I’ve been reading Psalms, a remarkable collection of songs, some written over three thousand years ago. Because they were written over many hundreds of years, they are a record of how the Jew’s belief in God developed over the centuries.
It is significant that despite the time-span in which the psalms were written, the theology they espouse dovetails together to form a unified narrative. Arguably, the main unifying feature of the Psalms is their strong focus on love – both the love of God for his people, and the love of the people for God. The Psalms are a strong reminder that the Jewish God was not a precocious god to be feared, like the gods of the surrounding nations such as Chemoth or Moloch – both of which demanded child sacrifices. The pre-eminent attitude of the Jews towards God was to be “love.” This is perhaps surprising, given that the Jewish God could not be seen or even be represented by an idol. So, it is therefore reasonable to ask: How could this love develop?
The answer is simple and significant. The motivation to love came from the overwhelming conviction that God was active in his people’s history. The Jews experienced God chastening them, teaching them, providing for them, and above all loving them.
This simple truth has huge implications for the traditional main-line churches of the Western world. Since the Enlightenment, the Western church has been infected by Deism, which has masqueraded as Christianity behind the mask of “Christian liberalism.” The Western church’s main-line denominations are currently reeling drunkenly from its influence. Liberal church after liberal church has collapsed and died under the weight of the meaninglessness they preach. Liberal theology has no room for a God who acts in history. It cannot allow that God may choose to override his laws of nature and do something that impinges on the life of his people. Similarly, liberal theologians cannot allow Jesus to be anything other than a moral example. They have forbidden Jesus from being any more special than themselves. They don’t believe that Jesus did any miracles, or that he rose from the dead.
The relevance of this is, I hope, apparent. The God of liberal theology would have totally failed to earn the love of his people in the Old Testament. For many Old Testament saints, their experience of God acting in history was their only source of hope, as many of them had not yet developed a theological understanding of life after death.
The failure to acknowledge God acting in history means that the liberal God remains impersonal, distant and not much more than a theory. This helps explainwhy worship in liberal churches rarely shows much evidence of love for God. Rather, it is characterised by formalism and a sense of duty. It is difficult to reconcile this relational bleakness with the primary commandment of Jesus who taught us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.
In recent years this emotional sterility has prompted some contemporary liberals to “gee things up” a bit by doing creative things in worship that feature the wonder of creation. When I attended a liberal theological college, this expressed itself in people doing “meaningful things” with tree leaves, candles and floaty scarves. It seems that when people feel they cannot worship a personal God, they compensate by sacralising his creation. Whilst honouring God’s handiwork is a good thing, worshipping nature is certainly not. The old-fashioned name for doing so is “paganism”.
The crucial question, then, is this: Can we believe in a miraculous God?
It is actually too late to ask this question as we already live in a miraculous universe. The laws that govern the existence of life have required a balance of nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational forces finely tuned to the level of several trillionths of a degree. And, here’s the thing: Our existence continues to require “miraculous” intervention in order to avoid our planet becoming as sterile of life as the rest of the universe (as far as we understand it). In other words, the fact that you exist is a pretty fair indication that God has intervened with the laws of nature in order to suit his purposes. Even the English astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, (an atheist) wrote:
A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.[1]
God is active in history and has revealed (and is revealing) himself in history. We have seen him peerlessly as Jesus.
It is truly the case that God can be known… and therefore loved.
[1] Fred Hoyle, ‘‘The Universe: Past and Present Reflections’’, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982): 16.
