God. That little three-letter word has caused unbelievable acts of selfless courage and kindness, and unbelievable acts of violence and destruction. In its name both the heights and depths of love and depravity have been achieved.
If we permanently deleted the God word, expunged it to eradicate the worst, we would soon need to find a replacement. For the word is a pointer to something mysterious, powerful, and ultimately unnameable in and beyond human experience.
That is the first thing to note: God can’t be contained. When a religious system creates boundaries around God, invariably God jumps the fence side. When a fundamentalist preacher proclaims, ‘Come tonight and God will heal you’, that impish God who refuses to be in anyone’s pocket smiles and says, ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ When a Pope, Archbishop, Synod, or academic says that God is on our side blessing the way we play and condemning our opponents, then God chuckles and says, ‘I’m not on anyone’s team.’
God however is not an open slate upon which any group or individual can write their own meaning. Each culture, time, and tradition has its controls on the story of God. Each say, ‘God is mostly like this.’ When the faithful adherents however leave out the ‘mostly’, they begin that slide into certainty and the condemnation of those who think differently. They begin to think they have a monopoly on God.
The Second Commandment in the Judeao-Christian heritage admonishes believers not to make any graven image of God. The Commandment is saying that God can’t be contained by our art or by our words. God can only be pointed to. Theology, doctrine, et al are at best pointers. When we enshrine them as absolutes we commit idolatry.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth similarly needs to understood not as a reduction of God – a compressing of the infinite into the finite – but rather a manifestation of God’s nature and power. There is universe of difference between saying ‘God is Jesus’ and saying ‘Jesus is God’. The former is an idolatrous reduction. This is why the Church avoids such a statement. The latter, at its best, is a pointer to the radical love, compassion, and justice that shapes the Christian understanding of God.
Despite the wisdom of the past, the revelations, the deliberations, the texts, and the people, God remains to a significant extent outside of our containers and our knowledge. God is not humanity’s servant or puppet. This is why we must always remain both open and sceptical to the faith and insights of others, particularly to those who don’t believe like we do.
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Sadly I believe the Church also tries to box God.
ReplyDeleteShirley