What I Believe: Expositions on the Nicene Creed
The problem with this is that God was already a ‘known’ quantity; what God could or could not do, what God was like had already been discussed and decided apart from God’s revelation to the Jewish people throughout their history and ultimately in Jesus Christ.
.. The God of Exodus 3:14 (“I will be who I will be”) who will not be named, labeled or boxed became the god who is unchangeable, without feeling, apart from space, time and history. This is a god who cannot suffer and who is not affected by the human situation.
.. To put it quite bluntly, the definition of God that comes out of Greek philosophy cannot contain the biblical revelation of the dynamic character of the Trinitarian God known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
.. A splendid example of this can be found in Jeremiah 7, a text Jesus cites in the episode where he symbolically shuts down the Temple. Jeremiah 7:21-23 is translated in the New International Version: “this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go ahead, add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! 22 For when Ibrought your forefathers out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, 23 but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people.”
.. The NIV translators (primarily conservative Evangelicals) could not handle the possibility that Jeremiah could be in contradiction to Torah and so brought his speech in line with what was in Torah. Yet, it is clear from the context that Jeremiah is a trenchant critic of the sacrificial system and the Temple.
.. Theology is not that in which we put our faith, it is simply our best articulation of how we frame our experience.
.. Can we not say that we are most like God, not when we are whole, but when we are broken?
.. The cross is the death of all our god concepts, and we humans are the ones who, through the justification of scapegoating, believe that God is one with us when we victimize others.
.. The fathers of the second century took an already known quantity from their philosophy, “God”, and sought to fit Jesus within that definition. They were asking “How is Jesus like God?” However, the early church experienced the Risen Jesus and was asking an altogether different question: “How is God like Jesus?”