RETHINKING GOD

In Exodus 33:18 Moses asks of God the universal question of all humanity “Show me your Glory, I pray” We all want to see God and know that he exists – but the universal experience is that God leaves humanity reaching out for God but never fully seeing the unambiguous reality.

Many of you will have heard of the controversial book “Honest to God” by the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, back in the 1960’s. He pointed out to the British people, in an accessible way, many things which thinking people in the church had already been exploring for decades. He pointed out that God couldn’t be a literal being above the clouds. He called us all to rethink our images of God in the light of what we were discovering about human evolution and the astronomical scale of our universe. Of course he caused controversy.

Theological reflection has moved on even further over the past 40 years – and it again demands we rethink our understanding of God and Jesus. Two trends are evident, and each position bases its claim to deeper insight through its way of using and interpreting the Bible. Many thinking people in the western world have left all the old foundations of the church behind, with church attendance declining rapidly, and its no wonder. If we are honest, many of us still in the church equally find lots of the hymns we sing, the biblical images we use and the traditional doctrines we are expected to believe “in-credible” in terms of contemporary understandings of physics, astronomy, evolutionary biology and the studies of our own human nature. A God that fits what we know through the sciences cannot be found in an Old or New Testament read literally – so many are increasingly uncomfortable as they ask the age-old God question through 21^st Century eyes.

Others have gone the opposite way, and deepened their fundamentalist attempts to cling on to Biblical literalism and traditional theologies. The controversy facing the Anglicans over the proposed appointment of Dr John was and is illustrative of the choice these two approaches pose for the Church. Are we free to seek our own glimpse of God in the open generous love we see in Jesus, or are we trapped in taking a literal view that worked in a pre-modern world?

Well, you know how it is sometimes when you get hold of a book and it grabs you from the first page. It was like that for me 18 months ago with a book I read called - “A new Christianity for a new world” - by John Selby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of Newark in the United States. Spong has been foremost in popularizing, for this generation, recent scholarly reflections on the scope of a Christian faith that can work today. As I read his book I kept saying to myself “yes!” that’s what I think – that’s what I’ve been trying to say!

Spong challenges today’s Christians with the simple idea that we have to choose if faith is to remain credible in the 21^st Century. Are we willing to re-imagine God in ways that will enable people to have and practice a liberating faith? Can we develop a new concept of mission that will make our gatherings as Christians exciting and vibrant centres for change? At the same time, can we offer a clear worldview to those who want to grow beyond fundamentalism? After reading “A new Christianity for a new world” my answer is, Yes!

Spong’s book is a bold call to be “Honest to God” for our generation. It is nothing less than a challenge to “come off the fence” and shape a new reformation – building a new Christian community for a new world. Spong says that the more “open” churches, like many in the URC that ask these questions, must not lose our nerve. How we worship, live and communicate must capture what really makes sense of our contemporary world, if people are to find God in Christ through us today. So, I say, lets be bold! It is exciting to think faith through and reshape it as a consistent whole that can work for today’s world of computers, genetics, and journeys to the stars – and at the same time offers real hope that we can soon build a world of justice, peace and common life on this our home planet.

Spong offers a fascinating starting point – he says redefining God has been going on throughout human history. "In the book of Exodus, Moses is portrayed as demanding the opportunity to see God face-to-face (Exod. 33:17-23). God and Moses do a deal: if Moses would cover his eyes, God would pass before him; and then, as God went around the bend in the mountain, Moses could open his eyes momentarily on God's "back” – literally “back side” The ancient writer was already pointing to something far more profound than literal minds could imagine: he was asserting the common human experience that mortal men and women can never see who God is but only where God has been. We see God's tracks. We visualize and experience God's effects, not God's being. We find God in his footprints.

Spong says, and I agree wholeheartedly, “I do not argue for a moment that God is not real. I assert only that no human words, no human formulas, and no human religious systems will ever capture God’s reality. Human beings can approach God only by human analogy, nothing more.” He says, “I believe passionately in God. Yet I now find the theistic definition of God far too limiting. I want to move to a place where I can propose something new.”

Spong mentions that he once asked a group of predominantly young church people a question in a discussion on a Sunday morning: "What content comes to your mind when you hear the word God?" He says, “Their responses amazed me”. The words mentioned were energy, wind, nature, and love. Other words included a jumble of nouns and adjectives: centre, connection, living, present, enveloping, creative, strength”. He says, “I was startled to realize just how far removed the members of this congregation were from the definitions of yesterday. Far more than I had imagined, the revolution in theological thought had taken hold at the grassroots level.” He found no mention of words like Almighty, Sovereign, Lord, Judge, or sin, wrath, fear, dread. He goes on, “for at least this congregation the traditional God "up there"—the divine Mr. Fix-It, the invasive miracle-working deity of our religious past—had clearly faded from view. Yet these parishioners were not atheists. They were not nonbelievers. They still gathered on Sunday mornings to probe the mysteries of their God-experience, to listen to the details of their Christian faith-story, in which they, by a specific decision-making act, continued to live and to celebrate their relationships with one another as members of a community dedicated to the reality of God.”

He then makes his first key point about the God we only glimpse. He says, “beneath the literal words of the Old Testament there was a sense that God and life were not separate. God was seen as the source of life—the depth, the meaning, the experience of life.” The traditional literal God “out there” he says, “was a human symbol for the divine depth of life, that vast consciousness which we encounter in the centre of life and to which we can contribute, when our lives expand or when we are able to expand the lives of others.” “That is”, he says, “a new “God-thought” creating new “God possibilities” that invite us to journey more deeply in this direction. He then offers the first of three new definitions of God, and in so doing redefines worship too.

He suggests: “God is the ultimate source of life. We worship this God by living fully, by sharing deeply.” The God of the Universe is not a tyrannical father figure waiting to judge our sin – but a loving bringer to birth of creation’s potentiality – through the emergence of human life here and other sentient life, who knows where.

Secondly he points out that in the Old Testament “God required us to love our deity with all that we have: our minds, our hearts, our strength—indeed, our whole humanity (Deut. 6:5)”. He says, “We journey into God by being absorbed into wasteful, expansive, freely given love. This love is something like the footprints of God in which I seek to walk. I discover that the reason I cannot see God - but only where God has been - is that God is clearly in me, just as God is before me. God is part of who I am and part of who you are. God is love, and so love is God.” As our love extends ever further, so is the love that is God made evident in creation. Thus, Spong says, his second definition of God is this: “God is the ultimate source of love. We worship this God by loving wastefully, by spreading love frivolously, by giving love away without stopping to count the cost.” That is precisely what the first disciples saw in Jesus – love drove him to be for others without limit – and the narrow minded hated that, and hounded him to a cross for it.

Finally, he unpacks his third new definition of God. He says, “It is a characteristic of our human life that we cling to our being with an intensity that befits the profound struggle that all creatures have endured through the billions of years of evolution. The evolutionary pathway has been a journey from single-celled life to the complexity of self-conscious humanity, with its ability to know transcendence. He comments, “look at what our self-aware but fragile humanity, so desperately seeking the bondage of security, does with the gift of being [building material protection, trying to limit risk and adventure] Protected being is dying being. Un-risked being can never become expanded being. The only thing one can do with being is to give it away.” That is the great discovery of all the exceptional human beings – who risk their being, their life for others.

Spong makes his point using the story of the burning bush. God is said to have confronted Moses in a dramatic scene (Exod. 3:1-14). This vision challenged Moses, the story tells us, to be a liberator, to set the slave people free—free to live, free to love, and free to be. Moses, in his curiosity, inquired of God, "What is your name?" The divine voice responded, "I am who I am is my name." "I am," says the Bible, “is the name of God.” Spong asks, “was that enigmatic answer the ancient biblical writer's way of suggesting that God is Being itself? Thus he offers his third new definition of God: God is Being—the reality underlying everything that is. To worship this God you must be willing to risk all, abandoning your defences and your self-imposed or culturally constructed security systems.

Spong says we need to hear the instruction, "Shout your 'I am' to the world!" In other words, each of us must stretch beyond our limits. If God is the Ground of Being, we worship this divine reality by having the courage to be all that we can be—our deepest, fullest selves. He concludes, and I agree, God is not a supernatural entity who rides into time and space to rescue the distressed. God is the source of life, the source of love, the Ground of Being. We must live today in the conviction that we are not separate from God. We participate in that which is eternal, infinite, and beyond all boundaries. Our being is expanded by this experience. And that is exactly what Jesus brought to his generation – God’s perpetual challenge – to live, to love and to be, to the fullest extent they could.

And that is precisely what the church again needs to demonstrate to the world of today – but in pictures and ideas that work for our modern world view – where we understand the scope of our universe and the wonder of what we have evolved to be – beings with a potential limited only by our willingness to live and love and be to the full!

Christianity was never meant to be a negative “don’t do” religion – but a “do do” religion – live and love and be to the full. So hold on to that positive message – because to conclude I want to make quite clear what we should no longer say – if our God is the one in whom we must fully live and love and be!

You see, if all this is true - We are free of the God who was deemed to be incomplete unless constantly receiving our endless praises. We are free of the God who required that we acknowledge ourselves as born in sin and therefore as helpless. We are free of the God who seemed to delight in punishing sinners, or the God who, we were told, gloried in our childlike, grovelling dependency. Worshiping that God has not allowed us to grow into the new humanity that Jesus challenged us to embrace. Rather, it kept us as the clay, passively seeking to be moulded by the divine potter.

We are, I now passionately hope, discovering again the intellectual integrity and life-changing force of what Paul called being "filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19). We have gained the freedom to live and to love and to be. God is not dead. We can indeed enter God. We are called to be God-bearers, co-creators, and incarnations of what God is, just as Jesus was before us. And with that conviction we can, I believe, go on to make our world one that truly values and delivers life, love and true human being for all. The church must again offer God’s good news to every human being – we are here on this small speck of stardust to live, to love and to be, to the fullest extent possible. If we do, then at last we will see God’s glory as God’s loving purpose is found on earth and in the heavens.

John Hetherington