A Nonviolent Theology of Love

Peacefully Confessing the Apostles Creed

Sharon L. Baker Putt

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506424934
• eBook ISBN: 9781506424941
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The impetus behind the ease with which the church has periodically justified violent behavior lies in its conceptual image of God as a violent deity. This book emerges out of a passion to think differently--albeit biblically--about the character of God and articulates a theological construction of a nonviolent God--an alternative to any image of God that seems to condone human violence. It calls the church to rethink theology as something other than what might be termed "redemptive violence" and encourages Christians to reinterpret Scripture and traditional theological beliefs in ways that are more faithful to the God disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth.

Students of theology need a fresh glimpse of the love, mercy, and redemptive power of God through Jesus. As it follows the structure of the Apostles' Creed through the various theological topics, this book reminds Christians to share in God's desires for peace and love and to recommit themselves to the call of God to be "ministers of reconciliation" and lovers of both neighbors and enemies even while, at times, responding to violence with nonviolent resistance.

1. Revelation and Theology

I believe . . .

The . . . theologian who does not find that his work drives him to pray frequently and urgently, from his heart: “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” is scarcely fit for the job.

—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God

Our theology, since it is a human enterprise, needs to be constantly revised and reformed.

—Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology

How many times have we seen a TV show or read a book with a big “reveal” at the end? The author or producer finally discloses the deeper meaning or the real story or the true identity of a character. This unveiling of the truth surprises us and gives new meaning to the story. The “reveal” always enlightens us with its clearly defined answers and “aha” moments.

Many of us believe divine revelation is God’s “big reveal” that finally gives us total understanding of the divine character and way of working in the world. We may believe that revelation only comes through official pronouncements from religious authorities or perhaps through a sacred text such as the Bible, with clear instructions for life that we must simply read and obey. But is the Bible that clear? Does God reveal the divine nature completely through church doctrines and Scripture? Or does God still keep something hidden from us as a mystery? What do we do with revelatory experiences that somehow communicate God to us? And what does it all have to do with theology?

The word “theology” describes our way of making sense of revelatory experiences. We always seek to understand and apply what we gain from revelation, whether we realize it or not. In this chapter, I talk not only about the nature of revelation—how God comes to us in our finitude and human history—but also about the task of theology—its definition and purpose. When we “do” theology, we strive to construct a coherent picture of God’s character and ways of acting in the world. Most importantly, we do theology to know God. We find out, however, that God is knowable and unknowable at the same time. Our encounter with revelation and our theological task will never end, because we can never fully plumb the depths of God’s mystery or exhaust God’s revelatory resources. But such knowledge and understanding will always surprise, renew, challenge, and transform us.

The Nature of Revelation

Contemplating divine revelation reminds me of the work of the abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko. My husband and I have traveled to various places just to stand in front of Rothko’s paintings and catch glimpses of the depths of color and layering deep within the pigments. The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, is one of our favorite places to see his work. The artist painstakingly designed the space that would hold his work and engineered the placement of his paintings. He did not want people to come and merely walk around the chapel looking at each canvas as a separate piece, although we do that too. He desired that we first soak in the atmosphere of the entire room as a consecrated space and experience the works as one whole. Rothko hoped each person would find the art an experience that communicated something profound and previously undisclosed to them.

As soon as I stepped into the chapel the first time, I felt the hushed and holy ambiance, a peaceful tranquility. The paintings that dominated each wall appeared as gigantic, silent black sheets of canvas. But as I moved closer and gazed carefully at each piece of art, I noticed they were not black. The longer I stared at these masterpieces, the more colors, patterns, and undulating layers emerged from the paint, interrupting my initial preconceptions. At one moment, I thought I saw red entangled in the black. At another moment, I detected stripes forming a pattern under the darkness. As I stood before each painting, the light shining in from outside changed, and then, so did the paintings, surprising me again with new colors, patterns, and depths of hue. My husband, who had visited the chapel many times before, explained that each time he stood in that room, the shifting light infiltrating the space revealed new and surprising visions of the paintings. He could never completely plumb their depths, never with absolute certainty know what the paintings “really” looked like, and never fully understand Rothko’s creative message lying (un)disclosed in each piece.

God discloses the divine self to us in a similar way by revealing a message previously unknown and unexpected. We translate the Greek word apokalyptein as “revelation,” meaning “a striking disclosure,” “an unexpected uncovering,” or “an unveiling.” Just as the Rothko paintings surprised me with their complexity and the depth of their message, God surprises us by revealing the divine character, actions, and desires for us and the world. Just when we think we understand God, when we believe we have it all figured out, God “changes the light” or interrupts our status quo by revealing something new and unexpected. When God communicates to us, that divine “voice” comes uninvited and as an intrusion that shakes up our preoccupation with ourselves, awakening us from our dogmatic slumbers, challenging and calling us to something new. Philosopher Merold Westphal explains that the silent and revelatory “voice” of God has the “power to break through our prejudices, to disrupt and unsettle them, to call them into question, to show that they need to be revised or replaced, that they are always penultimate and relative, never ultimate or absolute.”1

God breaks through all obstacles to heal, liberate, and save us. The Hebrew word for “to break through” (perets) literally means “to break through a wall” or “to burst through” something hardened into inflexibility. We can apply this notion to our theological task. God breaks through our limitations, our prejudices, and our lack of intellectual humility, revealing something new and previously unknown. We can look to medieval theologian Meister Eckhart to take us even a step farther. He believes that, through divine revelation, God breaks through to us, but in response, we break through to God and lead transformed lives as participants in the life of God. In other words, God comes down to us, breaks through our conceptual walls, and reveals the divine character and will. This revelation, when we truly receive it, raises us up to God, enabling us to live lives transformed by the Spirit of God. So revelation includes both “hearing” and “doing,” both a communication from God and a response from us.

We need to remember, however, that God’s self-disclosure to us through revelation is never a set of divine propositions that dictate doctrinal belief systems. Instead, as theologian Ray Hart says, revelation serves as the “fundament from which, and against which, and toward which theology thinks.”2 As the foundation from which theology merely begins its thinking process, revelation does not give us thoroughly thought-out, totally complete, full-blown doctrines. Rather, revelation unveils facets of God’s character and will. It acts as a motivator to heal us and transform us into participants in the work of God in the world.

Revelation never gives us total knowledge of God. It hinges on the fact that despite the surprising moments of self-disclosure, God still remains hidden, shrouded in mystery, and inaccessible to finite creatures of dust. So, like the changing light that precludes total comprehension of the Rothko Chapel paintings, the cloud of unknowing3 that surrounds God ensures we will never completely clear away the fog. God self-reveals; yet, at the same time, God hides. We “know” God through what God reveals to us, but we live with only partial knowledge. This paradox—divine revelation residing in the midst of divine mystery—keeps us in the game, so to speak. It keeps us seeking, knocking, and asking for more of God. It makes our relationship with God dynamic and alive because the hunt takes precedence over the capture. In order to maintain a dynamic, growing, and intimate relationship with God, we want to keep on hunting, seeking, and catching glimpses of the elusive mystery that we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because knowing God is a form of union with God, we want to know all we can, while knowing we cannot know everything.4 So we live on the dash between the year of our birth and the year of our death, seeking to know God in our time, for our context, and within our circumstances.

To be effective, revelation needs to find a conduit that connects it to our brains, to travel the eighteen inches or so (at least figuratively) into our hearts, and then to work its way back out of us into our transformed actions. Every form of communication needs some sort of transmitting medium. Landlines use wires; cell phones and radios use waves; the internet as reached on my computer uses a wireless digital signal. Since revelation is a communication from God, it needs a conduit to get from God to us. We know it must be wireless communication, but what is it exactly? Garrett Green believes that our imaginations, fueled by the image of God in us, serve as the conductors that enable us to receive revelation.5

We use our imaginations all the time. Unfortunately, we most often use them when we daydream or worry. But we also use our imaginations when we think about God. Obviously, we cannot audibly hear or visually see God. We cannot examine God under a microscope, send a text or email to God, or call God on the phone. Consequently, we use our imaginations when we think about God and how God acts in our lives and in the rest of the world. In fact, our capacity to reason is intimately connected to our ability to imagine. When we dream, invent, write, think theologically, or do anything creative, we use our imagination. The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, minus an imagination, would never have moved the medieval church into a new age of reformation. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., without an imagination, would never have pushed the nation toward civil rights for black Americans. By imagination I do not mean daydreaming or thinking up images of unicorns or other fantastic objects that have no purchase in reality. I am talking about our minds’ creative ability to map out theological expressions of the ineffable God we see described in narrative and poetic form in Scripture and experienced in our day-to-day lives. In fact, the imagination serves as the key or the medium that connects us to God, and as the conduit through which God reveals the divine mind and character to us.

The image of God, which we will discuss at length in chapter 10, serves as the point of commonality and connection between divinity and humanity and makes God accessible to us through our imaginations. It enables our imaginations to interpret revelation and to imagine God correctly so we can gain real knowledge of God.6 We see that God’s imagination connects to us through our imagination, opening up channels of communication that enable us to work together to transform the world for God’s glory.

Yes, God has an imagination! The second creation story in Genesis 2 reveals the reality of the divine imagination. You know the story: God creates the human being from the mud. The Bible says, “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (2:7; emphasis mine). The word we translate “formed” (yatsar) means “to squeeze something into shape,” but another form of the verb (yetser) carries the notion of a “mental impulse” or “imagination”—in this case, the divine imagination intentionally playing in the dirt and creating a human being for mutual partnership in taking care of the world and working with God for God’s purposes.

Jewish theologians talk about how in using the divine yetser (imagination) to create humanity, God gifted us with the yetser hatov or the good imagination, the ability to imagine the good, to know the good, and to know the good God fully. Before spiritual ignorance and infection through sin set in, the image of God worked in us and enabled us to know God completely, without taint or corruption. With the entrance of sin, however, the yetser hatov lost its luster and became dulled by corrosion so that human beings can no longer imagine God clearly or determine the divine will without error. Our spiritual ignorance dimmed the image of God so we can no longer see the divine light clearly. Due to our spiritual ignorance, our humanity made in the image of God found itself saddled with an imagination infected by a yetser hara, or an imagination prone to imagining evil. The yetser hara drew us farther and farther from God as we began to imagine ways of life without God. Consequently, we doomed ourselves for an existence separated from God. Christians believe our salvation through Jesus Christ results in our transformation; we are made new creations, redeemed from the yetser hara and, through sanctification, we are enabled again to imagine God in valid ways.

That said, God has gifted us with the ability to imagine, to participate with God in imagining a new creation, to be a “creative vicar of God” as those created in God’s image.7 The imagination functions as a point of contact, a conduit through which God discloses God’s self to us and enables us to explore God, the world, and ourselves in new and creative ways. So our imaginations play a significant role in receiving divine revelation.

General Revelation

Equipped with the image of God in us and outfitted with our imaginations, we gain access to divine self-disclosure from outside of us through what theologians have termed “general” and “special” revelation. These two modes of revelation developed in Christian thought in order to answer one of the major questions that has haunted theologians for millennia: At what point does divine revelation make effective contact with humans? The word “effective” refers to revelation complete enough to lead people to salvation, to redemption in Jesus Christ. In Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam, God and Adam reach out to each other, almost making contact. The narrow space of air between their outstretched fingers speaks volumes and leads us to ask the question, Where and how do the divine and human effectively and salvifically “touch”? Theologians have spent decades arguing over the validity of general revelation for salvation. Some, such as John Calvin and Karl Barth, claim that the divine and the human cannot make effective contact through that form of revelation at all—the fingers do not touch. Others, like Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley, and Paul Tillich, make the opposite claim. So which is it?

Before we answer that question, we need to define the terms. General revelation, sometimes called “natural revelation,” comes to us first through the natural created world. Through general revelation, God discloses the divine character and nature through generic or natural means to everyone at all times in every place through the multiplicity and dive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Apostles’ Creed
• Preface
• 1. Revelation and Theology
• 2. Hermeneutics
• 3. The Trinity
• 4. God
• 5. Creation
• 6. Jesus
• 7. Salvation and Atonement
• 8. The Holy Spirit
• 9. The Church
• 10. Humanity
• 11. The Last Things
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index