Current Understanding of God

Recently, a friend raised the question, “what am I doing wrong?” to try to understand why some bad things have happened altogether too often. Then, I was at a hospice volunteer supper when two men seemed interested in my responses to their questions about Christianity. They had questions that the institutional church did not seem to address.

And even though I have shared my history from a traditional faith aligned with the Catholic Church to my present understanding that is rather different, I thought that I would try articulating my views with more detail. 

To preface my current understanding, it is important to know that I still read authors that support the more traditional understanding of God and Christianity. Recently, I read Questions of Faith by Peter Berger who is now an 84 year old scholar, a sociologist with a long history and interest in religion. He has been a faculty member of many universities, including Boston College and, for many years, Boston University. He is a Lutheran and most conversant with a range of religions and the intellectual or theological sources that support those religions or institutions within a specific religion. He surely comes well prepared to review in great detail the Apostles Creed, section by section.  He is clearly a believer and a committed Christian. Yet, I found his approach forced and presumptuous. In order to avoid conclusions that were personally unacceptable, e.g., the “naturalness of death”, he asserts the need for God to maintain life after death. To think that the Holocaust occurred without God’s rectifying the horror is unacceptable to him.

I am still working on Hans Kung’s Does God Exist? I will never complete the 700-page book. In fact, I have no intention of reading every page. While I marvel at Kung’s brilliance and appreciate shis many books that have been such an influence on me, his approach to the issue of God flows out of a history of philosophical thought dating back centuries. It is very analytical and highly intellectual. There is a basic problem with the approach, from my perspective. God, however one may interpret the word, is by definition unknowable. God is Other than humans. There is no common ground that would enable us to understand God. Whatever we say about God, then, has to be some form of projection. The exercise to rationalize the inference of our reality to God represents an inherent problem. How can any human inference to God be supported except by an element of preconception?

I am not directly disparaging anyone whose understanding of God has been formed by either personal history, including involvement with an institutional church, or personal experiences, however subjective they may be. I was “there”. I spent much of my life using rational analysis to support a faith-based God. And I surely have experienced feelings of discomfort with the notion of the consequences of one’s behavior in terms of “eternity”. Whatever works for a person is more than acceptable. Life is tough enough in so many ways, more so for some than others, that I support anything that helps.

However, I am not there and have not been there for some time. It is not that I never questioned theological assertions or faith-based statements. However, I have transitioned over time as I have previously documented. The sources referenced in the linked blog remain the principal influences of my thinking, especially for this document, Dairmuid O’Murcho.

  

My current understanding starts with three facts: (1) creation, as we know it, started with the Big Bang approximately 13 billion years ago, (2) humankind is dated to 6 million years ago, and (3) institutionalized religion, i.e., “an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values”, dates back 10,000 years. Thinking about these facts in the context of God, albeit unknowable by definition, it appears evident that God was always present. It would be difficult to comprehend a God that had a beginning. Whatever God is, God has to be outside time.  Otherwise, God would be temporal and God would be “one of us”. When I think of the listed facts, 13 billion years of creation and 6 million years of humans, I realize that God was as present for these eons of time, as in these past 10,000 years when a more natured-based approach to God, polytheism relating to natural powers, e.g., sun, moon, became more rigidly defined, as in written scriptures attributed directly to God. All of creation, from eons past, has to be vibrantly included in our understanding of religion.

Creation then is a key element in understanding God.

Relying on the work of biblical scholars, e.g., John Dominic Crossan, and other writers, e.g., Garry Wills, I understand now that virtually all of the institutional understanding of Jesus and Christianity is an extrapolation of people trying to justify and expand on personal experiences rather than writing attributed to God and/or Jesus. Without belaboring what others have written, I conclude that Christianity has been a creation of people to support preconceptions of reality and the institutional requirements required to support the power structure.

Formal religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, now represents a problem to me. Not only is the formal content questionable, as pertaining to its sources, e.g., New Testament attributed directly to Jesus, Koran attributed directly to Allah, these various religions are inherently divisive and intolerant, resulting in all sorts of violence and death.

Formal religion, then, may represent a help to some, but is principally a tool for those in power.

I finally come to my understanding of God which starts with the premise that I do not understand God. He/she is unknowable. However, by focusing on creation in all of its 13 billion years, I can be overwhelmed with awe. To think that I am a part of this amazing universe is amazing. My basic approach to God, then, is through this appreciation of Creation.

While the universe is generally benevolent, it is inherently involved in ongoing creation and destruction. Observing animal life as survival of some at the expense of others is a prototype of creation, as we know it. Granted that extrapolating animal existence to human life does a gross disservice to the horrors and hate perpetrated by humans on other humans and nature, there is no escape from the realities of evil. Since I do not understand God, I am comfortable not understanding evil. From my point of view, evil simply is.

Bad things happen, not as some action designed by a God that wants to send either a positive or negative message to people. Praying may be helpful to cope with tragedy, but it would be impossible to attribute positive outcomes of prayer, e.g., someone surviving serious illness or accident, to God without also attributing negative outcomes to God. Why help some and not others? While I may not be able to know God, I can reasonably assume that God is benign and loving to all.

While much of what I read cannot be easily summarized, I conclude with how I understand personal morality. The challenge of life is to live in a benign relationship with creation, all of creation ("radical inclusiveness"). The appropriate response to being created is to address the needs of all, the planet itself, nature, animals, and our fellow human beings. Our attention is best devoted to those in need, whether it is restoring nature that we have threatened, or rescuing animals or humans from the miscarriage of justice. (N.B. I previously claimed to not understanding either God or evil. Evil is a given; God, as totally Other, is a reasonable hypothesis for a Ground for creation.)

In the context of my relationship with Creation, death may be the end of human experience, as we know it, but I understand that we will continue to part of creation. Admittedly, conceptualizing reality after death is difficult, if not impossible. However, I can live with the awareness that the inherent benignness of Creation will be extended forever to me and everyone else.