Act 1, Scene 2, the biggest box for God

God is often shut up in containers of our making. We create a judging God, a merciful God, or an avenging God. We create a European God, a male God, or a kingly God. We make these containers in order to help us understand our world and God’s role in it. Yet these containers and the thoughts with which we construct them need to be changed and refreshed generation after generation in order that God doesn’t get boxed in.

In pre-democracy times, for example, to acknowledge God as king was to relativize the monarch’s power. The monarch was not absolute and therefore, in theory anyway, was answerable to God.

Similarly Athanasius’ insistence that the man Jesus was, as the Nicene Creed puts it, ‘Very God of very God’ effectively elevated a humble Palestinian carpenter to a position superior to the Emperor’s.

Yet ultimately if these containers aren’t understood as time-dependent metaphors, potentially helpful and harmful, but are expounded as eternal truths, then God is boxed. God is reduced, squeezed into, our understandings of yesteryear. God becomes our possession.

One of the containers we continually dump God into is ‘a being’. We make God into a being, a super-version of us. God ‘smiles’, ‘chuckles’, ‘loves’, etcetera. Many Christians call God ‘Father’, and some ‘Mother’. Some have replaced God with Jesus, and address their prayers to him. Indeed ‘him’ is consistently and uncritically applied to God.

On the one hand making God a being is a convenient and helpful way to talk about the nearness and empathy of God. On the other hand the inability of Christians to talk about God without using anthropomorphic language should alert us to how close we’ve come to making God a product of our projections. God has been dumped in one huge linguistic container and we’ve come close to sealing the lid.