God Speaks

This blog (in case you’re new here) opposes the common understanding of Christianity known as “justification theory.” The God of justification theory is a trifling tyrant who tortures human beings (men, women, and even children) continuously without end forever and ever. But it is not merely the doctrine of “hell” that we are opposing here at Reimagining Paul, but also the common understanding of “the Gospel” and of “salvation” that it proposes. 

In short, we oppose the contractual nature of the theory (God saves those who are able to believe). We dispute the notion that we can choose our belief. We deny that God is a perfectionist, ready to put people in an eternal air fryer for telling white lies or walking out of Walmart without paying for an apple. We challenge the reading of Romans that takes Romans 1:18-32 as Paul’s belief (it is the belief of his rivals and he is challenging it with a Socratic style dialogue, a technique known as “speech in character”). We accuse centuries of justification theorists of having undervalued Romans 5-8, in which we see the actual Gospel Paul believes. And, quite importantly, we shoot down in flames the notion that God can be deduced—by science, by philosophy, by religion, by reading “apologetics” books, or by any means available to human inquiry.

Only God can reveal God.

The “No-God” of the Philosophers

There are plenty of arguments for the existence of God. There is merit to these arguments. But they prove nothing. We as human beings are not close to agreeing what “proof” even means. If we could agree on that, maybe we would have one human religion or non-religion that we all shared.

Some of the arguments for God’s existence are precious to me. I value and find much comfort in the argument from reason, from morality, and from the desire for immortality. These are all examples of starting with human beings and reasoning our way up through the clouds into the distant heavens towards the great mountains to the West where we imagine God dwelling.

But you can’t work your way up from the human condition to true knowledge of God. Only God can reveal God.

So, who is it that philosophers and existential thinkers deduce? Karl Barth called this the No-God. You have perhaps heard the line, “In the beginning, man created God in his image.” Or you have heard Marx’s dictum, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” 

The God deduced by human reason is imaginary, not real. This so-called God is a human invention. The actual God is shockingly different from the rationalist God.

As Barth said, God is free. He is free in his Infinite Being and Eternal Existence. He is free to become weak, free to die, and free to love. He is free to speak to human beings.

And he does.

It’s Retrospective, Not Introspective

In justification theory, the process of coming to faith is introspective. You look inside yourself and you find fault, agreeing with God. You realize that—along with everyone else—you are a moral failure. And you can see—they claim—that God requires sinless perfection and will only be satisfied with that. No trifle is too small for God to condemn even the nicest person to an unending conflagration or (in the milder form) to instantaneous annihilation. 

But the actual Gospel is retrospective. You look back at your life prior to God speaking to you (more about this shortly) and you can see that you fell short. You can see more than that now—you realize that we are all helpless, irrational, and unable to do what is in our best interest. The briefest of surveys of human history show this to be irrefutably true. The most trivial of psychological investigations reveals the same. The so-called rational life of the philosopher has never been lived successfully in any thorough sense.

The Gospel is retrospective for a simple reason: you cannot understand the human problem prior to God granting you faith in his Gospel. The Gospel is what shows us the inability of human beings to achieve equanimity and virtue. 

The Gospel is retrospective because until God speaks to you, you are not capable of understanding the problem between you and God.

The Word of God, Jesus, and the Bible

Is the Bible the “Word of God”? Karl Barth said no, but it can become the Word of God when God speaks through it. 

The Word of God, actually, is Jesus Christ. The Bible is the witness to the Word of God. The Bible is human literature collected by Israel first and later the church, but it is a special kind of human literature. The words are not magical. And reading the Bible does not in and of itself grant faith to a person. Nor can the Bible reveal hidden truths.

The Bible is literature by human beings who encountered God. It contains their witness to who God was and is and will be. Those who have read it in depth will often say—and I agree—that scripture before Christ promises a future deliverance of some kind and scripture following Christ reflects on the Gospel which is that deliverance.

Barth read the Bible daily and during his years as a pastor, preached from it. But he did not agree with the older orthodoxy that the Bible was “inerrant” or “infallible.” Barth believed in three levels of the Word of God: Christ is the Word, the Bible is witness to the Word, and preaching is the proclamation of the Word. The only infallible level of the Word is Christ himself.

Barth believed that every person (I’m uncertain as yet whether Barth was a universalist, like me, or if he believed that some people would never find redemption) would at some point be spoken to by God. Quite likely, it would happen as they were thinking about a sermon or a reading. Two simultaneous things happen in that moment: the human words stir us but the inaudible speech of God’s Holy Spirit enlightens our spirit and accomplishes God’s purpose in us. We emerge with faith—not faith that we concocted or dug up from some place deep within us, but faith given as a gift (see “It’s Not Free If It’s a Discount”). 

How Were We Saved?

God did it. All of it. Now, I know this brings up the aversion most of us feel toward “predestination.” I will address that in a future post. God does not coerce our will. He speaks to our spirits relationally. We do not resist his will because we do not want to resist his will.

Concerns about predestination aside, the truth that God speaks corrects a slew of problems people have with religion:

• There is no boasting. Religious people have no reason to feel superior. We have no superior intelligence or spirituality. We simply received the gift of faith from God.

• God is not the Angry Judge demanding perfectionism that many people think he is. He is the Benevolent Father bringing better things for his wayward children.

• Proofs of God and arguments from reason to induce someone to Christianity are neither proofs nor the actual cause of anyone coming to faith. And all such proofs and arguments are subject to error.

• Humanity’s problem is not that we are in danger of punishment from an Angry God, but that we are unable to be the humans we want to be, much less the ones God wants us to be.  

• The Bible is not a book of Power, putting divine truths into the hands of angry men who preach at you and condemn you. The Bible is a witness to the Word of God, which is Jesus Christ. The ultimate power is God whose power is shown in weakness, contrary to human expectations in every way.

• God’s love is not a conditional love: “if you believe, I will love you.” God’s love is prior to ours. In that love, he chose us before time to be adopted as children. God’s love says, “since I love you, believe.” And he grants us that belief by speaking to our spirit.

God and Jesus Christ can only be understood after God speaks. All our ideas prior to that event in which God speaks to us are distorted notions, projections of our desires and fears, incapable of seeing God as he actually is. God is in eternity and we are in time. God is infinite and we are finite. Few seem to understand the paradox of time and eternity, infinity and finitude, God and humanity.

God speaks. If he didn’t, we couldn’t possible know him.