Hosea 11:1-11
God’s Inner Turmoil
James Sledge July
31, 2016
Church
hymnals are usually organized into sections that cover topics, themes, special
seasons, and so on. It’s helpful for people who plan worship services. If there
is a baptism that Sunday, you can go to the section on baptism and look at the
different hymns. Same with the Lord’s Supper.
When
the Presbyterian Church came out with a new hymnal in the early 1970s, someone
had the bright idea simply to put all the hymns in alphabetical order.
Predictably, most people hated it. When you’re using the hymnal to plan the
Christmas Eve service, no one wants “Angels We Have Heard on High” at the very
front of the hymnal, “What Child Is This” at the very end, and other carols
scattered throughout. You want to open to the Christmas section and find all of
them in one spot.
The Presbyterian
Hymnal
in our sanctuary came out in 1990, once again featuring sections for Advent,
Christmas, Lent, Easter, and so on. There are section for baptism and the
Lord’s Supper and a section of Psalms. Right after the Psalms are about sixty
hymns organized around the persons of the Trinity. That makes some sense. If
you want to find a hymn about the Holy Spirit, you can turn to that section and
see what’s there. Or you can find hymns about Jesus.
But
I’ve always had a problem with how they labeled the Trinity sections. As I
mentioned, there’s “Holy Spirit” and “Jesus Christ.” No problem with those. But
then there’s a section simply labeled “God.” God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit;
but that’s not the Trinity. The Trinity is God the Father (or Mother perhaps),
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It’s not God and then something else
called Jesus and the Spirit. Each person of the Trinity is truly God.
This
idea that Jesus and the Spirit are somehow subordinate to God is probably the
most common version of something called “functional Unitarianism.” It’s not
true Unitarianism because we say that we believe in Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. But in practice, functionally, we often speak of God and then, on a
slightly lower level, there’s Jesus and the Spirit, important but not really
God.
I blame Greek philosophy for this
problem. That may be overstating things, but Greek, philosophical notions of
God predominated in much of the Greco-Roman world before Christianity ever
showed up. And these Western ways of thinking didn’t always fit easily
alongside the non-Western understanding of God from Judaism and most of the
Bible, the understanding shared by Jesus and his followers.