Revisiting God
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Reading:
From Obermann Once More by Matthew Arnold
"'Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,
Your social order too!
Where tarries he, the Power who said:
See, I make all things new?
"'The millions suffer still, and grieve,
And what can helpers heal
With old-world cures men half believe
For woes they wholly feel?'"
Sermon:
So what happens when creeds are dead and rites are dead, and the old-world cures
are only half-believed in, but the woes still wholly felt? What should happen is
something we once referred to in religious history as a Reformation.
What should happen is that we look again at the creeds and the rites and the old-world cures and ask ourselves why we can't believe in them any more. And then we should look at our options. Where are the possibilities that we might believe in if we knew that they were options?
Today's sermon is about some of those options that you might not have known you had. It will incorporate some of the ideas of the last two sermons I've offered here - about natural theology and about emergence. And it will explore how, using our reason and taking a careful and unprejudiced look at the natural world might suggest some different ideas about God than the ideas of classical theology.
It won't tell you what I believe (I'll talk about that more next month). It won't particularly recommend one belief over another. But it will tell you what some of your options are.
As I have done for the last couple of sermons (and won't trouble you with again), I've distributed some feedback forms on some of the chairs. These are to create a kind of random group of folks who can tell me whether the ideas in this sermon are clear and useful for them - it's the final piece of my D.Min. project and if you can't take the time to fill one out please pass it to someone who can. If you'd like to chat about it as you fill it out, I'll be around after the service to do that. Thank you for helping me finish up this degree.
Now. We talked several months ago about natural theology and the idea that we could learn something about the nature of the divine through observation of the natural world and the application of reason. Assuming it's ok to do that (as we tend to assume), we then talked about the idea of emergence in nature, and the idea that nature is fluid, constantly changing, and holding capacities in relationship that individuals don't hold singly.
Fluid, dynamic, relational. That's how nature works. If that's creation, then why do we assume that the creator is static, unchanging, all knowing but unmoved by what happens?
Why would the force that caused it all to be, be nothing like what is?
If you've ever wondered that you're not alone. Plenty of theologians through history are wondering that right along with you.
Another problem that comes up is how God can be both all powerful and all good in the world that we happen to live in. Innocent suffering is a real poser for the all-powerful and all good God.
There are ways to address both of these problems - the disharmony between supposed nature of the creator of nature and the actual nature of nature and the theodicy problem - how God can be all good and all powerful in a world in which the innocent continually suffer.
One way is to make God less powerful. This sounds like a magic trick - we go looking for a God with certain characteristics (goodness) and we find that it's not logically compelling to say that God can be all-powerful and still be good, so we decide that God is not all-powerful. It can be exactly that, actually - an exercise in creating the God you want to find and then go looking for him.
One of my favorite theologians, Arthur Peacocke, expresses this very well. He says:
The fact of natural (as distinct from human, moral) evil continues to challenge belief in a benevolent God. In the classical perception of God as transcendent and as existing in a space distinct from that of the world, there is an implied detachment from the world in its suffering. This renders the problem of evil particularly acute. For God can do anything about evil only from an intervention from outside, which provokes the classical dilemma of either God can and will not, or he would but cannot: God is either not good or not omnipotent. The God of classical theism witnesses, but is not involve in the sufferings of the world - even when closely "present to" and "alongside" them.
Hence, when faced with this ubiquity of pain, suffering, and death in the evolution of the living world, one is impelled to infer that God to be anything like the God who is love in Christian belief, must be understood to be suffering in the creative processes of the world. Creation is costly to God.
So, we begin to see what our options are, and, probably most importantly, we start claiming the rational power for ourselves to say that if something that has long been believed about God turns out not to make sense, we can discard it - without necessarily throwing out the whole idea of God. We claim the authority to redefine, which is what natural theology is all about - it's a question of authority as much as it is a question of reason.
The classical middle ages view of natural theology says that we can claim that authority except where God has offered us a special revelation of some kind (well, ok, the classical Christian theologians meant only one special revelation - that of Jesus the Christ). Other religions say the same thing but very helpfully point to different special revelations. We stand at a point in history where we tend not to make the exception for the special revelation, but insist that everything comport with reason, and reserve to ourselves the option of thinking differently if we find that something is unreasonable.
Now, once theologians spotted the idea of emergence they wanted to apply it to their ideas about God so there is some good grist for the theological mill around that idea, and some of that grist leads us in a very different direction from the God of classical theology.
One idea that helps to start out with is a reminder (this one from Russell Stannard) about what we are actually looking for. He reminds us that we are looking for that which caused everything to be, and sustains it in being. He says:
We exist not because of some instantaneous action of God that happened long ago - an action that set in train all the events that have happened subsequently - an inexorable sequence requiring no further attention by God. We do not deal with a God who lights the blue torch - and retires. He is involved at first hand in everything that goes on.
An atheistic response to this discussion would be to dismiss the "creation question" as meaningless. Why not simply accept the existence of the world as a brute fact? What is to be gained by saying that God created the world - that only raises the question of who created God?
This is to misunderstand how we are using the word God. God is not an existent object. One cannot say that God exists in the same way as we say an apple exists. If that were the case, then postulating one more existent thing - God - would not be any real advance in understanding. No, the point is that God is the source of all existence. "God" is the name we give to whatever is responsible for the existence of things - including you and me.
So as we talk about options, and changing definitions, it's helpful to remember also that we aren't actually looking for a being in the sense that we are beings. We are looking for the ground of being - a cause. Not only the first cause but the continuing sustainer of all that is here. Not something like ourselves but bigger - but that ground in which we live and move and have our being.
Given these thoughts - that we're not looking for a being, per se, and that we can change the definition of what we're looking for without violating the rules of natural theology or being struck by lightening, let's see what people who've gone looking before us have found.
One named Samuel Alexander got to a pretty interesting point long before we might have expected him to. He delivered some lectures in 1916-1918 called Space, Time and Deity in which he suggested that God is so radically dependent on the world that God becomes as the world is becoming. As the world is emergent, so God is emergent. Before there was anything there was also no God. As things come into being, God comes into being. As more consciousness emerges in creation, God becomes conscious - the world deises itself (as Alexander unfortunately put it).
God is a verb, in this view - a process of becoming.
Interesting, isn't it?
It might not be very emotionally satisfying but I lay it out on the table because it's good to know what's out there and because it's good to remember that we shouldn't just be looking for what's emotionally satisfying.
At the other end of this particular spectrum we might point to the views of Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit anthropologist who believed that nothing we were finding in the fossil record would be in conflict from what we know about God. He wrote about this in his book The Phenomenon of Man in which he suggested that as evolution continues we should expect to achieve higher levels of consciousness, including, ultimately, a sort of disembodied collective consciousness, which he referred to as the noosphere. He expected this noosphere to emerge at some future point, and described it as a returning to what he called "the omega point"- the source of all love to which love returns. While Alexander's view is completely open-ended, Teilhard de Chardin's is what we call teleological - it's going somewhere quite definite - toward God, or back toward God.
That's why I would locate these two ideas at opposite ends of the emergent views of God spectrum. One is completely open as to what God becomes - and makes God radically dependent on the world. The other is very closed-ended and teleological - it makes the world so radically dependent on the world that we will eventually shed our physical skins and emerge as pure consciousness and when we do we will find ourselves back with the God who created us. And, presumably, Jesuit.
In the middle of this spectrum we might find the views of the panentheists. These are folks who believe in a God who is immanent - in all things - but more than immanent. Panentheism is a view that distinguishes itself (by that syllable "en") from pantheism (God is equal to all things) and from the God of classical theology who is so transcendent as to be a little remote.
The panentheists got going out of the philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, who did his mathematical work early in the 20th century and started speculating about the nature of God later, in retirement. One of those annoyingly brilliant people.
Whitehead was interested in a God who comported with new physics - who could be understood to have an influence in the becoming of an event in time - in the movement of an actual occasion toward its culmination. That Whitehead used that kind of language is unfortunate because it means that so few people read him. But he was trying to help us to free our minds from our eyes as it were - to realize that what have reality in this universe are events in time, not bodies durable in space. Much as we appear to be durable bodies we are not - we are a collection of molecular events in time.
Another theologian describes the God in this conception of things this way: "Classically, panentheism entails that the world is located within the divine, although God is more than the physical universe. The three central contentions of this article are, first, that God can be thought of as logically prior to the universe and responsible for the set of laws that allow self-organizing complexity to emerge in the universe. That is, the rational order of the physical universe is grounded in God. Second, the process of emerging complexity rests uneasily with "interventionist" divine action, but it need not exclude panentheist agency. The laws of nature can themselves be regarded as expressions of God as long as nature's novelty and creativity are identified with, not separated from, divine agency. As I noted in the opening, the unfolding of the potentialities contained in nature's laws in the course of natural history can now be considered God's action as well. Finally, panentheism allows one to think together these two dimensions of divine agency. The activity of complex processes eventually produces agents who are able to "glimpse the mind of God," comprehending (at least in part) the underlying laws of the universe. Creation "in the beginning" and creation through self-organizing complexity may therefore be regarded as merely two aspects of a single divine creativity."
This may seem like a more rational God than a cuddly one. In fact it is. But it is not a remote God - it is a God who is in all things. That being said, this God can be a little impersonal - except via creation itself. God is the category of love. But personal, directed love is the province of God's creatures. God is what Whitehead called actually deficient - God requires us to fulfill the laws, one of which may be the law of love.
In the end each of us will make a leap to the thing we can believe in. But if the church has failed to keep up with the needs of the people - failed to offer new-world cures that can be fully believed in, for woes fully felt - then a Reformation is truly in order. I hope that this congregation will always be one that seeks to know its options - that borrows the thinking of theologians and other useful minds as each of you comes to know your own.
Is God wholly emergent, coming into being as we do? Is the telos of the universe an evolution toward the collective consciousness of the human in the mind of God? Is God panentheist - in all things and prior to all things - the source of the laws that express God's will for being? Frankly, no one knows. But in asking the question and examining your options seriously, fearlessly - you may come to know something that you need to know - about yourself.
Amen.
Benediction:
From the poetry of Jane Kenyon:
I am the musk rose opening
Unattended, the fern on the boggy summit….
I am the one whose love
Overcomes you, already with you
When you think to call my name….
Go in peace.