Category Archives: Arthur McGill

It really is Good Friday

Posted by on April 2, 2010 5 comments

The glory of God that calls forth our worship is not God’s absoluteness, that is, not an identity perfected by secure possession of it. God is not God because God holds the divine identity and does not let anyone else have it. That is the mark of Satan. God is God because God shares that identity, the Father with the Son, and through the Son the Father with us. Here is a very different image of the meaning of God as the foundation of the universe and, therefore, of our own lives. God then is the power to communicate life. God’s will is the will to communicate life. In this regard we believe that Jesus in his dying is doing God’s will and is revealing God’s wonderfulness. Therefore, it really is Good Friday! You don’t have to wait for Sunday; it’s really Good Friday. There are dreadful aspects, the human barbarity, but these dreadful aspects are not at the center. And to us the Eucharist, the bread and wine which we eat and drink, represents to us Christ’s death as life-giving, self-giving expenditure. That is why in our communities we eat to represent his death.

Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology, 78.

But not so with you. . .

Posted by on September 11, 2009 7 comments

A quote for 9/11:

In his teachings and in his life Jesus stands completely opposed to all powers that victimize, to all energies of violence and rage throughout this world. He allows no ground for treating these forces as really good, to be affirmed as agents of God’s will and expressions of God’s power and, therefore, to be allowed to run their course. He sets himself against all those persons and realities which use their power to cause suffering.

The reason for this comes out very clearly in a passage in the Gospel of Luke. The disciples argue with each other about which of them is the greatest.

“And . . . [Jesus] said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, the one who sits at the table, or the one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves.’” (Ch. 22:25-27)

In this passage Jesus sets himself in contrast to the Gentile lords in terms of his relation to human weakness and need. For the Gentile world, neediness is precisely the condition in which a man may be violated by a superior power, and a lord is one who can exercise such power. The Gentile lords stand in authority and demand submission because of their capacity to exercise violent power. They may give richly to their subjects. Nevertheless, this is what undergirds their authority, their “greatness.”

Jesus makes clear that the divine power in him vindicates is powerfulness in the face of human need in just the opposite way. It does not dominate, threaten, or impose violence; it serves. In this connection it is no accident that Jesus undertakes his mission to the poor and not to the rich, to the sinful and not to the righteous, to the weak and not to the strong, to the dying and not to those full of life. For with these vessels of need God most decisively vindicates his peculiar kind of power, his power of service whereby the poor are fed, the sinful are forgiven, the weak are strengthened, and the dying are made alive.

Therefore, in the perspective of the New Testament, what is involved in the problem of violent suffering is no incidental matter, but touches the very nature of divine power. Jesus sets himself in total opposition to all modes of violence and to every kind of powerfulness that must establish itself in the Gentile way, that is, by being able to do violence to the weak and needy. Such so-called power is not an aspect of, but rather the very opposite of God’s power. And therefore, since God alone is the author and ground of all real power, this energy of violence is not actually powerful at all. Its power is only pretension.

At the hear of the Christian faith in Jesus is the knowledge that true power belongs only to God. The distinctive mark of God’s power is service and self-giving. And in this world such power belongs only to him who serves. In light of such a faith, the Christian has no final fear before the pretentious claims of violent power.

If there is a Christian solution to the problem of suffering, therefore, it lies in such an understanding of the power of God.

~ Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method, 61-63.

On a day so shamelessly used to valorize power-as-violence and to unify a people through fear, it is fitting to reflect on the true nature of God’s power. The power that serves, heals, dies, and rises again rather than anxiously grasping for control of history.

The Power of God

Posted by on August 25, 2009 21 comments

In regard to understanding the nature of God’s power, a subject that is much misunderstood and contended over in theological discourse I have found no one as helpful as Arthur McGill. McGill’s book, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method is one of the most under-read books out there. I strongly suggest that everyone get a copy (and a copy of his other book, Death and Life: An American Theology).

In light of recent discussions I think it is worthwhile to quote extensively from McGill on the issue of God’s power. I’ve yet to find another treatment of this issue that puts everything quite as well as McGill does:

It is possible to speak of “evil” as that which contradicts the good of man. But for the Christian life it is not man but God who determines what evil is. The Bible therefore speaks of evil as that which opposes God’s will, or as that which mocks God’s power, or as that which abuses God’s goodness. If God within himself is an eternal interchange of self-giving between the Father and the Son, we must now try to see why acts that are designed to hurt and cause suffering are essentially evil. It is obvious that such acts contradict the good of man when man is a victim of suffering. but in what sense do they also stand opposed to God?

Violent suffering is the product of excessive power. It shows that one thing is able to dispose of something else, is able to break it and shatter it. It represents, therefore, the decisive way by which any agent can prove that it has power over another thing. If God had no character of his own but were simply the bearer of any and every sort of power, if he acted always to vindicate himself at the expense of other things and n that sense were the absolute intensification of all power, then he would have to be honored as the supreme agent of violence. Then all torturing and degradation, all action by which one creature uses his superior power to exploit the weakness of others and to subject them to his control and domination would be an expression of God’s kind of power.

But by his life and teachings, Jesus makes perfectly clear that the divinity active through him is not Absolute Power. That divinity is not a potentially tyrannical force that might just do anything at all, such as produce square circles or smash the world to pieces. Within himself God is the life and power and energy whereby the Father generates the Son as his perfect equal in all regards and the Son adores the Father as his perfect in all regards. Therefore, in his outward actions toward his creatures, God does not act by some other kind of life or power. The energy that informs all his dealings with men is the energy of his own being.

Thus, when God moves toward his creatures, he does not exercise his powerfulness by subjecting them to his domination, or by shattering them with his superior force so as to demonstrate their helplessness before him. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not brute power raised to the nth degree. This God exercises his powerfulness by his giving, by how much he nourishes his creatures, by how much he communicates his own reality to them. To be sure, their being lifted by him into life may involve pain to them. But this pain is only a means for their elevation not an enhancement of God at their expense. Because of his essential nature as the loving community of Father and Son, God cannot act without conferring something of himself on those toward whom he acts.

Therefore, should God will that certain creatures dry and shrivel up, losing their vigor and life, he does not attain this by acting upon them positively with violent force, for “force is no attribute of God.”[The Epistle to Diognetus] He simple withdraws his action from them. In these terms, then, a creature’s misery and death can only be the result of God’s inaction and absence, not of his active presence.

This leads us to a judgment about the behavior of creatures. When they use force to exploit the weakness of others and by this means establish their superiority and domination over others, they are not then acting by the power of God, they are not then being vitalized by the life of God, and they are not then proceeding in accord with the will of God. In short, they belong to the realm of evil. As Jesus said:

“You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. . . . For the Son of man . . . came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for man.” (Mark 10:42-45)

If Jesus is the revelation of the essential power and life of God, then men cannot do violence to one another for their own self-expansion within the area of his Lordship. So far as they do this, they are exercising a powerfulness that contradicts the power of God. They have turned from light to darkness. (p. 84-86)

This is as good a statement about the true nature of God’s power as you are likely to find anywhere. Too many Christians are still tempted to think God’s power merely in terms of unconstrained, raw power. As McGill shows, this is precisely the wrong way to think of God’s power. Rather God is powerful in that God gives, loves, nourishes, sustains, and transfigures. The author of the Epistle to Dignetus was indeed right that “force is no attribute of God.” Rather the power of God must always and everywhere be understood as the power of the cross and resurrection.

Nicene Theology as Paganization

Posted by on August 30, 2008 9 comments

In his discussion of the controversy between Athanasius and Arius over the nature of God, Arthur McGill makes a rather delightful observation:

“[For Arius], to apply the notion of ‘begetting’ to God’s own substance is to take a notion from Greek mythology and apply it illegitimately to the Biblical God. According to the entire Hebrew tradition, and therefore also according to the New Testament, the model for understanding God in his activity is not the model of generation and sexual reproduction, so dear to Greek mythology, but the model of the artisan who makes and the king who governs. The Arian party therefore looked upon this theological use of the model of begetting by Athanasius and his supporters as one of the most corrupt paganizations of Christianity.” (Suffering, p. 71)

We are generally trained to view Arius as the one who was assimilating Christian theology to the metaphysical millieu of antiquity. He is case as a sort of revisionist Hellenizer of the Christian faith. However, as McGill points out, Arius thought he was doing exactly the opposite. He was protesting against what he thought of as a mythologization of God which entangled God’s otherness in the categories of a non-Christian metaphysic.

Thus, Athanasius is actually the Hellenist and Arius is the Hebraist (albeit, perhaps one of the exteremely Philonic variety). If anything this shows that the revelation of God as Triune is just as subversive of an allegedly pure “Hebraic” notion of God’s being as it is of the “Hellenic” theology that is so often decried. It is, in the parlance of Scripture, both a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.

Arthur McGill’s Death and Life: A Review

Posted by on April 2, 2008 6 comments

I’ve blogged in the past several times about the work of Arthur C. McGill, a little-known theology professor who taught at Harvard.  The few small books he has left behind are all amazing treasures.  Here is my review of what I take to be his best book, Death and Life: An American Theology.  Honestly, I can’t remember the last book I read that was this small and so packed full of amazing insights. Arthur McGill does an amazingly erudite job of exploring how death is viewed in American culture and the radically different vision that the New Testament provides.

The first two chapters deal with looking at the way in which America understands death. Essentially, McGill sees two responses (which are really two sides of the same coin) present in American culture. Through either an “ethic of avoidance” or an “ethic of resistance” Americans do everything they can to remove death or the traces of death from their consciousness. This cultural phenomenon results in what McGill brilliantly terms “the bronze people.” The bronze people are those that are seen all over American cities and television screens every day. Well tanned, happy, wealthy, fully alive people. Death does not seem to in any way be intruding into their lives. Of course, as McGill shows, the bronze people are a thorough facade. Suffering, mortality and death intrude on their lives at every turn, albeit hidden behind well kept suburban lawns and curtains. 

Ironically enough, the sort of necrophilia that attends the horror film genre is but the other side of this sort of bronze necrophobia; here death is portrayed as this utterly alien, bizzarely horrific force that intrudes on “normal life” from outside.  McGill’s main point is that in America death is seen as an alien force that is the absolute negation of life that must be avoided at all costs. Death is the ultimate end of being that is the most horrible thing that can be thought.  In other words, in America, death eventually reduces all things to nihilism.  Therefore it must be resisted and denied.

In contrast to this, McGill goes on in the next three chapters to explore the Christian understanding of death. McGill shows beautifully how America’s account of life views being as a possession that must be held onto. Thus death, which deprives us of being is the worst possible thing. Death threatens our possession of ourselves and unsettles all our having. In Jesus, on the other hand, being is not viewed as a possession that we are ever able to have, but is thoroughly ek-static, it is something we passively receive from God. This is most clearly seen in Jesus. Jesus does not possess himself or his being, rather his life is whole constituted by the Father. His being is from beginning to end pure gift. Thus, there can be no “having” of being.  For if the primordial ontological reality is unpossessed being, then the attempt to possess it can only be understood as seeking after non-being.  

Because being is a constant state of receiving, Jesus can give his life away without the fear that he will somehow cease to be. The only way that one could cease to have life by dying would be if life were a possession we must hold onto. What Jesus and the resurrection show is that by dying we most truly live because true being is expending ourselves for the sake of others. And because all being is constantly received from God, we can give flagrantly of ourselves to the point of death. Death, in light of Christ’s resurrection is not to be seen as the termination of life, but rather it’s fullest expression. For in death we surrender our being, refuse to become possessors of it and in so doing continue to receive the abundance of resurrection life from God who is constantly giving.  One might infer that McGill’s ontology, is the ontology of the martyrs.

McGill ties all this discussion of death into a discussion of the nature of sin, which he definies seeking to possess our own identity. Sin is living as if our being were not the constant gift of God. That’s why we have to die in Christ to experience the freedom from sin. We have to give up possessing our selves in order to live an ek-static life of receiving from God. The only way to do this is through death with Christ. As McGill so brilliantly puts it “In Jesus, God separates us from ourselves.” (p. 58).

McGill then goes on to tie in this account of being to worship and the nature of the glory of God. Here he deconstructs the common picture of God’s glory as his aloofness, omnipotence and raw power. Rather, as the Gospel of John particularly demonstrates, the glory of the Father is seen in his people bearing fruit (Jn. 15:8). In other words, the glory of God is seen in “engendering and communicating life.” (p. 72). The other key text in John that McGill latches onto is the account of Jesus death as both his glory and the glory of the Father (Jn. 12:23-24). The glory of God is thus see in the communication of life to others, as self-divestment for the sake of the other to the point of death. Thus worship is not fearful obeisance before some monarch, or “top person” (McCabe) but a life of self-divestment for the sake of the other in everything one does.

Finally, McGill shows how self-divestment is at the center of the Christian command to love our neighbors. Here he offers a powerful discussion of the common misconception that love involves helping the needy from a position of fundamental non-neediness. In contrast to this common philanthropic notion, Christian love is seen first of all in the recognition of our own constant neediness, for our being is not our possession but something we constantly receive and constantly give. Thus, we do not show Christian love by being charitable. In Christian love we must ourselves become needy, expending our-self for others, giving, not out of our fullness but our lack. This is illustrated by McGill’s amazing reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Contrary to standard readings in which we identify with the Good Samaritan, who is called to go and take care of dying, needy people we may find, a close reading of the text bears on that Jesus’ point in telling the story is to show us who our neighbor is.  The one who was the neighbor was the Samaritan, it would seem then, that in the narrative logic of the parable, we are cast, not into his role, but first in role of the broken, needy man lying along the side of the road.  The Samaritan is none other than Jesus who comes to us in our total neediness, expending everything he has for our sake and then calls us to do likewise.

McGill’s theology of death and life offers us a profoundly difficult gospel.  As such it represents a gift to the church and theological discourse as a whole.  I frankly cannot imagine who shouldn’t read this book.  Certainly in a work so small there are some shortcomings.  However, one would be hard pressed to find a more densely packed gift of theological wisdom and pastoral fervor.  All would do well to read and absorb this all but unknown Harvard theologian.

Identity as Sin

Posted by on February 23, 2008 3 comments

“Identity-in-sin means not to live from God, not to honor God as the constant source of our being, not to be thankful to God as the one who constantly gives us ourselves.  Identity is sin when persons imagine that their being has been conferred over to them, when they try to live out of themselves in terms of the reality which God may have once conferred onto them by which they now hold in their possession.  Sin is to refuse to life out of the reality in which a person constantly receives from God.”

–Arthur C. McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1987), 52.

Sacrifice, Gift-Giving, and Philanthropy

Posted by on February 13, 2008 18 comments

The works of Kathryn Tanner offer a great deal to the contemporary theological community.  Her theology is deeply centered in the development of two key concepts: a theology of divine transcendence and the principle of noncompetitiveness.  Her development of these themes was portrayed most clearly in her Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology and such insights were later applied directly to economics in her more recent Economy of Grace.  Both of these works make substantial contributions in their own right and as such have real value.  However, there are some debilitating weaknesses in Tanner’s account of a theological economics which flow from her construal of the shape of noncompetitive gift-giving.

Against accounts of giving and economics that assume a principle of competitiveness and strife, Tanner argues in light of the revelation of the trinitarian God as a fount of pure self-giving love, that Christians must reject such an economics of scarcity and competition.  So far, so Augustinian.  However, when she goes about explicating the shape of such an economics of noncompetitive gift-giving, problems begin to sprout up all over the place.  Tanner argues that “the Persons of the Trinity give to one another without suffering loss; each continues to have what it gives to the others.”  Thus, for her it follows that “we too, then, should give to others out of our own fullness.”  What Tanner cannot embrace is any notion that our giving to others might come at a cost to ourselves.  Rather, “we do not give out of our poverty, but of what we have already received so as to work for the good of others in response to their need.”  We give out of our abundance, never out of lack.  Indeed, “giving to others…should not mean impoverishing ourselves.  Giving away should not be at odds with one’s continuing to have” (Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 93-94).  

For Tanner, the shape of the life of total giving to which the Christian is called by the triune God is not a life of sacrifice, but a life of non-needy fullness in which giving away need not cost or diminish us in any way.  Rather than calling us to self-denial, the gospel of God’s gift-giving calls us to see that “self-assertion, the effort to realize ones own perfection and good, therefore need not be at odds with concern for the needs of others.”  This orientation leads Tanner to argue for the formation of a “community of mutual fulfillment in which each effort to perfect oneself enriches others’ efforts at self-perfection.” (Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 94).  She is emphatic on these points, consistently insisting that “giving to others and having oneself are simply not in competition with one another in a theological economy” (Economy of Grace, 83).   Indeed, for Tanner, if our giving to others is taken advantage of, if our ability to posses what is ours is imperiled by our sharing it, we have every right to exclusive possession of ourselves and our goods, and the right to protect them violently.  If other persons “don’t advantage you, they void their ownership of you, leaving you now in exclusive possession of yourself, with rights of self-protection against them.”  Indeed for Tanner it is axiomatic that all have the “exclusive right of self-protection against those who would harm you” (Economy of Grace, 82).

Thus, at the end of the day, despite protestations to the contrary, Tanner’s theological economics is simply a dressed up advocacy of philanthropy.  It is premised on the notion that what we have is to be given away only insofar as such giving does not diminish us.  We give to those in need out of our fullness, not in any way that costs us anything.  For her, the ultimate enemy is the thought of having to give something up.  Self-limitation, self-denial, self-sacrifice, these are councils of despair and evil in Tanner’s eyes.  For her “giving should not be at odds with one’s continuing to have.”  Rather we should all simply realize that we need to bring about a some sort of paradisical community ”in which each effort to perfect oneself enriches others’ efforts at self-perfection” (Economy of Grace, 84).

In contrast to Tanner’s insistence that we need never suffer or give anything up, Rowan Williams offers us a much different account of the implications of the triune life of gift-giving for the shape of our own lives.  Williams argues that, “If the substance of the gospel has to do with God’s giving up possession or control – in Paul’s language, the Father giving up or giving over the Son to the cross, or Christ giving up his ‘wealth’, security, life for the sake of human beings – then the speech appropriate to this must renounce certain kinds of claims and strategies.”  Williams argues, contrary to Tanner, that the shape of God’s self-giving in Christ places distinctly self-limiting and self-sacrificial demands on those who would follow Christ.  As Williams argues, “I can either attempt to close off my vulnerability or I can so work with it as to show the character of God.”  (Rowans Williams, On Christian Theology, 257-259).  Here Williams recognizes precisely what Tanner wishes to close her eyes to, namely that we live in essential vulnerability.  Her longings for a community of mutual fulfillment where we all get to have everything we want is precisely the desire to flee from the vulnerability of creaturehood. 

Tanner falls into the trap which Williams sees so clearly of assuming, “that we possess a territory to be safeguarded”.  Williams is absolutely right that, in contrast to Tanner, “the gospel of the resurrection proposes that ‘possesion’ is precisely the wrong, the corrupt and corrupting, metaphor for our finding our place in the world.  What we ‘possess’ must go; we must learn to be what we receive from God in the vulnerability of living in (not above) the world of change and chance” (On Christian Theology, 273-274).  It is precisely this world of change and chance which thrusts us into vulnerability and neediness that Tanner cannot stand, insisting instead on the right of self-protection and insulation from that world.

Likewise, Arthur McGill argues, in contrast to Tanner that philanthropy can never be the shape of the love manifested to us in Christ.  He argues that “Jesus does not identify love primarily with producing good in the lives of others.  Not does he equate it with what we call ‘philanthropy,’ that is, the giving of surplus wealth or surplus time to help others.  On the contrary a man only begins to love as Jesus commands when he gives out of what is essential to him, out of what he cannot ‘afford.’  For Jesus, it is the deliberate and uninhibited willingness to expend oneself for another that constitutes love” (Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method, 55).  

This notion of love as self-expenditure is precisely what Tanner cannot countenance.  For her, our gift-giving must always be out of our abundant surplus, never out of what is essential to us.  And of course, Tanner will point out that such a notion of love as self-expenditure will lead to the mortification of the self.  If you completely and prodigally give yourself away, holding nothing back, then you will eventually get used up and die.  As McGill states directly, “Of course, if you live in this way, you will be used up by others.  Of course, they will take everything you have.  That is why you should expect this self-expenditure to lead sooner or later to your death” (Suffering, 55).

What is at work in the contrast between the philanthropy of Tanner on the one hand, and the self-expending vulnerability of Williams and McGill on the other is a profoundly different theological consrtual of what it means to be truly alive.  For Tanner, being alive means being in possession of one’s self, able to freely give to others without cost to oneself.  For Williams, being fully alive means casing oneself in the same mode of self-dispossessing kenotic love that is manifested in the cross of Christ.  “We are to offer our lives as a sacrifice to the Father, as Christ did, and to follow the pattern of self-emptying or non-grasping embodied in Christ” (On Christian Theology, 254).  Likewise, for McGill, “being dynamically alive does not consist heaping up treasures or achievements or reputations for oneself.  It consists in expending oneself for others.”  In contrast to Tanner, there is no ethic of self-perfection and self-possession appropriate to the Christian faith.  If we take Christ seriously, we must insist that it is self-expenditure for the sake of the other that is the very flourishing of our humanity.  “Self-expenditure is self-fulfillment.  He who loses his life is thereby finding it.  Loving is itself life, and not just a means to life.  He who expends himself for his neighbor, even to death truly lives.  But he who lives for himself and avoids death truly dies. ‘He who does not love remains in death.’” (Suffering, 57)

It is precisely this understanding, embodied by Williams and McGill that conforms to the gospel in all its foolishness.  While Tanner’s construal of non-sacrificial giving sounds utterly reasonable to modern ears, McGill’s call to complete and total self-expenditure sounds worthy of scorn.  And that is precisely how Williams’ and McGill’s accounts of the Christian life conform to the gospel in way that Tanner’s fundamentally does not.  They call us into the life of “having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Cor. 6:10) in which  we are called to precisely the sort of foolishness that would insist that the greatest love possible is to lay down one’s very life.  There is no way to make the call to self-expenditure palatable.  It is simply the shape of the gospel.  We can either fall up that rock and be broken or wait for it to fall on us and be crushed.  And we will indeed be blessed if we are not offended on account of the one who calls us into his life of self-dispossesion and kenosis.  For it is only in the complete surrender of our lives that we discover the fullness of life abundant.

Our Existence in its Questionableness: The Nature of Theology

Posted by on January 25, 2008 2 comments

“Christian theology is not a detached, purely theoretical abstraction, which has somehow to be made practical.  It itself is the voice of man’s actual existence in movement from darkness toward the light.  We cannot treat the ignorance and confusions of our rational minds as merely preliminary problems, which if once solved, still leave us unfructified by the gospel.  They are an essential part of the evil from which Christ redeems us.  Coming to an understanding – a coherent understanding that can be shared with others – of God’s work in Christ is as such a share in his life.  For the questions investigated by theology, such as the question of suffering considered above, are not intellectual questions, devised by the mind out of its own imperial curiosity.  They are the questions of our existence, the are our existence itself in its questionableness.  That is why the discovering of light by means of our reason in these matters belongs to the very heart of our fellowship with God.  However technical its language or abstract its concepts, theology should never have to be made ‘relevant.’  From beginning to end it is embedded in the most relevant process in the world: God’s transfiguration of human existence.”

–Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1982), 122.

‘Force is no Attribute of God’

Posted by on January 23, 2008 1 comment

“‘Force is no attribute of God” – that is the basic principle for the Trinitarian theologians.  God’s divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding.  Far from staying above the world, he sends his own glory into it.  Far from imposing, he invites and persuades.  Far from demanding service from men in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to men for their enhancement.  But God acts toward the world in this way because within himself he is a life of total self-giving.”

–Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1982), 82.

Arthur McGill: We Worship the Fecundity of God

Posted by on January 21, 2008 6 comments

“The Christian worships not the absoluteness of God but the fecundity of God, the fact that the Father engenders the Son who carries the fullness of divinity.  God is not God as superior, as superior to us in holding onto the divine reality.  We do not worship God as self-contained divinity.  We worship God for the glory of the Father, a glory which consists in bearing fruit.  That is the meaning of the cross.  We worship God as Father, that is, as the one who engenders the Son.  We worship God further as one, who not only engenders the Son, but engenders in all of us the same life.  Where do we see the glory of God?  In the Son.  Here the Father is glorified, and fruitful power is the Father’s and not the Son’s own.  Worship then is a response to glory.  Where is glory?  In Jesus’ act of dying.  In the act he shares his glory and bestows life, but we worship here the glory of the Father.”

–Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 74-75.

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