The Idea of God
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Reading:
From A History of God by Karen Armstrong
Ever since the prophets of Israel started to
ascribe their own feelings and experiences to God, monotheists have in some
sense created a God for themselves. God has rarely been seen as a self-evident
fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent. Today many
people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort. This need not
be a catastrophe. When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have
usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us
in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet in the past people have always
created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always
created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and
ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence
that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now they are not
deliberately creating a faith in "God" or anything else - it matters
little what - many people are falling into despair.
Sermon:
Good morning. Last time when I was here I
talked about the idea of the holy and how it might still be important as we try
to make meaning in our lives. I talked about the "numinous" - that
ultimate thing toward which we orient ourselves, stripped of all morality and
all reason. I said then that I believe that the idea of the holy - of something
which transcends everything - is necessary in our development as ethical people.
That we need to believe in something greater than all, in order to orient
ourselves properly in a bewildering and sometimes very cruel reality.
Today we'll take that conversation one step further and talk about how the idea of God has changed in theology over the last hundred years or so, and why I believe, and you might also, that the idea still holds power and validity. Though power and validity are not the same thing, are they? And it might hold both in unequal measure.
At the time of the first World War, when that crisis we talked about last time was going on, Otto wrote his book to try to redeem the idea of the holy in the face of the brutality. Other theologians did much the same thing with the idea of God, and they did it from a multiplicity of approaches. There are too many to talk about this morning, but the ferment that occurred in doctrines of God after the first world war and then after the second has completely altered how most liberal protestant clergy think about God, even as they say the same words they have always said. This, by itself, I think, is one of the most fascinating intellectual developments of the last half century or so. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For our purposes today I want to make some attempt to focus the conversation on a particular development in the idea of God that I find personally useful. And I want to talk, again, about how this idea still serves us in the 21st century.
Now when you think about the idea of God your mind may go back to third grade in Catholic school, or Baptist Sunday School, or wherever you were then. And you may get the sort of "Santa Claus" version of God, or at least a larger-than-life white man with a lot of facial hair, who is, somehow, not on earth, wholly other, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable, but looks exactly like us, only bigger.
This idea of God is, let us say, problematic.
What you might be less aware of is that, at least among the liberal denominations of Christianity, no one believes in this God any more, if they ever did. Some people mature religiously by rejecting this idea of God (as religious maturity requires) but without substituting any other idea in its place. This is a loss - it leaves a hole to be filled in our structures of meaning. And as the reading from Karen Armstrong points out, we don't seem to be doing such a great job of filling in that hole.
What I want to talk about today is one possible way to fill it, and why I think it matters.
It is a fallacy to think that the idea of God is consistent throughout the last 4,000 years or so. Monotheism represents a major shift in the doctrines of God in the first place - we used to have many that were assigned to different tasks. Then we moved toward the idea of a single ultimate reality, and we personalized it by the monotheistic Gods of the Abrahamic faiths. The eastern religions tend to depersonalize it - which helps to cultivate detachment. So I find that no matter which approach you take, the other is useful as a corrective.
The God of Hebrew Scripture walked around and conversed with his human creations. He shows up in the Garden of Eden to express his general disappointment with the way things turned out and then he expels Adam & Eve, and that's about the last time anyone lays eyes directly on him. There is a moment at which Moses is put down into a cleft of a rock up on Mount Sinai, and allowed to see the glory of God from the back, but mostly after Eden he shows up as a column of fire or smoke or something. He remains a pretty chatty God through the book of Exodus, but as we move into the later books his messages tend to be inferred rather than heard directly. Prophets come into play. God moves further off.
This is a theological development though it may not look like one. So we hardly invented these. The ideas of God that we came into the 20th century with were derived mostly from the great theologians of the Christian middle ages, and, oddly enough, from Newtonian ideas of the universe. Which have one foot in Platonic ideas of the universe, so we needn't give Newton all the blame or all the credit.
Plato believed in what he called the "forms" which were idealized something or others which exist completely apart from material reality. These forms had to be permanently unchanging - the represent a perfect ideal and therefore any change would be for the worse. This idea of Greek philosophy is pretty obviously imported into the theology of Christians like Augustine who were heavily influenced by Hellenistic thought.
The idea that God could not change was one that Christianity really struggled with. God had to be perfect from before creation, and therefore any alteration to the pre-existent God could only be the first step down the slippery slope. Thus, one of the primary characteristics of God had to be immutability.
Immutability is a pretty unfortunate characteristic in someone you are trying to love. It also greatly complicates the various theological understandings of the role of Jesus and the crucifixion of Jesus that have pertained throughout Christian history. These complications are addressed by the idea of the holy trinity, which permits God to be wholly other, and to stand outside material reality, but to interact via the holy spirit with the incarnate God, Jesus. We'll talk more about that next time I'm here, but for now you can see that humans are willing to take twenty five complicated steps forward rather than take one step back and admit that the original idea doesn't work very well.
Also, once the original idea becomes enshrined as church doctrine, and even moreso after the church becomes the state religion of the west with the council of Nicea in the 4th century, and Constantine goes about not only Hellenizing everything but Christianizing everything in what was euphemistically called the Holy Roman Empire, it became very difficult to revisit matters of doctrine. So remember that, friends. Doctrines plus armies equals a bad result, and I believe there are no historical exceptions to that.
After World War I, with the deaths of so many young men who were just starting their lives, it was not only the idea of the holy that was severely compromised. Even more badly wounded was the idea of God. You may have had the experience of being in the emergency room with someone who is thanking God for sparing their child from the car wreck. This is not the time to ask them what God had against the other person's child who was not spared. But after World War I, particularly if you were a European parent, you were probably not spared. It was simply not possible to believe any more that God was completely in control of what happened here on earth, or, if God was in control - if the old doctrines of God were correct, it was no longer possible to worship him.
Something had to give. One person who revisited the doctrines in a startling new way was Alfred North Whitehead. He did this in part because of his lifelong interest in physics (he was a mathematician before he turned his attention to philosophy). As a contemporary of Einstein, Whitehead became interested in a project that would re-describe the visible world so that it was in accordance with the new information that more contemporary science was giving us. Newton had an idea of a fixed and static universe, with certain forces interacting inside the shell. Einstein, of course, blew that wide open.
I think a lot of us still don't appreciate what the shift was between Newton and Einstein. It's described by the title of Whitehead's most famous philosophical work - Process and Reality. Newton maintains an emphasis on an assemblage of visible finished products - I am a person, that is a chair. Einstein's discoveries, and those that have succeeded him through the door he opened, describe a world in which everything is in flux, and the emphasis is on energy and process.
In classical theology, in other words, the emphasis is on substance, being, external relations, immutability, the absolute, independence, and the necessary individual. In the process view, as Whitehead's philosophy has come to be known, the emphasis has dramatically shifted and is now on process rather than substance, on becoming rather than being, on internal relations rather than external relations, on mutability or change rather than immutability, on relativity rather than the absolute, on dependence rather than independence, and on the contingency of the individual rather than on the necessity of individual.
These are the features of a new way of viewing God that match the new features of our view of reality.
In this view God is both being and becoming, as is every other actual occasion - and Whitehead called them actual occasions to emphasize that what we have here in this universe is not a collection of objects in space, but a collection of events in time. Therefore, I, here and now, am the sum of every actuality I've ever experienced from parenthood to parking tickets, and my personhood (my DNA, my current crop of molecules) is one abstract feature of that series of experiences. My experiences have my DNA - my DNA does not have my experiences. This illustrates what Whitehead ever so famously referred to as the "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness." We think that what is concrete about ourselves is the body - but that is the thing in constant flux. What is concrete about us is our history of events in time.
The same is true for God, but on a much larger scale. Whitehead said that God could not be the sole exception to the laws that govern the universe, but must be the chief exemplar of them.
It's probably impossible to overstate how radical the shift from classical theology to process theology has been. It's also probably impossible to overstate how complicated Whitehead is to read and understand. I recommend a buddy system, as do others who have studied process philosophy - too many have gone into Whitehead's Process and Reality with inadequate equipment, and they are never heard from again.
What I want you to take from it today is something much simpler than the whole of it. It is the idea that God is not the wholly other, immutable, unchanging, and therefore unresponsive to love. God is, instead, the most immanent of all creatures - and is therefore in part dependent on the creative power of creatures in God's own becoming. While God transcends all, God is also most immanent in all - and therefore is a product of God's own creation, changed by the decisions that God's creatures make in their own becoming. Whitehead said vastly much more than this about God, but what you can take away this morning is that there are many more ideas of God about than there were at the beginning of the 20th Century, and so you as a believer have more options than you may have thought you did.
Why does this matter? I can tell you why I think it does. I feel, intuitively, related to life. I believe that my own existence is somehow implicated in all existence. I do not believe that this relationship is neutral - I believe that it is pregnant with ethical implications. There is, in other words, a hole in my structure of meaning that must be filled somehow so that my understanding of my own obligations are in reference to something real.
Humans are social creatures. There is no denying this. We don't always socialize successfully. Think of the condition you were in when you were born - it's hard I know because among other things you were pre-verbal and someone else had to figure out what your needs were. If they hadn't you wouldn't be here this morning.
So we are undeniably social creatures. We understand our obligations socially too, or relationally. If there were no obligation to other, then our decisions would be governed purely by expediency. Normally socialized people understand that expediency is not the only consideration operating - there is somehow also the question of value. Some acts have more value in them than others, some add value to the world. A word of love adds value. An act of violence diminishes it. We know this - look at all our moral codes - they all reflect it. None of them are neutral on either love or violence, though the more primitive ones sometimes excuse the latter in the name of the former.
Humans do best, I believe, when oriented in relationships. God is a way of personing ultimate reality so that it becomes relational - and we understand our obligations more clearly as a result. The categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant is a good idea, but God is a being I can love. I'm not suggesting that you make yourself believe in the process God because I think it will help you to behave better. I am suggesting that when I discovered this school of thought it put words to something I already intuitively believed, and it cut me loose to love the God I already knew was there - that ground of all being who somehow loves me back because God is the embodiment of the experience of all love since being began, plus one. God is the great memory of all existence, who insures that nothing of value is ever lost - as Whitehead puts it that nothing is lost that can be saved.
And now I can tell you that besides being a great mathematician and philosopher Whitehead was also a father. Of a son who was killed in World War I. This can help us to understand his statement at the end of Process and Reality that the best image for what he calls God's consequent nature - the part of God's nature which is altered by the movement of creation - is that of "a tender care that nothing be lost….It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage." God is in the world as love. Whitehead says "By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion - the fellow-sufferer who understands."
To what could Whitehead have been addressing himself here if not to his own experience of loss, and a God who could still be worshipped, loved, in the face of it, because he does not stand outside deciding who should live and who should die like some gigantic game-rigger, but he lies deep within, absorbing all, bearing all, remembering all - and insuring that while the body may be, indeed must be, lost the value is retained forever.
In the reading this morning, Karen Armstrong says that "Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now they are not deliberately creating a faith in "God" or anything else - it matters little what - many people are falling into despair."
Maybe you don't need this, my friends, but I can tell you that I do. And that it is quite possible to possess a rational mind and a love for science and new discovery, and to love this God. And maybe for someone here today that comes as very good news. I hope so. It has come to me as radically good news, it has been with me a long time, it has sheltered me through trouble. And so I offer it to you this morning in case you needed to know that you had this option, and so those of you who do not need this will understand better that those of us who do may still reside in imaginative complexity, and intellectual integrity.
Amen