More than a thousand years ago, way back in the early eleventh century, the Christian philosopher and logician Anselm of Canterbury used words to the following effect to express the meaning of the word, God:
“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.
Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.
You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.
While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.
But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.
Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.
None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.
That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.
And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.
And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.
Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.
This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:
“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”
Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.
Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)
Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.
Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.
However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.
If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.
When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.
The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.
The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.
That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”
What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.
When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”
And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:
“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)
Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)
Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.
Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)
Jim Weller is a graduate of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is currently a member of Peace United Church of Christ, formerly called First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Holy Trinity?
God Almighty, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these are different aspects of the One God. Though understood metaphorically as distinctive divine persons, the differences among these aspects are occasioned only by human sensibility. God is triune only in traditional Christian understanding, not in essential reality. While it may be useful to conceptually differentiate the aspects of God’s ultimate unity, and it certainly is traditional in Christian orthodoxy, it is not religiously necessary.
Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.
In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.
“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.
Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.
As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.
God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.
This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)
Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)
To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.
The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)
The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.
Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.
For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)
In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.
I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.
Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.
In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.
“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.
Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.
As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.
God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.
This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)
Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)
To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.
The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)
The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.
Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.
For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)
In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.
I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.
Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
Word of God?
Yes, my friends, the Bible has great social, cultural, and religious importance. It is an incomparable, paradigmatic artifact of the human spirit. It is best understood religiously as a metaphoric record of the deeds of God and the piety of the people of God. But it is not literally the Word of God. It is a collection of the words of many ancient authors about God, among other things.
The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.
God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.
For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.
If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.
Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.
Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.
The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.
God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.
For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.
If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.
Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.
Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.
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