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 Jesus vs. Generic GodPreaching and teaching our particular God
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Shortly after September 11, a preacher told me about seeing a couple interviewed on TV. In great grief, they had just lost their beloved adult daughter on that terrible Tuesday. The reporter, perhaps trying to find a way to wrap up the conversation, said, "Well, er, I guess you'll be going to your place of worship this weekend to receive some consolation." The mother replied, "No. You see, our religion teaches that we ought to forgive our enemies. And we are just not ready for that right now." Now there was a woman who knew something of the perils of worshiping a God whose name is Trinity, who has come to us as a Jew from Nazareth named Jesus. When lecturing on preaching to fellow pastors, I have sometimes told them, "Some of your homiletical failures are not your fault. Many of your failed sermons are due to Jesus. You have some tough material with which to work!" In debates on campus, in order to put a point on this issue of divine particularity, I have said, "Christians don't believe in 'god.' We believe that Jesus Christ is God." That affirmation makes us—in a world of generic, fuzzy contemporary gods—peculiar. After the September 11 disaster, I heard a professor of Islamic studies say on TV, "Well, after all, Christians and Muslims both worship the same God." In a divided America, there are understandable political reasons for hoping that were the case. However, I've read a fair amount of the Qur'an, and I find vast amounts of material there that would not fit into the mouth of Jesus under any circumstances, no matter how much we need to get along with Muslims. Of course, Muhammad is not thought to be the only begotten Son of God (an idea abhorrent to Islam). But he is believed to be a perfect revelation of the true God. Muhammad was a righteous warrior. Jesus died without defending himself, died forgiving his enemies (us). Between these two definitions of "God" there is a great gulf that cannot be bridged by well-intentioned attempts to jettison all of those troubling peculiarities that make Muhammad almost nothing like Jesus. To do so would be unfair to Islam, to say nothing of what it would do to Christianity. Preaching a Particular GodWe cannot get around the central Christian claim that, when we look at the life and teachings of this Jew from Nazareth who was born of a woman, lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly, we have seen as much of God as we ever hope to see. The current age is a particular challenge for preaching a particular God who is manifest to us in Jesus the Christ. For some time now, we have been in the mire of something called "spirituality," which in my experience tends to be decidedly anti-traditionalist, anti-institutional, amorphous, vague and therefore undemanding. Spirituality is what I feel when I feel better than I did before I felt it. It is a big, accommodating basket into which I can put almost anything I want to feel about the "higher power," or "spiritual force," or "my own little voice," or whatever I call whatever it is that makes me feel better. |             | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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