My Narrative of God

Final Assignment Blog 2

8/3/2012

Steve Briggs, Student Number 16309596, MTh in Spiritual Formation.

My Narrative of God
1. My Narrative of God a. Introduction This paper outlines my Narrative of God, which is effectively another way of describing my journey into a deeper understanding of who the Triune God is. I have wrestled with three different pictures of God, to assist me in narrating this story. I am encouraged that even Jesus was able to ask people to describe who He is, as evidenced by this question taken from the gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16:13-15: When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, Who do people say the Son of Man is? They replied, Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets But what about you he asked. Who do you say I am?

In laying the framework for the answer to these questions, I want to tell the story of the various pictures of God I have known in my own life. This is not as bizarre as it may sound, because the God I know now is a very different God to the one I met when I became a follower of His many years ago; and is a very different God to the one I knew in my late teen and early adult years. I will attempt to tell my story, and to use Trinitarian theology and language in doing so.

b. My first picture of God I met the first Jesus (and by using the term Jesus, I am not being sloppy in my Trinitarian thinking, I genuinely mean that I met primarily with the Son of the Godhead only) when I was a tender 13 year old in my first year of boarding school at a waspy institution just north of the Juskei River. While being sent to this bastion of English colonialism, the atmosphere I encountered in the Pretoria of early 1990 was anything but country lanes and peaceful cricket greens. Instead it was the heady days surrounding the release of Nelson Mandela, and the churning change that our country was set to embark on.

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I too was churning on the inside, as my worldview shuddered to a halt in the crazy fire of being a new boy at Pretoria Boys High. Dislocated, both socially and

geographically, I cried out to a monadic God for help of any kind, and my prayer was answered in the form of two brothers resident with me in my hostel, one in Standard Nine and one in Matric, by the names of Paul and David Bombal. These boys parents were both missionary doctors and their Jesus was the Jesus of fundamentalist missionary zeal, who had put them in the Gomorrah of School House, to be the light to the darkness that is 75 young men living together.

I was introduced into a faith of intense sensation - the physical sensation of the Holy Spirits burning power (not that the Holy Spirit was understood in the context of the Trinity), the spine-tingling feeling of hearing someone speaking in tongues for the first time, and the fervent prayer and spiritual warfare we engaged in at the Student Christian Association (SCA) hut tucked down at the school swimming pool.

My Jesus condemned culture, and had just enough grace to love the unlovable sinners we were. He had no time for those who didnt believe in him, and he could be easily explained in the sinners prayer I tearfully prayed one early Friday evening. He was my Remedy for Sin as the small blue Gideons bible testified, and the contract I signed at the back of that Bible assured me of a place in heaven, away from the perceived sleaze and evil of 1990s Pretoria. It was also a world of great fear, as in moments of aloneness I imagined demons fighting over my mortal soul; even more so when 2 years later I heard a series preached at a large Charismatic / Fundamentalist church in Pretoria, which told me authoritatively that the anti-Christ was coming soon (because our coins had just changed and a Black government was about to be voted in). All I could hope for was something called the Rapture which might whisk me off this planet (only if I was a real Christian), otherwise I would suffer the torment of torture by the Beast (whose mark was already on barcodes everywhere).

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My Narrative of God
It was a world where I was thoroughly scared of secular culture, and hence hunkered down to my own narrow understanding of Christian music, Christian books, lots of SCA prayer meetings, and generally behaving very strangely.

Fortunately, towards the end of my high school career, I made friends with a teacher, Andre Steyn, who was running a small church in Pretoria called Ichtus Fellowship, and I started to experience balanced teaching, true fellowship, and lots of love for my teenage angst-ridden self. This introduced me to a second Jesus, the Jesus who proclaimed Good News, and for whom every knee bow, but first every ear had to hear!

a. My second picture of God The second Jesus I met was a loving God who needed the whole world to hear his message of salvation. He was still the only tangible member of the Trinity. And once saved, he changed our hearts and made us nicer, better people, which was also good, because then we could also get on with Gods task of saving the world around us. There was no notion of the Triune God already at work in the world.

This was the Jesus of Michael Cassidy and African Enterprise, whose mission was to preach the gospel to all of Africa. Michael was particularly involved in inter-racial reconciliation in South Africa, and in Matric I read his book The Passing Summer, written in the late 1980s and offering his personal vision of a harmonious country, once everyone had given their lives to Christ (including those hard-core heretics in the NG Church, as he would have put it. He would be quite amused to see how the Trinity has reshaped this part of the church today, I imagine).

After completing my Matric in 1994, I took the mandatory Christian year off from studying, and worked as an intern for this same African Enterprise, where I was taught how to give my testimony and also how to lead many to Christ. I preached the gospel in schools (from the Ivy covered walls of Hilton College to the povertySteve Briggs, 16309596 Page 4

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wracked Edendale High School) and even in dusty townships. This Jesus was the God who was the answer to the need everyone felt in his or her heart. This need was a God-shaped need and only this Jesus could fill it.

This was also a time of forming an image of the Father. For those who chose not to accept this Jesus, a sure fate awaited them. Because the Fathers wrath had to be satisfied by someone perfect and blameless (and because only his Son, Jesus, was perfect and spotless enough to qualify as the requisite sacrifice for his Fathers wrath and anger), those who did not choose him were condemned to suffer a tormented fate, and would, should a car hit them tonight, be sure to suffer the eternal wrath of God in Hell. The Good News of the Gospel could set them free though.

These were the two parts of the Trinity I knew when I went on to university in Port Elizabeth in 1996, and where, in my final year, I ran the student ministry for Walmer Methodist Church, including taking students on mission trips to places of darkness like Ubombo in Northern Kwazulu-Natal. Again, I had no sense of Missio Dei, and how the Triune God is present in all places, at all times,

These same members of the Trinity, once I had graduated with a B.Com Economics degree, led me to Johannesburg in 1999 where I joined Standard Banks graduate program (secretly still haunted by my early days in a fundamentalist church wondering when the anti-Christ would take over the banks IT systems, and after seeing how chaotically these were run, figuring it would still be a long time!).

It was the Father and Son whom I met at a large New Covenant Ministries suburban church in Bryanston, Johannesburg, and to whom we earnestly prayed in our young adults home group as we watched people get saved and healed. We also put up firm social boundaries when people were unable to be healed from homosexuality, or kept on asking questions that were too difficult to be simply answered.

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My Narrative of God
But somewhere towards late 2004, just after Julie and I had gotten married, I started to fall out of love with this imbalanced picture of the Trinity. And things no longer made sense - I started to have a crisis of faith. I was unsure if there was another picture of God, but I was determined to find out, or die trying.

b. My third picture of God What drove me to believe that there might be yet another type of God picture out there? Why did I not just make peace with the one I already knew? And who was I in the first place to even begin to make value Judgements on the image of God I had been taught? Could it be the wind of the Holy Spirit calling me to a balanced view of the Trinity?

Looking back from my current perspective, I can narrate a Trinitarian experience at this crisis point in my faith. I would suggest that the Fathers love, expressed through the Son, and actioned by the call of the Spirit, was both enticing me to something better, and making me uncomfortable with the status quo.

In a nutshell, even though I lacked the words for it, I simply knew that something was very wrong with the two earlier pictures of God (expressed primarily in Jesus, with an imbalanced understanding of the Father) I had known up to this point. These pictures of God were empty and flat, lacking life, and squeezed dry of any sense of mystery. These were the pictures of the God of the Western world, baked hard in the dry fires of the Reformation, and dogmatised in the orthodoxy of late Modernist Protestantism and Pentecostalism. And the possibility of God being Trinitarian was wholly unknown.

These pictures were the Theism of Middle America, with the Colgate-perfect smile of a happy nuclear family, a good middle-income life, and success and happiness assured, with the promise of a heavenly dwelling one-day. These pictures of God were the Deistic theology encompassed in the SUV-driving soccer moms, with the church as a happy alternative to the country club, where moms and tots bounced
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gaily and the dads spoke about rugby and the next big business deal. In short, these were the monadic notions of middle-class white western civilization and I could stand it no longer!

I innately knew that the Triune God of all creation was far less tame, far wilder and less safe than anything I had experienced up until this point. And despite titles like Wild at Heart that exhorted men to run around the bush and rediscover their inner tiger, it was all the same old stuff, just repackaged.

I am still searching, but let me give you a small bit of this new Triune God I have met. The Father I am now starting to get to know better, is the God who calls us to trade our certainty for his possibility. He is the Lord of all of Scripture, not just the parts written by Paul, and especially not just the bits written in Romans about how the Son had to die to satisfy Fathers wrath. In this Trinitarian picture, the Son and Spirit look to the Father as untameable mystery, whose only acts of condemnation seem to be aimed at those in religious positions of power who attempt to judge as to who is worthy to be in and who is out.

The Son no longer stands as the heroic single leg of a tripod.

Instead he is

balanced in a dance of communion, with His Father and with the Holy Spirit. Together, Being in Communion, this Jesus is but one expression of the Triune God whose whole purpose is to fellowship with, and restore, his creation.

And talking of Communion, the Spirit presences himself in divine acts of grace, from overt physical experiences, to His life-giving presence in the Eucharist, to silent spaces of centering prayer and lectio divina.

In this picture, the Spirit has stretched me to believe that dying in Christ is far preferable to the sterile certainty of keeping the God of mystery at bay, a certainty I have long forgotten as I have wrestled over the past two years with personally the

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hardest calling I have ever had to endure, in starting my business ARC, and trading in the security I once knew.

This picture of the Triune God is big enough for the whole world! Through the Spirit, He seeks to answer questions people genuinely ask of him, and is more relevant than the latest expression of good science or cutting edge literature. This God, expressed in the Son, has his apex in the resurrection, an act in which the Son, through the power of the Spirit, smashed through the fabric of the cosmos and started to reverse the decline of space, time and matter, which I fervently believe will culminate in the restoration of a new heaven and a new earth, as so beautifully described in Revelations 21 and 22.

And yet God the Holy Spirit has never been more intimate, nor more present in so many places. I meet the Spirit in the sacred Baroque arias of Handel, Bach and Mozart; and in the quiet space of monasteries. I have met with Him in the sandstone grandeur of the Washington Cathedral, and have felt His presence in the beautiful yellow robes and blue-domed mystery of Orthodox Churches. In my quiet morning mediation of centering prayer or the late night prayer of Examen, there He is, offering a peace and an energy way beyond anything I have ever known. He is the outworking of the Son, an outworking of mystery and mysticism; He is the healer of my own darkness and the displacer of brokenness with his habits of wholeness.

I meet Him in the elements of Eucharist and the booming voice of contemplative stillness. I encounter the Spirits mission in places good and bad; in the likely and the unlikely, Gods Triune mission is there already and the Spirit calls us to discern it and then participate in it.

And this is just the start of my knowing the Trinitarian God. I know that the Spirit will never get tired of my questions, or be unable to satiate my thirsting; I know that the Father is present in the highest learnings of my Stellenbosch colleagues, and in the

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lowliest questions of a simple home group. I know that the Son is relevant in 2012, 2112 and even for millennia after that.

God the Son is no longer British or American; instead he is Near Eastern, or maybe Asian, and definitely African, and possibly even South American. He is no longer Protestant; he is maybe Catholic, or possibly Orthodox, and definitely Jewish. He is bigger than all the religious structures of this world and He is bigger than the church (although he loves the church). The Son stands towering over the wisdom traditions and faiths of this world, and offers hope and reconciliation for all.

2. My Trinitarian Creed I have attempted to write a personal Trinitarian Creed, following Prof Dirkie Uys lecture (and Connie and Danies input) and offer the following: I believe in the God of all creation, the Creator of space, time and matter; who through the Father called all things into being; who through His Son Jesus Christ, has reversed death and decay; and through the Spirit is empowering life, renewing all things and creating new energy and direction.

I believe in the Triune God who chooses to partner with us as co-labourers in His myriad actions of putting the world to rights, beginning with the Resurrection.

I believe in the God who elects all mankind to be participants in His renewed earth, heaven imbued, at the end of all things.

I believe in the God of justice, who calls the poor, dispossessed and homeless to feast at the top of His table; the God of peace and righteousness who challenges Empire and the accepted compromises of Capitalism, civic structures and the real politik of the status quo.

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My Narrative of God
I believe in the infinitely creative God, who constantly stretches our imaginations and leaves us better for being bidden to give all.

I believe in the God of ultimate reconciliation, who manifests His love through renewal with us; renewal with the church; renewal with the all of humanity; and renewal with creation. I believe in the God of sacred space, who straddles both universal revelation and personal intimacy.

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