God in Everything

 

Ouroboros, the cosmic world-serpent 

Friend Xerxes seeks to embrace all the joys of life. He sees God in everything. Even he says, the rattlesnake coiled to strike. 

It sounds like a good, cheerful and magnanimous philosophy.

It is, however, not possible for a Christian to see God in everything. That is pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, not monotheism.

To worship everything would be a violation of the First (or Second, but who’s counting?)  Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” That is, you must not worship nature. God stands apart from anything in the physical universe, on land, or sea, or sky. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

One thinks also of this passage from 1Kings: 

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 

There are evidently many things in nature God is not in. He is in the whispers, the inconspicuous or invisible, the mustard seed, the leaven. He is more present where the physical is more absent.

All of this is based on the Bible. Authoritative for Christians, but does pantheism perhaps make sense on its own merits? 

It does not. As the later philosophers of India have pointed out, if you assert “God is in all things,” the concept God simply loses all meaning; as there is nothing other than God against which to define it. You have said nothing but “the universe is the universe.” “Things are things.”

Moreover, Xerxes choice of the rattlesnake image is telling, in a Freudian sense. The serpent is the standard Christian image of evil. If you hold that God is in all things, he must also be in evil: not just in natural evil, like rattlesnakes, cancer viruses, aging, death, and pain in childbirth, but also in moral evil, in murder and rape and incest. And he is in the ugly and defective, in offal and pollution and decay. This cannot be, for God is by definition perfect: perfect good, perfect truth, and perfect beauty.

You have simply turned away from God.

Nature has fallen. The prince of "this world" is, after all, the Devil.

On the other hand, one’s daily life can and should be understood as a conversation with God. If one is alert, and prayerful, little miracles are happening all the time, as well as little corrective messages.

The Evil God

 

Friend Xerxes has revealed himself to be a pantheist; or, more precisely, a panentheist. That is, the created universe is divine and a part of God himself. 

I pointed out to him that this leaves us with a God who is evil; or, put another way, with evil as divine.

To which he responded that “evil is a concept invented by humans.”

This does not address the problem: God is still evil. The more so since Xerxes holds that man, creator of the concept, is divine. So I assume he really means to say that evil is an arbitrary concept with no real content.

This is a common idea nowadays. This is “cultural relativism”; this is constructivism; this is postmodernism.

Kant demonstrated, though the categorical imperative, that the moral good was unconditional and absolute. The Bible shows creation itself, from beginning to end, as a struggle of good against evil. And if you accept the “morality is relative” claim, you are implicitly accepting that Hitler or Charles Manson did nothing wrong, that we only persecuted them for holding different opinions.

The Christian believes that all men have a conscience, an internal compass that tells right from wrong. This is reinforced by the often-noted fact that all major religions contain, somewhere in their scriptures, a near-identical phrase: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Friend Seiko suggests that Buddhism does not concern itself with morals. Yet Buddhism too has its five precepts, binding on all men, which correlate well with the Ten Commandments. In the legend of the historical Buddha, his ultimate enemy, Mara, is a figure of personified evil. Making the struggle of good and evil as central to Buddhism as to Judaism or Christianity.

There is an obvious reason why so many want to deny the moral good, despite it being so universal and so certain.

It is because they are conscious of having done wrong. They do not WANT there to be a good and evil.

This is, perhaps, the sin Jesus called the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. One cannot be forgiven if one refuses to admit one has sinned.