Discovering God 5 – God as Personal

God as Personal

My sister in law (now former sister-in-law) was livid. How could Cindy and I allow our children to read story books in which animals talked. We were all in Colorado for vacation with my parents and our children were reading some of their favorite stories (which had talking animals). My sister-in-law said that since animals could not talk it was inappropriate for us to allow our children to even, for a moment, think that animals had such human characteristics. It was anthropomorphizing at its worst.

Now for those of you who are unaware of the term, anthropomorphizing means giving human traits (speech, emotions etc.) to non-human parts of creation. The most obvious example would be Disney films in which tea-pots can talk and trash compacting robots can fall in love. However much we may enjoy such stories we know the difference between make-believe (talking fish) and reality (stuffed trout for dinner). We know that non-human creatures and inanimate objects, while having many endearing characteristics are not in the end human.

I raise the issue of anthropomorphizing because it is at the heart of our discussion of God as personal. As I wrote in a previous article, when the church moved from a Judaic to a Greek view of God, the universe and everything, it became an unwritten rule that Christians were to avoid any attempt at anthropomorphizing God. We were not, in other words to attribute to God any characteristics which might remotely be associated with human beings. God was not to be seen as jealous, angry, loving, or even, in fact, caring. God was the unmoved mover. God was the first cause. To attribute any sort of human attribute to God was to return to some ancient past in which people were superstitious and used inappropriate language about God. We were to react to such usage with the vehemence my former sister-in-law used when confronted with our children's books about talking animals.

This concern with anthropomorphizing God continues to this day. I still hear people in and out of the church castigating others for speaking of God in terms that might also be used to speak of human beings. The problem with such antipathy toward using human language to refer to God is that it ignores virtually the entire Biblical tradition…which regularly uses such language to describe God. Granted, while the use of human characteristics might be metaphor it is intended to remind us that God is not merely a force (ala Star Wars), a spirit that inhabits everything (ala pantheism), an ideal thought (ala much Greek thought) but instead a personal being who is interested in all of creation including all humans.

When we say that God is personal then, we are indeed saying that God while being other than us (creator not creature) is also in and of God's self a "Thou". Martin Buber in his wonderful book I and Thou (Simon and Shuster, 1996) writes about the relational character of God. That when encounter God we are encountering a "Thou" and not an "it". That when we encounter God, or God encounters us, we are engaging in a relationship in which we experience "another". This sense of encountering the personal is what I believe the Biblical writers were trying to get at when they used anthropomorphic terms to describe God. The encounters of human beings with the one, true living God, were encounters of very personal nature in which God was experienced as loving, caring, judging, calling, jealous and concerned (to name a few human traits). This sense of encountering the personal becomes even more real in the person of Jesus of Nazareth whose birth we will celebrate this week. I encourage you then, as you prepare to celebrate Christmas, to see it as a moment when the "Thou" we call God, becomes the enfleshed human being we call Jesus, who desires to encounter us in a very personal and loving way.

Next week: God as loving

Discovering God 4 – God as Interactive

God as Interactive

So which God do we want? I realize that may seem like a very strange question, as if we were at the god cafeteria and could select which ever flavor of God we wanted. But in essence, as we have discussed in earlier articles, this is what we do. We read the scriptures, test our own experience, listen to a variety of traditions and then we make our choice. This exploration and choosing has essentially led to three very distinct images of God in terms of how God relates to the world.

The first is what I will refer to as the Deist God. This is the God who made everything, established a set of immutable laws, set the world in motion and then sat back and watched what took place. Some people have referred to this as the watch-maker God who created a self-sufficient world and simply let it run.

The second is what I will refer to as the hyper-Calvinist God. This is a God who acts upon the world. This God is all powerful, remote and immutable. This God causes all things but is unaffected by what takes place in the world. Everything (and I mean everything) is planned before the beginning of time. History is merely a God-authored script being played out.

Finally there is the God I will call the calling God. This is a God who interacts with all of creation. This is the God who "walks in the cool of the morning" in the Garden of Eden. This is the God who speaks to Abraham and Sarah. This is the God who calls Moses, the judges, the Prophets and Paul. This is the God who becomes flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and is tempted like all of us.

So which God do we want? While I can't answer for ay of you I will choose God number three (so to speak). I will choose the calling God. I will choose this God because, as you will read in a moment, I believe this is the God whom scripture describes, whom Jesus incarnates and who interacts with us today.

This is the God of scripture. God interacts with God's creation. From the very opening lines of scripture in Genesis (God being active in creation) to the closing verses in Revelation (God being in the midst of God's people) God is involved with creation. God is neither remote nor merely acting upon. God is calling, speaking, arguing and acting with and for humanity. God has relationships with human beings in such a way as to impact the choices and decisions that they and we make. This is a God who cares enough to be involved with a world that has the freedom to make choices.

This is the God who is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is remarkable to me that people can see God as either remote or merely acting upon the world, when God loved the world enough to be enfleshed and live in the midst of the trials and tribulations of a human life. This is an incarnate God who took the time to tell stories and parables, heal the sick and give sight to the blind, and then give his life to defeat the powers and principalities of this world. Jesus was not an avatar of God, moving through life unmoved by the pain of the creation. Jesus was one who prayed, wept and loved.

This is a God who is with us today. The book of Acts, the history of the church and much of our experience tells us that God not only cares, but that God listens and acts in the time and space which we occupy. We have encountered a God who cares deeply for us, causing (as even Calvin would argue) our hearts to burn within us. This is a God, who trough the Holy Spirit, guides our lives when we are willing to listen. We experience ourselves not as puppets, but as human beings in relationship with a living God.

So which God do you want? The choice is yours but I hope you will consider God number three.

Next week: God as personal

Shaping Our Faith: Discovering God 3 – God as Creative

God the Creator

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." With those words the entire Biblical epic opens up before us. Unfortunately most of us have become so accustomed to this opening line that we give it little attention, even though it is an extraordinarily remarkable statement.

It is a remarkable statement first because it implies that what exits does not exist as an accident of physics and chemistry. In other words the creation of the universe (including the "Big Bang" for which there is great evidence and for the moment is still the most plausible explanation for the origin and character of the universe) was not simply a random act of a spectacular nature. It was instead, somehow, an intentional act which offered the possibilities and potentials for life. Many of the "new atheists" have argued that if one were to replay the Big Bang any number of times the odds are against life emerging at all. Other evolutionary theists take exception to that view and argue that if one could replicate the Big Bang that things would turn out very much like they are today. The nature of our understanding and experience of God would have us agree with the latter group…God was intentional in the shaping of the origins and structure of the universe.

It is a remarkable statement second because it reminds us that God acts in creative ways. God it would appear is never quite satisfied with the status quo. The intentionality of the act of creation says that there is something about God that is always looking to new possibilities. We might assume that God could have been satisfied to simply be God in the vastness of nothingness (Sorry but I don't have the grammar to describe an "environment" in which there is no time, space or matter), yet for whatever reason, about 13 billion years ago God set out to be creative. God decided to create the universe in which we live. Now we need to be clear that unlike the Genesis account in which everything was neatly created exactly as humanity currently encounters it (in a mere seven days to boot), God's creative energies were not exhausted in one moment. They have been at work ever since the first energy was released by the Big Bang billions of years ago and are continuing even today as the universe continues to change.

It is a remarkable statement third because it implies God's playfulness. I realize that playfulness if not often a notion that comes to mind when we think of God. Our traditions (that of Calvin who argued that God had planned what would happen in every moment in time before time began…and that of Newton for whom every action there had an equal and opposite reaction…meaning little or no randomness) have given little room for God to be playful. Yet how else can we describe a God who was willing to allow species to come and go (experts estimate that 99% of all species that have lived on earth are now extinct yet there may still be 30 million species left on earth), species to transform (there are nearly 300,000 kinds of beetles) and species to become self-aware enough for relationship with God (you and me)? These facts, among many others, seem to imply that God's creativity is open to the playful and the novel.

    So what is the bottom line for us? First I hope the bottom line is that this view of God as creator allows us to see God as one who is continuing to create ever new possibilities for the universe and for us even as we read this. Second I hope it gives us permission to be creative and playful in what we do for God since we are those created in God's own image.

Next week: God as interactive