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September 12, 2004
We Believe in One God
We Believe in One God
Exodus 20: 1-5 / Hebrews 11: 4-6
September 12th, 2004
This morning you all said together the Nicene Creed. For some of you it was the first time. Those of you who have attended Christmas morning worship here, you remember saying it. But few of us have dug into those carefully crafted words that express the core of our belief system.
The opening words of the Nicene Creed are, “We believe in one God.” Today to say that must seem to many people hardly exceptional. I suppose we think of the two options as atheism or theism; belief in one God or believing there is no god. Who thinks of many gods in the modern world?
Many scientists today think belief in God is nothing more than refusing to let go of an ancient outlook. Science has demonstrated that all there is, is all there is, after all. The more humble or indecisive sort say, “I don’t know,” and we call them agnostics.
Many others today think not so much in terms of one God as in terms of “spirituality.” Spirituality is a response to the feeling that there is something more than what we see. Folk I know interested in “spirituality” meditate rather than worship. Meditation is a discipline of concentrating on something other than the material world, something inside. It results in an odd sort of radical individualism, an “ism” of the self.
Some spirituality fastens on feminine images of what is beyond. Back in 1993, several of the mainline Protestant denominations Re-imagined God in terms of this feminine principle. There was a big conference up in Minneapolis at which many Presbyterian women played a leading role in re-imagining god as female Sophia. At the 1994 General Assembly that I attended I saw many people wearing little gray buttons saying “Sophia, Dream the Vision.”
New Age fascination with crystals with their remarkable refractions of light, or Wicca, which is essentially nature-religion, suggest how widespread are the ideas about the spirituality that avoids thinking in terms of one God.
But two challenges in particular face believing in one God today. These are both adaptations of ideas from long ago. First, there is the challenge of thinking of God as a national god rather than the one God who is over all. Second, there is the challenge of thinking in terms of the god who we can manipulate to control life. This is the god we call today “technology.”
These two challenges get at the very heart of life and roar their appeal largely unchallenged by most Christians. Oddly, they have become a part of “conservativism,” while being at odds fundamentally with what the Bible teaches us about God.
Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, thought of God as one’s “ultimate concern.” He was, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God ought to be our ultimate concern, but he was wrong in that we may have an ultimate concern that is not God. I once asked Jules Mureau, a prominent Episcopalian theologian, how he thought of God. He paused for some time and then said, “I think of God as what is beyond myself.” He was also, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God is beyond us, but wrong in that God is considerably more and other than what is beyond me. What is beyond me may be just beyond me, or way beyond me, indeed, categorically beyond me.
When we ask, “What is our ultimate concern?” and “What is beyond myself?” and then look around us to find an answer, it can seem very much that the American way of life has become our ultimate concern. And the means to this high standard of life is the technology that makes what is beyond our capabilities possible. We little realize how we are rekindling ancient and pagan ideas about the gods.
Way back in Old Testament times we read of Dagon, the God of the Philistines, and Molech, the god of the Ammonites. Dagon helped the Philistines and Molech helped the Ammonites. Ancient Greece and Rome had pantheons in which the gods worked for the good of the favored people.
The conflict in Palestine now between Palestinian Arabs and Jews suggests a battle between the God of Israel and Allah, the God of the Muslims. We are not immune to this tendency. When I hear passionate singing of “God bless America”, I wonder if we have forgotten we should sing more passionately as Christians, “God bless the world,” because we believe “God so loved the world?” The God we worship is not an American deity.
The ancients worshipped the gods that make things happen. There was Mars, the god of war. There were fertility gods who controlled the fruitfulness of fields and flocks, who granted children to men’s wives. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth in the land in which I was born. Worship these gods and you manipulate them for your good. These ideas seem quaint to us today.
But have we not bowed at the shrine of technology as the ancients bowed before their unseen agents that controlled what they wanted to happen? We run the risk of deifying technology with shrines on our great university campuses. More than ever we need to remember, as Christians, “We believe in one God.”
We reveal how fully we worship the deity of technology when we check to see if questions of ethics must bow to the god of technology. When what we can do is the first issue rather than what we ought to do, you know which god is in control. Those who devised the atom bomb quaked to think what powers of destruction they had let loose. Questions about the morality of stem-cell research hinge on the temptation to “harvest” fetuses as the greatest source of stem-cells. Huge ethical issues bow before the god of the possible. If we believe in God, the question of what we can do will be controlled by what we ought to do as discerned from conscience informed by Holy Scripture.
Plastic surgery, the technology that allows severely burned people to look better, that fixes babies with cleft pallets, has fallen from its lofty goal of helping people. Many plastic surgeons today deny the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” as they hurt and distort human bodies in “make-overs” that attempt to manufacture “perfect” body parts in keeping with the modern sexual preoccupation. It seems quaint and impractical to ask the question, “Does God approve of the direction we’re taking?” But if we believe in God, we will ask this question.
So when, in church, we say together, “We believe in one God,” we open ourselves to a very different way of thinking than controls the mind of much of the world today—no longer just the Western world. America set the pace and some countries are catching up. What deities have we flashed before the world imagination? The deities we proclaim are the gods that we actually worship.
We look back with gratitude to the Council of Nicea, when 318 men came together from every part of Europe, Asia, and Africa and said with one voice, “Only one God!” They overcame ideas about national gods and technological gods who could be manipulated by sacrifices. Together they said, “We believe in one God.” That was a huge achievement.
We must wait till a future Sunday to look at what made all of these Christian leaders come together at Nicea and what were the broader issues they faced. It is enough this morning to recognize that when they said together, “We believe in one God,” they achieved something never before accomplished in the annals of history. It was not the product of a natural religious evolution.
What led to this huge moment that taught us how to think about God? First, it was the Israelites, the Jews, who taught us there is only one God. When we look at their story, we see it began with God undermining the nationalistic, territorial idea of a supreme being by having Abraham travel from one spot to another. He recognized that the God who led him from Haran to Canaan was more than the deity of one location. God continued to teach the Israelites this lesson as they went from one spot to another—to Egypt, and then out of Egypt to wander forty years in the wilderness. Of all places, out in the middle of nowhere, on the backside of the desert, God revealed Himself to Moses. How strange that God should speak to Moses from such a nothing of a place!
Then having primed Israel by moving this people from place to place, from Mt. Sinai, a tall hill in the middle of nowhere, God taught them, “You will have no other gods before me. You will make no idols.” And thus Israel had fixed in its thinking, “There is only one God, a God over everywhere—over Egypt, over the desert, over the land they longed to see. We cannot distort Him by making statues that suggest what He is like.” Why no idols? Because idols always take the form of something God created, limiting the idea of God of those who focus on the idol. One God. No idols.
Then in the fullness of time after many suggestive moments, when God appeared to Abraham, to Moses and seventy Israelite elders, and to Gideon, a great Israelite general, God appeared in a seemingly impossible condescension, as a little baby in an obscure village in Palestine. Nobody thought of the Creator of heaven and earth this way. Gradually the world took notice that something very strange, very grand happened in Jesus of Nazareth.
Josephus, the Jewish historian, living and writing in Rome where there was a strong fellowship of Christians, wrote of their Jesus:
He was a wise man, if one should call him a man. He was a performer of marvelous works and a teacher of those who received the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by the foremost men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who first loved him did not cease. For he appeared to them on the third day alive again, the holy prophets having foretold these things and many other marvels about him. And even now the tribe of Christians, so called, has not disappeared.
This is a remarkable testimony from a non-Christian. It was because the message of Jesus dove-tailed so remarkably with the message of One God that the Jews had spread throughout the world that the Gospel of Jesus resonated with people everywhere it was preached. The reason why 318 men could come from all over the known world to the town of Nicea to talk about the central truths of life, was that the Gospel of One God and the Good News of one Lord Jesus Christ overcame the two tendencies that have always seemed most important to people: nationalism and the manipulation of the means of securing a good life.
When we affirm together, “We believe in one God,” we are pulling ourselves back from the temptation to worship the deity that favors America most, and from the temptation to worship the technology that can make life as we want it to be.
We need to think aright about God because our thinking about life can’t rise any higher than our thoughts about God. If our god is the god of America supremely, what will we do when we see the god of China gets more powerful than our god? If our god is the deity that drives technology, what will we do when ethical questions are swept aside with broad sweeps, and we find ourselves facing Mr. Hyde when we look into the mirror? It matters how we think about God. It matters that we say from the heart “We believe in one God.”
It was a huge achievement to recognize that there is only one God. It still is a huge achievement to realize not only that there is one God, but also that we submit to His sovereignty over all life.
I believe the reason why God gave Israel the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” was that keeping sacred one day in seven brought a continual reminder in the cycle of time that there is one God, and living willingly, indeed joyfully under His sovereignty is needful for life. It seems to me that the Lord’s Day has become less and less important to the Lord’s people as we have been lured to bow to the gods of nation and technology. Keeping the Lord’s Day is not just a matter of legalism. It is a matter of keeping focus that there is One God, in whom we trust.
How do you think of God? Today we have said together, “We believe in one God.” You said this with me. I said this with you. When we say this together, we willingly bow the knees of our hearts to Him. Let us leave this place this morning looking the week ahead in terms of this confession.
How shall we then live? We go out to answer that question. I pray you and I will answer it well, to the glory of God.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bow before You and acknowledge You to be the Lord. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at September 12, 2004 09:30 AM