Know Your Product
In order to effectively sell the gospel, Christians must know their product. There are two subcomponents to this knowledge:
- Know the scriptures
- Know the players involved
Know the Scriptures
The Scriptures for St. Paul are the texts and stories that establish the paradigm for God’s interface with humanity – the processes and results that were expected according to each new version of the relationship, and the enhancements brought to the lives of those who upgrade from one version to the next.
The Scriptures speak, for St. Paul, with God’s own authority and God’s own voice. This comes from fundamental assumptions that St. Paul has with regard to the World, God and Revelation. He didn’t invent these assumptions – they exist on a cross-cultural basis and form the bedrock on which the entire marketplace of wisdom literature is built. The assumptions are the following:
- Through knowledge it is possible to avoid harm and pursue health.
- Without knowledge, a person resigns themselves to slavery.
- Wisdom is knowledge that possesses enough life-giving properties to survive a generation.
Know the players involved
Creation
The created universe exists as a graceful interruption of natural chaos by God’s intentional supernatural design. There is no intelligent design for St. Paul. There is no self-sustaining ecosystem that naturally rebounds to its original state once mankind has left. Creation for St. Paul is the same as it was for the prophets – a seed or kernel of life established by the power of God and sustained through His daily contribution of life applied through His own grace and love. There is no element of the outside world that lacks personal touch or intention.
St. Paul acknowledges that this structure is one that human beings have difficulty complying to – however righteousness is possible at times, and in anticipation of upgrades we need to be forward thinking about our attitudes and our practices. While St. Paul acknowledges that our interactions with the universe are flawed, we have in the example of Christ a person who lives up to the design of creation – who not only matches all of the specifications of what a human being was designed to be, but also provides an upgrade path out of our current state of life and into one that is more interactive, more interconnected, more life-giving and less chaotic.
The beauty of this upgrade is that we are able to manifest the benefits of this new created state now, although our compatibility with many of our contemporary systems will be impaired depending on how much they operate outside of the tolerances built into creation at present. The risks are that there is limited backward compatibility due to the reduced tolerances that are built into the new design.
Humanity
Human beings were designed with one essential purpose in mind – to serve as God by proxy. This is part of God’s idealism which unfortunately backfires – though benefits are still possible. Having established all of the components required to stave off disorder and the chaotic waters, God established human beings, breathing His own breath and spirit into them and furnishing them with His own image and likeness.
By giving human beings the image of God, they look like God and all of creation responds to them – listens to them attentively – when it sees them coming. By giving human beings the likeness of God, they act like God acts – they manifest the life-giving power they have received from God and creation interacts with them as if they were God himself.
Ideal kingship within the Judahite tradition is built on the model of this relationship – that a person who exhibits Godly image and Godly action will both subdue and serve creation as a steward. The thought behind this was clear – if God could create proxies to serve as stewards in the garden, His life-giving potential and efficiency multiplies with every generation. With respect to creation, God created not just one fully vested proxy of himself – Adam – but a helper as well – Eve! These two were more than able to serve creation and were told to be fruitful and multiply – to create more and more life and increase the population of authorized stewards who could serve and maintain creation.
This activity, in its ideal form, allows God himself to rest and look with gladness on what He has made. Fundamentally, this is why sin angers God while righteousness pleases Him. When someone lives out their role as an authorized steward – acting in a Godly manner – it is one less thing God has to do. It allows God to enjoy what He has made. When we do not accept this role – either through deception or rebellion – our humanity is exposed and creation denies our authority. On top of that, if we break something, God has to ‘buy’ it. It was out of love that God did not decide to simply scrap this whole experiment and start over – rather, he put limits of human life so that those who suck the life out of creation would not be able to do an infinite amount of damage.
God
God does one and only one thing – He sustains life throughout every created system and particle in immeasurable means and amounts.
Life was the victory of His declared order over chaos. Life is the sustained victory of His created order over pending chaos. This is a personal and willed contribution – a force with intent. God is not personality-driven, though He is all-loving. God wishes life for every part of His creation, but if one refuses to accept and share that life through the investment of graceful love, one risks death. It is better to follow a steamroller paving a new road than be in its way – and God is certainly rolling out a magnanimous flow of creative energy on a regular basis. When it comes to the role of creation (and all of its complex parts) the rule is simple: “Grow or go.”
Christ has numerous examples where he illustrates this principle (as well as his manifest power – see Humanity above) although the withered fig tree is probably the most concrete example.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny