Most of our religious terminology comes from the Iron Age. Men were forging iron and smelting steel in pre-Christian times. Things didn’t change much, technologically, until the Age of Steam, which let people turn iron, in the form of cylinders, rods, gears, and boilers into motion.
Now, we live in an Age of Electron Control, and the words in our Scripture haven’t kept up. As a result, we have all tended to ignore that which was kept old-fashioned. Most of us no longer think that the increasingly remote, Iron Age words of Scripture apply directly to us. We read them, and sometimes think “Boy, it must have been nice to have lived in a time when all this business about saving your soul and going to Heaven made sense. Not any more.”
Few concepts have made the devil as happy as getting people to ignore Scripture “Because it’s so, well, out-of-date.”
Catholic Fundamentalists have bridged the gap between the Iron Age and our own by assuming that our new age needed a new definition of God and new words to describe Him and His activities. That’s still resisted by the older establishmentarians, whose tattered debentures have diminishing value in the market. We may be asked: “How do you define God that’s so different?”
That’s a good question and fair one. A response: “We think of Him as ‘The Unprogrammed Programmer’. When we wish to emphasize His care and concern for us, we think of Him as ‘The Loving Programmer’. If we want to drive home His power, we speak of ‘The Programmer of Programmers’.”
When it comes to The Trinity, we think of God The Father as “The Loving Programmer”. We think of God, The Son as “The Program”, the fullness of Creation. He, in perfect, obedient, human form came to earth, where He obediently sacrificed Himself for all who would be saved. The Holy Spirit, to us, is “The Holy Wireless Connector”, joining Programmer to Program, and both to everything in The Creation Program.
At the heart of this, we realize that God can program particles, compile them into systems and beings, and have them move through time. As we grow in that understanding, we develop a far healthier respect for what He did, can do, and is doing in the ongoing miracle that is each of our lives.
In fact, when we see that He can erase as easily as He programs (we are the very first generation to know how easy it is to push the “delete” button!), we have more reason than those in any prior age to be God-fearing. “The fear of the Lord”, the Iron Age words tell us with uncanny accuracy, “is the beginning of wisdom”.
