The Nature of God (2012)

 Originally published as a Facebook Note January 21, 2012.

Our adult Sunday school class has been reading the book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by theologian Marcus J. Borg (HarperOne, 2003). I enjoy Borg’s work, and that of his often-collaborator, John Dominic Crossan; even if you don’t agree with their perspectives, they do a valiant job of unpacking a lot of the baggage Christianity has acquired over the centuries.

In chapter four of The Heart of Christianity, Borg describes two concepts of God (citing the work of Karen Armstrong as he does so). He uses the terms supernatural theism and panentheism. The first might be termed “God classic,” though he maintains it is only in the last few hundred years that it has come to dominate Christian thinking. God is a person, usually male, who exists above and apart from His creation; He intervenes in creation, at least occasionally, typically in response to intercessory prayer.[1] It stresses God’s judgment—who’s going to heaven, and who to hell—and gets easily hung up on awkward questions like whether devout people of other religions are damned, and why God appears to answer some prayer but not others. If God cured your cancer, why didn’t he cure your neighbor’s cancer? Or stop the Holocaust? 

The panentheist—not “pantheist,” which is something else altogether—concept sees God as an immediately present, all-encompassing Spirit. This God is here already, rather than only coming sometimes when summoned by prayer. God is a god of love and justice, loving everybody and everything, and willing good treatment for all. God does not prefer “us” to “them,” and does not work through “requirements and rewards,” unlike the God of the “Left Behind” series or Jonathan Edwards’s famous Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  

I’m very okay with a panentheist view of God. Like Borg’s intended audience, I have long since ceased to hold to anything like supernatural theism. God does not seem to me like a person to. When I pray, which I do less and less often in the formal sense (contrary to Borg’s advice), I have little sense that there is someone on the other end of the line. Yet I believe in God. I have more sense of the presence of God now than I did when I was younger, when I was trying to nail down the facts of my theology.  This belief has persisted despite my disillusion with Christian orthodoxy, the occasional smugness of the saved, and crabby people who tell me I’m not a real Christian because I don’t believe in something like the substitutionary atonement.[2] I can’t prove God exists, but I have a clear sense of an ultimate reality with which humans need to, but struggle to, connect. 

Connection with this ultimate reality is the key to a better way of living. I am sure, for example, that self-restraint is better than self-indulgence, that cooperation is better than cutthroat competition, that honesty is better than lying, that the long-term good of all is more important than the short-term good of an individual, that conserving the environment is better than consuming it, that charity is better than indifference, that empathy is better than prejudice, that countervailing forces are better than unchecked power. Life works better for all when all live by rules like these. But I also recognize in myself the difficulty of living up to these ideals, and the short-term temptations to cheat, ignore, or flout them. Hence, I need God, not just to exist, but to be a presence in my life calling me to be connected with his world. 

Panentheism comes with its own problems, however. Supernatural theism may be hard for some people to swallow, but the panentheist God can be hard to warm up to. How can you have a relationship with a concept? The male, judgmental images of the earlier paradigm are replaced by expressions that at best grope at describing God. Borg references Paul Tillich to call God “what is,” “ultimate reality,” “the ground of being,” “Being itself,” and “isness.” This reads like either poetry or nonsense. In the words of one class member, panentheism leaves us with a “nebulous” God. If God isn’t a distinct being, a person, then what is He? Well, not a He to begin with, which makes this as hard to discuss as it is to picture. God is present in all Creation, fine. But that’s a feature, not a description. How can we relate to God when we don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore? 

This is, I think, a fair point, which I wish Borg had directly addressed. He does recommend prayer, and says God’s relationship to us is still personal, and that God still speaks to us, though not in oral or written form. He quotes Frederick Buechner: “Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks…. It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.” Yet the reality of God seems so abstract. The poetry of Buechner’s language (or Borg’s) gives us little clarity. 

I’ve been wrestling with this problem for awhile. I remember a conversation with a pastor in the 1980s where I said I understood the need for Christians not to think and speak of God in purely male terms, but once we start down that road God becomes more difficult to picture, much less to relate to. (What does someone both male and female look like?) 

The answer starts with the truth: We don’t know. A naturalistic knowledge of God is impossible. God can’t be seen with microscope or telescope, and Scripture is vague. We can never know God the way we know the human digestive system, or a molecule. With a supernatural being, we have to settle for metaphor. 

I think of God as an all-pervading harmony, to which we humans should tune our lives. That may be bizarre, and it’s certainly not a naturalistic description, but it’s a metaphor that works for me. I’m certainly not out to convert you to it. I encounter God daily—in people’s smiles and acts of kindness, in the beauty and power of nature, in artistic works. None of these is God, but God is in them, and I connect with God through them. Christians believe that God loves us, wants to be in relationship with us, and so (some believe) will communicate with us in whatever language we understand. And if supernatural theism works for you, I—here echoing Borg—rejoice and wish you an ever-closer relationship with God. (Just be aware of some of its negative aspects.) If supernatural theism does not work for you, as it does not for me, then panentheism is a way to a relationship with God.  For me it’s a musical metaphor, for you it might be a person, or a natural system, or a set of ideas. If it gets us off rigidity and legalistic line-drawing, and into lives that aim at love and justice, then we’ll all be better off.

NOTES (FOR WHAT IS A BLOG POST WITHOUT ENDNOTES?) 

[1] That is, prayer that asks God for something, as opposed to prayers of praise or thanksgiving.

[2] The doctrine that Christ’s death on the cross was a necessary and sufficient price for the cosmic price for the sins of all believers.