God – Part 1 ➢ Christian Monotheism One God, omnipotent creator and controller of all things; transcendent and unknowable; the doctrine of the Trinity and its importance; the meaning and significance of the belief that Jesus is the son of God; the significance of John 10:30; 1 Corinthians 8:6. ➢ God as Personal, God as Father and God as Love The challenge of understanding anthropomorphic and gender specific language about God: God as Father and King, including Christian feminist perspectives. ➢ The concept of God in process theology God as neither omnipotent nor creator. Keywords Keyword Definition anthropomorphism atonement covenant ex - Deo ex nihilo immanent incarnate Monotheism Omnipotent Omniscient Pantheon perichoresis polytheism redemption salvation Salvation History Shema transcendent Yahweh Task: research and fill in keywords table with definitions in your own words. Christian Monotheism Monotheism The belief that only one God exists and is worthy if worship. The Old Testament did not make this distinction straight away. Other Gods were believed to exist, although they had no power. One of the names for God in the Old Testament is ‘Elohim’, which in Hebrew in is a plural form: ‘gods’, this shows that God was seen as a head of a pantheon of God. The different nations were thought to have its own deity, these gods made up Yahweh’s council called the ‘sons of God’. “…I am He. Before me no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me…” (Isaiah 43:10) “ Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god’.” (Isaiah 44:6) Ethical Monotheism ❑ In the Old Testament, good moral behaviour is at the heart of the covenantagreement between Israel and God, where God ‘adopts’ Israel in a special relationship, and in return Israel promises moral and religious obedience (Exodus 19:5-6). The Law given by God to Moses in the ‘text’ of that agreement, and is centred on the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-17). ❑ In the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers that whoever weakens in the obeying these commandments, or who teaches others to weaken, shall be called last into the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5:19). Many Christians believe therefore that they are bound by the same moral laws. Others, of course, do not (e.g. those who prefer the approach of Situation Ethics). ❑ In Mark’s Gospel (12:29), Jesus quotes from the preface to the first commandment in Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One’. This phrase forms the heart of the Shema prayer in Judaism, and is said to be the ideal expression of ethical monotheistic belief. This is the full text of Mark 12:28-31: And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered: ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Many Christians take this text as morally authoritative, depending on their view of the authority of the text itself and Jesus. ❑ Moral obedience is at the heart of salvation. The appearance in the world of Jesus as God’s Son is part of ‘Salvation History’. The ethical teaching of Jesus shows how Christians (by obeying that teaching) can be saved into the Kingdom of God. God (and God alone) has the complete power, authority and love to save humanity from its sins. Again, this is true for some Christians, depending on whether they accept that salvation is by works or by faith, for example. God as the omnipotent Creator For many, to say that God is the only God, means also that he must be omnipotent, the Creator of everything that exists and the controller of all things. Since God is the only God, he cannot be challenged by any other power or authority, so Christians have deduced that God must be omnipotent (all powerful). For example, in Matthew 19:26 Jesus tells his disciples that ‘…with God all things are possible‘. Christians disagree about what it means for God to be omnipotent, because omnipotence can be defined in different ways: 1. For some, to say that God is omnipotent means that He can do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible; so if God wants to make l or to make murder a morally good act, or to make a stone too heavy for Himself to lift, He can do any of these things. 2. Others think that this is just logical nonsense, and that to say God is omnipotent means that He can do anything that is logically possible You will remember that for many Christians, it is important to accept (2) as the right definition because of the problem of evil. If (1) is true, we are faced with the problem of why God does not control evil in the world. Scholars such as Hick and Plantinga maintain that (2) is true, and that it is not logically possible for God to allow humans to be truly free and to get rid of evil at the same time. You will remember, however, that Process Theologians ‘solve’ the problem. of evil by denying that God is omnipotent in any sense, arguing that the sheer extent of evil in the world shows that God cannot be all-powerful You will have to make up your own mind on this. Most Christians argue that if God is omnipotent, then he must be the Creator of everything that exists. Most Christians accept this, although again they disagree about the method of God’s creation: 1. Some Christians believe that the universe comes ex Deo (out of God’s own being), but most reject this idea because it would imply that God and His creation are the same thing whereas most Christians believe that God is transcendent (beyond space and time) and ‘wholly other’ (completely different from the material world). 2. Most Christians think that God created the universe literally ‘from nothing’, ex nihilo. This might suggest that the universe is some kind of mental construct by God. Many Christian theologians insist that the idea of ‘creation from nothing’ can be found in the creation narrative of Genesis 1, where God ‘brings forth’ the universe by words of creative power: God simple says: ‘Let there be…’ (for example, verses 3,6,9). In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters, And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. It may be true that God created the universe from nothing. The problem is that Genesis does not show this to be the case, because the Revised Standard Version's translation here is almost certainly wrong. A more likely translation of the Hebrew is this: In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth, the earth being without form and void, and darkness being upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters, God said, Let there be light': and there was light. The words in bold are describing an already-existing. dark, watery chaos God's creative acts are to bring order to this chaos, hence his first act is to create light to banish the darkness. 3. Those Christians who accept the second translation therefore believe that God created the universe by using already existing chaotic matter, which he put into an ordered state. You will remember that this the view of Process theologians who think that God/the material universe have always existed together. Of the three views explained here, this is the closest to the text of Genesis not least because the Genesis texts reflect the Babylonian account of creation, the Enuma Elis, which also assumes primeval chaos. Lines 1-5 of the Enuma Elis refers to the mingled waters of heaven and earth, and to ‘chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both’. In Genesis 1:2, Tiamat is reflected in the word Tehom, which in the Revised Standard Version translation is ‘the deep’, referring the formless primeval waters surrounding the world. The mythological elements are subdued in Genesis, nevertheless the language reflects them. None of this shows that the doctrine of creation out of nothing is not true - it is just that the Bible makes little effort to make a case for it. It is an idea which, like many others in Christian thinking, has evolved during the ongoing life of the Church. Balanced against that, the idea of creation as God ordering pre-existent chaos is much closer to the ideas of Process Theology. The important point is that for most Christians, God is the all-powerful Creator of everything. There are clear links with the problem of evil here, because if God is perceived as the all- powerful Creator of everything, then he must have created evil. Augustine addressed this problem by denying that evil exists as a thing in itself, whereas others claim that what we perceive as evil is created by humanity, so God is not the sole creator of evil.