Battlestar Galactica, Monotheism, Terrorism and Trinity

I'm not the big sci-fi guy in my family. Josh and Nancy are far more devoted to that genre, but I go along for the ride from time to time. In the last few years that has meant time with Battlestar Galactica (not the old one with Lorne Greene, but the new one with James Edward Olmos). It's well done, and interesting for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its theology.

The basic story line revolves around a long conflict between the human race and their rebellious creation, the Cylons. The Cylons have evolved from "robotic" soldiers (what humans call "toasters") to human-like characters who cannot be detected within the normal human population. OK, I know, but its amazing how easy it is to suspend belief here because the story is well-told.

But here's the thing. The humans are polytheists, the Cylons monotheists. The humans thank the gods for their world, the Cylons view the world in relation to one source. This is a pretty interesting flip on things, one worthy of its own post by someone with more knowledge of both the show and systematic theology.

But here's the other thing. There's a new spin-off from the BG phenomenon that tells the back story, Caprica. The creation of the Cylons, it appears, comes out of a terrorist attack (in a round about way) committed by a religious cult that is interested in serving "the one true God." Monotheism and terrorism are related. The link is explicit. The belief in one God as the source for everything is inherently violent. With one God, there are only two sides, good and evil, with us or against us. The implication is that this is inherently violent.

I've stewed over this for a number of years now. Christianity is not only monotheistic, but historical. That is, the primary issue for Christianity is the outcome of history, and that is certainly a contested reality. I'm not saying that Christianity is inherently or inescapably violent, but I am saying that a monotheistic, historical faith has certain temptations along these lines.

Moltmann makes similar observations to those made by the BG crowd (don't want to oversimplify BG here, the question of God is dynamic, not wooden or static). Moltmann is critical of any theology that is monistic, by which he means any notion of God as a single source. He suggests that such a view of God results in an over/against view of the relationship between God and world. Much of Christian theology is susceptible, for Moltmann, to the label "monist." This is particularly true of Christian traditions, including most of Western Christianity, that define God in relation to a single substance (ousia) that is prior to an understanding of God as three persons. Pannenberg piles on at this point as well, criticizing any notions that reduce God to a single-acting-subject.

The antidote for both to Christian monism is a more biblical understanding of God as Triune. For Moltmann, if you start with philosophy, you emphasize one God and then try to explain the three persons. If you start with the biblical testimony, you start with the relations of the three persons and move from there to God's unity. As Moltmann works the biblical witness, particularly as it relates to the "history of the Son" and the drama of the Kingdom of God, we find a dynamic God with different centers of action and reciprocal relations. This God is not closed, like the god of classical theism; immutable, simple, persisting, free. The God of Scripture is open, passionate, understood as making room for the other in love.

For me, this is precisely the importance of the Trinity, especially as seen in the work of theologians like Moltmann and Pannenberg. It keeps God in history without the amplifier of monism. It guards the Christian imagination from an easy us vs. them. It makes possible visions of God's future that are rooted in non-violence which corresponds best to the story of Jesus found in the gospels.

Moltmann And the Father of Jesus, the Son

This is one of those weeks I will always remember. I drove Wednesday morning from Detroit to Chicago to join around 300 others for a conversation with Jurgen Moltmann, a conversation hosted by the Emergent Village bunch. I will cap the trip with a U2 concert in Soldier Field on Sunday night. Bono and Moltmann, two of my favorite theologians. Awe and wonder all the way around.

Moltmann is 83 years old. His life is an amazing story (you might want to read his autobiography, A Broad Place). He was a German soldier in WWII, taken priosner, and found God in a Sottish prison camp. Amazing story, and consequently his career as a theologian finds few parallels. His work has sounded the themes of hope, justice, and ecology, all in the pursuit of knowing the God of Jesus Christ. His work is important for my dissertation in many ways. I am currently immersed in his books as I prepare for my comprehensive exams in a few weeks. I am richer for this engagement, by a long ways.

Here's the one thing you should know about Moltmann (from my perspective). HE refuses to think about God apart from the human experience of Jesus. Which sounds kind of obvious to many of us Bible-believing type folks. But Moltmann shows that for most of us, this simply is not the case.

Most of us begin with a version of God based on certain assumptions that we inherited from the Greek philosphical tradition. For God to be perfect, God must be simple, free, unchangeable, impassable, independent, etc. This is sometimes called classical theism, and Moltmann suggests that this view of God results inevitably in a kind of monism--God as a single acting subject and everything else as an object. Christian theology in the West has often assumed this view of God. God was thought of as a single substance, identified with the Father, and the Son and Spirit were sometimes thought of as modes of this one substance. The beginning assumption is the unity of God, the three persons being the hard thing to explain.

Now, here's the deal. There are a lot of problems one gets into when accounting for the real problems of the world if God is thought of as as single acting subject. For the Greeks, the problems of monism were expressed in the problem of theodicy. If God is all powerful, and if God is good, then how can bad things happen? Either God is all-powerful, and not good. Or God might be good, but not all powerful. There are current forms of Christian theology that opt to begin with the assuption that God is all powerful and the goodness of God will work itself out in the end. The tornado that swept through the Twin Cities a few weeks ago was God's punishment for the ELCA's decision to ordain homosexuals, says John Piper, the most prominent voice in the new Calvinism that explains every event as an event under God's providential control. But as Moltmann suggested yesterday, such a God is a monster.

In milder forms, Christian monism simply puts the world on the receiving end of all of God's stuff. The world is perpetual object to God's perpetual subject. All the arrows point one way, and the church is often thought of as being on God's side of the arrows. We've got all the good stuff. The world is simply our target, our strategic concern. This leads easily to mission as a kind of imperialism, or benevolence and evangelism as a kind of paternalism. This is the implication of the criticism Moltmann brings to Barth's theology. (God is a single-acting subject in Barth's theology, from Moltmann's perspective).

Moltmann does not begin with the assumptions about God located in classic theism. He begins with Jesus as the Son of the Father. We know God as the Father of Jesus, the Son. It is in this relationship of mutuality that we begin to understand God. This is true also of the relationship between Father and Spirit and Son and Spirit. God is not one substance in three forms, or one acting subject in three modes. God is three persons who each have centers of action and have a dynamic and reciprocal relationship. And in any relationship, any reciprocity, there is need and vulnerability. There is openness to the other.

In fact, it is this openness to the other that constitutes God as love. And it is this love that makes room for creation. And it is this love that leaves space for a free creation. And it is this love that marks itself as suffering, enduring love. As Moltmann said yesterday, God's power is not expressed by the fact that he controls all things (the opposite of love), but in that he bears all things and suffers all things. This is a game changer in so many ways.

At the conference yesterday, people talked to Moltmann about how his book, The Crucified God, gave them a lease on life--new hope--in the most tragic of circumstances. The loss of an infant son, the persistent struggle of disability, the opression related to class and race and gender. That's a pretty hefty theological legacy. I doubt that Piper's theology has many stories like that. The answer to why in Piper's theology is always God, and that causes more problems that it solves. For Moltmann, there is no answer to the question why and if there were it would not satisfy us. But in the crucified God there is a who and a where and a when related to suffering. There is a God who suffers all things, who lashes himself to the world on a cross, and whose resurrection will not allow suffering to be the last word.

Wilco on a Sunday

This morning is a cup of coffee and the new Wilco. I like Wilco. It's smart stuff, both musically and lyrically. The new cd, Wilco, the Album, is perhaps more modest than their previous cd's. It doesn't have some of the jagged, experimental edges of their earlier work. But that makes it more immediately inviting to me. And so, coffee and Wilco this morning is a pleasurable thing.

Wilco refuses the happy face, the easy ending. Jeff Tweedy sings often with tongue planted firmly in cheek, rolling around in the irony of it all. The title track to the cd offers comfort to world weary listeners. Wilco cares, Tweedy sings, and will offer you a sonic shoulder to cry on--in my case comfort from an itunes download.

Wilco touches for me that feeling related to the complexity of life. Whatever it is we think we're up to gets lost too easily in the thick and bewildering nature of things. Even the offering of one's life for another, dying "alone like Jesus," gets lost in the sweep of generations and the numbing pursuits of daily life. We forget. The grand gesture is lost.

Still, there is somthing about bringing all this brokenness together in one place--this refusal of the easy happy. The fact that all of us are one wing short of being able to fly throws us all together under the same aching need. And there is hope there, in the commonness of our ache and pain.

I've been reading Jurgen Moltmann this week, preparing for my comprehensive exams which are coming up sooner than I need them to be. Moltmann sees the world as the history of God's suffering. He is following the minority theological tradition that begins not with a catlogue of God's attributes, but with the passion of God, his willingness to suffer and his openness to creation. Sorrow is the mark of God's evelasting love, the only place we can accurately attribute to God all power.

So, the paths of my reflection crossed over coffee in the Wilco song, Everlasting, Everything. In all the irony, Wilco still sings of hope.

Everything alive must die
Every building built to the sky will fall
Don't try to tell me my
Everlasting love is a lie

Everlasting, everything
Oh, nothing could mean anything at all

Every wave that hits the shore
Every book that I adore
Gone like a circus, gone like a troubadour
Everlasting love forever more

Everlasting, everything
Oh, nothing could mean anything at all

Oh, I know this might sound sad
But everything goes both good and the bad
It all adds up and you should be glad
Everlasting love is all you have

Everlasting, everything
Oh, nothing could mean anything at all
Everlasting, everything
Oh, nothing could mean anything at all

Moltmann and God as the Coming One

So, I've been swamped with travel and the end of a semester and so haven't gotten to my blog to continue the series on gospel and cultures. But I'm writing a paper on this for a class this semester and am using Jurgen Moltmann as a source. Moltmann is a hope guy, and I have a friend who recently and in very eloquent ways reinforced the importance of hope in everyday life.

So, here are some paragraphs from Moltmann's, The Future of Creation. It's not in any kind of form and lacks a setting to make it seem like an argument. But hey, this is an adventure in getting to the point. I like, however, how Moltmann defines God and ties God to the category of the new. Anyway, more soon. My semester ends next week.

While gospel was a word used primarily outside of religious circles, it is not a word without theological significance. Jurgen Moltmann, for instance, emphasizes the biblical descriptions of God as “the Coming One,” and in turn suggests the category of novum as a primary category for understanding God. Moltmann distinguishes the biblical view of God from the traditional Greek depictions of deity. God is not the one who “will be” (einai), but is the one who “is coming” (erchestai). “God’s being is in his coming,” and it follows that “the future is God’s mode of being in history.” The experience of God in history is one of advent.

This is important for Moltmann who distinguishes between futurum and adventus. Futurum develops out of the past. The future is latent in the “tendencies of process.” In contrast, adventus is a change in “the transcendental conditions of time.” Advent is an arrival, a coming, and the conditions of arrival carry the prospect of surprise, or of the astonishingly new. The future is not determined by the momentum of historical processes, but is open to the possibilities of the Coming One.

The prophets represent an advent posture toward the future. Israel’s hope in exile is not for a restoration of Israel’s former glory, but rather lies in God’s ideal future. Moltmann cites Isaiah as typical of this postexilic prophetic hope: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. For behold, I purpose to do a new thing” (43.18f). The “new thing—is the historical side of their eschatological openness to the future.” God, as the coming one, is bringing new possibility, an alternative to the inevitable forces of history.

The category novum (new), for Moltmann, possesses two characteristics. First, it announces itself as a judgment on what is old. This is not simply the improvement of the old, but the announcement of its end or futillity. The new makes the old obsolete. This does not mean, however, that the old has no place in the new. The second feature Moltmann cites relates the new to the events of the past. The new is like things that have happened before—for example, the Exodus—but the new is always more. It resembles roughly the former, and, therefore, is recognizable as God’s faithfulness. In this sense, one might say that the former is not in linear continuity with the new thing, but is related typologically, the former thing to be understood now in relation to God’s coming. These same characteristics are true, for Moltmann, of the advent of Jesus. It possesses surprise and judgment, but also a resemblance to prior things.

Moltmann does not notice here that the prophetic emphasis on newness is also the place where the word gospel appears in the LXX (Septuagent, the Greek Old Testament). “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’” (Is. 52:7-8, italic added). The announcement of the rule of Zion’s God is not obvious to all. It is hidden in the disfigurement and suffering of the servant who bears the announcement. “Who has believed what we have heard? To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (53:1). It is precisely the surprise of this announcement, however, that awakens observers that the suffering of the servant is a suffering on their behalf. If the term gospel as used in the New Testament has biblical antecedent, it is surely here in relation to God’s new work.

Moltmann’s description of God as the Coming One brings us back to the question of news. News is related to the identity of God and corresponds to eschatological notions of God’s saving reign. Novum, therefore, is descriptive of God’s engagement with the world. And the two characteristics of novum that Moltmann cites provide clues as to how the church might remain in the mode of news. Surprise and Wisdom.

God the Spirit, 3

I took my German language exam today. I'm pretty sure I'll have the chance to take it again, which is not a good thing. All those Hogan's Heroes episodes wasted.

But there was some benefit to it. I was asked to translate an article by Jurgen Moltmann. I took a class on Trinity and Mission last Fall, and the Moltmann readings were my favorite. I love the way that he begins theology, our understandings of God, in the Garden of Gethsemane. We understand God as Father, Son and Spirit best in relation to the suffering of Jesus.

But I also like how much Moltmann stresses the importance of eschatology for our understandings of God, church, and world. Now, by eschatology, I don't mean Tim LaHaye or speculation about end of the world events. I mean more just the tension between the already and the not yet. The Kingdom of God has come near, but is not fully present. The resurrection is the event where God's future breaks into our world, guarantees for us participation in God's ultimate purposes.

Moltmann points to Paul's understanding of the role of the Spirit in raising Jesus from the dead. The Spirit is an agent of God's future, bringing the fruit of resurrection to every aspect of life. A new creation.

In the passage I translated today, Moltmann encourages his readers to think of the gifts of the Spirit not so much as supernatural phenomena, but as gifts from God's future. They belong to the day of God's peace, his new family, his ultimate victory over death. (He either said that, or that Paul McCartney is dead. I'm not real clear sometime with the German).

I like this notion. God has established a day in the death and resurrection of Jesus. There's nothing that anyone can do about it. It is established and it has made its apperance in our history. By God's grace, and through God's Spirit, we are invited to belong to that day, and to serve its interests in the power of the Spirit.