Reflections

Seven Categories of Thought for Today’s Christians

Phillip Michael Garner

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532694929
  9781532694936
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532694943
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Reflections is a theological guide for today's Christians seeking a fuller appreciation of religious faith than is represented in populist religion. The seven categories and their chapters are designed to provide the reader with an intensive study on neglected, but imperative concepts for faith. Subjects of vital importance to both theology and humanity are explored with a flowing continuity of understanding God and the world. Reflections begins with the concept of revelation and its relation to monotheism and conviction. The chapters that follow are titled "Religion Is," "Christianity Is," and "Intelligent Spirituality"; these set the foundation for the rest of the book. The sense of moderns is that they are immune to the primitive concept of idolatry. Under the category of "Perennial Idols," Garner dismantles the idolatry that plagues humanity in every generation. Reality and its creation is a category of theological thought that is essential for Christian development and sorrowfully neglected in church education. The other categories are "Sex and Romantic Love," "Popular Myths," "Being Human / Being Poor," and "Forgiveness." Garner's conviction is that the root of humanity's dysfunction is our failure to learn how to live together as male and female.

Category I

Revelation, Religion, and Intelligence

Christian Revelation

Divine Touch

Who are you?

Come I will show you

Just tell me

I cannot

Will you touch me?

I will

I am overcome

I see the invisible one

My being is changed

My consciousness invaded, heightened –

I will never be the same

The Christian revelation is the product of God’s self-revealing through the incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If God were to appear in his transcendence there would be nothing for humanity except a sense of the numinous. Transcendence brings us nothing and mystery is distraction from reality. It is the enfleshed entrance of God into the human family, as one of us, that provides us with a clear vision of who God is. We are called to follow his example.

The revelation of God in Jesus is superior to the revelation of God delivered to Abraham or at Sinai or experienced by the prophets. Yes, Christianity is the continuance of the work and revelation of God that began with Abraham. However, the faith we call Christianity is the apex of God’s self-revelation. It is so complete as to be final; meaning all that can be learned of God has already been revealed in the stories of the gospel, the writings of the New Testament (NT), and in the kerygma (proclamation) of the word become flesh. There is no further revealing that can communicate the nature of God beyond the person of Jesus Christ, God’s son.

Revelation, in this sense, is a purely religious concept that expresses the invisible deity’s self-revealing. Human beings do not have an innate knowledge of God. We possess a moral conscience (which we can defy). We can view the external witness of creation (it is a display of power). We bear the image of God (which we mar with our freedom). The image of God in us is limited to the finer attributes of being human such as insight, love, compassion, to be relational, to act redemptively, to keep promises, and to participate in the creation of social reality.

God was able to become one of us because God related us to God’s self when he created us in his image.1 This being said, we can know God only if God reveals himself to us. To know God is not to describe God with terms that attempt to communicate God’s otherness and omnific existence. We can come to know God because God reveals himself in order to be known. Knowing God is a relational matter that is accomplished through the conduit of faith upon hearing the narrative of God’s self-revelation contained in Scripture.

Revelation questions all of reality. Revelation requires an abandonment of all contradictory theological concepts, and subjects all thought to the content of the revelation. For this reason the Christian revelation is authoritative over contradictory portrayals of God in the Old Testament (OT). The problem with these conflicting portrayals is in direct relation to how the writer perceives God in the world. One example is the expression of Jewish monotheism that can be referred to as radical monotheism. In this view, God is responsible for everything—even the failed choices of human freedom.

The portrayal of God in the Old Testament is subject to the consummate revelation of God in Christ found in the New Testament. This is a simple guideline for the Christian. When readings of the Old Testament conflict with the revelation of God in the New Testament the problem is not with God or even the text, it is with the interpreter’s knowledge of Scripture and imagination—even the interpreter’s revelation of God.

Literary criticism is essential for interpreting the OT in light of the NT revelation of God in Christ Jesus. For example, reading Joshua requires recognizing the genre of the book as a conquest narrative. Conquest narratives serve nation-states for co-opting the voice of God to justify the crimes against the former inhabitants of the land. The book of Joshua also contains literary hints that deconstruct the claims of God made in the book. The following piece from Joshua is one example:

Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” He replied, “Neither; but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and he said to him, “What do you command your servant, my lord?” The commander of the army of the LORD said to Joshua, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so.

Jos 5:13

When the angel of the Lord appears, he is not on the side of the forces of Israel or Jericho. Rather, he is present as a reminder of the revelation of God to Moses. This is depicted in the command for Joshua to remove his sandals because in the presence of God the ground is made safe. The angel of the LORD before Joshua is portrayed as the same God who met Moses at the burning bush. Moses, with God’s help, delivered Israel from Egypt with a shepherd’s staff. However the messenger holds a sword in his hand. Joshua is not like Moses, who provides God with a man whose sole defense from hostile forces is a walking stick. Joshua has chosen a sword. The imagery of the sword is reminiscent of the flaming sword at the entrance to the garden of Eden.2 Humanity cannot enter the rest of God in his garden sanctuary because humanity has learned to use fire and steel for warring. This piece in Joshua suggests that Joshua was given a choice to lay down his sword. God is portrayed as not being at war with humanity, neither with Israel or the people of Jericho. The theophany doesn’t take sides; the sword is only symbolic in relation to Joshua.

The book of Joshua includes giants as a threat and so clues the reader in on the mythical nature of conquest stories, where the crimes of the conquerors are ignored because the people of the land are depicted as inferior (a giant is an aberration). Interestingly, in the Jericho story, the person with the most faith and education about the LORD and about the activities of Israel is a harlot. When the walls of Jericho fell, her home in the wall did not fall. So the walls of Jericho did not all fall down. The people were not all destroyed.

I have offered this brief view for reading Joshua to emphasize the subjecting of the OT revelation to the consummate revelation of God found in Jesus Christ the Lord. For those who are attentive to the theology and literary instruction of the text, the nonviolent God revealed in Jesus is present in the Old Testament.

The importance of the concept of revelation is essential for claiming that God reveals God’s self over against ideas that insist God is the progressive creation of human need. Without the concept of revelation, religion is human invention. That the concept of revelation is not a part of the basic instruction for seminarians involved in critical thinking and being exposed to the realties that formed Scripture and history is tragic. This one failure results in the poverty of soul that results in atheism.

Revelation and the Suffering Servant

Conviction

Conviction born of an encounter with God is a word for expressing a change brought on by a phenomenal divine touch that enters into a human being,

a change that gives witness to a power able to make

any person who is recipient of such an encounter

into an extraordinary soul.

Such a person overcomes the world from within

and faces it outwardly with immovable courage and indomitable faith,

faith that is always motivated by love.

The life of Paul portrays an uncommon power to live out a calling in the face of rejection and suffering. Paul lives without exhibiting uncertainty or doubt. In this sense Paul models a trait seen in Jesus. This trait is either unseen in the disciples or none of them lived it with the tenacity of this immovable convert named Paul, the violent, power-seeking, religious zealot who was called to be an apostle.

I think it is helpful to view Paul as more than a disciple, even as Jesus’ replacement.3 First, Paul’s Damascus revelation is compatible with the call and commission narratives of the prophets. Yet, it is also distinctly more comparable with Moses’ received revelations at the bush and at Sinai.4 The formative preparation of Paul’s life is noted in his educational studies. Beyond this, he becomes an example of grace. His conversion and life ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• The Gospel
• Category I: Revelation, Religion, and Intelligence
• Category II: Perennial Idols
• Category III: Reality
• Category IV: Sex and Romantic Love
• Category V: Popular Myths
• Category VI: Being Poor/Being Human
• Category VII: Forgiveness
• Bibliography