What’s your God concept?
Everybody knows that the image of God as an old man with a beard sitting above the clouds is way out of fashion. But what kind of God do you think of in his/her place? For a long time, I’ve had this kind of idea that God is sort of a disembodied being that drifts about throughout all the universe, seeing all, being all and everywhere at the same time etc…
However, my concept of God as a disembodied spirit thing has just not quite been ‘sufficient’ as theologians would say. The idea of an invisible God that kind of watches and maybe somehow interacts with creation seems about as plausible to me as the Flying Spaghetti Monster (of whom I’m a great fan but not a true believer).
A friend told me that I was being too scientific and literal about God and that I needed to do a liberal arts major. I thought about this and perhaps what he was getting at is that I need to see God as more of a narrative. Perhaps God doesn’t exist in any way that we might understand existence but is still real in the sense that a character in a book is real.
Take Doctor Who for example. The Doctor does not exist (afaict) but I could argue that he is real because lots of other people know about him and he has changed many people’s lives. Doctor Who fans would say that he represents a bunch of other things that don’t really exist but are real nonetheless such as adventure, eternity, hope, the future, the past, imagination and the universal desire to travel through time and space with hot chicks.
So is God real the same way that Doctor Who is real? Is God the meta-narrative?
Br William tells me that God’s existence is the existence of everything – i.e. everything is God and God is everything. That God exists within us and through us. There is no supernatural God hanging out in the 5th dimension but if there is a fifth dimension then God is there.
In my head, I’ve been combining some of these ideas to try and nut out a more immediate problem: what is the point of prayer? You see without a concept of God that makes sense, there is no real point in praying because you don’t know who you’re talking to. So I’ve been thinking about this and come up with an idea that when we pray, God manifests in our prayers. What I mean is that prayer is one of the places where God exists. “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them”.
So I think I now have a sufficient concept of God as a kind of an all pervasive presence that can take the form of a person manifesting in our prayer, just as a reflection manifests in the mirror when we care to look there. Or something like that. Summing up: God is nowhere: In the rational literal sense, he/she doesn’t exist but God is real and is everywhere kind of. Get it? Well at least I can go back to praying now.
Posted: September 4th, 2007 under Big Questions, Spirituality.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from Marty
Time: 5/9/2007, 3:08 am
Hi Matt,
I have always had trouble with the “God is in everything” mantra. I recently found an agument that I am happy with that God is not everything around us, mainly because it was all created by God and is external to him. However, God does sustain the universe by keeping the laws of physics constant.
The God concept is even harder when the Bible says that we are created in God’s image. God doesn’t have bodily form except that of Jesus, God does have a spiritual form, however that is the “Holy Spirit”. So the Father of the Trinity is a disembodied presence. I agree that it can be hard to focus on God the Father for that reason (especially because I prefer the visual). Even when biblical characters have encountered God they only got the back or voice or an angelic representative.
The thought I am having is trying to describe God is like trying to describe Love. What does it look like?
Maybe that is why I like the some of the church symbols, the church can’t give you a picture (real or mental) to focus on so they have introduced symbols of God’s actions to focus on e.g. the cross.
I agree with Nathan that prayer is about building the relationship. The part of us that is in God’s image (our soul?) is designed for relationship. What does a soul look like? Repeatedly the bible says that God designed us to first be in relationship with him and then be in right relationship with each other.
I hope this helps,
Martin
Comment from Nathan-James
Time: 4/9/2007, 3:05 pm
Hey Matt,
Just some light afternoon philosophising?
What’s my ‘God Concpet’. I think it is difficult for us to get our heads around understanding God as anything but a ‘Being’. That is to say, we view and understand the world in and through the things that are in the world, humans, animals, plants, elements etc. God then surely must be one of those ‘things’. The trouble is, most of those ‘images’ of God immediately limit God both in time and space and qualities and characteristics; because the things in our world are thus limited. The net result of this is that we give God the same characteristics we have ourselves; body, emotions, etc. Thus we end up with grandad God, in the clouds in the sky, seeing everything we do, taking it down, and using it to judge us. This works prefectly well for people who want a God to blame when things go wrong, or want to be absolved of their repsonsibility for being members of the created order, or who need a pupet master to control their lives so they don’t have to, or who are ready to condemn others because of their differences (need I go on).
Hmmmm… but what if… God was not so…. what if indeed we were God, what if all things were God.
It is perhaps a very poor description, but nonetheless I’ll try. You are of course familiar with the law of conservation of energy, that is, that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another. I kind of imagine God as that energy of the whole of created order, our planets, solar systems etc (you get the point). That at one point in its (the energy’s existence) was one absolute complete module of energy. That energy then transformed, perhaps there was a big bang who knows :-) but that single module of energy became transformed into elements, single cells, complex cells, organs, bodies etc. In other words put anything under the right microscope and you see that it is all the same thing at its fundamental level.
We a complex state of this basic form of eternal existing energy contain the pattern of that first complete whole module of energy and seek to fund unity as that one complete energy module once again. That is we contain in us the DNA of God and seek to re-form back to God. Hence the strong pull in all of us, however religious or not, to sense something bigger than ourselves, a quest to find wholeness and completeness in our lives etc. This is more than simple being happily ever after but becoming united in totality with all things.
I realise this is a terrible analogy but its all my mind can wrap its head around. God therefore is in and through all things, there is not one ‘place’ or ‘time’ that God is not.
>what is the point of prayer – you ask (guess who needs to come to my next prayer workshop lol).
What is prayer I ask. Answer that and perhaps we have the answer you seek, what is the point of it.
We all have different understandings of prayer. My early memories were prayer as reciting the Lord’s prayer at school (does that show my age lol). Later, prayer was when you stood up in church and rattled off a list things God ought to be doing (and if not why not). Later prayer became the routine reciting of endless words from books. What is prayer, what is the point?
For me, prayer is the process by which we respond to God’s call to enter into relationship with God, and thereby seek to come into union with God, to become God. Prayer then in its ultimate expression is seen in the relationship between the Trinity.
To try and say that another way. We have in us, whether we immdediately identify it or not, a longing to enter into union with God. It is perhaps the taste that brings people to discover church (or other forms of spirituality – but something that invites them to look beyond themselves and toward something mystical). Depending on what that path of church or spirituality is depends on how you see the ‘goal’ of that journey.
I’m proposing that whatever the differneces in most religions and forms of ‘spirituality’ the goal is generally one of harmony with all of creation. In chrisitan speak, to care for the least among us, to love our neighbours as our selves, to lay down your life for another, need I go on. But we are in essence called to look beyond ourselves, to see oursleves as part of, committed to, responsible for, all of creation (people, plants, animals – all that are unable to care for themselves).
If we are called by God to live in complete harmony with one another, in the same way the Trinity exist for, with, in and through the other, then prayer is the response to that call.
That is, at one point our prayers are an expression of our concern for others (intercessions – not the Christmas, I want, shopping list kind). At another it is sitting in the presence of God learning to know and be inspired by God, to discover God’s call for our lives (the daily office, eucharist, sacraments etc). But at a more critical, it is allowing the transforming power of God’s wisdom and inspiration to change us, to deepen our repsonse to God, through our response to the needs of the created order, to strive to perfect harmony (to become prayer incarnate, to become the things we pray). In its full expression, becoming prayer incarnate brings us in complete union with God. Some have blinking moments of this, some go their whole life not ever coming close to experiencing it. But we are still called to sit in the presence of God, to be inspired and transformed by God, to then allow that to flow over into the way in which we interact with the world, such that we become the very presence of God in the world.
Hmmm not sure if that helps or hinders… trouble is, it makes sense in my brain.
Nathan