THEOLOGICAL APPROACHES

In our faith we talk about God as a Trinity of persons: an inherent relationship of three beings in one. It’s a paradox, but it’s the best way we have to talk about something ineffable.

The word “trinity” is never used in the Bible; the idea was codified at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century. The picture of a three-in-one God is how we humans have tried to express that we’ve experienced the Divine in distinct ways and forms over the last several thousand years. There is an aspect of God who is the source of all—a divine Creator. There is another aspect of God called Logos (or Word, or Wisdom—who we Christians believe incarnated as Jesus). And there is an aspect of God that is experienced as Spirit or breath or life force. In the Scriptures we see all three facets present and distinct in both Genesis 1 and at Jesus’s baptism.

Any way we talk about God is metaphor. Traditionally the metaphor used for the Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s not surprising humans in male-centered cultures used masculine language to try and make sense of God. It’s not even wrong as a metaphor, but we believe it’s an incomplete metaphor if that’s the primary or only way we conceive of the Trinity; it limits our concept of who God is. All of our metaphors for God will always fall short because God can not be contained within the boxes of our human imaginations and languages. So you might hear us say Creator, Jesus, and Spirit. You might also hear us say Mother, Child, and Breath. You might just as easily hear us say Source, Wellspring, and Living Water.

The Protestant Reformation was shaped by reaction to the centralization of authority in the Pope. The Reformers replaced this by locating church authority in Scripture, a formulation dubbed Sola Scriptura or “Scripture Alone.” The Bible was regarded as a safe authority because it was unchanging and therefore wouldn’t be as capricious as some of the popes. This served many wonderful and needed purposes—it catalyzed a surge in literacy rates, and it encouraged Christians from all walks of life to read and meditate on the Bible for themselves.

However, Sola Scriptura also resulted in 30,000 church denominations as church after church parted ways over this, that, or the other—all while insisting the Bible was “clear” about various issues and that their interpretation was more authoritative than anyone else’s. If the fruit of entrusting the authority of Scripture is 30,000 denominations in the span of 500 years then maybe we’ve missed the mark.

Contrary to Jesus’s whole point in the Parable of the Sower, trying to follow a Sola Sciptura approach to church authority equated following Jesus to mastering a user’s manual rather than interacting with the very-much-alive Jesus. Keeping our eyes on Jesus and following where he leads is the heart of Christian faith. 

This does not by any means negate Bible reading and scholarship. Instead, it puts the Bible back into the category it claims for itself of being an invaluable guide as we follow Jesus. You may hear us use the term means of grace—as in “The Bible is one of many means of grace through which the church connects with the Divine.” Other means of grace include: community, experience, practices, and reason. 

Supersessionism (or replacement theology) is a belief embraced by a large chunk of the Western Church that says Christianity replaced Judaism after Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. It is an anti-Semitic theology that discounts the faith of our Jewish friends.

We remember that Jesus was himself a Jewish rabbi—not a Christian. He taught from age-old streams of Judaism and never rejected his tradition. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is recorded as saying, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kin-dom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kin-dom of heaven.”

We believe part of our faith community’s calling is to help root out the anti-Semitism so rampant in much of Western Christian teaching. Part of this calling entails learning from Jewish scholars, rabbis, and practitioners. Part of this calling entails trying to better understand the Jewish context in which Jesus lived and taught, in order to truly respect what shaped his spirituality. We also hope to become better allies to our Jewish friends when they’re made out to be scapegoats by people in our society.

At Blue Ocean Church we learn from various Christian traditions (and beyond). Many of us, for instance, have found that our best teachers on spirituality have been from the Eastern Orthodox arm of the faith, the Episcopalian tradition, or the progressive Black Church stream. We recognize there have been four historic types of churches as described by Phyllis Tickle in The Great Emergence: liturgical, evangelical, social justice, and renewalist. We believe the Spirit is calling churches to circle toward the center where the treasures in each sector of the quadrant are most concentrated. In the center of this quadrant is Jesus himself.

We also take a humble posture toward other faith traditions—knowing that, while we can fully embrace our own faith, we could be wrong. The Creator is big enough to bust open all our human containers, and we should humbly accept the gifts others offer us, and humbly offer what’s proved helpful for us in return.

We read Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, as part of a reformation movement within his own tradition. He called for imaginative thinking—new wineskins—to cast off some of the corruption that inherently builds up in all religious systems over time. We believe his devotion to the streams of Judaism that advocate for the oppressed, stand against empirical power, and invite everyone to the table of God is what ultimately led to his being sentenced to death by the Roman state. He was made a scapegoat—an innocent on whom the collective sins of an anxious political system were placed. In the Christian tradition, God overturned this unjust death sentence by raising Jesus from the dead. In doing so, God stood with the collective scapegoats (victims) of the world and called all of us to do the same. This is the Jesus-shaped theology of justice we embrace.

Every week when we take communion we say, “Whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim his death until he comes again.” In other words, whenever we remember the death of Jesus, we declare that his is to be the final scapegoat death. No more.

A significant number of (mostly) white American Christians have embraced a political movement where they seek power as a means of propagating their idea of Christianity. Jesus never advocated seeking political power in his (or any other) name. This doesn’t mean Christians can’t work for the government or seek political office—functioning social services run with integrity help communities thrive—but that seeking power to use the levers of empire specifically to impose the kin-dom of God is counter to the project to which Jesus calls us.

When the writers of the New Testament made the claim that Jesus was Lord, Emmanuel, Savior, Redeemer, Son of God, etc., they were committing what the Romans called majestas and what we call high treason—because those titles were reserved for Caesar. It’s why early Christians were often jailed, beaten, or put to death in the Roman Empire. It’s why they were sent to be eaten by animals in the Roman colosseum or at the Circus Maximus. They refused to bow to Roman gods or to call Caesar, Lord. Jesus was Lord and Caesar was not.

Early Christians made a strong distinction between the Empire of Rome and the Empire of God—or kin-dom of God. The kin-dom of God was meant to be a counter way of living to that of the way of Rome, just as the kin-dom of God is meant to be a counter way of living to the way of the American Empire today.