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September 9 - December 20, 2018
God is not “a being,” not even “the supreme being.” A being is something that exists in time and space, but we are trying to describe that which is ultimate, unbound, meaning that such terminology—the category of existence—cannot be used. Our first step then requires that we move beyond the idea of God as a being and contemplate the possibility that God is “Being itself.”
How can we describe “Being itself”? “Being itself” does not exist in time and space. What does it do to understanding and to language to suggest that maybe time and space exist inside “Being itself”?
So the Jewish name for God became an unpronounceable set of consonants: YHWH. When Jews came to this unpronounceable set of Hebrew letters in their scriptures, they made no attempt to speak this name, but rather, were trained to say the word Adonai, which means “the Lord.” Jews were taught that they could not speak the name of God because that name was part of God’s being.
Jewish scholars, trying to translate that name, became convinced that these consonants reflected the source of God as “Being itself,” not a being, though they would not have used those words. So the suggestion was made that YHWH meant “I am who I am.”
In this way of approaching the “Holy” the Jews were suggesting that God could be experienced, but never defined.
In the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, the prophet seeks to respond to the question of how people will know when the kingdom of God is dawning in human history. In his answer Isaiah does not refer to such theistic images as the messiah descending to the earth from the realm of heaven. He speaks rather of a world transformed, a world alive and whole in the oneness of God.
The presence of God, Isaiah was seeking to communicate, will be seen not in a being, but in the image of human beings achieving wholeness. It was a different insight, perhaps a new breakthrough in human consciousness. The realm of the human and the realm of the divine driven to their depths were not separate, he was suggesting. Isaiah the prophet was using the vehicle of words to speak of a reality beyond words. The divine can be seen only in and through the human. One must look inward not outward to experience the meaning and reality of God.
God is not a being separate from the human. If you do not and cannot see God in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick and the imprisoned, then you cannot see God at all. God is not an external being; God is present in the faces of the least of these—our brothers and our sisters.
Please note that none of the requirements that religious systems appear to think are important received the slightest bit of attention in this parable of the judgment.
The only question raised was whether or not God had been experienced as part of the human!
Note that while the assertion was made that God is love, this simple definition was never reversed. Nowhere in the text was it said that “love is God.”
The common theme in each of these biblical vignettes is that God is not a being separate from the beings who are human.
God is not a noun that needs to be defined. God is a verb that needs to be lived.
Earlier in this book I stated that there is a difference between an experience and an explanation. That distinction is critical for theological thinking.
God, I believe, is an experience that is real. Creeds are, however, nothing more than attempted explanations of that God experience. Theology thus represents little more than human attempts to organize the explanations. Doctrine then becomes only the attempt to enforce the theology arrived at in those creeds. Finally, dogma develops, which is doctrine literalized and turned into idolatry!
All living creatures can and do experience happenings, but only self-conscious human beings can interpret those experiences in words, and our interpretations will always reflect the limits of our humanity.
How do I experience God? First, I experience God as life.
Life flows through me, even as I am aware that I am part of it. It is the regular pattern of our humanity to name that transcendent dimension of life “God.” Now look at what follows from the experience of transcendence.
If God is the source of life, then the worship of this God forces me into the task of living—living fully.
Eternal life
Then that which we call God becomes visible in others in the fullness of the depths of our ability to live.
The word “God” becomes not the name of God, but rather my name for the transcendent dimension of my own life. God is the name for the power and the source of life.
God originally was not perceived by this writer as external from us; God was rather met in the life we lived.
Love is another reality that we human beings can both experience and name. Perhaps it is true that every living thing experiences that which human beings call love, but lesser forms of life cannot interpret it as we do.
the queen?
None of us can create love. None of us can give love until we have received it. So love is also a reality that relates us to something beyond ourselves. That is the meaning of transcendence.
Love relates us to something that is real, but something that we can neither create nor destroy. God is the name by which we call this experience of love. If God is love, the only way we can worship God is by loving others. The more we give love away, the more we make the experience of God visible. God is not a being, external to us; God is experienced in the presence of love.
So if God is Being, then the only way we can worship God properly is by having the courage to be all that each of us can be. The more deeply and fully we can be ourselves, the more God, who is Being, becomes visible.
When the Christian church asserts, in words attributed to the apostle Paul, that God is that in which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), we are saying that God is the life we live, the love we share, the Being in which we are united.
I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.
Religious honesty requires the admission that certainty in religion is always an illusion, never a real possibility.
A human being, I am quite convinced, has the ability to experience God, but no human being has the frame of reference that would enable that person to describe to another human being what it is like to be God.
Most people cannot bring themselves to embrace the levels of ambiguity that theology requires. They will not be drawn to the enterprise of probing the symbols of our faith story for meaning. They will not want to do the painstaking, slow and laborious work of clearing their minds of normal human presuppositions.
I want to speak to those who know that the religious assumptions of their childhood can no longer form the answers for them.
I think it is important to state, both up front and clearly, that I am a Christian both by choice and by conviction. I do not understand Christianity as a religious system with fixed points of revealed truth, however. I see it rather as an evolving home in which I dwell happily.
The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, describes a stage in the evolution of human experience. It was certainly not a revealed truth, nor was it the way the earliest Christians understood God. Paul, for example, was clearly not a Trinitarian. For the Jewish Paul, God was “one” and nothing approached or modified that “oneness.” Paul says in Romans that God “designated” Jesus as “Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). God is the designator, Jesus is the one designated; that is not co-equality or Trinitarianism.
Developing Christology was one of the things that allowed us to begin to grow out of this childlike religious form. Christology arose in the late third and early fourth centuries with the suggestion that God had entered human life, which served to give human life a dignity it had not had before.
Of course, in the telling of it, the Jesus story got corrupted. The idea that God could take on human form, however, meant that we had come to an awareness that humanity might have a potential we had never realized before. This represented a major shift in consciousness. Next we began to entertain the story of the Holy Spirit, which served to universalize the Christ story. Now all people, not just Jesus, could be God-filled. There was no longer anything unique about a God-filled humanity. Maturity had begun to set in.
What does “incarnation” mean? It is clearly not a biblical concept. It reflects rather the fourth-century dualistic Greek mindset in which it was born. It asserts that the external, theistic, supernatural God has taken on the form and flesh of a human life.
If Jesus was God in human form, then all of the miracles claimed for him in the New Testament made sense.
When the theistic concept of God was battered by the expansion of knowledge, however, the idea of incarnation became more and more nonsensical.
Really?
then does it mean—or indeed what could it mean—to assert, as Paul does, that “God was in Christ” (II Cor. 5:19) or that God had emptied the “being” of God into the life of a servant, “being born in the form” of the human (Phil. 2:5–8)?
Paul was a Jew. For a Jew God could not be defined or discussed as if God were an object that we could observe or control. God could be experienced only as a presence that transformed human life and drew it beyond its boundaries.
Can the divine be seen in the human? That is where we must begin. Can the human be pulled beyond its limits until it becomes the vehicle through which the divine is able to be experienced?
No one prior to the writing of Mark in the eighth decade ever seems to have associated miracles with Jesus. This fact surprises many. Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64 CE, never spoke of Jesus as a worker of miracles. The Q document, if its existence can be definitively established (I am quite skeptical), and if once established it can be dated as earlier than or even contemporaneous with Mark, contains no miracle narratives.* The Jesus of supernatural acts seems to be a late-developing portrait that people painted of him.
No, there was something far earlier and perhaps more profound about this Jesus that caused his followers to make the God claim for him. It was, I believe, the breaking down of all the boundaries and barriers by which we human beings separate ourselves from one another.
In Jesus there was a humanity that included all and that dismissed none. In this Jesus a human community without boundaries could be seen. God was the power of life, the passion of love, the Ground of Being that draws all lives into a new humanity. That was the experience that drove first Paul and later many others to say of this Jesus: “God was in Christ” (II Cor. 5:19).
The first challenge that traditional Christianity had to face was that there never was an original perfection from which we human beings had fallen.
Life is never set. It is always in flux. No part of life reflects a state of unchanging perfection, as the Bible’s creation story suggested. The corollary of this insight is that no form of life ever “fell” from perfection into what we came to call “sin.” Physical reality knows only an evolving world of trial and error.
If there was no original perfection, there could have been no fall from perfection into original sin. If there was no fall into sin, there was no need for a “savior” to rescue us.
So how do we today account for the reality of evil?
