Understanding Faith - God Here and Now
notes by Ian Bensted
SYNOPSIS
1. The objective is to summarise a wide range of issues related to God's
moment by moment involvement in this world, and with individual personal
lives within it. This will encompass many key aspects of Christian belief
and practice, such as God's transcendence, his upholding and sustaining
of the world, the doctrine of the Trinity, the activity of the Holy Spirit,
and dialogue with God through prayer and worship. Taken holistically our
subject impinges upon associated gigantic topics such as evolution, miracles,
the mysteries of imperfection and suffering, and the relationship between
the Spirit and the Word of God.
2. Whilst all these topics have, at some time, to be addressed in the
same context for the sake of consistency of a total world-view, here we
are focusing on such key questions as: "How does an infinite transcendent
God express his personality within his creation?"; "Can we gain
some insight into the mechanism through which God can and does communicate
with his creatures on a day-to-day basis?"; "What is God's normal
practical point of influence with his creation, and in particular with
his creatures in this world?"
3. God is transcendent - that is he is distinct from his creation. And
yet he created the world as we know it, apparently out of nothing. That
is why there is something rather than nothing! In the New Testament especially
we understand that, unlike a human architect or engineer, who may have
no further involvement in his creative work after it is completed, God
did not and cannot abandon his creation to fend for itself. Time and again
Scripture attributes nature to God's handiwork, whether or not it can
be explained in scientific terms. God is continuously present and active
in our world, sustaining it by holding it in being moment by moment. This
carries with it the awesome implication that, were he to cease this activity,
the world would not simply be left to wind down, it would vanish instantaneously
out of existence.
4. In God's relationship to his creation we see that there are clear indications
of a multi-dimensional structure of the Godhead. Trinitarian ideas in
the Bible begin to focus. For:
Firstly, a transcendent God cannot enter his space-time creation, either
to formulate it in the first place, or to sustain it, without compromising
his infinity.
Secondly, a transcendent God would have the most fundamental problem in
coming into meaningful dialogue with free human beings, because he would
know the outcome before that dialogue even commenced.
5. This leads us to three very important Christian theistic truths:
Firstly, that the original creative act and the ongoing upholding and
sustaining of the universe have to be the work of an agent, on an extended
arm basis as it were - God-the-Son, Jesus Christ, the second person of
the Trinity, through whom God set aside his transcendence in order to
create and sustain our finite world
Secondly, that there must be a fundamental continuity between the activity
of creation and the subsequent upholding and sustaining of our world.
Thirdly, personal, individual dialogue between God and man must also be
on an agency or extended arm basis. The vital task of communicating with
us as individuals is entrusted to God-the-Holy Spirit, the third person
of the Trinity.
6. God-the-Holy Spirit challenges us through our deepest feelings. Examples
that may come to mind are the delights of human love, friendship and fellowship;
the happiness associated with laughter and fun; the joy of sexual union,
procreation and bringing up children; the beauty of music and other art
forms; the excitement of learning, enjoying creation and exercising our
creativity; the fulfilment of achieving ambitions and aspirations that
drive us to exploit our talents and to maximise our endeavours into worthwhile
outcomes; the sadness of parting from loved ones; the pain of suffering
and imperfection; and finally the fear of death, judgment and extinction.
CS Lewis summed this up so well where he wrote, "God whispers to
us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain:
it is his megaphone to a deaf world." Of course these kinds of feelings
and experiences are common to all mankind. That should not surprise us
because God speaks to everyone in these ways, for "(God) wants all
men to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth".
7. But there is another even more personal activity of the Holy Spirit.
All of us experience from time to time flashes of insight and inspiration.
In common with other thoughts and more generalised experiences, these
"strays" have a physical correlate in the brain, because what
we call our minds are the experiential correlates of what goes on in our
brains. In "Behind the Eye", Donald MacKay speculates about
the actual mode of God's communication with individual human minds, "Within
the multi-million-fold activity in a human brain", he writes, "if
we could, as it were, 'magnify up' regions of activity here and there,
what we would find is a stochastic process of immense complexity in which
spontaneous transitions are happening all the time." Later he writes,
"It does seem to me to be a fair claim that there is nothing whatsoever
incompatible between the testimony of religious people down the ages that
their experience can take on the significance of dialogue-with-God, and
the most tough-minded of mechanistic images of what goes on in their brains
as the correlate of these experiences". On this basis the crucial
significance of Genesis
2 must be that it is a record of the first such experience in the history
of mankind.
8. God communicates with his creatures in either generalized or specific
terms via our minds in one of these kinds of ways. They are God's chosen
way of direct personal communication with his creatures, and also his
normal route into our world on a moment by moment basis. Dialogue with
God is a credible Christian experience, through the Holy Spirit. All this
is consistent with the Biblical assertion that the Holy Spirit is the
major personal player in our world today, illuminating Jesus Christ for
us, and his point of entry is human minds. He is active in the minds of
non-Christians, as well as in those of Christians in a very special way.
As the Apostle Paul put it, "God has poured out his love into our
hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us".
9. Throughout all of this I would want to affirm absolutely the concept
of a purposeful controlling hand upon the universe, as expounded by Keith
Ward & Arthur Peacocke in recent publications, and also the reality
of extraordinarily unusual activity of the Almighty in special circumstances
- miracles, most notably the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ!.
However, for different reasons, neither of these will yield up any of
their secrets in the context of a strictly scientific investigation. Hence
we see God's activity in our world today as practically confined to universal
general laws - pre-determined at creation and the very stuff of scientific
enterprise - together with the interaction that God exercises with human
minds through the Holy Spirit.
10. If the heart is representative of the will and the emotions, that
is the "real me" and what I want from my life; if the soul is
representative of my capability as a human being to enter into a relationship
with God which includes dialogue; then the mind is the mechanism that
facilitates and enables. I cannot then think of a better way of summarising
all this than the first and greatest commandment according to our Lord,
Jesus, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind".
Ian Bensted
15.09.02
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