God and humanity

Of course, we all know that 'no one has seen God at any time'! There is the real problem about God. For lack of evidence, we cannot prove that there is a God or that the stories about God in the Bible can be shown to be any more than our own assumptions that in any particular circumstance 'God' has shown his hand in this or that way. So the horrendous punishments that God has said to have visited on the often recalcitrant Israelites in their wilderness journeyings depend upon the original authors' ideas, long after the events. All sorts of human catastrophe and sickness were often, in history, said to be due to human sinfulness and the resultant punishment by a righteous God. But there are many more incidents in the Bible which express human experience of the divine in ways which are wholly positive, such as Elijah's encounter when he was at the end of his tether - it is impressive in its unadorned simplicity and artless language -

'[The Lord] said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks into pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire the sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah? ..."'(1 Kings 19:11ff)

Even so, it is not until we read the accounts in the gospels of Jesus' faith in God that there is, shall we say, a more humanly resonant tone about God - 'Abba', 'Father', he prayed - and the extraordinary account of the transfiguration which, in a way, mirrors Elijah's experience -

' ... as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. (Luke 9: 29-31)

Early Christianity had no 'theory' about God except that he was revealed in Jesus - a forgiving, merciful, divine Being whose nature was Love - love for the creation and for all of fragile humanity: even for the sinner. But there was always, after the second century, an increasing link with the ideas of Greek thought as a means to express more clearly the tenets of Christian belief. God as the Almighty one, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Impassible, entered the Christian vocabulary. God became the 'unmoved Mover', as in Aristotle and we, mortals, at his mercy.

These ideas became the stock in trade of theologians and of those who composed worship services. So the language about 'God the Almighty' resonated, for instance, throughout the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. They are still the common understanding of many people, particularly the atheist lobby and the traditionalists of all the churches today. But even when there is a debate about why an Almighty and Merciful God can allow terrible things like earthquakes and Tsunamis to happen, the well intending Christian will never go behind the traditional understanding of God and point to the reality of God expressed in the gospel. It seems that we get stuck in a mediaeval bog! But there is a way round this impasse.

We need to begin again and start with the human person - fragile and yet capable of remarkable courage, beautiful creations in thought and in all kinds of art, and above all - forgiveness and love. Our human heritage from the Greeks onwards is also very remarkable. We do not have to ditch our heritage. But in the past four hundred years we have taken immense steps forwards in understanding our place in the universe. Sadly, the Christian churches throughout this period of scientific exploration became bogged down in the traditional, centuries old way of thinking about God which the discoveries of what have been called 'the Enlightenment' called in question. There were other ways of understanding natural disasters and also human breakdown. So, although in the 21st century Christians now acknowledge all this, there is rarely any attempt to discover ways of thinking about the divine which can turn the arguments about an Almighty God on their head. It is the challenge facing us all today.

The key is to stop thinking about God as somehow a static, divine entity. Our human nature is not like that - we are all involved in life as a process; sometimes it is tragic and that tells us that we are quite fragile in ourselves and in our situation. But normally we have good possibilities before us which depend upon our responses - we are not the pawns of some unearthly power, either of the stars as ancient folk believed nor in a God who has planned our lives in advance. He must be at least as 'human' as we are, in the best sense of 'human'. Not a tyrant, an onlooker upon all our miseries, unconcerned about our frailty, snooping with a sort of divine 'evil eye' and planning the future for each individual person. Probably the most important feature about a renewed understanding of the divine is that he does not know the 'future' in advance of all happenings in the universe or in human society.

This way of thinking about God has been called Process - as distinct from Static. We are not static people, nor is the God in whom we have faith. This goes to the heart of all the arguments about suffering and God and about Jesus' death. We have to say, as against many theologies of atonement throughout the past millennium, that the death of Jesus was not a sacrifice to his Father on our behalf. Neither was it planned in advance by God as such. Rather it was a willing obedience by Jesus to follow through his call, even through death, to proclaim and initiate the new life, the new creation which was indeed in the mind of God for us all. The New Testament has this process theology set out very clearly in Paul's statement -

'Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.' (2 Corinthians 3: 17-19)

All of which goes to clinch the understanding that the God who is expressed in process thought is not Impassible but, as the gospel tells us, Emmanuel - God with us.