The Presbyterian Layman Foundations of the Faith
The Lord’s Prayer: Who art in heaven
Robert P. Mills , Posted Friday, Aug 4, 2000
Whatever else the words “Our Father” imply at the beginning of a prayer, they acknowledge that the prayer is being directed to a person rather than an object or force. Suggested Scripture Readings:
Matthew 6:9
Exodus 3:13-15
John 8:52-59
This implication is clear in the RSV’s translation of Matthew 6:9, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” But it is lost in many contemporary English translations, which fail to translate the Greek ho and simply read “Our Father in heaven.”
The omission is grammatically justifiable, but to linger even briefly as we pray “Our Father, who art in heaven” is to be rewarded with a deeper knowledge of God, ourselves and the nature of prayer.
What is a person?
“Person” and “personal identity” are topics of considerable contemporary interest. However, as John Zizioulas notes, “nobody seems to recognize that … the concept of the person is indissolubly bound up with theology.”
“Person” comes through the Latin persona from the Greek prosopon, which originally meant an actor’s mask. In ancient Greek philosophy, the idea of permanent, individual existence was unthinkable. Neither Plato nor Aristotle could reconcile human individuality with their underlying assumption that the universe was in essence a single, indivisible, eternal entity from which human beings briefly emerged and to which they inevitably returned.
The concept of “person” as we now understand the term did not emerge until Christian theologians began to wrestle with issues surrounding their faith in the one God who revealed himself in three persons. How could they say that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit yet without ceasing to be one God?
“ … on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood … ” |
Their answer to the seeming paradox was to identify the “person” of God with the “being” (ousia) of God. Greek philosophy could not conceive of the “person” of an individual being linked with the individual’s “being” or “substance.” It was the Christian theologian Tertullian (ca. 160-225) who formulated what became the orthodox Christian understanding of the Trinity as “one substance, three persons.” Tertullian’s articulation of God’s self-revelation offered Christians a way to understand and explain to non-Christians how God could be three distinct persons while remaining one God.
The importance of this development, writes Thomas F. Torrance, “was the radical transformation of the Greek concept of being (ousia), when used of God, from a pre-Christian impersonal to a profoundly personal sense. That transformation was rooted in God’s self-revelation and self-naming to Israel as ‘I am’ which was applied by Christ to himself in his ‘I am’ sayings. This … not only revealed the profound personal nature of God’s Being, but considerably strengthened and intensified the personal relation to God in the understanding, faith and worship of his people, which enabled them to appreciate as never before the personal Nature of God.”
Degrading God
The nature of God is ultimately at issue when the Rev. Will B. Dunn, long-suffering hero of the comic strip “Kudzu,” stands in his pulpit, solemnly intones, “In the name of the Parent or Guardian, the Offspring and the Holy Mojo!”, then thinks to himself, “I hate these modern translations.”
“Parent” and “Offspring” are intentionally inaccurate translations of Scripture that reject God’s self-revelation in favor of current cravings for politically correct inclusiveness. And while “Holy Mojo” has so far been confined to the comics, the underlying sentiment is one of the most pernicious now afflicting the Church: the depersonalization of God.
People have always worshiped bits of inanimate matter as gods. A modern twist on that idolatrous tendency has been to degrade the Triune God to the level of an impersonal object or force. God has revealed himself to us in Scripture as a person, more precisely, as three persons who share a single substance or essence.
Consider, as but one example, the increasing tendency to replace God’s self-revelation as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” with “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.” Certainly God is the one who creates, redeems and sustains us. Without question it is right to pray and give God thanks and praise for those mighty acts.
But machines can create specific items, redeem tokens for toys and even sustain human hearts and lungs. Yet machines are not persons. Thus to refer to God in exclusively functional terms is to reduce him from a person to a job description.
Throughout much of the past century, theologians have critiqued the tendency to see individual human beings merely in terms of their work product, to see them as mere cogs in society’s machine. Christians have argued, rightly, that it is “dehumanizing” to view a person as nothing more than an economic unit, one which produces and consumes.
If we recognize that it is degrading to reduce a person to an occupation, should we not be equally aware of the tendency to degrade God?
Depersonalizing people
“What is it to be human, what is it to be a human person, and how should we think about personhood?” asks Alvin Plantinga. “The first point to note is that on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood … and the properties most important for an understanding of our personhood are properties we share with him.”
If human beings share the most important properties of personhood with God, and if God is degraded from person to object or force, human persons are correspondingly reduced from individual souls who will live forever to momentary aberrations that at death are reabsorbed into that impersonal oneness assumed by ancient Greek philosophy (and modern Eastern and New Age religions).
If that impersonal view of personhood is true, then the varied ways in which human beings treat one another are of little, if any, immediate or eternal consequence. However, as J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae rigorously explore in Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), the Biblical understanding of human personhood has enormous implications for human behavior, particularly issues surrounding the beginning and end of life.
To recognize that God is a person, and that we are made in his image, is to know beyond doubt that the way we treat other human beings is eternally important, for each human being, from conception to death, is a person made in the personal image of God.
Praying to a person
Finally, to realize that we pray as persons to a person is to grow in our understanding of prayer as relationship with God. We do not pray to an impersonal force, in the vague hope that our words will in some unknown way alter the karma of the cosmos. Nor do we pray to a celestial vending machine, waiting for the desired treat to drop into our laps once we have inserted the appropriate word-tokens.
Instead, we pray to a person. And since we pray to a person, one who has his own mind and will, the results of our prayers are not as predictable as we might like. When we pray, God may answer “Yes,” albeit in a way we did not envision, or “No” or “Not yet.” For we pray to a Father, a person infinitely wiser than we (I Cor. 2:9).
We acknowledge the wisdom and the will of the one God in three persons each time we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
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