Saving God From Religion

Let’s be clear, this is an audacious idea.  Writing a book about God is an audacious project.  In fact, claiming to know anything about God is more than audacious—it is intellectual blasphemy.  So, to begin, let me be clear.  I have no idea what I am talking about.  Nor do I possess even a shred of secret, spiritual information about God that is not available to anyone, or to everyone.  Being a recently retired, lifelong parish minister (a “man of God” in the old patriarchal language) provides me no special knowledge either.  Nor does being a person of prayer and meditation.  Nor does it help to have advanced degrees in rhetoric, or to have published other books about Jesus and progressive Christianity.  The Divine Mystery is not a rational idea; it is “trans-rational.”  Indeed, not even being a white man of privilege, with tenure no less, is an advantage.  It may be a disadvantage.  All of which is to say that such a project should not be attempted.  Do not write a book about God.

When I told my wife that this was exactly what I planned to do, she responded, “That’s great, Robin.   At least you picked a small, manageable topic.”

No wonder it took five years.  Books about God make editors nervous.  They do not sell as well as books about Jesus.  Both scholars and the reading public are prone to pick up such books and feel slightly nauseous.  Why?  Books about God usually fall into one of two categories:  1) An extended “proof” that God does in fact exist, since that is what the author believed to begin with.   Or 2) an extended proof that God does not in fact exist, since that is what the author believed to begin with.  Both things, of course, cannot be true.

Such an approach was never my intention, however, since “existence” when it comes to God has never made sense to me.  I have spent my life as an ordained “a-theist” (a non-theist).  Why?   Because everything that “exists” once did not, was brought into being by something that preceded it, and will one day cease to exist—hardly things that most people are comfortable believing about God.  Neither does it make sense that humans could have a subject/object relationship with that which is beyond knowing or naming—unless, of course, we have created God in our own image–the opposite of imago dei–that beautiful idea that we are created in God’s image.

Creating God in the image of humans, however, is exactly what we have done.  Look no further than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo’s most famous fresco, the creation of Adam, depicts the most iconic image of God in the western world.  God is a white, bearded European elder, surprisingly buff, who is surrounded by a heavenly bevy of attendants, one of whom is embraced by Godfather God as if she is a gift that is about to be offered to Adam.  Is that Eve, or is it Mary?  Art historians are not certain, but the real focus has always been on the world’s most famous “gap”—the space between God’s outstretched hand reaching down to touch Adam’s hand, where their fingers do not quite touch.  Theology has been “minding” that gap for centuries, promising to bridge it.

Granted, many people reading this will say that they do not believe, at least intellectually, that God is an old White Guy in the Sky.  Yet studies have shown that until an old image is replaced by a new one, the original image remains.  It is the default image, if you will, and evidence abounds that we are still stuck with this default image of God.  “He” is male (just listen to our liturgies, even in progressive churches); “He” is white (just look at much of the church art hanging in the vestibule), and more dangerous still, “He” is a kind of the heavenly vending machine (handing out favors to God’s chosen, while ignoring, or punishing everyone else—the unchosen?).

God in western theological models is William Blake’s Nobodaddy.  He is a heavenly Partisan, the fearsome and petulant head of the cosmic household, a jealous tyrant who must be appeased with gifts of supplication (obedience, prayers, praise) in order that “His” subjects may be restored to their right relationship with Daddy—who, for some strange reason, wants or needs to be worshipped?  These traits remind us of many earthly fathers, of course, or kings, or authoritarian politicians, and that is no accident.  Western God language is profoundly monarchical, as we crawl into the sovereign’s throne room with our petitions, unworthy wretches, or worms, that tremble as they seek divine favor or beg for forgiveness.  What’s more, “His” eye never sleeps, and he is perpetually disappointed in what “He” sees.  Consider that our image of God is not all that different from our image of Santa Claus:   He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake/He knows if you’ve been bad or good/ So be good for goodness sake!

There is another way to think about the Sacred Mystery, however.  It is more consistent with many Eastern religious traditions where God is not a “being” at all, but rather no-thing.  Instead of God being just a bigger version of you and me, perhaps God is the animating Spirit of everything that does exit, a kind of evolutionary insurgency in the universe, a Primal Memory of the Big Bang, a transcendent, sacred Mystery that does not initiate discriminatory action, but is action and change itself.  What if we are “entangled” in what Barbara Brown Taylor called The Luminous Web, where all actions have consequences, physical and spiritual.  To assume otherwise, to think that any of us are exempt from the consequences of our actions, is sin, because separation is sin, as Paul Tillich put it. What if the life of faith means acknowledging and embracing the life of spiritual entanglement, and the time has come for the church to replace a theology of obedience with a theology of consequence?  By their fruits you shall know them.

Strange as it sounds, what if God does not do anything, but without God nothing gets done?  What if, as quantum theory suggests, the universe is made up of “non-local stuff?”  What if there is a spiritual version of string theory, so that instead of a God who pulls strings, God is the string?

Since human being are always claiming to know what God is up to, and those claims have done great harm (as when a pastor tells a grieving mother that God wanted her baby in heaven early), wouldn’t it be better to think of God as up to nothing in the world?  Wouldn’t this solve the problem of evil?  What if quantum entanglement proves that everything really is connected to everything else—beyond time and space—in ways that baffled even Einstein?  And what if, as chaos theory posits, there are no variables too small to change the outcome of complex systems?  In other words, what if what we do, down to the smallest choices we make every day, chains out in an infinite and incomprehensible dance of cause-and-effect—rippling across the luminous web for good or for ill like the proverbial stone tossed into the pond?  What if that Luminous Web is God?

What’s more, what if—since we can never know what the ultimate aggregate of any single action may turn out to be—we could return personal responsibility to the life of faith, rejecting the idea that we are helpless and must be rescued.  What if Process Theologians are correct when they imagine that even God is evolving?  What if, instead of pretending that faith means believing things we know are not true in order to get rewards we doubt are available, we could return to the servant model of just trying to do the right thing.  What if, in our small corner of the universe, we acted in love and then trusted in a “this-worldly” faith that Bonhoeffer called “religionless” Christianity?

Dr. King called it the “moral arc of the universe.”  He endorsed the “entangled spiritual life” as opposed to our intensely privatized, individualized gospel when he said, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
       
Perhaps God is not, and never was, an Old Man in the Sky.  Rather, God is something closer to Pure Relationship.  When we enter into that relationship by trusting in the power of unconditional love, risking forgiveness, offering mercy with no strings attached, imagining the plight of others as if we were the other, and making the world a safer and more welcoming place for the weak and disenfranchised, then we act in faith.

Freed from dogma and doctrine, we could stop believing stuff to get stuff, and live by trusting the power of the choices we make entangled in the Luminous Web.  It is, after all, trust—not certainty—that makes us “believers.”