In this long slog that I refer to as my Jacob-time, I have been trying to determine what about my faith I believe, and what are the things that are causing me to wrestle with it. During one of my walks I recently was able to identify and contemplate one of the problem areas.
Like many others through history I struggle with the apparent dichotomy and paradox of a monotheistic faith expressed as a plurality. Three in one. Separate and distinct, but all one. Confusing. More than that, I have struggled with the fundamentalist approach to faith that seems to slight not only the Spirit but God the Father as well through a singular focus on the "person of Christ" to the near exclusion of the other two members of the Godhead. This has bothered me.
Along with that, and clearly related to it, there is the focus on Jesus being the "Son". That God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But yet..... the Son and Father are one, aren't they? The Word was God and with God. So wouldn't that mean that God give himself as a sacrifice, not someone else? How then does this work?
And then it occurred to me. Perhaps we have the whole "son" thing wrong. Are we taking a term literally that was perhaps best used then, and now, as an analogy and as a historical reference point? Maybe it was intended to describe in terms that humans could understand a relationship that was not gong to be comprehensible to them any more than the concept of God taking human form is comprehensible to us. As we do perhaps too often, maybe it is an issue of taking literally a term not intended that way.
It struck me, how would the idea of God assuming human form and human nature, be expressed to a primitive people? Maybe the best analogy of it is a son. Part mother (human nature and body) and part father (divine nature and infinite life), a son takes attributes from both and combines them. In human terms, the mother and father unite to generate a totally new and distinct person. That explains the human nature from Mary, the Divine nature of God.
Where the analogy breaks down is that in human terms the son is totally separate and distinct from the father. A son's life is a life of it's own unconnected physically to the father (or mother). As a sacrifice story, it hearkens to the story of faith that the Jews would understand, the story of Abraham and Issac. Faith. Sacrifice. Relationship. Key elements. The story of Abraham and Issac....one of the classic stories of faith
and which has a father sacrificing (or being willing to sacrifice) a son. If God
talked to the Jews in relation to that story, it's a story that they
would certainly understand. Combined with the cultural issue of sons
and family, the word works.
As an analogy this fails in the area of life ownership. On earth, a son has a life independent of any other; once born the son has relationship with the parents but his life...the beating of his heart, the pulsing of his blood...is his alone, untied to the parents. The theological challenge for me is that using the earthly analogy, one can give only their own life. I can not offer anyone else's life and have it be the same as me offering my own.
This is why it seems to me that perhaps this is an analogy. The Lord our God is One. He came to earth and assumed the human nature and human body, but did so while still God, still infinite. In that form He offered up himself as a sacrifice to cover our sins; His human nature covering the human sin and having human death, His infinite nature providing the infinite blood for all the sins that ever happened. The part of God that became corporeal was offered up, died, and rose again. The blood was divinely-human blood, human enough to cover us, infinite enough to cover for us.
I know. Maybe it's heresy. Maybe I'm nuts. But it makes sense to me. It clarifies in my head the things that I struggle with...the singular focus on only one-third of the Godhead, the issue of one offering up another who is not them. And maybe it gets me out of my obstruction enough to move on in the struggle.
I'm hoping it's the latter :)
