Before God

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Before God

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Psalm 16:8

According to the Bible, human life is lived coram Deo - before God. Human beings are created to live before the face of and in the sight of God. They live and die before God, and it is God before whom they are finally at rest. They live in the hope that God will "make his face to shine upon [them], and be gracious to [them]" (Num. 6:25). Traditional forms of Christian faith, worship, piety, and theology presuppose that this coram, or "beforeness," is the most important fact about human life. The convictions of Christian faith - that God creates everything that is; that human life is grounded in God's promises and covenants; that sin is not only disbelief and disobedience, not only "missing the mark" and "going astray," but also fleeing and hiding from God; that redemption is both the forgiveness of sins and new life in Jesus Christ, life that looks forward joyfully to a new heaven and a new earth, in which all creation will be gathered in eternal doxology - all presuppose that human life once was, is now, and forever shall be "before God."

Although for much of its history the church and its theologians were able to presuppose this "beforeness," many Christians today have experienced not so much what Martin Buber described some thirty years ago as the "eclipse of God," but more precisely the eclipse of life lived before God. The dilemma for many people today is not uncertainty as to whether God exists. Polls continue to show that a large percentage of people in North America believe in a "higher power." There is also considerable evidence in contemporary culture and in churches that people believe there is mystery and transcendence in and beyond human experience. But believing that there is mystery is vastly different from believing that one's life, from beginning to end, is lived daily before God. A God who is a remote mystery or impersonal transcendence may exist and in some sense may or may not be present in the world, but Christian faith presupposes not only God's existence and transcendence but also that people live before God and are accountable to one another because they are first accountable to God.

Many Christians no longer understand their everyday lives as lived before God. They grow up, develop friendships, discover vocations, fall in love, have families, make good and bad decisions, experience joy and disappointment, fear and hope, perhaps even attend church on Sundays, but without a sense that the drama that is their daily existence is played out before God. They continue to believe in God, but they do not eat dinner, enjoy a sunrise, read the newspaper, have a disagreement with their spouse, participate in worship, attend weddings, spend their money with a sense that they are "before God."

The eclipse of life before God has consequences for almost every aspect of Christian life. First, it has significant implications for theology. When separated from the presupposition of life before God, basic Christian convictions undergo significant alterations. We shall use sin, grace, and gratitude as examples of theological convictions that not only are now understood in new ways but also have been diminished and impoverished by the eclipse of life before God. Second, most forms of Christian faith have understood theology and ethics to be distinct but intricately related. The loss of life before God has led not only to a separation of theology and ethics, but in some cases has reduced faith to a cultural form of morality. Third, one does not have to agree with Friedrich Schleiermacher's claim that "Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech" to acknowledge that piety is indeed closely tied to theology. Jonathan Edwards insisted that "True religion, in great part, consists in Holy Affections," and by affections Edwards meant "the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul." Many traditional forms of Christian piety, including Protestant piety, are characterized not only by religious affections but also by certain disciplines or practices such as the regular reading of the Bible, prayer, public worship, and serving God in society. The eclipse of life lived before God has had a corrosive effect on Christian piety. Both its affections and its practices have fallen on hard times. Fourth, and not least, worship that no longer takes place before God becomes something entirely different. Community rituals are important sociologically. Talented individuals may give impressive performances as they "lead" worship. But neither is worship of and before God.

The argument in this book has the following structure. This first chapter discusses what the Bible means by this coram, or "beforeness," of human beings in relation to God; the embeddedness of this presupposition in the Bible and Christian theology; and some of the possible cultural reasons for the eclipse of life before God. Chapter 2 examines New Testament interpretations of Jesus Christ as the one person who lives fully and authentically before God and before neighbor and in so doing is the epitome of true humanity or full human flourishing. The third chapter reviews traditional interpretations of sin, and argues that with the eclipse of life before God sin has become more a moral category than a theological description of the act and the condition of turning away from God. The fourth chapter discusses Christian interpretations of God's grace, the meaning of redemption and Christian freedom, and the contemporary misinterpretation of salvation as a sociological rather than a theological reality. The "end" of life, that for which Christians yearn, and therein the meaning of Christian hope, becomes no longer doxology - to praise God and enjoy God forever - but utopian human communities in which God serves as little more than a warrant for commitments to peace and justice. The fifth chapter argues that Christian life is an expression of gratitude to God for God's grace in Jesus Christ, in contrast to some forms of contemporary Christian life which no longer appear to be characterized by gratitude so much as by cultural values of autonomy and entitlement. Chapter 6 asks whether life before God requires God's presence, and if not, how Christians should live their lives in the shadows of the eclipse of life before God.

Beforeness in the Bible

From the creation stories at the beginning of Genesis to the vision of the "final things" in the book of Revelation, the Bible presupposes that human beings are created before God and live as such even when they turn away from God, pursue other gods, experience God's judgment and wrath and apparent absence and silence.

Humans are not simply created by God and given lives and a world to do with as they please. They are created in the midst of a "world" of sun, water, heaven, earth, trees, green plants, fish, beasts, and other animals. Twice in the first creation story (Gen. 1:26-31) God says to Adam and Eve concerning this created world: "I have given" (1:29, 30). The world in which human beings find themselves is a "given" world, and the worth of the world and everything in it - and therefore the human use ("dominion") of it - must first be assessed in light of its givenness from God. The world is not value neutral, with its worth to be determined and assigned by its human inhabitants. It is value laden, not because of anything attributed to it by humans, but because God has created it, given it to humans, and called it good. "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (1:31; cf. vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25). Hence the "world" should not be assessed in and of itself. Creation is not intrinsically good, good in and of itself. It is only good because God declares it such, because it comes from the hand of the one who alone is intrinsically good. The world has been given by God, and life within this good world presupposes it is lived before its Giver.

Life before God in this given world is a structured existence. In the second creation story, in Genesis 2:4bff., the world is given its structure by means of the two trees in the garden (2:9): the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Furthermore, the two trees constitute not only the physical landscape of the garden, but also the relation between God and human beings. And God said, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (2:16b-17). From the "beginning," human life before God is inseparably tied to God's commandments as to how humans are to "fill the earth and subdue it" (1:28), how they are to live before God and one another in this given world.

Sin appears on the landscape when Adam and Eve are asked by the crafty serpent whether God did indeed say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden" (3:1). The temptation to disobey is introduced by a deliberate falsehood. The serpent's question deliberately misrepresents God's command. Even though Eve corrects the false question - they are not forbidden to eat from any tree, but only this particular tree - the door is opened for the lie to enter the world. And the serpent takes advantage by lying outright: "You will not die" (3:4) if you eat of the forbidden fruit. What is at stake in this encounter between Adam, Eve, and the serpent is how humans will live before God - by trusting or distrusting God's Word, by obeying or disobeying God's commandment. After Adam and Eve eat, their eyes are opened, and for the first time they know themselves to be naked. Previously they were naked but did not know it, and consequently they were not ashamed. Now they know themselves to be naked, and shame comes with knowledge. Their nakedness is not just "nudity" but having their eyes opened. Eve "saw" that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that it was desired to make one wise (3:6a). But this "seeing" is also blindness because when the world is seen this way, the fruit of the tree and the wisdom it offers become more desirable than life before God, and the result is flight from loving God and living before God to loving wisdom and living in the darkness of the shadows.

When Adam and Eve hear but no longer see the Lord God walking in the garden "at the time of the evening breeze," they hide themselves "from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden" (3:8). In violating God's command concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve have altered the created and given world. It is still a world in which God walks in the evening breeze, a world filled with God's presence, but it is no longer a world in which Adam and Eve live unashamedly before God. It is now a world in which they cling to the shadows and to cover-ups, both those stitched together from fig leaves and those constructed for self-justification. It is not a world from which God has withdrawn, for God still seeks and asks, "Where are you?" (3:9). But it is a world in which human life before God is characterized by self-deception, flight, and hiddenness. It is life in the shadows. Most importantly, it is not so much that God has turned away from human beings, but that they have hidden from God. It is not God who hides in the shadows.

In the biblical story this root or "original" sin taints not only all human beings but the world given to them as well: "cursed is the ground because of you" (3:17). Their acceptance of the serpent's lie and their flight from God lead inexorably to Cain's murder of Abel (4:1-16). "Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence" (6:11, italics added). The good world has become sinful, deceitful, and violent, and God resolves to destroy it. God commands Noah to build an ark, "for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation" (7:1, italics added). God covenants not only with Noah, but later also with Abram, to whom God says, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless" (17:1, italics added). One sign that Abram/Abraham and Israel walk before God is their practice of male circumcision, which demonstrates that living before God is not just a matter of believing certain convictions, but of conforming life to God's commandments by physically embodying them in each new generation.

Life before God in the biblical narratives, both in Eden and beyond it, is a covenant mediated by promises, prohibitions, and commandments. God covenants not only with Noah and Abraham but also with Moses and the people of Israel by descending on Mount Sinai and giving them two tablets of ten commandments "written with the finger of God" (Exod. 31:18). The first commandment identifies God in terms of what he has done: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (20:2). And because of who God is, Israel shall live by having "no other gods before me" (20:3, italics added). Israel is not to live before God as though God were merely one among many gods. Rather, this God, the one who brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt, is alone to be worshiped and obeyed: "You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God" (20:5). There may be other gods - "the gods of the peoples who are all around you" (Deut. 6:14) - but "the Lord is our God, the Lord alone," and it is this God and no other before whom Israel lives and whom Israel is to love "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (6:4-5).

As the people of Israel travel from Egypt through the wilderness to the Promised Land, God travels with them and goes in front of them in a cloud that covers the tent of the covenant by day and assumes the appearance of fire by night (Num. 9:16). When the cloud moves, so does Israel, and when the cloud comes to a rest, the people of Israel stop to set up camp. In this manner God stands over Israel and goes before them so that Israel, even in the wilderness, is always before the Lord, "in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night" (14:14).

Even after it occupies the Promised Land, Israel attempts to live as though its place in the world, its fundamental orientation, is not before God. When Israel turns away from God, it treats its neighbors and the weak in its midst as though they too do not live before God.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Before God by GEORGE W. STROUP Copyright © 2004 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission.
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