Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
“In God We Trust” is the official motto of the United States of America. While I’ve seen and heard this phrase all over the place, including on all our money (which is weird concerning what Jesus says about money), I only recently learned of its official status and how recently it acquired that status: 1956 if Wikipedia is to be trusted. While I don’t have any reason to doubt the good intentions of those who worked to make it the motto officially, I have come to believe that it is a pretty empty statement. Let me explain.
There is an old critique of Christianity that goes like this: “God created man in His own image. And then man returned the favor.” In other words, we tend to make God in our own image. Our inclination in this direction is indisputable. We prefer God to be malleable, able to be conformed to our ideals and our aspirations. We prefer God to be really interested in our pursuits, our happiness, our liberty - likely at the expense of someone else’s. This is a universal human temptation and one that is not limited to Christianity. For example, the gods of ancient Rome, Greece, or Egypt were very human-like, from their temperamental emotions to their petty in-fighting. They were more like adolescent super-humans than like truly transcendent, supernatural deities. They had limits to what they could achieve and their actions were bounded by some basic laws of the universe. These gods were basically extrapolations of humanity taken to the nth degree. They were gods made in the image of humanity.
The God of Christian theology is different than these superhuman gods. The Christian God is completely free to be who and what He is. No box can hold Him. No boundaries constrain Him, save for those He has set up. No list of attributes is sufficient to describe Him, no matter how long we make it. But that doesn’t mean that we modern Christians don’t still find sneaky ways to try and form God in our own image.
The contemporary way of doing this is through abstractions. We really love connecting God with abstract nouns like Love, Justice, Truth, Liberty, or Goodness. These are all great words and are immensely useful in Christian theology. But we have to be on guard. Our minds constantly reverse such statements and give primacy to the abstract noun. We turn “God is Love,” into “Love is God.” We turn “God is Just,” into “Justice is God.” We don’t do these things deliberately or even consciously. In fact, when we read the reversed statements it isn’t hard to reject them. But we still operate as if the abstract noun (Love, Justice, Truth, etc.) is what is most important. We prefer the abstraction. It is safer. It demands less of us. Best of all, we can mold the abstraction in ways that suit our own needs and desires. We can concretize the abstract qualities of God into the kinds of pursuits and actions that we think are best. This is our modern way of putting God in a box, of creating God in our own image.
It isn’t actually modern though. It is the same thing that Job and his friends were arguing about millennia ago. They were trying to locate God within their box of justice. They were seeking to constrain God’s possible ways of acting to their understanding of righteousness and their system of rewards and consequences. God’s appearance at the end of the book demonstrates how wrong they were. God cannot be constrained to any of our ideals, no matter how just and true and right they seem. God remains free to be God.
This impulse to give abstractions like Love and Justice independence and autonomy has been a growing force in Western Christianity since at least the 14th century. In the first part of his book Heavenly Participation, Han Boersma tracks the loss of a sacramental view of the cosmos during the late Middle Ages. He notes that the philosophical idea of univocity entered the stream of Christian thought with Duns Scotus who argued that both Creator (God) and creation (the cosmos) had the same kind of being. Boerma writes, “No longer did earthly objects receive the reality of their being from God’s own being. Rather, earthly objects possessed their own being. No longer was there a mysterious reality hiding within what could be observed by the senses. The full reality of created objects could be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted. The loss of analogy meant the loss of sacramentality.” He later notes that this led to “a reduction of God: God is subordinated to a higher concept, namely, that of being.”
This is the same kind of subordination that we are prone to do with all kinds of other concepts like Love, Justice, Truth, Liberty, etc. No longer do we intuitively see these concepts flowing from God, their source. Now we are more prone to imagine that they have independence, their own being, their own autonomy. And we are more prone to see God as subordinate to these concepts, or our understandings of these concepts. This is our modern bent, but it is bad theology. And again, we find ourselves creating God in our own image.
Most of the churches I am familiar with would suggest that the antidote to this proclivity of ours is the Bible. If we find ourselves creating and worshiping a false image of God, then it is the Bible that steers us back to the proper worship of the true God. I agree with this, but it isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds.
See, there is another critique, one that I hear mostly from pastors and biblical scholars, which says that you can use the Bible to justify just about anything if you read it poorly enough. Certainly this is true from a historical perspective. The Bible was used to support slavery, it was used to rationalize the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and it is still used in a whole host of negative and disturbing ways (such as to sanctify aggressive, militant masculinity as a Christian ideal). This shouldn’t surprise any careful reader of the Bible. In the temptation story we see Satan using Scripture to tempt Jesus, demonstrating that the Bible can also be used for Satan’s purposes. By highlighting certain verses or texts we can make the Bible say just about anything we want. We can use the Bible to support our distorted images of God.
So what are we to do? What is the antidote to this sickness of ours? Here is where your Sunday school experience comes in handy. For the answer is…Jesus!
The God of the Old Testament was concretized in the person Jesus Christ. Jesus embodied the fullness of God and is the exact representation of His being. In other words, we don’t have a God who can only be described by abstract nouns. We don’t have a God of philosophical concepts. We have a God who took on flesh and exhibited his character as a human man. And this has some serious implications for how we read the Bible and how we do theology.
The New Testament authors describe Jesus as the full image of God, the exact representation of Him on earth. And in the prologue of John it is said that Jesus came to the world which was his own and yet his own people did not receive him. We see this throughout Jesus’ ministry, that the religious leaders, the experts in God, did not realize who Jesus was. There are only two ways to interpret this: either Jesus was not God, or the religious leaders were functioning with a distorted view of God. As an experienced religious leader, I think the latter is far more likely.
A further implication of this would have to be that the images of God in the Old Testament are insufficient to fully capture God’s character. Or that they are ambiguous and open to different interpretations. I find this to be an extremely helpful point. It demonstrates that not every image of God that we find in the Old Testament has a one-to-one connection to the person of Jesus Christ. If it did, then how could the scribes, the Pharisees, and in fact the whole Jewish nation have missed who Jesus really was? It also demonstrates that some of the images of God in the Old Testament are more accurate to God revealed in Jesus than others. Which means that there may be some representations of God in the Old Testament that are erroneous.
This is actually not a new idea. It is part of the concept of Progressive Revelation, which means that God’s revelation of Himself to His people was gradual and culminated in Jesus Christ. He had to lead a nation out of paganism and pagan concepts of God and into a truer understanding of who He is. The nation didn’t always get it right. They often had ideas of God that were more in line with the cultures around them, than with who God truly is. (We haven’t come all that far have we?) Which means that when they recorded their experiences with God, sometimes they misrepresent Him. What I find most amazing about this is how patient God was with His people. It would seem that right thinking about God wasn’t the most important thing to him. Right relationship seems to always be the primary emphasis.
Christ is the center of the whole biblical story, the purest representation of God that can exist in creation, and should be the rubric by which we judge any and all ideas of God that we work with. The difference between “In God We Trust” and “In Jesus Christ We Trust” is stark. It is uncomfortable. “God” here is just an abstract concept that makes us feel more religious and helps us sanctify our idolatries. But put “Jesus Christ” in the statement and suddenly that abstract concept gets concretized into a man who lived in a specific place during a specific things. And he lived and taught in very specific ways. He gave up heaven for our messy little earth. He abdicated power to the point of death. He traded the divine community of the Trinity for a world that misunderstood and rejected him. All the abstract nouns that we like to subject God to take on a shape and become part of a narrative. In other words they become real again. And they take their proper place in the universe as concepts that find their meaning and definition in the person of Jesus Christ.
So I guess what I’m really saying in this excessively long post is that “In God We Trust” is fine. But “In Jesus Christ We Trust” tells a whole different story. I think it would be prudent for those of us who claim to be Christians to keep this distinction in mind.