Fundamentals: God, Part I

I’m thinking about the way people talk about God. I mean religious types. Like me, maybe. Usually we use ancient Greek philosophical categories to speak of God: omni- -ent words like omnipresent ,. I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to point that out, nor am I the first person to lament that state of affairs. Nothing new here; but bear with me for a while. All language mediates, and all complex language is a series of extended metaphors. When I say that all language mediates, I mean that the words – grunts, groans, grinds, and glottal stops – are a way of conveying something we cannot carry to other people for them to see, smell, hear, and experience. We cannot carry it, so instead we bring them words. We translate the experience into words and they translate the words into experience, in what might be humanity’s greatest asset and greatest curse: imagination.
As a writer, I love adjectives and adverbs. They can colour and nuance a phrase and make it pop. But maybe using adjectives to speak of God does God a disservice. In the anti-hellinization conversation, we say that it isn’t always useful to speak of God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc., because the scriptures do not bother to do so. We say that it might be better to use the language of the people who encountered God (sometimes in a completely unmediated way) and recorded their thoughts in what we now call the Bible. The Hebrews didn’t go for abstractions. They used metaphors, to be sure, but metaphors that hit closer to home and whose referents could be seen in everyday life. So, God was for them rock, king, fortress, and redeemer-kinsman. God rides on the clouds, God’s voice makes things happen.
Carrying that idea further, I’m thinking that maybe we should be careful about using mediated language to speak of God – the language of adjectives: loving, beautiful, merciful, kind, judging, etc. Instead, perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to begin to speak of God as exclusively as possible in nouns and verbs. Two outcomes immediately spring to mind from such an effort.
First, it makes God less abstract. The Epistle of First John, for example, likely written at least by a friend of a friend of Jesus, says that God is love. That is unmediated language at it’s purest. Love is not tempered by the addition of a suffix like –ing. Moderns/post-moderns would be tempted to say that God is loving. And, no doubt, God is loving. John (or John’s friend) wasn’t interested in parsing God away, though. God is love. Does that mean, therefore that love is God? Maybe, in some sense, encountering even something as faint as the love a mother hen shows her chicks shows us God. John does go on to say that to live in love is to live in God. When we encounter love, even lower case, small potatoes, easy-cheesy love, it ought to make us think of God.
I do a little acting in a community theatre (you know it’s artsy because it has the
–re, instead of –er). While were rehearsing “It’s A Wonderful Life” a few years ago, I realized that the story was a parable of love. There is no God figure per se, but the love and sacrifice of common people, spurred by the uncommonly common love of George Bailey, defeats evil in a very theologically appropriate way. Evil, perpetrated by (and in a way, personified by) Mr. Potter simply melts away, forgotten. That love made me think about the love who is God. It also says something very powerful about the nature of evil, but I’ll hold that thought.
Second, we’d be better able to see the ways all virtue, all characteristics, all of the cosmos are reflections of God. Maybe other things like kindness and beauty we see around us are emanations of God’s own beauty and love. I do not mean to speak like a modalist or a pantheist, but maybe the pantheists (or, better still, the panentheists) have something to teach us here, that God is not contained by our clumsy attempts at definition or description and that God’s works might show God peeking through the paint.
The other part of speech to examine, in addition to nouns, verbs, and adjectives to speak of God is conjunctions. As School House Rock taught me, “and, but, and or, they get most of the work done.” Let’s talk about buts,,. “God is loving,” I’ve been reminded, “but he’s also just.” “Just what?” never gets the laughs I hope for, but I keep going. In fact, it’s almost as though one segment of the Church has invented a new theological term, “lovingbut”. To say that God is love and God brings justice might be more Old Testamentish.
“Brings justice” uses verbs. In nouns: God is the best judge in one of those cases where an old woman is tossed out of her house so developers can make a killing and the court sides with the old lady and gives her back her home plus a ridiculous amount of damages. That’s Old Testament justice. To bring justice in the OT meant to make sure that the wealthy didn’t become so on the backs of the poor and that the hungry were fed, widows looked after, and that aliens fairly treated.
A lot of modern Christian conceptualizations of justice looks like a gunslinger riding into town, blowing everyone straight to hell, mumbling some cryptic wisdom, then leaving the young widow and her ten year old son to her now-restored farm. That ain’t far from the truth. It just stops short, is all. Old Testament style justice is about bad guys getting theirs, but it’s also about the poor being elevated, the hungry filled, and the full going away empty-handed. That last bit’s what’s hard to swallow. I’m full. I’ll go away empty. Not because I took it from someone, but because I didn’t share it with my neighbor.
There’s another thing about God: God is unfair. Those third world theologians who pioneered liberation theology liked to say that God has a preferential option for the poor. “Foul!” first-worlders cry. “God doesn’t have favorites!”
But if you want to find God, unadorned, raw, obvious, look at the bottom of the human pile. Jesus is in prison, in the soup line, holding her child dying in the desert south of Tucson. God apparently likes being in the mud of humanity. God chooses slaves, clowns, and sinners over the powerful, the wise, and the righteous. At least, Jesus seemed to see it that way.
And that preference extends to giving away my hard earned stuff to those who didn’t work for it. At least, that’s what the Bible says again and again. I don’t like it any more than you do. Although I scrape from week to week to make ends meet, I’m a king compared to the rest of the world. And the Magnificat says that God pulls the powerful from their thrones. Great. In my little house, we’ve got three.


, Isn’t it interesting that the triumvirate of God-words – omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (present everywhere), omnipotent (all powerful) is so concise but there isn’t a compact word for all loving? The 1611 English translation of the Bible uses the term lovingkindness to translate a Hebrew word that means . . . well, it means lovingkindness. I’ve seen bumper stickers recently that say, “Lovingkindness Is My Religion”, usually on cars of people who don’t self-identify as Christians, but whose impulses are pretty close to the gospel of Jesus. “Lovingkindness-is-my-religion” is actually quite in keeping with the way St. James (not the Bible translation authorizing guy, I mean the epistler in the New Testament) defines true religion: visiting widows and orphans in their affliction and keeping away from the favoritism of wealth. The words we use and even the words we do not use but have access to shape our understanding of God.

,, Remember in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when he said, “Everyone’s got a big but. Let’s talk about your big but, Simone”?