WB Scotus
God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.
…God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good.
all things were created through him and for him.
He existed before all things,
and all things are held together in him.
What is your starting point for talking about your faith? Most of us would answer something like God, Jesus, or grace. But if you’ve been raised in Western Christianity at all, chances are, your actual starting point for talking about faith is sin. Even if we’ve tried to overcome a fundamentalist upbringing, culturally we have absorbed the teaching that the starting point of faith is that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We see how messed up the world is and we start from an ingrained belief that everything is broken, in need of fixing. It’s the primary way most people talk about the purpose of Christ. Jesus came to fix a broken world, to atone for our sin, to free us from sin for a life in God.
I believe that we can take sin seriously while refusing to let it be the starting point of our theology. First, it’s a very human-centered view of the universe: God is only reacting to the problem we’ve created. Second, it is degrading and has proven to create an entire culture of shame around our bodies and personhood. To be inherently sinful at birth, to be intrinsically unworthy no matter how kind a person you are, can do serious psychological damage. To say I am only worthy of God’s love because an innocent man was brutally murdered (in other words, I deserve to be brutally murdered but someone took my place), can lead to some serious inferiority issues and self-hatred. The fruit that has been born from this teaching may mean people have converted to Christianity out of fear, but more broadly the fruit is that of on-going shame and a profound lack of actual freedom.
Christ Is The Starting Point
Imagine if we grounded our faith in Christ first. Not in our need for Christ. But just Christ alone, apart from anything else. Just based on the actual scripture, it might go something like this:
God is love. Real love requires someone or something to love. God is Trinity (the relationship that makes God love). God the Father loves God the Son, the Spirit is the love shared between them that envelopes all creation. God could have existed without creation and still been Love. But God freely chose to expand that love beyond God’s Self by creating the heavens and the earth and all life. Everything was created by Christ, the Beloved, and for Christ the Beloved. Christ was there from the beginning, eternally God’s purpose for this ever-expanding and growing love. From the beginning, God always intended for the incarnation, the fulfillment of God’s love for creation through the unity of flesh and divine. Christ’s first purpose in the incarnation was fulfillment, expanding God’s love to the fullest extent.
This is the language of Franciscan friar, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308 AD), of Scotland. For Scotus, the Incarnation was planned from the beginning, and not contingent on human brokenness. Humanity was made in the image of God and it was declared supremely good. This means we were given the freedom to love and the capacity to know God. Scotus taught that the ultimate purpose for something is the actual starting point. When an artist takes a block of wood, the starting point isn’t the unfinished wood but the vision for the statue that inspires the artist to sculpt in the first place. The vision and ultimate purpose inspires the form and process it takes to get there. God always intended to connect to creation through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and therefore, God chose to create things the way they are so that we could know God’s love.
God made beings because God is being, and God desired other beings to experience God’s expansive love. Christ made all things and holds all things together in the love of God. God made a diversity of beings (what Scotus calls “this-ness”) so that there is a limitless variety to God’s expression of love. Philip Yates describes it this way: “Each creature shines with something of God that can be expressed by no other. Each sun, star, proton, grape and grain is charged with a divine meaning – a meaning that no other can express. And each creature speaks to us of Christ who is the first among creatures.”
In this rubric, atonement for sin was not the sole reason for Christ’s existence, but a benefit of the love that was eternally there. Each creature was made and declared good. Each creature has a unique experience of the brokenness of relationships and the work of reconciliation. Each creature witnesses Christ’s love from a different perspective, and therefore all of creation bears witness to God’s great love. Redemption and justification are the result of God’s perfect love present from the outset of creation. The fullness of Christ brings us fully into God’s love in a way that we could not experience without Jesus.
My prayer for you today, dear reader, is that you would reconsider the primacy of Christ as your starting point. My hope is that thinking of Christ first may release you from shame and fear. By discovering that God has loved you from the beginning, you find your own love ever expanding into the infinity of God. By receiving the inherent goodness of diversity in Creation, you find the humility to receive blessing from voices that are not like you. Listen to black voices. To womanist voices. To queer voices. Listen to mujerista and latinex voices. Christ is speaking loudly from the margins of this expansive love of God. There is so much of God’s love yet for you to experience!
New Charlie Baber
The Rev. Charlie Baber, author of Wesley Bros cartoon.
Creator of the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves at Highland United Methodist Church in Raleigh, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.