Whatever else the words “Our Father” imply
at the beginning of a prayer, they acknowledge that the prayer
is being directed to a person rather than an object or force.
This implication is clear in the RSV’s translation of
Matthew 6:9, “Our Father,
who art in heaven.”
But it is lost in many contemporary English translations,
which fail to translate the Greek
ho and simply read “Our
Father in heaven.”
The omission is grammatically justifiable, but to linger even
briefly as we pray “Our Father,
who art in heaven”
is to be rewarded with a deeper knowledge of God, ourselves
and the nature of prayer.
What is a person?
“Person” and “personal identity” are
topics of considerable contemporary interest. However, as John
Zizioulas notes, “nobody seems to recognize that ... the
concept of the person is indissolubly bound up with theology.”
“Person” comes through the Latin
persona
from the Greek
prosopon, which originally meant an
actor’s mask. In ancient Greek philosophy, the idea of
permanent, individual existence was unthinkable. Neither Plato
nor Aristotle could reconcile human individuality with their
underlying assumption that the universe was in essence a
single, indivisible, eternal entity from which human beings
briefly emerged and to which they inevitably returned.
The concept of “person” as we now understand the
term did not emerge until Christian theologians began to
wrestle with issues surrounding their faith in the one God who
revealed himself in three persons. How could they say that God
is Father, Son and Holy Spirit yet without ceasing to be
one
God?
Their answer to the seeming paradox was to identify
the “person” of God with the “being” (
ousia)
of God. Greek philosophy could not conceive of the “person”
of an individual being linked with the individual’s “being”
or “substance.” It was the Christian theologian
Tertullian (ca. 160-225) who formulated what became the
orthodox Christian understanding of the Trinity as “one
substance, three persons.” Tertullian’s articulation
of God’s self-revelation offered Christians a way to
understand and explain to non-Christians how God could be
three distinct persons while remaining one God.
The importance of this development, writes Thomas F.
Torrance, “was the radical transformation of the Greek
concept of
being (
ousia), when used of God,
from a pre-Christian impersonal to a profoundly personal
sense. That transformation was rooted in God’s
self-revelation
and
self-naming to Israel as ‘I am’ which
was applied by Christ to himself in his ‘I am’
sayings. This … not only revealed the profound personal
nature of God’s Being, but considerably strengthened and
intensified the personal relation to God in the understanding,
faith and worship of his people, which enabled them to
appreciate as never before the personal Nature of God.”
Degrading God
The nature of God is ultimately at issue when the Rev. Will
B. Dunn, long-suffering hero of the comic strip “Kudzu,”
stands in his pulpit, solemnly intones, “In the name of
the Parent or Guardian, the Offspring and the
Holy Mojo!”,
then thinks to himself, “I hate these modern
translations.”
“Parent” and “Offspring” are
intentionally inaccurate translations of Scripture that reject
God’s self-revelation in favor of current cravings for
politically correct inclusiveness. And while “Holy Mojo”
has so far been confined to the comics, the underlying
sentiment is one of the most pernicious now afflicting the
Church: the depersonalization of God.
People have always worshiped bits of inanimate matter as
gods. A modern twist on that idolatrous tendency has been to
degrade the Triune God to the level of an impersonal object or
force. God has revealed himself to us in Scripture as a
person, more precisely, as three persons who share a single
substance or essence.
Consider, as but one example, the increasing tendency to
replace God’s self-revelation as “Father, Son and
Holy Spirit” with “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.”
Certainly God is the one who creates, redeems and sustains us.
Without question it is right to pray and give God thanks and
praise for those mighty acts.
But machines can create specific items, redeem tokens for
toys and even sustain human hearts and lungs. Yet machines are
not persons. Thus to refer to God in exclusively functional
terms is to reduce him from a person to a job description.
Throughout much of the past century, theologians have
critiqued the tendency to see individual human beings merely
in terms of their work product, to see them as mere cogs in
society’s machine. Christians have argued, rightly, that
it is “dehumanizing” to view a person as nothing
more than an economic unit, one which produces and consumes.
If we recognize that it is degrading to reduce a person to an
occupation, should we not be equally aware of the tendency to
degrade God?
Depersonalizing
people
“What is it to be
human, what is it to be a
human person, and how should we think about personhood?”
asks Alvin Plantinga. “The first point to note is that on
the Christian scheme of things,
God is the premier
person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood … and
the properties most important for an understanding of our
personhood are properties we share with him.”
If human beings share the most important properties of
personhood with God, and if God is degraded from person to
object or force, human persons are correspondingly reduced
from individual souls who will live forever to momentary
aberrations that at death are reabsorbed into that impersonal
oneness assumed by ancient Greek philosophy (and modern
Eastern and New Age religions).
If that impersonal view of personhood is true, then the
varied ways in which human beings treat one another are of
little, if any, immediate or eternal consequence. However, as
J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae rigorously explore in
Body
and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), the Biblical understanding
of human personhood has enormous implications for human
behavior, particularly issues surrounding the beginning and
end of life.
To recognize that God is a person, and that we are made in
his image, is to know beyond doubt that the way we treat other
human beings is eternally important, for each human being,
from conception to death, is a person made in the personal
image of God.
Praying to a
person
Finally, to realize that we pray as persons to a person is to
grow in our understanding of prayer as relationship with God.
We do not pray to an impersonal force, in the vague hope that
our words will in some unknown way alter the karma of the
cosmos. Nor do we pray to a celestial vending machine, waiting
for the desired treat to drop into our laps once we have
inserted the appropriate word-tokens.
Instead, we pray to a person. And since we pray to a person,
one who has his own mind and will, the results of our prayers
are not as predictable as we might like. When we pray, God may
answer “Yes,” albeit in a way we did not envision,
or “No” or “Not yet.” For we pray to a
Father, a person infinitely wiser than we (I Cor. 2:9).
We acknowledge the wisdom and the will of the one God in
three persons each time we pray, “Our Father,
who
art in heaven.”
For
Discussion
1.
How does understanding God to be a person
strengthen our faith and aid our worship?
2. What happens to
Christian faith and life when God is depersonalized?
3. What happens to
our understanding of human beings when God is
depersonalized?
4. What difference
does it make when we pray to know that we are praying to
a person, not an object or a force? |
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Additional Resources
J.P. Moreland and Scott
B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis
in Ethics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000);
Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,”
Faith and Philosophy 1 (July 1994); Thomas F.
Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being
Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); John
D. Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in
Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993).
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