Lift in the City

I believe in one God

If the first rule in thinking about God is that He cannot be thought, the other first rule is to affirm that He is one.

Christians, together with Jews and Muslims (and some others), affirm first and foremost and above everything else that God is one.  The most severe anathemas should fall on those who deny it! It is an idea which has given birth to many martyrs.  Jews, Muslims and Christians have died in common cause, to defend this simple truth. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

Martyrs throughout the ages have borne witness to the fact that the God who is infinite possibility will tolerate no rival: not Ceaser; not the King; not Robert Mugabe. No earthly or heavenly power is greater than the God of Israel. And Jewish, Islamic and Christian laws and morals have been based on the very simple understanding that there is no other authority. If we are to call no man on earth “Father” or “Teacher” it is because there is one God to whom all men and women owe allegiance. In our own society it is the whole basis of the notion of the Rule of Law: the king is subject to a higher authority. For me, the only guarantee of political freedom is the possibility of a supreme authority who we are all subject to – even our would-be oppressor s.  Since that supreme authority is “infinite possibility” it is an authority which liberates and does not oppress.

The understanding that there is one God emerged in a political context as Israel discovered that she owed allegiance to her Lord God even abroad; that he was Lord not only of their history but of the whole of history. God was not just the Saviour of Israel; he was Lord of the nations and the future was in his hands.  That God was God of Persia, of Babylon and of Egypt; that he was in control of the events of history: these are the exciting discoveries of the Hebrew people as the one God revealed himself through Moses and the Prophets. Everything else in the Hebrew Scriptures is secondary to this key revelation.

This one big idea of Judaism, discovered in the ups and downs of a turbulent history eventually came to be expressed in philosophical language, so that by the time the Fathers of the Church are writing in the second, third and fourth centuries, certain philosophical propositions are just plain obvious to them: that God is all-powerful – there is no competing power; all-knowing – He is God of the future as well as the past; that he is “impassible”  (un-changing and incapable of suffering) - there is no variation in his goodness; that there is no division in his Godhead and so on. These philosophical ideas simply strengthen the one central claim that he is one.  

Crowning all these ideas is the claim that God created everything ex-nihilo – out of nothing. That is to say that everything that exists comes to exist by God’s act of creation alone. Again, this simply underscores the crucial claim of Judaism and Christianity – there is no other power or authority “competing” with God. Even Satan is God’s creation. And, as we shall see in my next post, all creation came into being through God’s act of love.

 

 

© Peter Bolton

Thinking about God

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God. Exodus 5:8-9a

Readers of my blog may be surprised that I have not posted for a while. Well, here is the reason: I have known for several weeks that my next posting would have to be about the very nature of God. You can see, then, why I have been putting it off! It hasn’t helped that my laptop died. But that's another story!

I have been helped enormously by an article which appeared in the March 2011 edition of the Anchor, the magazine of the parish of All Saints with St Saviour, Weston-super-Mare. The piece is by Humphrey Reader. Here is his penultimate paragraph:

For mathematicians, infinity goes beyond crude ‘bigness’ to a concept with a completely different agenda, something which took centuries to work out and which is still a work in progress. I would suggest a parallel with our understanding of God. At the time of the Decalogue He presents as a possessive and jealous super-tribal-leader. Yet the very emphasis on avoiding idolatry is perhaps a hint (in terms understandable by people of that time) of the importance of reserving absolute loyalty for the indefinite and completely Other rather than man-made representations.

Elsewhere in his article Humphrey quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The infinite is understood rightly when it is understood, not as a quantity, but as an “infinite possibility”’ He insists that infinity cannot be conceptualised for the moment you conceptualise infinity you make it finite. 

This mathematical analogy helps us grasp that God is not “a thing or an object among many things”. Just as infinity is not a number so God is not an object.  We must always understand that any talk of God which implies that He is something “out there” is to use language allegorically or analogously.  The very name of God as represented as by the letters in our alphabet: YHWH, suggests a dynamic becoming: not simply, as in the NRSV “I AM WHO I AM” but, rather, “I am becoming”.  (From the Hebrew verb “hayah” meaning “to be”). Wittgenstein’s “Infinite possibility” captures something of the idea.

Mr Reader’s article emphasises the first rule when thinking about God: He cannot be thought. And if you think that you have got an idea of Him, I regret to tell you, you have actually got an idol. God cannot be contained or thought anymore than infinity can be contained or thought. And it is vital in any discussion of God to hold on to this truth.   

You may have noticed that those who think that they have got God sewn up tend to be the most  dangerous of human beings.

© Peter Polton