What about "God"?
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 12:34 pm
"God", not unexpectedly on a relgion based site, seems often to be seen as an "either-or" with little centre ground. I think 'pasted' below are thoughts germane to thinking expressed here. It comes from a question asked of John Selby Spong on his site. It has to do with "God" intervening in human affairs, either in mini or maxi...
I hope you found it read-worthy. Thoughts? Warm regards, Roger
...explained as natural phenomena? Or, deeper still, should we even think of a God capable of inserting himself into human experience? Is "God" something else entirely?
Dear Hal,
Your question is a primary and essential one and cuts immediately to the essence of theological debate today. Yet it is one that most people who identify themselves with evangelical Protestantism or conservative Catholicism seem to think they can either ignore or repress. They cannot. It is also a question that in order to address it adequately would take a book, not a column.
Sam Harris' criticism of popular religion is right on target. The weakness of his book is that he assumes that popular religion is what Christianity is all about.
The intervening, miraculous God is built upon the old idea of the record keeping Deity who lives above the sky and who swoops down on earth to split the Red Sea, or to rain heavenly manna on the starving Israelites in the wilderness. This is also the God who delights in sending plagues on Israel's enemies, the Egyptians, and drowning them in that same Red Sea.
This is also a God who apparently has not accepted the insights of Isaac Newton about how the world operates. It is a world, not of precise natural law, but of controlled chaos. Most theologians have long since abandoned such a deity.
When people assert that God intervenes in human life to heal, they must explain why God does that so sporadically. When people assert that splitting the Red Sea was a miracle to save Jews from death, they must explain why God allowed the Holocaust that destroyed Jews by the millions. It is not a simple subject.
The only thing that needs to be said quickly is that the idea that anyone knows who God is or how God works is ludicrous. What kind of human folly is that? I do not think that a horse can describe what it means to be human. Humanity is a dimension of life and consciousness that is simply beyond that which a horse can embrace. Similarly, I do not believe that human beings can describe what God is. The realm of God is simply beyond that which the human mind can know. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes once wrote that "If horses had gods they would look like horses!" Perhaps one ought to observe that most of the deities that human beings have worshiped throughout history have looked remarkably like human beings, magnified and supernaturalized. We have no God language to use so we force our God consciousness into human language. Only when that truth is acknowledged and accepted can we even begin to answer your question.
The discussion must then turn to the nature of God, again something we cannot know but about which we speculate endlessly. I believe God is real, but my human mind and human language can never penetrate that reality. So I cannot describe God, I can only describe my presumed God experience and honesty compels me to state that I might be delusional. Only at that point can we begin a discussion on the reality of prayer.
When I wrote a book entitled, "A New Christianity for a New World," based on lectures I had given at Harvard University, I sought to address the issues you raise. The book is almost 300 pages long. It challenges most of the pre-suppositions of traditional Christianity. It seeks to find new meaning for the most traditional symbols. It seeks to move between what I call both the God experience and the Christ experience which I believe are real and the way both the God experience and the Christ experience have normally been explained, which are to me dated, inadequate and generally unbelievable. Your question rises out of that mentality.
I hope this helps though it only scratches the surface of the territory where an answer can be found. I want to assure you that your question is the right question and that you are not wrong or weird to be raising it. Those who continue to repeat the slogans of their religious past as if they are still operative are wrong and they are increasingly weird.
I hope you found it read-worthy. Thoughts? Warm regards, Roger