Cruciform Hermeneutic

I remember years ago, as (probably) a teenager I heard my pastor preach about how often we as humans tend to each interact with one part of the Trinity stronger than the others. And he went on to say that that a healthy spiritual walk would have a strong relationship with all three, and therefore a strong relationship with God as the whole Trinity.

Over time that sermon revolutionized the way I continued to interact with God. I was able to quickly identify the fact that, indeed, my “go to” in my walk was with God the Father. And then I began to listen to my sisters as they talked about their spiritual lives and their “time with Jesus”, etc. And I began to think.

Obviously, a warped view of God in any way was never His design for us. Arguably, we’ll always have it for as long as we’re living in this Murky Mirror of an existence, but that’s not the point. The point is the trajectory, moving toward a more whole picture of our Maker—and I don’t ever want to leave that trajectory.

So I began to pray. I began to pray I’d understand the Holy Spirit more. And not surprisingly, that process has never stopped. Seriously, I have been blown away at how my life has changed along with my understanding of the “Holy Spirit.” I thank God we started with the Holy Spirit, because now I see how key the Spirit is to the entire experience of God.

Let me stop here and say that I use the word experience because I actually mean relationship. But I often feel that the phrase “relationship with God”--at least within the "church" (I choose not to veer off onto my views on that word)--has become cliché and we’ve stopped really interacting with the actual reality of what those three words mean. So, in our “Christian” culture today, I think the word “experience” avoids said potential cliché and cuts to the heart of the fact that: God is an actual experience, He’s not just something “other” that “can’t be grasped” and therefore not to be interacted with too much. Don’t get me wrong, He’s actually the first two of those things. But it’s the interaction that’s the key, and so the Holy Spirit is the catalyst. That’s all I’m getting at.

For me, the first step was realizing what a disservice to, again, the “experience" of the Holy Spirit is the way the name treats it as a thing rather than a person. The name is a proper noun and then tags on a, forgive me, holy adjective. It doesn’t beg the understanding of a person when those words are uttered. Rather, it almost begs the conjuring of some enigma, and can be discouraging to even the most earnest spiritual pilgrim.

So, I gave the Spirit a name in my own walk. I couldn’t believe what that did for how I interacted with God.

And then we moved forward from there and we’re still figuring things out. I have an eternity’s worth of things to learn about just this aspect of God...but there’s an entire other part of the Trinity that I haven’t even mentioned yet.

Yeah, Jesus. 

I feel like the worst Christian in the world to admit that the person of Jesus in the Trinity is the part of God that I understand and connect with the least. It’s humbling to admit and it’s funny (and sometimes frustrating to me) because I’ve actually been praying for years, just like I did with the Holy Spirit, to understand Jesus better….

But you know what? Of course God wouldn’t answer that prayer the way that I would think He should. He answers it better. Process. 

In this case, that process looks like this: the longer I’m human I have more respect and awe for the deific person of Jesus. Being human is not for the faint of heart—but even they have to do it too. Doing this well is, dare I say, impossible. And He didn’t just do it well, "setting a curve"—actually He did it perfectly so He literally eliminated the possibility of a “curve.” The longer I'm human I appreciate the fact that Jesus understands in a visceral way what it means to live the human experience. There's no "okay, but you never did it Yourself, God." He created it, and then did it....so many thoughts on that, but I digress.

All of this is at the forefront of my mind as I’m reading a book called “Crucifixion of the Warrior God” which dares to tackle the daunting task of explaining how the violent pictures of God in the Old Testament actually bear witness to the deity, perfection, and the ultimate revelation of Jesus Christ to all of humanity.

If anyone is reading this, they may have had to read that last sentence again. Actually, so did I. But it’s syntactically and semantically correct.

So, it all hinges on a hermeneutic approach that has actually (seemingly) been a time-honored tradition in the theological world. Now, I’m no theologian so it’s taken me a long time to even wade through the first 100 pages of this tome (I may not even be that far), and I’m learning all kind of new (and Sweet Jesus: NON-legal!) vocabulary. But this approach is called the Cruciform Hermeneutic. 

The idea is to look at all of scripture through the lens of the cross, because the cross is the key to understanding how all of revelation up to that point was the continual effort of God to keep moving his people, humanity, forward to the point where His true design could be revealed, incarnate, in Jesus the person and He could then push us further forward into His perfect design to experience Him the way we were created, intended to.

It’s like Jesus is the language that the entire story of Humanity was written in, but we had to be fed the alphabet before we even had a chance at decoding the whole language. And yet the whole time God was (is) speaking Jesus but it sounded (still sounds) like babble to Humanity without the key to the language that is Jesus. If you don't have that key, you think that God is absolutely incoherent, insane, and even vindictive. But beautiful Free-will and Agency mandate that we must choose to decode if we really want to participate in all that we were created for. And it all looks so ridiculous--until it doesn't and it all clicks.

WHAT?!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with god, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

The Word decodes God, decodes all of Scripture, and decodes our entire purpose of existence. But if we read the story as a narrative without that key to the Language, we get a really odd, sometimes (if not often) terrible, dissonant story of God, the violent Master who finally calmed down and sent Jesus--but that was 2000 years ago...right?

Yeah, that's the way it looks without factoring in Jesus, they way He's meant to be read. In sum, at the risk of sounding as cliché as I was avoiding being earlier: I’m learning that Jesus is the center of it all, and the reason God even makes sense.

I’m sure there will be more to come on this. I’m not going to lie, I think I thought that my deepest revelations in relationship with Jesus the person would grow out of an emotional place first, not with my mind leading the way. But the funny thing is, I’m also learning more about myself in that my mind is the key to so much of me. And praise God He knows that about me (He made it so)—and He’s working with it. I’m learning how good theology is so, so foundational to a healthy relationship of God.

If you can’t see Him well, what are you experiencing anyway?