The Abstract God That No One Understands

I hoped against hope that if I kept checking the religion page at HuffPost I would run across a post that wasn’t ludicrous. My persistence paid off.

Sensible ex-evangelist Valerie Tarico is founder of a website called WisdomCommons.org. I briefly checked it out and it looks to be a useful compendium of all kinds of wisdom literature, some good, some bad and some in between. I am sure I will be using it as I write presentations for Congregation Beth Adam or prepare life-cycle ceremonies.

In her current post, Tarico examines the “emotions of God” as understood by the faithful. Here is a key analysis:

Even when believers say they that they believe in the more abstract God of theologians, most don’t — at least not completely. In their day-to-day lives (and in a laboratory setting) they talk and behave as if they were relating to a human-like person god.

This tendency is universal and unlikely to disappear. It doesn’t matter how many complicated, “sophisticated,” and unfathomable books that theologians write. The truth is that outside of their teeny tiny circles, no one really cares:

If God is defined at a level of abstraction sufficient to satisfy many scientists, philosophers and modernist theologians, he becomes immediately uninteresting to most believers.

If you want to define the monotheistic god as the equivalent of the universe, then even I’m a believer. The statement is lacking in substance. Why call that God? Why not Harold?

Within Christianity, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a stab at making this vision personally relevant : “I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of Being, calling me to be all that I can be.” But contrast this with the God of Evangelical Christians: “God loves me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus. If I ask from God in prayer, I will receive. People who die are going to heaven or hell.”

Spong is regarded as an atheist by most mainstream Christians. If one doesn’t believe that God is a being – not the Ground of Being – but a really real being, then what’s the point of praying to and praising it? There is none.

Worse, and forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but the childish insistence to hold onto God, even if its all prettied up with lovely non-sensical descriptions, is dangerous. We have a real problem with the real God-filled dogmatic faiths in the world. They are a force that brings real, not imagined, harm into our lives.

The Spongs of the world may think that they are doing only good with their God abstractions. But when they utter their prayers and praises, their followers are not hearing them as abstractions. They are hearing about a person named God and we all know what horrific deeds are performed in his name.