Is the God of Jesus the God of the Church?

This past Sunday (Halloween) I gave Sunday school Lesson on the famous hymn, "there is a fountain filled with blood." You know it. "that flows from Emmanuel's veins. And sinners washed beneath the flood lose all their guilty stains." 

It took about 45 minutes to unpack how these two lines are actually a mashup of dozens of scripture passages linked by the words "blood" and "fountain." On the positive side it is a poetic expression of a number of inter-related themes running from Genesis 4 to Revelation 7. On the other hand, taken at face value is nasty and barbaric. Or just irrelevant.

What is most interesting about the hymn is its mashup quality. The formal basis for this is the idea that the canon, scripture as a whole, is a network of ideas linked not by chronology, but by the theological concepts invented, or recognized, or discovered (as you will) by the Christian church as it lived out its witness to Jesus. 

Probably the opposite of this kind of poetic mashup is the ecumenical creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed. 

Now I am a professional theologian. I've taught in theology schools all my life. And I'm pretty well read. I've also got access to a lot of books in my office and hundreds of thousands more a short walk away in the Bridwell Library. And yet even for me it is a long stretch to go from reading the Bible to the Nicene Creed. 

This isn't so much because it is hard to trace out the concepts asserted in the creed from their origins in scripture. It can be done just as I can show you how William Cowper's hymn is based in scripture. The problem is that while the God of Jesus is vigorous, complex, surprising, and deeply involved in the lives of his people, the God of the creeds, and indeed Jesus himself in the creeds, is abstract, metaphysical, disconnected, and ultimately boring. This is the God of professional church bureaucrats hammering out a document everyone could agree to in order to satisfy the ambiguous ambitions of an emperor. 

Just read it. Not one word about the ministry of Jesus between his birth and his crucifixion. The gospels gutted. God the Father not of intimacy and love but distance and abstraction. The Holy Spirit a carefully worded afterthought to protect the doctrine of the Trinity from abuse. 

"There is a fountain filled with blood that flows from Emmanuel's veins" may make you want to retch, but at least it suggests a God, to use the words of Ian Anderson, "that's not the kind you wind up on Sundays." 

Now of course the creed isn't the whole of Christian witness. And neither is the Eucharist, which also purports to tell the story but leaves out all the complicated interesting parts. There should also be sermons, and lessons, and personal reading. 

The problem is that ultimately, at least in the long established churches like Catholics, Orthodox, Anglican, and my own United Methodists, the creed too easily becomes the judge of the preaching and the teaching. To maintain some semblance of doctrinal unity the God of Jesus only gets to show up when conforming to this bureaucratic abstraction. Jesus is only allowed to appear when dressed in ecclesial garb. The Holy Spirit has to be corseted into liturgical strictures. 

I question, by the way, whether doctrinal unity is a concept found in the teaching of Jesus.

Reading the scripture "with the church," in the words of traditionalists, sounds illuminating and might be, but too often it is just smothering the Word with a doctrinal blanket lest God surprise us in any way. Which could be why the Christian church is sinking further and further into irrelevance. Jesus and his ministry and his God remain deeply relevant; speaking constantly to who we are today and the challenges and needs we face. The God of the Church less and less so. 

In their day hymns like "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" were pretty exciting. It was a bloody time and the contradictions, blood cleansing instead of polluting for example, reminded the listener of the sharp reversals found in Jesus life and teaching. Jesus in John's gospel commanding cannibalism. Jesus telling the rich to move to the end of the line. Jesus calling out the most punctilious about their theological coherence for their actual hypocrisy.

And the God of Jesus? Just the kind who showed up for the blood flowing from bulls and lambs to the blood flowing from a woman's body. The God of a man whose own family feared he was as crazy as the demoniacs he healed. Nowhere really, that this God won't go to bring healing, reconciliation, and love while refusing to answer to human standards of justice. In a bloody world a fountain filled with blood is pretty relevant, even if it makes those of us who live in sanitized suburbs pretty squeamish. 

But how do we recapture the sense of dislocation? Where do we find a whirlwind instead of the whisper of air from the well balanced air handlers. The truth is we need a new witness. The vigorous hymns of the great revivals ultimately got sucked up into the commonplace language of the church, losing their ability to surprise and shock by placing the God of Jesus on our lips. They have become an exercise in nostalgia with little meaning for those either inside or outside the church. Fake blood for a church sipping pasteurized grape juice and eating preservative-laced wafers. 

So tell me readers, where is the music for our world today that opens  hearts and minds to the God of Jesus? Where do we sing scripture outside and even against the church?