PART TWO
PAUL'S MODEL OF GOD
CHAPTER SIX
ARRIVING AT A MODEL OF GOD
A model is a picture existing in our brain that we can examine at will. The fact that we literally stand under such a model probably explains why the word understanding was chosen to describe a condition in which we could view clearly a particular aspect of reality. We understand something to the extent that we can stand under it and see clearly how its different parts fit together.
Now let's examine how people arrive at a model or concept of god. I did not capitalize the word "god" in the preceding sentence because as Paul makes clear people can conceive all kinds of gods--the god of this world, or "images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles." In fact I have argued in the appendix to this book that it is impossible for people to avoid arriving at a model of god. Anytime I capitalize the word "god", I am referring to the God revealed in the Holy Bible, if uncapitalized, the word refers to one of the other models of god created by man. But whether we're talking about god with a capital or little g we all arrive at our model of god exactly the same way, and that way is clearly illustrated by examining how we arrive at a model of the atom.
Nobody has ever seen an atom under a microscope; that is, nobody has ever physically perceived the thing called atom. Atomic scientists observe what the atom does, and from what they observe they deduce what the atom looks like--they form a picture of the atom in their mind.
The model of the atom has changed throughout the course of history. The model of the atom created by Socrates was very different from the model of the atom created by Niels Bohr, a twentieth century quantum physicist, and the model created by Bohr has been replaced by a more current model, a model altered by more current observations.
Now nobody today doubts the existence of the atom. We have seen what the atom can do. The reason we have seen what the atom can do is because the "model" "understood" by the nuclear physicists was close enough to what the thing we call atom actually looked like to allow nuclear scientists to make the real atom go boom.
I suggest all people arrive at a concept of god with a little g in exactly the same way atomic scientists arrive at a model of the atom. Just as the nuclear physicists create their model of the atom through observing its effects in reality, so too do all people arrive at their model of god. Through observing creation and making deductions about the meaning of those observations, images are stored in the brain of an individual that correspond to what that individual has decided to believe are accurate representations of god.
It is literally impossible for people to live very long on this planet without arriving at a model of god. Infants and creatures other than homo sapiens have no model of god in mind, but us grown-ups cannot avoid arriving at some kind of model of god. As we grow older, we observe too many things that follow a regular pattern, like the stars in the sky and the seasons of the year, to ignore the fact that some kind of cause and effect relationship is ruling the universe in which we live. Out of this observation we--all of us--construct a model of god.
The point I am making is simply an attempt to bring into our present historical context the point Paul is making in Romans 1:18-23. Like the atom, nobody can see God because God is invisible. But we can see what God does, the effects of God. Paul says this is why our God is angry with the world. Christians know Paul is right. Before we met Jesus, even though we could see the effects of God, we--like everybody of the world--refused to glorify Him as God. By that, Paul is telling us that the model we chose to hold in mind was a model of god that contradicted the real God, the One "out there" that the model was supposed to represent. We chose the wrong image in mind, one made to look like beasts, or mortal man, anything other than the model God meant for us to have in mind.
I know there are some Christians who do not remember a time when they refused to glorify and worship the God revealed in Holy Scripture. Their consciences are clean on this issue. But most of us Christians can identify with what Paul is saying and realize his words refer to our behavior before we met Jesus Christ.
But these differences aside, we all know our God in exactly the same way. Even though God is actually out there, we know Him as a model we hold in mind, an image--an abstraction. This is the way God created us, and there is nothing wrong with knowing God as an abstraction IF the abstraction, the model, is the one God wants us to have in mind: IF the model conforms to the model of Himself God intended to create in our mind.
That's where the Bible and that's where Jesus Christ come in. In God's Word written, and in God's Word in the flesh, we have been given precisely the model that God wants us to have in mind. That is the case for us Bible-believing Christians. That is our foundational presupposition, and it is there we take our stand together.
But we choose what our model is going to look like. This process of choosing usually goes by the name "interpretation." Each of us looks at God's Word and decides what model to hold in mind. Since we cannot see the thing (God) in the material world that we are trying to "understand", we inevitably create our personal model in response to the effects we see around us.
Now, for a Christian, one of the dominant effects that every Christian in history has had to deal with is the decisive influence teachers have in determining which models of God individual Christians choose as their model, their abstraction of God. Models of God have literally been handed down from generation to generation with little or no alteration in the model, even when those models of God bore little or no resemblance to what you or I would hold in mind as our image of God. And the people who held those models believed that they "understood" God.
For example, in the early middle ages, virtually everyone was dependent on a few literate people--Priests--for their model of God. Since only the Priests could read the Bible, the model of God held by the Priests was the only Biblical model available to everyone else. The Priests told the people what the Bible said about God and the people understood this model. They literally stood under this model of God and they worshipped the God portrayed in the model they held in their minds.
Today's Protestants, by definition, do not accept the model of God presented in the middle ages as an accurate model. If Protestants are correct, and the model of God presented during the Middle Ages was not an accurate model of the God revealed in the Holy Bible, then clearly models of God that once dominated the Church can change over time.
The question I have raised is this: is the model of God that has been presented to us by our teachers the model that God wants us to have in mind? I am not questioning whether we understand the model. Yes, we understand the model. I am questioning whether the model we understand is the model God wants us to understand. Obviously I think not.
I summarize my thesis this way: the Bible tells us exactly how our Union with Christ occurred, but because of Protestant theology's error in exegeting the "Eloi, Eloi," passages, it is impossible for Christians influenced by that error to grasp what the Bible teaches about our Union with Christ.
I know of no protestant, evangelical theologian
who has ever challenged Protestant orthodoxy on the meaning of Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. Therefore Protestant orthodoxy presents a monolithic consensus designed to convince us that God, the Father, turned His face away from God, the Son, as He was dying on the Cross. The necessary result of this teaching is to lead us to believe that Jesus lost His faith that He was in Union with the Father while He was dying on the cross. Having accepted this teaching, it becomes literally impossible to conceive a model of God that explains how we came to be in Union with Christ.
Our saving grace is seen in the fact that most christians, probably even Billy Graham included, know in their heart that God did not turn his face away from His Son. I had an experience with my mother that helped me understand how most Christians deal with the meaning of Jesus' cry of anguish from the cross. When I first told her about my ideas, she was baffled. On the one hand, she acknowledged that she believed what she had been taught--the Father had turned His face away--yet, on the other hand, she denied that she had ever really believed it. She had too much faith in the Father, too much faith in His love to actually believe that He had allowed His Son to experience being abandoned by the Father--even momentarily. When I explained to her that it had all been a misunderstanding and the Father had not turned His face away, she reacted with great joy. As we read the 22nd Psalm together, we celebrated God's providing for the Son in his time of utmost distress in the flesh.
Yet two weeks later, after my mother had returned home, she reneged on the celebration and took the position that she just didn't know what to believe, didn't know what happened between the Father and the Son on the cross. I took the position that she couldn't leave it like that: she had to make up her mind if she was to be able to help people know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. After all, we were talking about the most important event that ever occurred in the history of mankind. We owed it to the world to get our facts straight.
My mother went through about a month of soul-searching, Bible study, and prayer, and finally called me up to tell me that the Father did not turn His face away from the Son. In fact my mother, God bless her, had by this time concluded that I had tried to convince her the Father HAD turned His face away, and was calling me up to straighten me out. She was only slightly chagrined when I explained that she was agreeing with what I had been saying all along, because now she was really riled that there was anybody out there telling people that her God would abandon His Son in his moment of utmost need.
What's the point? The point is all of us Christians have what I call a heart model and a head model. In her heart, my mother knew her God and even though she had been convinced to hold a model in her head that defied what she knew in her heart about God, her head model did not disrupt her heartfelt relationship with God. I think that is the way it is with all of us who have been influenced by the "mystery" theologians. We have held their model in our heads, but in our hearts we have the model God wants us to have. It's the heart model that sustains us in times of trial and confusion, but I am convinced we would experience a lot less confusion if we could get the head model to conform with what we already know in our heart. That's why I am talking to you now.
Tens of thousands of Bible-study sessions occur each week in this nation with the great majority ostensibly committed to discovering the model of God held in mind by the Apostle Paul. The world is going to hell because none of these Bible study sessions are communicating the model of God held in mind by the Apostle Paul.
I look at that last sentence and I imagine what you must be thinking: who does this guy think he is? What gives him the right to make a statement like that? How does he know what is being taught in those Bible studies? He must be either insane or stupid! Nobody could know what is being taught in all the Bible studies!
For five years I worked with a prison ministry called Prison Fellowship. My job was to go into churches and mobilize volunteers to teach prisoners about Jesus. I spoke in hundreds of churches, and interacted with thousands of Christians from virtually every Christian denomination in the country. I got to know what those Christians know about Paul's model of God, and I saw that their understanding of Paul's model of God was a reflection of the understanding held by everyone in their denominations. Then I went to seminary and I studied what theologians have taught for the last two thousand years about Paul's model of God. In time, I realized that I saw something in Paul's model of God that was not being communicated to anyone by any teacher of the Church. And I realized that, if my insight was accurate, I had found my calling from God. Why would He allow me to see these things if He did not want me to tell others what I saw? He wouldn't. That's why I write.
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