We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The All-Too-Common Montage God
How do you picture God? It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of a believer’s mental picture of God. The intensity of your love for God will never outrun the beauty of the God you envision in your mind. So our mental picture of God completely determines the quality of our relationship with God.
In fact, there is now mounting neurological evidence that a person’s mental picture of God significantly impacts the quality of their life, for better or for worse. For example, it is a neurological fact that people who have a loving mental picture of God tend to have a greater capacity to think objectively about controversial matters and to make rational decisions than people who have a scary mental picture of God. There is a great book on this entitled The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life by T. R. Jennings.
This can prove problematic if people adopt the common way of reading the Bible where everything in the Bible should be given equal weight. All must carry the same level of divine authority. With this “flat view of the Bible,” Jesus is more or less placed on the same level as all other portraits of God. As a result, people end up having a montage conception of God. That is, part of the God these Christians envision is Christ-like, but other parts are vengeful and jealous and capable of doing horrible things like commanding genocide and killing families by smashing together parents and children.
No wonder so many people have trouble feeling passionate love for God.
I have become convinced that this approach is fundamentally, and tragically, misguided. While I continue to affirm that the whole Bible is “God-breathed,” I am now persuaded that we should base our mental picture of God solely on Jesus Christ. Other biblical portraits of God may nuance our Christ-centered picture, but only to the degree that they cohere with what we learn about God in Christ.
I make this claim because this is exactly what the Bible claims. In Hebrews, we read:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word (Heb 1:1-3)
The Son is the one and only exact representation of God’s very being, or essence (hypostasis). This means that Jesus is the perfect revelation of everything that makes God God. C. S. Lewis once said; “Jesus is what the Father has to say to us.” Jesus is not part of what the Father has to say or even the main thing the Father has to say. As the one and only Word of God (Jn 1:1), Jesus is the total content of the Father’s revelation to us. For this reason, Jesus must be our criterion to access the degree to which previous prophets caught genuine glimpses of truth. Only then will you overcome the debilitating montage picture that will hinder your love and passion for God, and for life.
—Adapted from Cross Vision, pages 18-21
Category: General
Tags: Cross Vision, Cruciform Theology
Topics: Attributes and Character, Christus Victor view of Atonement
Related Reading
How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part III
In the previous two posts on Oliphint’s God With Us, we’ve seen that Oliphint is trying to reframe divine accommodations in a Christ-centered way, but that what he means by this is not that he is going to derive his understanding of God from Christ, but that he is going to use the “hypostatic union”…
Does the Old Testament Justify “Just War”?
Since the time of Augustine, Christians have consistently appealed to the violent strand of the Old Testament to justify waging wars when they believed their cause was “just.” (This is Augustine’s famous “just war” theory.) Two things may be said about this. First, the appeal to the OT to justify Christians fighting in “just” wars…
How the Church is Tempted to “Do Good”
The previous post spoke of God’s call to the church to be resident aliens: a holy, distinct people who are set apart and peculiar when compared to the patterns of the world. The holiness of God’s kingdom is cruciform love, which constitutes our distinct witness to the world. Preserving this holiness and resisting the Devil’s…
Rachel Held Evans Interviews Greg on Benefit of the Doubt
We shared an interview that Frank Viola did with Greg yesterday, and we’re thrilled to share an interview that Rachel Held Evans posted today. Rachel is very familiar with the resistance and criticism that comes when dearly held beliefs are challenged. We feel like she is a kindred spirit in this regard. We hope you’ll…
Do We Read Bible-Violence to Children? (podcast)
Greg on children and Bible violence. Episode 658 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0658.mp3
Does God Have a Dark Side?
In the previous post, I argued that we ought to allow the incarnate and crucified Christ to redefine God for us rather than assume we know God ahead of time and then attempt to superimpose this understanding of God onto Christ. When we do this, I’ve argued, we arrive at the understanding that the essence…