Look! Up in the Sky!

 

Jupiter

He took a little child, and set him in the midst of them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such little child in my name, receives me, and whoever receives me, doesn't receive me, but him who sent me." ( -- Mark 9: 36-7) 

Friend Xerxes has mocked the proponents of Intelligent Design for believing in “an invisible God up in the sky.” 

Only atheists believe in this God.

The Christian God is not in the sky, but in the Kingdom of Heaven. Where is the Kingdom of Heaven? “Within you,” or “Among you.” At the end of time, it will appear as a city, New Jerusalem. He is not invisible; he is incarnate as Jesus. Even in the Old Testament, he appeared as a burning bush, a pillar of smoke, a pillar of fire, a hand. Moses was not permitted to see his face. In the New Testament, he appears as a dove. Jesus says in the gospel reading, he appears to us at all times: as children, as the poor and those in need. As the shekhinah, he is apparent in all things.

Modern Prayers

 

Durer, Praying Hands

When I was young, and in the umbra of Vatican II, I always felt hounded by the demand that we must pray extemporaneously instead of by rote. That always felt wrong to me. Sometimes you felt like it, but most often you did not. So were you just not supposed to pray? Or be insincere to God himself?

There is great power in set prayer formulae. It is the power we recognize as soon as we call it a “mantra.” With rote prayer, it is possible to pray without ceasing.

Of course, there is a place as well for speaking to God as a friend; when one has a particular problem or question to pose.

Both forms of prayer have their value. 

Friend Xerxes recently objected to the “Our Father,” and suggested instead several modern alternatives.

His core complaint is that it encourages an “unthinking” idea of God as an “all-knowing all-seeing old-man-in-the-sky.” A concept that he finds untenable.

I can’t agree with his basic premise, that the “Our Father” depicts God as an “old man in the sky.” The sky is not mentioned. It says he is in heaven. Is that “the sky”?

Where is heaven? Jesus, who gave us the words of the prayer, tells us: “the kingdom of heaven is within (or among) you.”

At the same time, the physical heavens as metaphor is valuable to prevent supposing God is only “in here,” and not also “out there,” pervading the cosmos. He is not merely some Jungian archetype.

“I have trouble,” Xerxes continues, “with God as the hyper-engineer who keeps everything running, who fixes things we can’t fix for ourselves, who feeds us sliced bread and steers us out of temptation.”

But that is not the Christian God either. The prayer says “Our Father.” Doesn’t that sound more like a mother?

Like a father, he allows us our free will, and expects things of us. He is not going to do everything for us; he is judgmental, not unquestioningly supportive like a mother.

The modern prayers Xerxes cites as preferable to the “Our Father” all strip out this masculine imagery.

For example:

“Holy One, holy one-ness, in us and around us and beyond us,”

--removes both masculinity and personhood.

I’m with William Blake on this: humanity cannot conceptualize anything greater than a perfect human. Anything else is less, and an inadequate image of God. You care more for your father than for the number one.

“Separate us from the temptations of power, and draw us into your community.”

Why power? This suggests that power is the only motive for sin.

“the empowerment around us,”

Again power--praying for power. This sounds like an impious obsession with power. Which, I may say, defines postmodernism.

“and the celebration among us, now and always. Amen.”

This is a significant change, because the original, the “Our Father,” says nothing about celebration, let alone celebrating “always.” Instead, it implies that something is wrong with the world: that God’s will is not yet done.

To assert that all is right with the world is callous towards the suffering. And unquestioningly supportive of the powerful.

“O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us.”

This loses the two essential points of Christianity: that God loves us, and that we are to love God.

That God is Love requires understanding God as Trinity, because love is a Trinity. Love cannot exist without Lover and Beloved.

To attempt to conceive love as a pure abstract entity is to eliminate love from the conversation. Being in love with love is callous, the opposite of love.

“May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings.”

Connectedness is only half of the equation; this is a monist rather than a Christian sentiment. It would require that all we do must flow from our deep connection with the devil, not to mention the Mafia, Nazis, the KKK, or animal parasites and predators, without discrimination.

Xerxes concludes with a passage from a book, Richard Wagamese’s “Embers,” which he proposes might be ideal:

“I am the trees alive with singing.

I am the sky everywhere at once.

I am the snow and the wind bearing stories across geographies and generations.

I am light everywhere descending.

I am my heart evoking drum song.

I am my spirit rising.

I am my prayers and my meditation, and I am time fully captured in this now.

I am a traveller on a sacred journey through this one shining day.”

In simplest terms, “I am God.”

This again is monist, and Advaita Vedanta, not Christian. Identifying God with self is moving backwards on the Christian (or Buddhist) path. That is what Lucifer did, and what Adam and Eve did.

Lead us not into evil.

Amen

Gods of Clay

Atheists seem always to refer to the Judeo-Christian God as an old man sitting on a cloud, a divine father. It is this God that they usually reject. They usually seem to make a point that it is this God that they reject, generally as “childish.”

But this is not the Judeo-Christian God.

Christianity has this thing called the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The father figure is only one. You are equally free to envision God instead as a friend, or a baby, or a bird, or a flame. All except as a friend are purely symbolic representations: it is as a friend that he chose to reveal himself to us. The point is to develop a personal relationship of love with God; use the image that works best in this way for you. It is no more intrinsically correct to imagine God as a father than as a lover: a metaphor found in the Song of Solomon, in St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, and in devotional Hinduism’s Krishna Gopala cycle.

If atheists insist on seeing God as an angry father, and themselves as a child, this probably says something about their family relationships growing up; and perhaps our society’s devaluation of fatherhood; not about Christianity.

As for Judaism, conceiving of God an old man with a long grey beard is blasphemous. God himself is beyond our comprehension, and we must have no images of him.

Feminists, of course, make much of making God feminine; a divine Mother. They miss the point. Unless they are lesbian, Christian women have the traditional advantage. It is sick narcissism to think that it is about gaining power by making God in your own image.

How much power did Christians gain by imaging God as a crucified criminal, then?

The Trinity and Islam

The major world religions agree on most things. On basic morality, on an afterlife, on heaven and hell. However, it is valid and necessary to point out that they do disagree in some things; and when they do, at least one of them must be wrong.

Islam has made its fundamental disagreement with Christianity plain: it developed, after all, in the context of Christianity, and needed to differentiate itself. Christianity is wrong because it believes God is a Trinity; for Islam, God is a unity. According to Islam, believing Jesus is God is a ticket to Hell.

We are obliged to take a position on the matter. We cannot stay neutral.

First, why insist God cannot have more than one nature? Even a mere mortal like myself can have three separate Facebook pages, each presenting a somewhat different identity. Why can’t God do something similar? And God is omnipotent: does one deny his ability to do so? To deny such an ability is to deny your God is God—and that would be the apostasy. You are worshipping some demon.

One must assert, therefore, that God may choose to remain at all times one person, or manifest himself as many. Do we have the right to presuppose which he must choose or has chosen? Would God send us to Hell if, in sincerity, we chose wrong in guessing the divine intent? How would that be a moral failing on our part?

To make it a matter for hellfire, therefore, looks like special pleading to scare people away from examining the argument.

What is the evidence? 

The evidence of the Quran is clear, that God is one and Jesus is not God. But the authority of the Quran depends on the assumption that it comes from God; using it as authority on the nature of God is tautological. The same is true of the evidence for the Trinity in the Bible.

Our conclusion must therefore be based on pure reason from first principles.

There are such arguments for the Trinity.

To begin with, to say that God is a perfect unity, lacking all duality or multiplicity, means that God is lacking something: multiplicity. If he lacks something, unless that thing is itself a flaw, he is less than perfect. Is being more than one a flaw? If so, creation itself is a flaw, and God must have been wrong to create anything. Either way, if he is envisioned as perfect unity, he is flawed.

Let us then consider the repeated Muslim assumption that Allah is benevolent, merciful. Or the Christian equivalent assertion, that God is love.

It is impossible for God to be benevolent or merciful in the absence of any other beings. Merciful to whom?

It is impossible for love to exist within only one being; love exists only with other.

Therefore, if either love or benevolence are intrinsic to his nature, he must have been multiple in some way eternally. Or, if he was not, his nature has changed over time. If it has changed over time, his previous state must have been lacking. And lacking in things we would consider intrinsically good: in love, in mercy, in benevolence.

So he was not God yet, for God is by definition perfect, and he was not perfect.

In sum, God is not God until and unless he is multiple. We must assume he is and was eternally.