Waiting and Wooing
By Fred | Friday, July 9, 2010
The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions
I’m just finishing a book called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. It reveals a contrast between liberal theology (represented by Marcus Borg) and conservative theology (represented by N.T. Wright).
Christianity says of God that he is both “immanent” and “transcendent.” Transcendent means that God is “above and outside” the universe. He is the Creator that stands apart. Immanent means that God is also intimately involved in the world all the time. The Creator is involved with his Creation.
Marcus Borg accuses conservative Christians of practically abandoning this idea. He says that conservatives see God as “interventionist.” That is to say, he leaves the world alone only to intervene in history at specific times. The extreme version of this point of view is “Deism”–the idea that God created the universe, wound it up, and then let it go, never to interfere again. Marcus responds to this by saying that God “is ‘right here’ as well as ‘more than right here’” (p. 62).
I think many people do buy into this. Consider Bette Midler’s 1990 song: “God is watching us from a distance.”
Sometimes in our attempts to define God we can lose sight of the fact that God is primarily relational. Our experience and the experience of others is that God is not always “right here.” To see “the sacred” as being “always here” I think we fear regressing to a medieval worldview with an angel or a demon behind every rock and tree. Or we may experience particular times when God is close and other times when he seems distant.
I think that God is completely transcendent. And completely immanent. He is the Creator involved with Creation. So why the disconnect with our experience? Why do so many people not recognize his interaction? I think that God honors our free will. He will allow us to do what we want–even to our detriment. And yet he is reaching to us repeatedly in subtle ways. When we respond, he is quick to respond to us in ways to truly build our relationship with him. He may not do things that would circumvent real relationship or perpetuate our own weaknesses or deceptions. For example, if I were to attempt to bargain with God, he may not fill my bank account with a million bucks if I promise to “go to Africa as a missionary.” Then I’m just attempting to use him to get what I want–which doesn’t further relationship.
God is always waiting for us to respond to him. He is always wooing us into relationship with him. He is our Creator who woos us, his Creation, and waits for our response.
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