Many of my own spiritual challenges involve moving past this. Drawing close to God, becoming aware of God's presence, resting in God, all require a God who is more than concept. Relating to God in some way would seem to require a certain dynamism on the part of God, and expansiveness that drives God to engage, and even to risk, for the sake of relationship. There has to be something going on in the heart of God.
I have sometimes been jealous of my more evangelical and fundamentalist brothers and sisters, especially of the way the seem to perceive of God so personally. But at the same time I am repelled by the way some of them seem to know a God who seems so preoccupied with damnation and punishment of those who don't get the rules of the relationship figured out just so.
Maybe that is why I was so struck by a line in today's reading from Ezekiel. While it is a section that talks about punishment and the death of the wicked, it also speaks of God's desire for the wicked (and to my mind wicked is a much worse condition than getting your theology wrong) to turn and be spared. "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD?"
It's obviously a rhetorical question that must be answered, "No," but the implications are huge. I assume that if God takes no pleasure in punishing, if God much more desires reconciliation, then it must cost God something to punish. Far from the image some Christians project of a God who cavalierly sends off countless souls to eternal punishment, such a possibility must be gut wrenching for God.
I've long been suspicious that one of my biggest spiritual liabilities is how deeply Greek, philosophical notions of God are embedded in my faith. For those not up on your Greek philosophy, such a God cannot experience anything gut wrenching. Such a God is by nature perfect and thus static and impassive.
But if Jesus is really in some way the image of God, then I'm going to have to go with a God whose gut is churning.
Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.
Thank you for illuminating, as you do, the ideas we use "to think with"; those conceptual foundations invisible to much of theological discourse in faith communities and in civil culture.
ReplyDeleteSo many things we project upon God, but this is largely, I think, simply to grasp what is ultimately ungraspable. I can allow for myself and others the use of metaphor and symbols just to move in the direction of the infinite. I am most uncomfortable, however, with how the concepts of will and emotion are projected. This is where we justify what is dubious at best, and allow and gloss over our own buried motives, lies, superstitions, and misunderstands of ourselves. I am with Bill Maur in his take on the shallowness of so many of the worlds "believers", obsesses with doing right far more than with doing good.
Establishing an orthodoxy by necessity does violence to some part of the Truth. I prefer an orthodoxy which is porous, flexible, and re-examined, in order that it can live and grow. Paradoxically, we cannot objectively examine orthodoxy from within it.
Again thank you for your illuminating ruminations.