An Indian Journey through Lent, Day 15
“What’s this God that Christians believe in and worship like?” is where I reached last night. I think it’s a really important question. Theology affects anthropology, and even ecology. Who we think God is will affect who we think we are and how we relate to the world.
That went up in lights for me when I read Samantha Trenoweth’s interview with Desmond Tutu in her book “The Future of God: Personal Adventures in Spirituality with Thirteen of Today's Eminent Thinkers”. Tutu came to the insight that the Hebrew belief in one, good, loving creator who considered ‘his’ creation to be good (and humankind to be very good) helped them survive with integrity in the overwhelmingly pagan environment of the Babylonian exile. The Babylonians considered that humans were formed from droplets of blood that fell from the goddess of evil when she was murdered and cut up by her son Marduk. Their purpose was to be rubbish collectors for the gods. Tutu applied this insight to his context in South Africa in which a warped Christian theology denigrating people of colour was used to justify Apartheid. We should, I think, apply the same methodology to whatever theology (whether it be atheistic or theistic) that is used to justify the prevailing ideology in a society.
But it starts off much more simply than that. The first challenge to God’s character in the Bible is issued by the serpent to Eve in Genesis 3. God is not a good, kind provider, implies the serpent; ‘he’ is a mean controller who has ordered you not to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden because he knows it’ll give you knowledge. (And knowledge is power!)
So for me the first questions the bible poses concern the character of God and of me. Is God good? Yes. Am I good? Yes. Oh I’ve been thoroughly corrupted, but the essence of what has been corrupted is good, and I’m a recovering sinner!
There follow a bunch of consequent questions, including the contextual ones. What do Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism and India’s multitude of other belief systems say about the characters of the divine, the human and creation itself?
But that will do for today.
“What’s this God that Christians believe in and worship like?” is where I reached last night. I think it’s a really important question. Theology affects anthropology, and even ecology. Who we think God is will affect who we think we are and how we relate to the world.
That went up in lights for me when I read Samantha Trenoweth’s interview with Desmond Tutu in her book “The Future of God: Personal Adventures in Spirituality with Thirteen of Today's Eminent Thinkers”. Tutu came to the insight that the Hebrew belief in one, good, loving creator who considered ‘his’ creation to be good (and humankind to be very good) helped them survive with integrity in the overwhelmingly pagan environment of the Babylonian exile. The Babylonians considered that humans were formed from droplets of blood that fell from the goddess of evil when she was murdered and cut up by her son Marduk. Their purpose was to be rubbish collectors for the gods. Tutu applied this insight to his context in South Africa in which a warped Christian theology denigrating people of colour was used to justify Apartheid. We should, I think, apply the same methodology to whatever theology (whether it be atheistic or theistic) that is used to justify the prevailing ideology in a society.
But it starts off much more simply than that. The first challenge to God’s character in the Bible is issued by the serpent to Eve in Genesis 3. God is not a good, kind provider, implies the serpent; ‘he’ is a mean controller who has ordered you not to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden because he knows it’ll give you knowledge. (And knowledge is power!)
So for me the first questions the bible poses concern the character of God and of me. Is God good? Yes. Am I good? Yes. Oh I’ve been thoroughly corrupted, but the essence of what has been corrupted is good, and I’m a recovering sinner!
There follow a bunch of consequent questions, including the contextual ones. What do Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism and India’s multitude of other belief systems say about the characters of the divine, the human and creation itself?
But that will do for today.
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