Bible Stories

Confessing God

All the creeds, confessions of faith and doctrinal bases that have ever gained currency in the church have defined theism along the lines already sketched.

If we say we believe in God, we are saying something about ourselves as well: that we are creatures wholly dependent on God the Creator for our existence, our continuance, our circumstances and our destiny.

Some theologians have said that affirmations about God must be ‘cashed’ simply in terms of the effect such belief has on the believer, since God cannot be known or spoken of directly.

Although such scepticism must seem unjustified to mainstream Christians, who believe that God has openly revealed himself to mankind in creation, in history, in the Bible and above all in Jesus Christ, it is certainly true that faith in God will change the way we think of ourselves. If it is ‘God-with-a-capital-G’, the God of the Bible, whom we confess, we shall know ourselves not only as creatures but also as sinners, condemned by God’s holiness yet called to salvation in and through Jesus Christ.

Finding the words

Christians believe that God is unique. They also believe that he makes mankind in his own image — like him, that is, in such basic ways as being personal, rational, able to form love- relationships. So the language we use of him must be able to express both our likeness and our unlikeness to him. When Christianity moved out of Palestine into the wider Greek-speaking world, thinkers drew on Greek philosophy for words capable of this double job.

Philosophers in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle thought of the world as eternal but depending in some way on a divine principle, immaterial, impassive, immobile, immutable and timeless. Plotinus, who adapted Plato’s thought, held that the only true statements that could be made about this divine principle were negative, saying what it was not.

Christians borrowed some of these verbal forms, and some would say that in so doing, they corrupted their own thinking about the gracious personal God, Maker, Redeemer, King and Friend, whom the Bible reveals. But anyone who reads the early fathers will see that, though their language about God could on occasion be abstract, philosophical and fantastic, they never lost sight of the fact that God is personal, all-powerful and very much alive. In finding words to express the doctrine of God the fathers did well on the whole. And the formulations in which they finally came to define belief in the trinity and in the person of Christ are among the great works of the human intellect.

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