Jesus, God, the Bible, and all that

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher.  My style of teaching requires that I learn something myself first through experience and then I pass it on.  There are some things that I can’t pass on in the classroom because (a) I teach math and (b) I teach in a state institution. If you don’t want to learn about religion right now, I recommend our excellent sports page to you. Well, that might be a religion too, but you know what I mean.

Traditional Christian teaching understands God as the Mystic Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  We believe that Jesus was God.  In particular, we believe he was fully God and fully Human.

This has been a point of contention.  Blood has been shed; ink has been spilled; hot air has been expended.

It’s been a big deal.

All my life I have believed, and I still believe. It was the way I was raised, the way I was educated.  But now as I grow older, grow more dispassionate, I find that the nature of my belief has been odd.

What do I mean?  I mean that I’ve had no difficulty seeing Jesus as God.  My difficulty has been seeing him as a human being.  I think that is something that I need to correct.

We are told in the Gospel of John that no one has seen God.  One might assume that he’s talking about his readers because there are scriptural references to Adam walking with God in the Garden and to Moses seeing God however obscurely.  But it’s safe to assume none of John’s readers were among those selected few.  

John goes on to explain that we see God through Jesus: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

As I said, I am well aware that there is disagreement on this. There are whole religions of very fine people who disagree with my tradition on this. I am not here to argue about it.  I am a math teacher: I don’t argue, I just explain why you are wrong.  My purpose is to start with this line from John’s gospel and go from there.

Most of the people I’ve met have an idea of God.  And here I will add even the atheists, nay, especially the atheists.  

The atheists have an idea of God. They are definite.  It is clear to them. They have done more study on it than you or me or almost any clergyman that I know. They take their disbelief in God very seriously.

They disbelieve in God, and when I’ve listened to their idea of God, I find I don’t believe in that God either. This is a statement that is by no means unique to me.

But don’t let me wander too far. My point here is not to try to change an atheist’s mind. God forbid. (It’s a joke; lighten up.) My point is that even atheists have some idea of God, and I think most people do.

Whether or not God exists, there is a natural tendency for people to believe. I’ve read articles that have stated that there is a part of the brain that is wired for holy experiences.  I’ve seen that used in arguments for the non-existence of God.  The same people don’t use eyes in arguments for non-existence of the sun, but there I go again wandering off again; it is not my point.

We have a natural tendency to believe in God.  But we have competing notions of what God is.

In the Bible, we have a record of one tradition’s experience of wrestling with God and/or that tradition’s notion of Him. (I’m using the traditional pronouns here. Make a drinking game of it, and let it roll over you.)  

Those in my tradition, use Jesus as a lens on the Bible (“the writings” as the authors of the New Testament referred to their scripture).  Through Jesus, the Human, his life and deeds, they came to an understanding of God.

Through that lens, those who knew him, those who were closest to him, wrote such things as “God is Love.”

We see God in the acts of Jesus: Acts of healing; acts of teaching; acts of expelling demons; acts of feeding the multitude.

Acts of loving kindness. 

Jesus is a lens that magnifies the picture of God that was given in the Old Testament.

So there you go.  There will be those who disagree. 

That’s okay.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.