Liking People in the Name of Jesus

One of my seminary professors would constantly post aphorisms on his door. Sometimes they were his own. Sometimes they were quotes. My favorite was one from his own hand.

“There is no greater anthropomorphism than Jesus.”

 

God is to be worshiped. God is to be adored. God is God and we are not. This is true.

But to paraphrase my main man Karl Barth, what if God’s deity includes his humanity?

In making God great, do we do this at the expense of the very people God created? In wedging an infinite qualitative distinction between God and us, do we forget God’s primal turn towards us? Do we forget that God is the covenant making God who bound himself not only to Israel, not only to Abraham, but to all of creation? Do we forget that God turned toward to us so fully he “became flesh”? This is not to deny the relevance of passage like Isaiah 55:8 ("For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways"), but to put it in proper context: God's ways are turning toward us in Jesus Christ.

I have one imprecise test of the theology of theologians and the preaching of preachers: Does he or she like people? Are people valuable in and of themselves? Not for who they might be, but who they are in all his quirks, eccentricities, foibles, and idiosyncrasies? Who she is for all the things she enjoys but you don't? Who she is as one loved by God?

As a preacher, teacher, small group leader, mentor, friend, co-worker, etc., I'm afraid I'm always running the risk of trying to subtly change people to be more like me. This demand isn’t born out of love. It’s born out of some uneasy desire to be right, to demand conformity, to somehow validate our own lifestyle choices. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a person who likes people. Love? Sure. But like? That’s not so clear.

Karl Barth wrote about the “humanity of God”. God was, no doubt, God. But God was a human God because God once-for-all turned toward us in Jesus Christ. Lets put it another way. In Jesus Christ, God demonstrated something good, something scandalous, and frankly something quite shocking: God likes people. Sure he challenged people. Sure he called people into a new type of life but the narrative I read is one where Jesus seems to be constantly and pleasantly delighted in people. (Seriously though, respected or no, who invites a relative stranger to your party if you aren't sure they like you?)

Consequently theology must be humanistic. (Or maybe better said “ecological” but that’s for another day!)

In all good theology there is a humanism that values humans for one reason: God likes people.