Turn to the holistic God: do not rejoice in hope while others are in despair - "Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope": Unfolding the Eighth Assembly Theme

The theme of the eighth assembly of the World Council of Churches, "Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope", raises one of the most important questions of our time: Who is God? This question is posed in a world in which even people within the church are turning away from God in droves and turning to consumerism and human-centred ethics and science. The religious alternatives seem only to be liberalism (with generous tolerance and no convictions about God) or fundamentalism (with only convictions and no tolerance).

The late Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios, a president of the WCC from 1983-1991, coined an apt phrase to describe the contemporary preference for immanence without transcendence and the substitution of "humanization" for the patristic idea of theosis or divinization: "the Great Secular Heresy". Reason and the human person are exalted; God, faith and ethics are relativized and diluted.

The popular idea that Yahweh is a Jewish God and not the God of the Gentiles, or that Allah is God of the Muslims alone and not Allah the compassionate, the socially compassionate one loving all, must be challenged. Similarly, though the Vedas and the Upanishads interpret advaitic, absolute Brahman as nirguna, or "beyond attributes", Sankara bases his saguna or "attribute-full" Brahman on the Vedas. While the Kevaladvaita school distinguishes between the ontological eternal Brahman and the existential Iswara, Hinduism has many Bhakti schools, and love is central in all of them.

Like Sankara, the philosophically inclined church fathers distinguished between the ousia or essence of the unknowable God and the energeia of God revealed in the nature of Jesus Christ. The Nicene Creed, which is more theological than philosophical, established the dogma that Jesus Christ is "very God of very God", of the same essence as the Father (homoousion to patri). What is this essence? It is eternal, all inclusive, infinite divine love (agape). God is love (1 John 4:8,16). The holistic God is this eternal God of love.

God revealed in Christ as agapic love

Reinhold Niebuhr concludes an appreciation of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the patriarch of liberal Protestantism and the godfather of "Christology from below", as follows:

Finally, we have to thank Schleiermacher for establishing high on the list

of virtues indispensable to honest theology the resolution to maintain

Christian thought in the painful but necessary dialogue with the faculties

of the university and the secular sciences -- the most

valuable trait of Protestant liberalism in the last century and this.(1)

Schleiermacher, with an emphasis on feeling coming from his Moravian background, could reject the dogmas of incarnation and Trinity while holding on to the sinlessness and uniqueness of Christ the Redeemer. But no Indian philosopher can see the logic of this, and all intellectuals ask, directly or indirectly, for some absolute revelation of God in history.

Who can defend a monad God, a God self-contained and alone, as love in eternal action? The holistic God, who comprehends singularity and plurality, has to be a social God of the unity of love -- in the plurality or thrimurthy of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, as well as in the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (satchidananda) and Allah the compassionate one. The Trinity is not a mathematical formula that says 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 (as St Basil said, "What is number in the Godhead?"), but a qualitative definition of God as Love.

To the eyes of faith, God was in Christ. To the one who has that deep faith, the mystery of incarnation is the key that unlocks the "tremendous and fascinating mystery" of God. The love Christ revealed in his person and work, in his teaching and death, in his resurrection and ascension was not exclusive but all-inclusive, infinite and not finite, heavenly but including the earthly. Though the incarnate God hid the omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of Godhead in himself like the latent heat of energy, he revealed the ousia of God, which is fully and unquestionably love.

The Orthodox church, like other historical churches which have not discarded continuity in favour of discontinuity as liberalism has done, takes seriously those New Testament passages which elucidate the divinity of Christ: "in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col. 2:9); "our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13); "he is the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20); "he was in the form of God" (Phil. 2:5); "he is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being" (Heb. 1:3); "the Logos was God... and the Logos became flesh" (John 1: 1, 14). The inclusiveness Peter expressed in Acts 10:35 ("in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him") must be understood as God's revelation that Cornelius can receive the Holy Spirit before baptism, though baptism is not withheld at the final stage. The Holy Spirit is not limited to the baptized alone, and the fruit of the Spirit is love (Gal. 5:22).