On Not Mastering Divinity--January 22, 2021

On Not Mastering Divinity--January 22, 2021

"For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me face to face. I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." [Colossians 2:1-3]

My seminary degree is preposterous.  Well, at least the way it sounds when you say it out loud sure is.  The name for the degree you get when you graduate from seminary in a program toward ordained ministry is, and I kid you not here, "Master of Divinity."

Shoot.  Master?  Of divinity?  

Where to even begin, right? That sounds like it's claiming an awful lot of expertise in a subject that by definition is bigger than our minds can grasp.  

We all know of course, that it's because the name for a graduate degree program is a "masters degree." And to be sure, there are some kinds of knowledge that you can indeed master--that is to know them exhaustively, completely, and to have your command and your disposal.  

State capitals--sure, watch me rattle them off from Juneau, Alaska to Cheyene, Wyoming.  That's a finite set that I can memorize and recall when needed. 

Pythagorean theorem--learned it in junior high school and never looked back.  No mysteries there--just triangles.

Names of all the Beatles' albums, painters of the Renaissance, lyrics to "Come On, Eileen," by Dexy's Midnight Runners--all of them are subjects one can more or less accurately be said to "master."  But--divinity?  Really?

Well, this is something we need to talk about.  Because it is all too tempting to put God in the same category as 80s song lyrics or the periodic table of elements--you know, as a subject you can exhaustively know, master, and explain.  We sometimes speak and act as if knowing God is simply a matter of memorizing Bible verses, reciting creeds, or learning a particular set of answers to predetermined questions in a catechism.  We treat God like God is something (not even someone) you can be a master of.

The letter to the Colossians begs to differ.  Instead of treating God, or even Christ specifically, as an academic subject we can study or dissect or put into a chart, the letter to the Colossians comes back to the notion of "mystery."  Mystery here, of course, doesn't mean like a whodunnit where Columbo solves the murder before the last commercial break as he launches into a speech that says, "Just one thing..."  But rather, a mystery in the biblical sense is a reality beyond our complete comprehension--something, or someone, that is too wondrous for words, too deep for diagramming, and too big to put in a box.  A mystery, a Bible teacher once told me, is something you would never have figured out on your own unless it had been shown to you.

And in that sense, knowing Christ isn't merely about memorizing a set of facts--it is being drawn to participate in the One whom we know... the One who knows us already, and perfectly, at that.  Let me try and sketch out a bit more of what I think these verses mean.  Back to state capitals--you can know that Albany is the capital of New York without ever having been there.  You can know that lithium is the third element on the periodic table, but not understand a thing about what it looks like, how it reacts, or what it does.  But to know Christ pulls us in; it changes us.  Knowing Christ puts us into a relationship with Christ, and also shapes us to become like Christ as well.  (In some languages, like Spanish, they even have different words for knowing a fact--the verb "saber"--and knowing a person or place relationally--the verb "conocer."  This might be a helpful way of thinking about it for us.)

Okay, so what?  

Well, in addition to meaning that we can never really "master" God and therefore maybe we should change the names of our seminary degree programs, I think it means that we should be prepared for being changed, being transformed, by knowing Christ.  Christians are not merely people who know facts about the historical Jesus--in fact, it turns out that the Gospels themselves give us precious few details about the man from Galilee.  Rather, we are called to be people who are shaped by the One we are coming to know more deeply.  You can't really, truly "know" a mystery by memorizing facts about it--you only "know" a mystery by participating in it, being changed by it, and being swept up into its reality.  And this is what voices like Paul's, as well as all the gospel writers and other apostles, and all the most faithful teachers and saints of the last two thousand years, have been trying to do for us--to help us to be pulled into sharing the life of Christ.  They aren't teaching us facts to memorize, but forming us by immersing us in the presence of Christ.

In a way, this helps to make sense of why other voices of the New Testament can say things like, "The one who doesn't love doesn't know God, because God is love."  That's different than state capitals and song lyrics.  I can memorize those without being there or singing the tune.  But God--I can't really know God without being changed in the encounter.  And because of who God is, that change will look like love.

So, for whatever else it might mean for us religious folks to say we "know God," or for us to invite other people to "know Christ," it definitely means a surrendering of ourselves to become what God will make of us.  It means that if I am using my belief in God as a way of beating up on other people, I have missed the point of the Gospel, because that doesn't fit with the God we come to know in Jesus.  And if we somehow get hornswoggled into thinking that our faith gives us permission to ignore the needs of others outside our faith, or to baptize our pet greed and hatreds, we are revealing that we really don't know Christ, no matter how many Bible stories about Jesus we have memorized or how many cross-stamped objects we own.  Christ's kind of knowing makes us like him--in other words, the way to gauge how well we are learning Christ is to see how we are getting better at love, at justice, at truthfulness, at gentleness, and at courageous mercy, not to measure how many Bible verses I can recite.

Today, let's allow Christ to shape us.  Let's give up on pretending Christ was ever an academic subject we could master, but instead to see that he is intent, as he draws us in close, on forming love in us, so that we can participate in the mystery--so that we will be like the One who loves us.

Come and make us into your likeness, Lord Jesus.  Shape us in the form of your love.