I was watching a debate between an atheist and a Christian, and the atheist asked this question:
“Where did God come from?”
The Christian answered, “That question assumes God is the kind of thing that came into existence. The Christian God didn’t begin to exist. He is the source of space and time themselves.”
I must have missed this teaching as a child. My idea of the Christian God was more like a very large, very old object inside the universe.
I was a bit off. The Christian worldview holds that God created space and time, and is not contained by either.
Someone can reject the actual claim, of course. But it’s worth rejecting the real one, and not a strawman.
It’s my misunderstandings like this that help me even more passionately assume my role as a translator. That’s why I started Fractal Faith. I am not trying to say anything new about Christianity, but to find words and images that might make its claims easier to see. For my younger self, you might say.
Walking the walk… I often use images to convey complex ideas, and I’ll do that here.
Below is an image I made of Christ, who is God, entering space and time. The wheel is a calendar, twelve months of a single year. I was inspired by the way Carl Sagan compressed the history of the universe into one. I shared his approach in The Fractal Nature of the Pit.
Sagan’s calendar humbled me. All of recorded human history fits into the last few seconds of December 31? Unreal.
As much as I love that image, it’s nothing compared to what I’m about to show you.
Notice Christ is not inside the wheel, as a part of creation. He’s outside of it, as the source of creation.
Then, incredibly, he enters it.
My previous “default” image of Christ was a child born in a stable. Donkeys, wise men, the whole thing.
The image I just showed you was definitely not it.
Yet…
Jesus himself said, “Before Abraham came into existence, I AM.”
John opens his Gospel with the same claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through him.”
Paul writes that “he is before all things, and in him all things are held together.”
It was always there, but I overlooked it.
The real story: The Word, who is Christ, becomes flesh and is born of Mary, a baby in a manger in Bethlehem.
The one who stands outside time took on a human life within it. Fully God and fully man.
Unreal.
By the way, one inspiration for how I think about images comes from the Eastern Orthodox tradition of iconography. They’re unique in that they’re designed to carry a great deal of information at once.
Take this icon of Christ’s birth:
Russian icon of the Nativity, early 18th century. Morsink Icon Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons.
See the infant? He’s in the manger at the center, with the ox and the donkey. He’s also in the lower right, in his first bath. The angels sing above while the magi kneel with their gifts, and at the right an angel is still telling a shepherd the news.
A photograph chooses a single moment. An icon compresses many moments into one. I’ve become obsessed with them.
That’s what I was trying to do with my image. It doesn’t show a single scene, but an idea.
Does my image make the idea easier to see? I appreciate your feedback.
I plan to build a library of these over time to help people understand what Christianity is claiming. Because it’s not what most people know.
Most people are unaware that Christianity’s claim is so grand.
And, I believe, true.