrum of experience that God sustains by subjecting himself to the same range of events and their resultant passions. Entirely open to the ebb and flow of earthly life, Jesus will turn water into wine at a wedding (John 2:1–11) and weep over the death of a friend (John 11:35). He participates fully, he commends full participation to his followers, and he laments the guardedness of his contemporaries: “We piped you a tune, but you wouldn’t dance. We sang you a dirge, but you wouldn’t mourn” (Matthew 11:17). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 127-129)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

Jurgen Moltmann. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

[Karadeniz]

1. People need to unravel the prodigal son. The father figure never helps his son.

The legion of demons who are thrown into swine and drown? Jesus doesn't forgive all those sins. He puts them through the god system for dealing with sin, represented by water and swine. One has to qualify for divine love by successfully participating in the god system. The god system doesn't run on love and forgiveness. It runs on perfect justice. Jesus gives us the route to complete the justice system, extending love and kindness to others. Jesus doesn't describe either him or god as coming to the rescue. We have a divine spark, the soul. Every parable I can think of deals with the soul's nature and its role in the god system.