Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century

God

It seems a bit ironic to have a chapter titled “God” in a book that is itself theology. After all, every chapter of this book is in some sense about God. This chapter, however, is necessary in order to focus on central issues of the existence and nature of God, including a few classical theological problems and debates. When we read the New Testament not looking in the first place for what it says about Jesus, the Spirit, human beings, the church, and other legitimate topics but for what it says just about “God,” what might we learn?

Given that question, I must immediately confess, however, that the chapter is not so much about God as about what it means to say, “I believe in God.” In fact, one of my main themes will be that Christians can say nothing ultimately and perfectly “true” about God in God’s very self. As I argue below, I believe we are limited in the end to identifying what we cannot know about God rather than demonstrating what we do know. My concentration, in any case, is on the nature of Christian faith: What am I doing when I confess, “I believe in God”?

I have no interest in offering reasons to believe in God. I do not argue for the existence of God. The existence in my life and in the lives of others of some kind of faith in God is taken as the starting point. I examine the meaning, the function, what we are doing (or should be doing) when we confess to believe in God. This is to a great extent, as I forewarned in the chapter on epistemology, an empirical account: I examine myself (and to some extent others, insofar as I can make out) in order to discern what I am “doing,” indeed, what I “mean,” when I say, whether to others or to myself, that I believe in God. The New Testament cannot “on its own” answer that question. It can, though, help us create answers.

Portraits of God in the Bible

As anyone having the least familiarity with the Bible knows, there are all sorts of names for God and depictions of God’s emotions and activities that strike just about any modern human being as problematic at best and offensive and horrifying at worst. But this has always been so. Even within the pages of the New Testament we find characters and authors providing interpretations of other scriptural texts that explain how a “first reading” or a “literal reading” of a text about God must not be right and how the truth of the text must be seen through more elaborate interpretation or by reference to some alternative scriptural passage.

Jesus does it. When Jesus, as demonstrated in the chapter on scripture above, ignores or rejects the Pharisees’ citation of Deut 24:1 as indicating that God allows divorce and remarriage (Matt 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–9), he is rejecting what most people would see as “the literal” reading of the passage. Jesus’s hermeneutical activity, as portrayed in the Gospels, is itself an interpretation of a text with the purpose of substituting one vision of God for another. Paul does the same. When Paul questions a literal reading of Deut 25:4 (1 Cor 9:9), he is implying that his God must not be very concerned about oxen. “Is God concerned with oxen?” The particle that begins the sentence, μή, implies a negative answer. We may feel Paul is being a bit too anthropocentric here. We may prefer to imagine that God does very much care for the well-being of oxen. But that just demonstrates that we and Paul have different conceptions about the nature of God. Even within the scriptures themselves, therefore, we see people practicing theological interpretation in order to correct what they take to be incorrect or offensive notions about God, even those they find in scripture.

Perhaps the most radical of such cases is supplied in the second century by Marcion. As just about any Christian has done through history, Marcion noticed that the God depicted in the Old Testament says and does things no good God should do. Marcion’s way of solving that problem was by insisting that the “god” of Jewish scripture was not the same God who was the father of Jesus Christ but a bungling and even evil god. Marcion took Jewish scripture as historically accurate, in that it truly depicted the actions of a god, but it was not the same god as proclaimed by Jesus and the Apostle Paul.1 Another second-century Christian, named Ptolemy, an advocate of what scholars call Valentinian forms of Christian thinking, taught something similar. Ptolemy also thought that the “god” who gave the Law of Moses and was depicted in most Jewish scripture was not actually “evil,” but simply “just.” That god was an intermediate god, neither the perfect God nor the devil but merely the “craftsman” god who created the universe.²

Again, this is one early Christian, though we might say heretical, attempt to read scripture, to confront portrayals of God that seem obviously unacceptable for moral and theological reasons and to deal with that apparent contradiction. Neither Marcion nor Ptolemy provides a solution for those of us wanting to affirm later creeds and Christian orthodoxy, but it is one way Christians interpreted scriptural depictions of God so that they did not impugn or hinder a more theologically acceptable understanding of God.

Those church fathers we label orthodox recognized the need for such interpretation, especially when dealing with popular notions of God or even scripture. Many of them believed that at least some scripture could not be acceptable unless interpreted figuratively or allegorically. Origen, for example, recognized that the Marcionites were correctly reading the text “literally” when they questioned the justice of a god who would punish children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren for the sins of their ancestors, so he insisted that the literal reading of the text must be inadequate.³

As Rowan Greer has noted, Origen was always on the watch for even the most innocent statements about God that could lead a Christian astray if taken too literally. Even the prayer “our Father in heaven” “should not be understood to confine God to a place and so imply that He is corporeal.”⁴ The Lord’s Prayer must be interpreted so as not mislead to false notions of God’s true nature. But Origen’s strategy for dealing with objectionable depictions of God—indeed, “impossible” depictions—in the scriptures is not to reject the scriptures or to take those as depictions of some “heretical” god, as did Marcion, but to interpret them properly, which may mean “not literally.”5 This is not just the practice of biblical interpretation; it is the practice of Christian theology: interpreting an inadequate notion of the nature of God by proposing an alternative.

From the beginning of Christianity (and for Jews, before that), Christians have recognized the inadequacy, even offensiveness, of some biblical representations of God when read “literally,” “commonsensically,” or “naively.” Christians often think first of the Old Testament when wondering about problems of biblical depictions of God. Was God really “walking in the garden” of Eden enjoying the evening breeze when he called out for Adam (Gen 3:8)? Was the Almighty sincerely asking a real question when he asked Adam where he was (3:9)? Even Christian children have balked when they read that God said, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26, my emphasis; “But who could be there with God?!”), at least until their well-meaning Sunday school teachers assured them that God was there talking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, an interpretation that also satisfied many ancient Christian readers. Should we really agree with the psalmist who thought God would bless those who bashed infants’ heads on rocks (Ps 137:9)? It is not at all surprising that Christians through the centuries have offered various interpretations to deal with such texts.

But we too often don’t recognize that such issues arise also within the New Testament. We may be more familiar with passages from the Old Testament, for example, that portray God as having a body.⁶ According to Gen 32:22–32, God even uses his body in a wrestling match with Jacob, in the end knocking Jacob’s hip out of joint in order to escape before daylight, something like a modern vampire. It is less noticed that the New Testament also speaks of God’s body. In Rev 4:2–3, John says he “saw” God sitting on his throne up in the sky somewhere, in what must be described as a very “physical” appearance indeed. Later in the narrative John notes that God held out a scroll in his “right hand” (5:1). Christians refrain from taking such descriptions of God as “literal,” and it would probably be rather heretical to do so.⁷

Our scriptures also depict God in ways we probably should see as morally offensive. When Paul speaks of the wrath of God that is coming to destroy all nonbelievers (1 Thess 1:10), are we to imagine that the almighty, ineffable, loving God suffers from anger and jealousy and has trouble controlling his temper? In parables the Gospel of Matthew depicts God as a moneylender who has a debtor tortured until his entire debt is repaid (Matt 18:34); and as a king who consigns a guest to eternal darkness and punishment for failing to wear the right outfit to a wedding (Matt 22:11–14). In the New Testament we come across passages that seem to compare God to a slave owner (Luke 16:13, and often in parables), an unjust judge who is won over only by importunity (Luke 18:2–8), a rich man who rewards a dishonest accountant (Luke 16:1–12), a businessman who exploits other people (Matt 25:14–30), a nobleman who kills subjects disloyal to him (Luke 10:21).

We can hardly take all these scriptural portraits of God as “true” representations in any kind of straightforward or literal way of the God we worship. We could, like Marcion, attempt to cut them out of our Bibles. Or we could, like Ptolemy, attribute them to a secondary god different from the God of love whom we worship. I suggest, though, that we follow those early Christians we call orthodox. The solution is not rejection of the text or a multiplication of gods but interpretation. We interpret these texts, as we must interpret all texts, so that they render more adequate, edifying truths that reflect what we truly want to affirm about the God of our faith and confessions.

Even depictions of God we might not initially find so offensive turn out to be nonetheless potentially false and dangerous, which is to say that if they are not taken in a “true” manner, they can also lead us into theological error. One of the most common portraits of God is as a king, indeed as the king of “all nations” (Rev 15:3). The popularity of the term “kingdom of God” in the Gospels is itself a constant reminder that God is a monarch.8 Ancient persons, whose world was literally ruled by several “kings” of various levels of competence and morality, may well have had no problem thinking of God as a king. In fact, they probably would have been incapable of avoiding the concept, since all “gods” known to them in antiquity existed in political structures just like human beings did. Zeus and Jupiter, therefore, were not just “kings”; they were something like “kings squared,” “hyper” monarchs. Naturally, in the minds of ancient people, if there was only one god, he would have to be a supreme king.

And we can imagine how the image may have functioned for ancient Christians and for most Christians throughout the centuries in a positive manner. Kingship denoted power, sovereignty, superiority. If one wants help from one’s god, it would be natural to hope that such a god was powerful enough to deliver. Our dependence on God and our confidence that God has the ability to help us may be strengthened by reflecting that our God is the most powerful being of the universe.9 Perhaps that use of “king” could be helpful.

Or maybe not. Is God the kind of king we have already seen in the New Testament, the kind who punishes a slave for not rendering a suitable return on his investment and then slaughters his subjects who had objected to his coronation (Luke 19:14)? Modern readers are often unaware that in the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire, the word often used to designate the emperor was βασιλεύς, “king.” Julius Caesar and his son Augustus had been careful to avoid the title rex, “king,” for themselves in Latin, knowing the political danger that came with claims of monarchy within Rome. But their subjects in the East never bought into the subterfuge. They constantly referred to the emperors by calling them kings. We can see this in modern translations of 1 Pet 2:13 and 17, where the author instructs his readers to accept and honor “the king.” The translators of the RSV and NRSV are no doubt correct when they translate basileus here as “emperor.” That’s the “king” his readers thought of with this reference, I’m sure.¹⁰ The author of Revelation, in his depiction of God as a king, himself uses a term commonly connected to the emperor when he calls “The Lord our God” a παντοκράτωρ, the “ruler of all” (Rev 19:6). God and Jesus in Revelation are the reverse image of the evil, beastly emperor of Rome: they are instead righteous emperors. They are, nonetheless, emperors. It probably did not occur to ancient Christians to find it worrisome to think of God as a king or even an emperor, even though they were quite aware that many emperors they knew about were untrustworthy, incompetent, even evil and dangerous—precisely because they were “all-powerful.” But should we ignore the potential problems with the title?

I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy. Thinking of God as a male, superior, all-powerful, and arbitrary monarch is precisely what has driven many people away from Christianity.

We may, in fact, use the New Testament itself to critique the ancient image of God as king, and kings themselves, not to mention emperors. According to Luke, Jesus taught his disciples, “The kings of the nations lord it over them, and those who are in authority over them are called benefactors. You must not do the same, but the greatest among you must become like the youngest, the leader as a servant. . . . I am among you as one who serves” (22:25–27). Jesus (or Luke) knows that kings are expected to “lord it over” their subjects, and he explicitly rejects that model of leadership. We may imagine Jesus modeling the only kind of “kingship” of which he approved in the way he staged his entry into Jerusalem. He chooses to enter the city not on a charger or even an average horse but on a young donkey (John 12:13–15) or, in the terms of Zech 9:9, “the foal of an ass.” Jesus rejects the image of the superior and overbearing king and comes as a humble king who submits even to his subjects. In other words, critiques of “kingship” as a model for God’s nature can be found even in the New Testament.

But, and again I say this is true of every image or notion of God we human beings can entertain, the nice image can mask potentially harmful meanings, as ideology always does. It may make us forget that shepherds eat lots of mutton and lamb chops. Shepherds eat their sheep and turn their skins to many uses. How differently would we interpret the parable from the Gospels if it ended with the man slaughtering the recovered sheep to provide a festal dinner for his friends and neighbors?11

Many Christians believe that “Father” must be an indispensable name for God. And as long as we are able to interpret this title to represent only a good, loving, gentle, forgiving, self-controlled father, it may well work for most people theologically. But it is demonstrable that people who have been abused by their father often have difficulty thinking of God as their father. I will argue below that even if we are careful to exclude any possible negative connotations of “father,” it is still a dangerous notion of God if it is taken, as it is by many people, including some theologians, to mean that God is more appropriately considered male than female or to have masculine traits rather than feminine. That, I will argue, is also idolatry. But it is idolatry to equate God with any name, role, or notion we humans can conceive.

The late ancient writer called by history Dionysius or Pseudo-Dionysius made what I consider to be an indispensable point about humans’ use of divine attributes. He insisted that the most dangerous qualities or characteristics we attribute to God are precisely those that at first seem the most fitting, words such as power, might, goodness, even love. Dionysius (the text is obviously pseudepigraphical, but I will sometimes call him Dionysius for convenience) explains that scripture uses both “similar” and “dissimilar” “sacred images” for God.¹² We may realize the inadequacies of thinking of God as truly having an arm or hand or suffering passions as human beings do, which demonstrates that we recognize that these scriptural images of God are dissimilar in important ways to God’s true nature. But Dionysius insists that even those images we may take as more similar to God’s nature, such as “Word,” “Mind,” or “Being,” must be seen as still inadequate: “Now these sacred shapes certainly show more reverence and seem vastly superior to the making of images drawn from the world. Yet they are actually no less defective than this latter, for the Deity is far beyond every manifestation of being and of life; no reference to light can characterize it; every reason or intelligence falls short of similarity to it.”13 Every word or image for God is defective because God must be beyond them all in ultimate reality.

So Dionysius explains how “similar” images may be even more dangerous than “dissimilar” ones: we may be tempted to think the word “Love” or “Good” captures the true nature of God, but that would be wrong. Later in the same treatise Dionysius discusses common images for “heavenly beings,” in this context meaning more specifically angels, but he would certainly make the same point for God. He speaks of biblical images for angels: “High-flown shapes could well mislead someone into thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or gleaming men, glamorous, wearing lustrous clothing, giving off flames which cause no harm, or that they have other similar beauties with which the word of God has fashioned heavenly minds.” In that case we would be better off to use more earthy or even crass terms for divine entities: “Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things” (2 141A-B). To help us avoid idolatry or misleading thoughts about God, we might prefer the dissimilar or crass images or terms over the apparently similar or holy.¹⁴ Biblical writers, therefore, “honor the dissimilar shape so that the divine things remain inaccessible to the profane and so that all those with a real wish to see the sacred imagery may not dwell on the types as true. So true negations and the unlike comparisons with their last echoes offer due homage to the divine things” (2 145A). Negative terms for God like “invisible,” “unbounded,” “immortal,” “inaccessible” and obviously dissimilar images are often better because they stop short of claiming to posit God’s true nature. They therefore are less likely to mislead us into idolatry or the idea that we have finally captured God’s true reality.15

Negative (Apophatic) Theology

Dionysius is a central figure within the long tradition of apophatic theology, theology that insists that whereas many things we say about God may be true in a sense, they are ultimately not true because no human speech can express or capture the essence of the ineffable and undefinable God. A literal meaning of “define” is “to set limits or boundaries,” something Christian theology has insisted cannot be done for God. Apophatic theology insists that though some of our thoughts about God may approach the reality of God or may help us establish some kind of relation to God, nothing we can say or think will fully and completely correspond to God’s essence or true nature precisely because of the limitations of our human nature and the infinity of God’s.

It is easy to see by rather simple thought experiments how negative theology works, moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, which is precisely the way the process is described by some church fathers: an ascent through denials.¹⁶ Though we as children may have begun with a conception of God as a very old man with a white beard sitting in the sky behind a cloud and compulsively controlling every detail of earthly activity, we tend to give up such images as our faith matures. But how much do we give up and still remain Christian believers? If we do away with the beard do we still have “God”? May we also dispense with the “old man”? or the sky? or the cloud? or the control? or the details? Perhaps we come to believe that ultimately God is in control of the universe, but we no longer require ourselves to believe that God is actively and personally engineering all the details, such as whether or not I find a parking space. Is that still “God”? Which of the many traditional notions of God can one dispense with—ought one dispense with—and still honestly claim to believe “in God”? Apophatic theology would answer: In some sense, all of them.

Though there are certainly biblical passages that promise knowledge of God, there are those that can be cited for negative theology. The Gospel of John begins by admitting that “no one has seen God” (1:18; see also 1 John 4:12), and though the NRSV translates the rest of the verse as, “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known,” that may not be the best translation. The word here translated as “made known” is ἐξηγήσατο, from which we derive the English “exegesis.” It can mean anything from “lead out” to “relate” or “narrate.” In this context I would prefer to translate it as something like “interpret”: Jesus “interprets” the Father for us. But that is a long way from clear, definite, firm “knowledge” of the very nature of God. And anyone who has read the Fourth Gospel carefully will recognize how full it is of puzzles and paradoxes. It seems to pose as many questions about God as answers.17

According to Colossians, Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (1:15). The author of 1 Timothy calls God “immortal” and “invisible” (1:17). Hebrews also speaks of God as “invisible” (11:27). Paul uses the words “unsearchable” and “inscrutable” for God’s activities and deeds (Rom 11:33), and Paul’s personal experience confirmed it for him. What Paul heard when he was himself “snatched up” into “paradise” were “unspeakable words,” perhaps better translated here as “wordless words” to capture the Greek paradoxical term (ἄρρητα ῥήματα; 2 Cor 12:4). What Paul saw and heard was “ineffable,” which might more strongly be interpreted to signify not merely a prohibition against but the impossibility of its expression.

Even in those rare cases in the New Testament when someone claims to see God, the vision is not really so clear or obvious. As I mentioned above, in Revelation John claims to have entered the heavenly throne room of God. He says he saw the “one seated on the throne” (Rev 4:2), but his description defies clear picturing: “The one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald. . . . Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder” (4:3, 5; NRSV). Finally, John claims to see a body part that is more familiar: he saw a scroll held “in the right hand of the one seated on the throne” (5:1). But that’s all we’re offered. If we’re looking for realism, this is not a very satisfying picture of God’s body.

John’s vision is an appropriation of the very similar one reported centuries earlier by the prophets Isaiah and, to a lesser extent, Ezekiel. There also, though, the visions are coy about what God actually looks like. Though Isaiah worries that he is “lost” because he has “seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isa 6:5), he doesn’t seem to have seen much at all, except the “hem” of God’s robe that fills the temple (6:1). This is more like “seeing” an “unseeable” God.18 It is therefore significant what the Gospel of Mark takes from the passage of Isaiah. Mark quotes Isa 6:9–10, “They may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven” (Mark 4:12; compare Matt 13:14–15; Luke 8:10). Parables in Mark, like any possible vision of God, hide more of the essence of divinity than they reveal. God’s body is unseeable, even in a vision. God’s essence is unknowable.

Church fathers may have been influenced by ancient philosophy, especially the Platonism that was becoming more and more influential from the second century CE onward, but they believed they were following scriptural teaching when they emphasized that we cannot know God’s essence. Clement of Alexandria taught that we should meditate on how all our notions of God must be lacking, and by means of that meditation “we would draw near somehow to knowing the Almighty, not knowing what he is, but what he is not.”¹⁹ Gregory of Nyssa wanted to modify more radical negative theology in order to admit that we may approach some kind of knowledge of God, but he nonetheless insisted that any kind of full comprehension of the divine is humanly impossible. Speaking of the “name” of “God,” he says, “For this name, which indicates the substance, does not tell us what it is (which is obvious since what the divine substance is is inconceivable and incomprehensible).”²⁰ Augustine famously said, “If you can grasp it, it’s not God.”²¹

Some of the best quotations and arguments in this vein come from Pseudo-Dionysius: “We offer worship to that which lies hidden beyond thought and beyond being.”22

Therefore God is known in all things and apart from all things; and God is known by knowledge and by unknowing. From him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything; he is known to all from all things and to no-one from anything. For we rightly say these things of God, and he is celebrated by all beings according to the analogy that all things bear to him as their Cause. But the most divine knowledge of God, that in which he is known through unknowing, according to the union that transcends the mind, happens when the mind, turning away from all things, including itself, is united with the dazzling rays, and there and then illuminated in the unsearchable depth of wisdom.²³

Everything good we can imagine, and the ability to imagine itself, we have as a gift from God, but we must never claim that God is any of those things in any way we can imagine. As John of Damascus would later put it, here quoted by Thomas later still, “We cannot know what God is, but only what he is not.”²⁴

In the last few decades many theologians have worked to reclaim the use of this kind of apophatic theology to speak about the nature of Christian faith in a postmodern age, and they have done so often by returning to Thomas Aquinas.²⁵ Paraphrasing Thomas, who is himself echoing John of Damascus, Dionysius, and others, Fergus Kerr says, “We cannot know of God what he is but only what he is not; so we begin by denying of God the marks of the creaturely condition.”26 As Herbert McCabe puts it, “So for St. Thomas, when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about. We are simply taking language from the familiar context in which we understand it and using it to point beyond what we understand into the mystery that surrounds and sustains the world we do partially understand.”²⁷ This all perhaps seems counterintuitive to many people, believers and unbelievers alike, who think that what it means to be a Christian is to “know God.” As McCabe elsewhere notes, “Readers of Aquinas, however, including some of those who see themselves as his disciples, have the utmost difficulty in taking him seriously when he says that we simply know nothing of the nature of God.”²⁸ “God,” to Thomas, is merely a label we place at the spot where we wonder, “Why is there something rather than nothing? What does it all mean? Why anything rather than nothing?” Aquinas knew he could not provide a fully satisfying answer. “God” is the label Christians use for the human question of “meaning.” As McCabe concludes, “We do not and cannot in this life know the answer but we label it ‘God’—et hoc omnes dicunt Deum.”²⁹

Many contemporary theologians reclaim these ancient Christian ideas. As Denys Turner writes, “In showing God to exist reason shows that we no longer know what ‘exists’ means.”³⁰ Discussing Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida, Graham Ward insists, “Although we cannot talk about God, and have no direct knowledge of Him, neither can we cease talking about God, and having the promise of knowledge about Him.”³¹ And in the words of Kathryn Tanner, “God is incomprehensible, beyond human powers of positive explication through concepts and speech, because God is without limits or bounds.”³²

There are people, many of them, who think Christians are people who think they have God figured out. They “have the goods” on God. They claim to know what God is like, what God likes, what God really is. Unfortunately, people who think there are such Christians are too often right: there are Christians like that. But that is Christianity at its worst. At its best, Christianity, all the way from ancient times to today, admits it knows nothing of what God truly is. There are and have been Christians who came to realize, through sometimes wonderful, sometimes painful meditation, learning, and prayer, that we end up with a radical unknowing when it comes to the true reality of God. We may believe; we may hope; we may try. But we end up realizing that when we say “God is,” we don’t really know what we’re talking about. We have come to realize that we no longer know what we mean by “God” or “is.” What we know when we, at our best, look into the mystery of the existence of the universe—a mystery we label with the incomprehensible term “god”—is that we don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about God.

Transcendence

It is just about impossible for human beings to resist the temptation to think of God as being like a human being, just infinitely bigger, more powerful, and immortal. God is thought to be just the most important and superior item in the universe. McCabe describes the situation as follows:

Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or had been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.33 The doctrine of transcendence works to refute such ideas and to convince us that nothing we can imagine God to be will actually be what God truly is, precisely because God is completely different from, completely other than, the universe. God is not identical with the universe. God is not even “outside” the universe. God is not another thing in addition to the universe. God is utterly different from and other than the universe. The “being” of God must be something completely alien from anything we, who are very much in and part of the universe, can imagine as “being.”

It would be anachronistic, to judge by the standards of modern historical criticism, to claim that the writers of the documents of the New Testament entertained a doctrine of divine transcendence. I don’t believe the theology of Paul or any other New Testament author was sophisticated enough or influenced enough by philosophy to work with a category like divine transcendence in the sense important for later Christian theology. I have argued elsewhere that for the classical Greek and Roman worlds and thus for the earliest Christians there was no such thing, for example, as “the supernatural” as a realm of reality apart from or alongside the realm of “nature.”34 Perhaps in the more complex theologies of Christians influenced by later Neoplatonism,” such as Dionysius, we can see the beginnings of some kind of notion of supernatural that may correspond tenuously to what has counted for the supernatural in modern thought.³⁵ But for authors of the first two centuries—and I would argue this to be true for Greeks and Romans as well as Christians—whatever gods or beings exist at all must exist “in nature” or as part of nature, which word is usually taken to mean “all that is.” So when I read the New Testament looking for doctrines of divine transcendence, I do so not believing that I am simply “recovering” the intention of the original human authors.

A nonfoundationalist reading of scripture, however, makes such concerns about anachronism irrelevant. We are perfectly within our rights as (postmodern?) Christians to read biblical texts as teaching the transcendence of God. When we read in John 13:1 that Jesus is about to go “out of the cosmos” and “to the father,” we may take that to indicate that God is not part of the cosmos but something completely “other” than it, transcending the universe. The author of Ephesians insists that God “elected us in him before the foundation of the cosmos” (1:4–5). God is here not part of the cosmos, not part, that is, of the universe at all.

One of the ways the Gospels teach divine transcendence is by emphasizing the radical difference between God and human beings: “What God has yoked together, let no human being separate” (Mark 10:9; see also Matt 19:6). A camel passing through a needle’s eye or a rich man entering the kingdom of God is impossible for mortal human beings, but not for God (Mark 10:27). Indeed, the tenth chapter of Mark seems to have as one of its themes the emphasis on the radical difference of God, even to the point of approaching what would later be considered heresy. Jesus says, for instance, that he doesn’t have the authority or power to assign seating on his right or left in the kingdom, implying that only God, but not he, Jesus, can do that (Mark 10:40).

Modern Christians may wonder about the passage in the same chapter where Jesus seems to deny any divine status for himself. When a man asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life and calls him “good teacher,” Jesus says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God” (10:18; Luke 18:19; the wording is changed a bit in Matt 19:17). Perhaps we could figure out a way to interpret this strange saying in a way that could sustain the orthodoxy of Jesus’s divinity, yet insofar as these passages are taken to represent Jesus’s humanity, they also indicate the radical difference of God from us and the entire universe.

Dionysius insists that God’s transcendence relates to how we should think of God’s “eternity.” Most people imagine that God is a being who existed “before” the world and will exist “after” it, and that is one permissible way to talk about God. But there is no before or after when it comes to God’s reality. In other words, God’s existence is not just a very long version of ours, as if his infinity meant that he exists in some kind of infinite extension of time. On the contrary, there is no such thing as time in God’s being except the eternal point of now. The eternity of God is not like a line that goes on forever. It is more like a point of presence. As Dionysius puts it, “He is nothing. He is no thing. The categories of eternity and time do not apply to him, since he transcends both and transcends whatever lies within them.”36

McCabe has put this in a nice, pithy way. Instead of thinking of God as existing outside or along with the universe in any kind of manner like the universe but just as a different thing, McCabe says, “It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two.”37 It makes a nice equation: G + U ≠ 2.³⁸ The transcendence of God means not just that God is another being bigger than the universe, but that the beingness of God is something we can never understand in relation to any existing thing we know about in the universe or any existing aspect of the universe. Utterly different.

Keeping this transcendence in mind may help people avoid problems that come with slipping into thinking that God is just a “super” person but basically with the same tendencies we know all people to possess, people with whom we find ourselves in competition, people from whom we may be wary of receiving gifts, people from whom we may need protection. As Tanner notes, “God is not a kind of thing among other kinds of things; only if God is transcendent in that way does it make sense to think that God can be the giver of all kinds of things and matters of existence; and only on that basis—God as the giver of all gift s—does it make sense to think of a non-competitive relation between God and creatures.”³⁹ God is so unlike the universe—not another thing within any genre of things—that every name we give to God, every concept we have of God, will ultimately mislead us from God’s true nature. The doctrine of divine transcendence helps us remember that.

Immanence

When they first encounter it, many Christians are wary of the doctrine of divine transcendence. How can we take comfort from or “relate” at all to a god who is utterly different from anything we can imagine from our experiences in the universe? If God is really so separate and different from us, how do we worship him—or it? What use is it to believe in a completely transcendent divine entity? These are legitimate questions, and traditionally their concerns are answered by insisting that the doctrine of transcendence must always be accompanied by the contradictory-sounding doctrine of divine immanence: the teaching that God is fully “in” the world even without being “part” of it.

And again, as was the case with the doctrine of transcendence, I would say that the New Testament provides resources for thinking about divine immanence, even though I would admit that probably none of the authors of New Testament documents would have been philosophically educated enough to recognize it as a theological doctrine. They do, however, use language that connects God very closely to the universe and ourselves.

The most common New Testament lessons about God’s immanence in the world are taught by stressing Jesus’s role as “God with us” or the representation of God in the world, embodied even as a human being. The Gospels especially can be mined to teach divine immanence by focusing on the incarnation. That is a function of immanence to be taken up better in the chapter below on Jesus. Moreover, many New Testament texts stress the nearness of God by emphasizing that Christians possess, within us, God’s very spirit (see, for example, Romans 8 and 1 Cor 2:12). God’s pneuma pervades the very bodies of Christians. I will take up that indication of immanence in the chapter on the spirit.

But there are other indications in the New Testament of God’s immanence in the world and in us. Ephesians says that God is “above everything and through everything and in everything” (Eph 4:6). God pervades the universe and everything in it. The New Testament uses significant prepositions to describe God’s relation with us. God is “with” us (Phil 4:9). God “works in” us (Phil 2:13). Our lives are “hidden within God” (Col 3:3). This last phrase brings up a point made by theologians: if we are uncomfortable thinking about God being “in” the universe, as if that would imply that God is “part of” the universe, an idea contradicted by the doctrine of transcendence, we may alternatively imagine that the universe is “in” God: God contains the universe in God’s self. The world cannot “contain” God; rather, as Tanner puts it, “God contains the world.”40 Or, in the words of Richard Norris, “God is not ‘in’ the world (or for that matter ‘outside’ it). On the contrary, the world is ‘in’ God, who is the ‘place’ in which the finite order is set, and is therefore non-mediately present to it; and that, oddly enough, explains why ‘no one has seen God at any time’ (John 1:18).”41 In other words, the radical immanence of God can be expressed as saying that the entire universe, including ourselves, lives “in” God.

Yet, according to Ephesians, God is also “in” us. We are “full” of God (Eph 3:19). The first letter of John puts it both ways. When we love, it says, we are by that action living “in” God, and God is also living “in” us (1 John 4:16). Paul’s sermon in Athens as narrated by the Acts of the Apostles makes Paul sound even philosophical, quoting Greek philosophers to make the same point. Paul says that all human beings “live and move and exist” in God (Acts 17:28). Paul is here probably citing Greek philosophers who probably meant such a phrase to express their own pantheistic theology: the teaching, that is, that God is not just “immanent within” the universe but is the universe.⁴² The universe, for such non-Christian philosophers, is God’s body. In order to avoid equating God with the universe, Christian orthodoxy teaches the immanence of God in the universe without God being a part of the universe or even the universe itself entire. Acts quotes even pantheistic Greek philosophy, at any rate, to support the closeness of God to the world and all human beings.

We may be more creative, however, in reading some narratives and sayings in the Gospels to teach divine immanence. According to Mark, Jesus makes a statement the radical nature of which is usually missed by most readers. Challenged about his disciples rubbing and eating grain on the sabbath, Jesus says, “The sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the sabbath” (2:27). This is a radical statement. Its implication would be that all laws and rules may be ignored or broken when people feel that it is in their and others’ interests to do so. We human beings are perfectly within our rights to make up our rules as we go along or ignore rules if we judge them to be against our interests. What if all of us went around obeying only those laws we had decided were “for” us? The saying is so radical that both Matthew and Luke omitted it (assuming they were using Mark, as I believe they were), leaving in place only the accompanying saying, “The son of man is lord of the sabbath” (Mark 2:28; Matt 12:8; Luke 6:5), not such a radical saying in itself for Christians. Matthew and Luke no doubt avoided Mark’s more radical statement precisely because it seemed so offensive or nonsensical.

But we may take Mark’s radical saying as speaking to human nature in its relation to divine nature. If we accept that the law was given by God, but that God gives us the authority to abrogate it, that puts us practically in the place of God, or, put another way, it makes no distinction between God and us. It puts us in God’s role. God gives us divine rights and role. Such a reading does emphasize the nearness of human beings to the divine in a surprising way.

A scene earlier in the same chapter in Mark may be read similarly to speak of divine immanence. When Jesus announces that the paralytic’s sins are forgiven, the scribes mumble that only God can forgive sins (Mark 2:1–7). Jesus divines their thoughts and asks which is more difficult: to forgive sins or to heal the paralytic? The point in Mark, read as it would be by a decent historical critic, is that “the son of man has authority [ἐξουσία] to forgive sins” (2:10). The point in Mark, on the most “historical” reading, is to demonstrate something about Jesus’s identity, not about whether or not God does actually reserve to himself alone the authority to forgive sins.

But there are other ways we could read the passage. For one thing we might take a lesson from it that would be wrong rather than right: that people who suffer do so because of some sin they have committed. They deserve their disease. Jesus’s words certainly seem to assume that. We could reject that interpretation on theological grounds derived from elsewhere, perhaps even elsewhere in Mark; but see especially John 9:3.

But we could also read the text to reject any idea that God alone can forgive sins and that Jesus, precisely in his role as “the son of man” here rather than the “son of God,” demonstrates that all human beings can forgive sins and in fact that we do so all the time when we forgive others, even when we need to forgive those who have sinned not only against us but also against others. There may be a time when we say we have no right to forgive people for harm they have done to others; in that case forgiveness is not ours to offer but belongs only to those harmed. But that may be only one side of a two-sided lesson, the other side being that sometimes we need to be able to forgive others as God forgives, completely and freely. Here again the text would be taken as emphasizing our nearness to God rather than emphasizing God’s sovereignty. It thus, read this way, emphasizes God’s immanence rather than transcendence.

A related doctrine that ends up emphasizing divine immanence is creatio ex nihilo, God’s creation of everything out of nothing. Many people mistakenly think about creation as simply the beginning of the universe. It is something they think about as happening in time, just at a very early time. But creation is not something that happened in time. It was the creation of time itself. And God’s activity of creating the universe is not something God did long ago and then was done with, as if he dusted off his hands and stopped creating at the end of the sixth day. That is the mistaken “clockmaker” notion of God’s role in creation: God just got the clock started and then sat back and watched it run.43 Creation, rather, is a constant divine activity.⁴⁴ God is constantly upholding the reality of the universe, giving it whatever energy it has, giving it whatever life it has, giving it whatever reality it has. Creatio ex nihilo is not just about the beginning of the universe. It is about the ongoing, constant radical necessity of the world to depend on God for its existence. That in turn highlights God’s immanent relation with the universe.

So yes, the New Testament notes that God “created all things” (Eph 3:9). God is the one “for whom and through whom everything exists” (Heb 2:10). God is the “builder of everything” (Heb 3:4). Even if there are other “worlds,” all possible “worlds” were made by God (Heb 11:2). But the New Testament also notes the ongoing activity of God in creating: God gives (present tense) life to “all things” (1 Tim 6:13). God “provides us everything richly for our pleasure” (άπόλαυσις; 1 Tim 6:17). As Ian Markham explains, the creation stories in the Bible are not scientific accounts of the beginning of the universe. They are not even mainly about the beginning of the universe. Markham interprets the creation account as “poetic” and as “myth”: “It describes in a metaphorical way the dependence of the world upon the creator.”⁴⁵

The New Testament contains many texts that are highly eschatological and even apocalyptic.⁴⁶ Thus is it not surprising that they sometimes foretell a time in the future when we and the universe will be taken up into God or combined with God in a way not possible until then. Though we have already seen texts from Ephesians suggesting that Christians are already united with God, it also predicts a time in the future when the entire universe will be gathered “in” God (1:10). According to Paul, Christ works so that in the end “God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). God promises to human beings that God will “live in them and walk among them” (2 Cor 6:16; a loose quotation by Paul of Lev 26:12). According to some New Testament texts, therefore, there is something like a “reserved” unity with God we now can only anticipate. That reservation and expectation have always had some place in most Christian theology: we enjoy God’s presence around and in us now, but we also await the full blessing of the “beatific vision” of God’s self.

McCabe makes some helpful points here: “I think it is true and very, very importantly true that the point of human living lies beyond itself but not outside itself. This is because I think that in the end the point of human living lies in God, who is beyond us but not outside us. God, unlike the birds or any other creatures, cannot lie outside us because he creates us and sustains us all the time, making us to be and keeping us as ourselves. So to say that the point of our lives is in God is not to point to something outside us but to a greater depth within us.”47

This is one way of making sense of the catechetical teaching that the purpose or goal of human existence is “to glorify God.”⁴⁸ Modern people especially are likely to be put off by such language because they think of God as another person “other” than and “outside” us. God is such an egotistical person that he created us solely for the purpose of his enjoying our admiration of him? The teaching can be properly understood only if we do not think of God as a different person from us but more as the underwriting of our very selves. When we allow ourselves to sink into the beauty and glory of God, we are at the same time sinking into what we as human beings truly are at our best. We are embracing our own creation by being grateful to the creator.

The Sermon on the Mount contains a beautiful passage that combines observing creation with the goodness and care given by God and ends by forbidding worry or anxiety. After insisting that no one can serve both God and money, Jesus continues,

Because of this I say to you, do not be concerned with your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor with your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Study the birds of the sky: they don’t sow or reap or gather into storehouses, and your heavenly father feeds them. Aren’t you more than they? Which of you by worrying can add one inch to your height or one day to your life? Why are you concerned about clothes? Learn from the flowers of the field, how they grow. They don’t work or spin. And I tell you that even Solomon in all his splendor was not decked out like even one of these. But if God so dresses the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into a furnace tomorrow, how much more will he do for you, you little-faiths? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For all these things the gentiles pursue. For your heavenly father knows that you need all those things. But look first for the kingdom [of God] and his justice, and all these things will be given to you also. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry for itself. Sufficient for a day are its own troubles.49

“Each day’s worries are good enough for that day” might be another way to put that last sentence. It is as if Jesus is teaching us that, at least for Christians, worrying is not only unnecessary and stress-making. It is also a sin. Observing God’s creation should convince us of God’s presence and care for us. God’s ongoing creation of the universe is proof of God’s goodness and immanence within it.⁵⁰

To make the point with empiricism: this is actually what faith means for many people, Christian and non-Christian alike. Observation of the world is what makes many people believe in an unknown deity. For many people, to look at the world—a sunset or, better yet, thousands of sunsets; a forest; an ocean; the sky; a waterfall; the miracles of animals of all kinds; of human beings of all types—and then to say we do not believe in God would be saying that we, we human beings, are the best designers in our universe.

In a way that could be considered true. We human beings may be the most intelligent beings of the universe, but only because, as I have insisted, God is not part of the universe. But when we look at the absolutely stunning beauty and complexity of the universe we actually can see and then say there is no God, that does seem to mean we are saying that we human beings, as far as we now know, are the supreme intelligences of any possible existence. We are the best artists and architects that can exist. Better than any imagined artist or architect who could have fashioned the clouds at sunset, the waves on a beach, the trees of a forest, the insects of all known continents. We are thereby saying that we are the highest level of designer possible in our imaginations.

The thing that makes many people say they believe in God is the wonder of the world.51 This is not a “proof.” It is merely to say that the wonder expresses itself in some of us as faith in God. Faith is merely the expression of the wonder that we live in a world wonderfully made. And “made” by some being supremely superior to us. We couldn’t make any of this. That is what some people mean by faith in God.

While there are problems with the doctrines both of transcendence (if it implied God’s indifference to the universe) and of immanence (if it implied that the universe is God or that God is one item among others in the universe), theological errors can be avoided if the two doctrines are held together. (I explain below why theological errors ought to be avoided; it is not simply out of fear of being labeled a heretic.) Christian doctrine avoids the idolatry of equating God with the universe precisely because of the Christian doctrine of transcendence: God can be immanent in our universe because God is radically other than the universe. God is not another thing alongside the universe. Precisely because God is transcendent God can contain the universe but not be contained by or exhausted by the universe.

This combination is noted by many theologians. As Henk J. M. Schoot puts it, discussing the theology of Thomas Aquinas,

God is not transcendent in the sense that he needs a difference to be the unique one he is. God is not different within a certain genus, on the basis of a common similarity. . . . God is “outside” of any genus, and thus God is not different from creatures the way in which creatures mutually differ. God differs differently. . . . Such an account undermines the opposition between transcendence and immanence, because God is not transcendent in such a way that he is simply “outside of” or “above” the world, and thus not transcendent in such a way that it would exclude his “descent” into the world. . . . All of our language about God should be analyzed in such a way, as the analysis of words and propositions used analogously in fact does, to account for this unique uniqueness of God.52

Or as Rowan Greer notes, commenting here on early Christian texts such as the second-century Shepherd of Hermas and combining emphasis on creation with transcendence and immanence: God is “one, who made everything from nothing, and who is uncontained while containing all.”⁵³

Hans Küng argued that we should not pine after beliefs about God that many of us can no longer accept, ideas, for example, that God is a “miracle-working helper in distress and ready to fill in the gaps; the God—that is—who is to be invoked in nature and history only at the point at which we can get no farther with our human science and technology.”⁵⁴ But Küng insists there are other ways to believe in God available to thoroughly modern, thinking people:

What is by no means obsolete, however, is the question about the God of the new world picture, who is to be understood as the transcendent-immanent, all-embracing, all-permeating, most real reality in man and in the world: the God—that is—who can be the answer to the questions of ultimate and primary interpretations, objectives, values, ideals, norms, decisions, attitudes, to the questions of the ultimate or primary why and wherefore, whither and whence, of man and the world; the God—that is—who as the Unconditioned involves us unconditionally, quite personally in the midst of and through all the relativities in the world, who sustains us, supports and embraces us (infinitely distant and yet closer than we are to ourselves) as ultimate and primary ground, support, and goal of all reality.55

The combination of divine transcendence and immanence is not a modern invention, as we’ve seen. It goes back at least to Christian theologians of late antiquity. But ironically, as Küng here points out, it also has reemerged as central to the theology of many modern and postmodern Christians, who find ourselves, against the odds, continuing to “believe in God” but in ways we may have trouble explaining. It is a complicated and complex faith and may not look like the faith of our childhood. But it is nonetheless faith.

Marilynne Robinson’s award-winning novel Gilead struck me as a fine literary example of the coming together of divine transcendence and divine immanence. Sometimes in history transcendence has been linked more to some forms of Protestantism, especially the Calvinist emphasis on God’s “sovereignty.” And immanence has appeared more “Catholic,” with its emphasis on the incarnation, ritual, the everyday, the saints—all as the “embodiment” or “revelation” of God.⁵⁶ Robinson’s novel brings these two traditions together. The first-person narrator of the story is himself an aging Calvinist preacher who is writing the story as a message held in trust for his very young son, the product of a late-in-life marriage to a younger woman. The birth and play of the boy seem to cause the old preacher to wake up to the bits and pieces of God seen in youth, life, and all the world around him. His Calvinist theology had rightly taught him to respect the “otherness” of God. But he is now discovering, to his and our delight, that God may truly be encountered in nature, the ordinary, the everyday, his neighbors, his wife, and in his beautiful boy. The novel, written by an author well steeped in Calvinist theology, is a wonderful fictional illustration, though not by any means an allegory, of the mature Christian combination of the doctrines of transcendence and immanence.

Divine Simplicity

In classical theology, exemplified by Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Thomas Aquinas, to name only the obvious suspects, the doctrines of divine transcendence and immanence were combined with divine simplicity. As Dionysius says, speaking of God’s nature, “In fact he is nothing less than the archetypal God, the supra-divine transcendentally one God who dwells indivisibly in every individual and who is in himself undifferentiated unity with no commixture and no multiplication arising out of his presence among the many.”57 Unfortunately, the doctrine of divine simplicity is not at all intuitive to most people. Divine simplicity is not so simple after all.⁵⁸

The theological idea was inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, Plato especially. According to much ancient philosophy (though there are always exceptions and several different philosophies had their own ideas), the most perfect supreme god, which was often taken to be the source of all other divinities, was an immaterial being. Since it is the nature of matter to change, and since change was understood necessarily to be from better to worse or from worse to better, god could not change and could not therefore be material. Matter is complex and alterable, and therefore god must be simple and unalterable. Many ancient philosophers took a sphere to be the most perfect form imaginable, so that the sun, moon, and stars, understood as perfect spheres, were higher divinities than any of those of mythology that took other forms, such as human or animal. The sphere was considered a superior form precisely because of its unity and simplicity. So the most supreme god must also be a unity and simple.

I have shown elsewhere that much of this philosophical preference for unity over diversity, oneness over dichotomy or plurality, and simplicity over complexity was taken over by philosophy and medical theory from earlier Greek political theory.⁵⁹ And the emphasis on singleness, unity, and simplicity was often emphasized more by conservative, antidemocratic ideology. The Greek democracies were founded on the assumption of difference between the few rich and the many poor, two classes expected to be in constant opposition and conflict. The democratic constitutions were designed to control those oppositions and balance them without getting rid of them. The response from conservatives was often to deplore difference and conflict and to urge unity, though admittedly a unity in which the poor and the rich stay in their respective places and thus retain difference between the two classes. The emphasis on singleness, unity, and even sameness characterized more the political ideology of conservatives than the assumptions of the democrats.60

Applying these ideas to theology and developing them further, some philosophers insisted that the supreme deity, being completely simple, one, and unified, should not be thought of as a being (an essence) who also has certain characteristics (“accidents” or “ways of existing”). That would divide the divinity into “essence” and “existence.” It would imply that god was a being, like we are beings, who also “happens” to be “good,” say, as we imagine for all human beings. Ancient philosophers insisted that such notions destroy the unity and simplicity of god. So they insisted that god’s nature could not be divided into his being and other characteristics or virtues in which he “participates.” If god is completely transcendent in relation to the universe, god cannot participate in anything outside god. So rather than say, “God is good,” they would say, “God is goodness itself.” This was taken to maintain the simplicity and unity of God with God’s self necessary for the transcendent and immanent deity.

Adopted in late antiquity by Christian theologians, these notions were taken to add more ammunition to the claim that God is not a being who also happens to exist, in the sense that I am a human being who happens to exist. I, at this time, do exist, but there was a time when I did not exist and there will likely be a time when I no longer exist. The universe is a being that came into existence and may end its existence. (I leave it to theoretical physicists and cosmologists to settle that question.) But God does not “have” existence. God is being itself. God cannot not “be” because God is being itself. The (eventually) Aristotelian-Thomist way of saying this is that there is no distinction between God’s essence and God’s existence.

That may seem like a picky, philosophical differentiation of words with no real difference, but it has theological uses. For example, we should not think, as most of us usually do, of God as a huge, cosmic being who also happens to be good—but may, if we are unlucky, be bad. God is not good in the same way that I, as a human being, may be good. Rather, God is goodness itself. There is no “accident” of goodness that may be attached, as a separate quality, to the “essence” of God, to use the Aristotelian-inspired language. The only reality that is goodness itself must find its fundamental identity in God. Put another way, God is not a person who may or may not love. God is not a person who happens to be loving. God is love itself. “Loving” is not a quality that expresses something about God. Love gets its very nature from God. As Henry Chadwick explains about Augustine, “Augustine accepts that God is one ‘substance,’ as long as no one imagines goodness to be an accidental quality of divine being. Unlike in man, in God it is not one thing to be, another to be good. God’s attributes are not other than himself.”61

One way of putting this is to say that “God” is not a noun, a word that functions by naming something, but a verb. The meaning of “God” is “to be.” “My name is I am” (see Ex 3:14; John 8:58). God is “to love.” God is not a loving person but the reason that love can “be” at all. God is not a person who created the universe to “exist” alongside God’s self. God is the reason the universe can exist at all because God is the “is” behind or underneath all “existences” (ways of existing) at all.

Some people object that the notion of divine simplicity is not worthy of Christian theology because it is “not biblical” and “comes from” Greek philosophy. Such an objection is rather naïve and philosophically unsophisticated itself. In the first place, as I have insisted, whether or not some idea is “biblical” or not depends on how someone interprets the Bible not on whether the “text itself” somehow “contains” that property “within” it. Nor does it depend on whether the ancient biblical author “intended” to place divine simplicity “into” his text. I argue that we Christians are well within our rights to read the New Testament as teaching divine simplicity, even if the ancient human authors had no notion of this admittedly philosophical idea.

The objection also suffers from ideological self-deception or dishonesty. It implies that we can use some kind of language to talk about God and our faith that is “pure” and “untainted” by “foreign” influences. That notion is false. We have no language that is applicable only to Christian topics. All our language comes to us from elsewhere. And if we are at all philosophically educated or inclined, we will automatically use ideas and language we learned from some kind of philosophy to talk about our faith. The search for “purity” (in the sense, often, of whether or not something is “biblical”) in language is misguided and ideologically loaded in harmful, deceptive ways. The crucial question about the doctrine of divine simplicity is not whether it is “biblical” but whether it is useful. Whether it helps or hurts Christian faith and our understanding of it.

We need not take on all the different aspects of ancient philosophical (usually Platonic) notions of divine simplicity in order to find it useful. For example, the ancient philosophical author Alcinous argued that God could be neither bad nor good since that would mean God “participated in something, to wit, goodness.”62 I have admitted that this can serve to make a good point, precisely by forcing us to be careful about every attribute we claim for God. I have no problem, however, thinking of God as complex or participating in something or even as changing. I just don’t share the ancient philosophical assumption that all change must be from better to worse or vice versa. Neither do I assume that change would destroy God’s infinity or necessarily place God in time. I simply assume that when I say something about a change for God (when I read about God “repenting” in the Bible, for instance) I am saying something that may be true about God in a sense but that must not imply time for God or change between better and worse. But I also recognize that when I say God does not change, that is also true only in a sense.

Divine simplicity, though, may be useful if it guards us from moving toward idolatry, that is, looking at any attribute as we know it and assuming that God is “that” or “like that” in a human way.⁶³ We may think of God as “father” only by continually knowing that only the very truth of “fatherhood” in its most unimaginably pure and good nature is God’s nature, not that God might be like any “fathers” we know, who may be overbearing, authoritative, domineering, or cruel—and male! I may not be particularly concerned, as ancient philosophers certainly were, to save God from having “accidental properties.” But it does help to remind me that when I say, “God is good,” no notion we have of “good” can correctly represent God’s goodness. God is goodness itself in a perfection we cannot even imagine.

And that is the fundamental aspect of divine simplicity stressed by Thomas Aquinas and many Christian theologians. As McCabe explains Thomas’s position: “The predicates we attach to the word ‘God’ have, indeed, different meanings in that their meaning is derived from our understanding of these things as properties in our world, but what they refer to in God is a single mystery which is quite unknown to us. We have some understanding of the wisdom that God creates in us, but when we say that God is wise we mean neither that he is the creator of wisdom in us, nor simply that he is not foolish; we mean that the quality we call wisdom in us exists in God in some higher and utterly mysterious way (cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia, 13, 5).”64 As is true of so many Christian doctrines, divine simplicity is best used to keep us from false or dangerous notions about God, not for saying anything ultimately positive about God’s true nature, as if, for example, being “simple” were inherently superior to being “complex.”⁶⁵

And there are certainly clues from the New Testament with which we may think about the oneness and simplicity of God. The shema from the Old Testament but cited as central by Jesus in the New begins by declaring God’s oneness: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Mark 12:29; see also Zech 14:9: God’s “name” is “one”). We may correctly imagine that in its original contexts the saying functioned to differentiate the “one God” of Israel and the church from the “many gods” of other peoples. The point was God’s singularity, not God’s simplicity. But as I have regularly argued in this book, we need not limit ourselves to the ancient meaning.

Likewise for many other references to God’s oneness. “I and the father are one” (John 10:30). “God is one” (Rom 3:30 and Gal 3:20). “There is no other God but one” (1 Cor 8:4). “There is but one God” (1 Cor 8:6). “One God and father of all” (Eph 4:6). “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ” (1 Tim 2:5). The New Testament is sprinkled with the theme.

We find even more to think about if we realize that a Greek word often translated in the New Testament as “sound” or “healthy” has as its more basic, fundamental meaning “single” or “simple.” Jesus says, “The light of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is ἁπλοῦς, your whole body will be full of light” (Matt 6:22; see also Luke 11:34, which is almost identical in wording). The basic meaning of the word is “single,” “one,” and by extension “simple,” as opposed to “double,” “two-fold,” or “compound” (διπλοῦς). In fact, the LSJ (1968), in spite of listing several similar meanings of the word, has no listing as “healthy,” demonstrating simply that the other translations are much more common, certainly for classical Greek but probably also for ancient Greek more generally. In other words, the meanings of the word as “healthy” or “sound” derive from the older, more basic meaning of one, single, or simple.66

Modern translators, I believe, are perfectly within their rights to translate the word to reflect health rather than unity. As I noted above, much ancient medical theory took unity, singleness, and simplicity to be attributes of the healthy body, individual or political. And I take it that Jesus, in the quotation, should be taken as talking about the eye when it is working in its proper manner, as a whole, healthy, sound eye. But we may also take the saying as Jesus praising the quality of singleness and simplicity—innocence, we could also say. And as those virtues Jesus urges are possible only because they are given us as expressions of God’s own nature, Jesus also here teaches and praises the simplicity of God.

These different theological concepts or themes—we could also call them tools, practices, handles—I have been treating in this chapter—negative theology, transcendence, immanence, divine simplicity—all work together to help us talk about our faith while knowing we cannot really know God, at least not like we can know anything or anyone else. We Christians have learned through much experience—for some of us the experiences of our own lifetimes, but for all of us the accumulated experience of theology and life contained in Christian history and tradition—that all words for God are inadequate. Every word for God may mislead, be untrue. If we think we can replace the unspeakable, unknowable, true God with any word or combination of words, we have at that moment descended into idolatry. No human word is adequate for God, even those words we believe have been given to us by God in revelation. Thus much of the best Christian theology provides word pictures of what God may be like that it knows are true, if they are true at all, only partially and “in a sense.” We can never look straight at God, at least not in this life. When we try to look at God, it is as if she is over somewhere else, just outside our direct line of sight, as if we see God only fuzzily on the very periphery of our vision, as someone we know must be there but on whom we cannot “get a bead.”

That’s why the best attempts to speak of the God of our faith are sometimes with poetic or literary metaphors. We may use our imaginations to think of pictures or things to which we may compare God while their inadequacy is obvious to us. Or, as when we attempt to wrap our minds around the seeming impossibilities of modern physics, we may pose definitions that we know we cannot really understand. So one such definition cited by the novelist, essayist, and I would say theologian whom I’ve already mentioned, Marilynne Robinson, is apropos: “God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”67

Idolatry

As I have briefly noted, these various doctrines—apophatic theology, transcendence, immanence, and divine simplicity—are useful not because they are self-evidently true, or because they point to some kind of fundamental knowledge we have of the universe or God, or because they have been “proven” by philosophy. They are useful only because they help us avoid idolatry. But theologians do not often enough point out why idolatry is wrong. I agree that idolatry is dangerous, but I believe we need to be more explicit about what is wrong with idolatry. What makes idolatry so dangerous?

That idolatry is dangerous may be taken from the abhorrence of idols (“images” of gods that are not truly god) and idolatry (the “care and feeding” of those images and those gods; service to and worship of those images and gods) so apparent in the New Testament. What is probably our earliest extant document of the New Testament, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, begins with his reminder that his original preaching to them had involved mainly an attempt to turn them away from their native gods, from what Paul calls idols (1 Thess 1:9). Greeks would not usually have used that term for their gods and images since the word itself implies that the images and statues are in some way “false,” in classical Greek meaning something like “phantom.” As we can see from 1 Thess 4–5, Paul seems to have failed to inform the Thessalonians, in all his initial teaching among them, about the resurrection or indeed any afterlife hope at all, but he did make a condemnation of idolatry a key element of his first instructions.68 The most basic element of Paul’s gospel must have been the necessity for gentiles to reject their traditional gods and turn to the God of Israel and his representative, Jesus.

In 1 Cor 10:14, Paul says, “Flee idolatry!” In Gal 5:20, he lists it among the most serious vices. For Paul, as probably for most Jews at the time, idolatry was a “gentile” sin par excellence (see Rom 1; 1 Pet 4:3). So Paul insists that the Corinthians should not even eat with any fellow believers who have not completely cut themselves off from idolatry (1 Cor 5:11). We must remember how socially disruptive this must have been for many of his converts. So much of ancient life of the Mediterranean revolved around social events and even eating itself that were deeply implicated in acknowledging the gods of one’s people, family, and city. It would have been very hard to avoid mingling in one way or another with what Paul calls idolatry. Recognizing this, Paul does not tell the Corinthians they cannot eat or associate with idolaters themselves, only with any fellow believer who is tainted in some way by idolatrous behavior.

We can see the fear of idolatry in the fact that so many early Christians went out of their way to avoid eating any food and probably drinking any wine that had been implicated in the worship of other gods. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the early church forbade gentile converts from eating anything that had been part of a sacrifice to an idol, which would have included probably most meat sold in marketplaces (Acts 15:20; 15:29; 21:25). This strict avoidance of “idol meat” is also demanded by the author of Revelation (2:14, 20). Paul’s position is a bit more moderate. He said that believers could share in eating such food as long as they were not involved in the worship of the idol or the actual sacrificial cult itself and only if they had superior knowledge that could protect them from any potential harm threatened by such eating (1 Cor 8:8; 10:19). But Paul’s “solution,” which takes up all of 1 Cor 8–10, is none too clear and has led to an entire history of exegetical debate about what precisely he meant.69 And Paul may well have been an exception: most evidence suggests that the vast majority of early Christians believed they should avoid any contact with materials that had been part of a sacrifice or offering to an idol—evidence again of their utter fear of idolatry and of idols themselves.

But we have evidence that early Christians were able to expand the definition of “idolatry” to include behaviors beyond the worship of or service to actual images of gods. They broadened the meaning to include allowing the desire for anything whatsoever to rise to the desire for or honor of God we should nurture. Thus Colossians and Ephesians teach that love of money, greed, is also “idolatry” (Col 3:5; Eph 5:5). The Greek word translated here as “greed” (πλεονεξία) is broader than simply a desire for more and more money, though it certainly includes that. It means any kind of “grasping” behavior, wanting “more than one’s fair share.” That would make almost all of us idolaters at least much of the time.

So already within the pages of the New Testament, Christianity recognized the dangers of idolatry and broadened the traditional definition to include putting anything at all in the place we should reserve for God alone. What idolatry is putting in the place of the hidden being and the mystery we designate by the label God is any other thing at all, anything we can see or even imagine, anything at all of the cosmos, the universe. If anything of the universe can be made into an idol, that means God must be radically other than and different from the universe and everything in it. As Nicholas Lash puts it, “If Christian discourse is not to become idolatrous, it must be permanently iconoclastic.”70 The doctrines of transcendence and divine simplicity and the practice of apophatic theology spring from, we may imagine, the Christian abhorrence of idolatry.

But, again, why is idolatry so dangerous? The idea in much traditional or popular religion is that idolatry is wrong because God is offended when we turn our attentions away from him to someone else or if we make another of our lovers equal to him. This is a rather mythological understanding of why idolatry is wrong—mythological because it provides a narrative that seeks to show something about God but does so by making God too much like us human beings. God is not Othello. Idolatry is wrong but not because it hurts God. And God is not some jilted boyfriend or cuckolded husband who may beat us up for dating someone else. That myth needs rigorous critique.

When we encounter in the Bible such images of God as jealous and forbidding idolatry because he is just the kind of selfish god who wants us “all to himself,” we must carefully interpret them, even “demythologize” them. We may indeed read biblical descriptions of God’s jealousy or wrath, but then such passages must be subjected to interpretation so that we see how they may be in some sense true but in other senses false. If we imagine that God is sad when we forsake him for some other god, that probably won’t harm our theology or faith too much. We can then imagine that God grieves when we commit idolatry because God knows we will end up hurting ourselves in the end. God grieves because God knows we are going to come to grief. That could be an acceptable way to interpret biblical images of the jealous God. But we must remind ourselves that ultimately we do not hurt God by our idolatry, we hurt ourselves. God, in forbidding us from substituting anything in the universe in God’s place, attempts to protect us from being harmed, not from harming God.

Thus we may indeed use biblical images of God to help us think of why God wants us to avoid idols. The prodigal son (Luke 15:11–23) thought he could replace his father by means of his inheritance and self-reliance. His father, though grieved and certain it would all end in sorrow, let his son go. The father, though, was not offended at his son’s behavior nor did he punish the son when he later realized his mistake and wanted to return. If God is pained by our turning to substitutes for the true God, it is the pain of the father of the prodigal, not the anger and passion of a spurned lover.

A mother may attempt to persuade her daughter that someone with whom the daughter has fallen in love is not a suitable partner for her. If the mother does so only because she is jealous of her daughter’s affections and wants to keep her daughter “for herself” alone, she is acting out of selfishness and spite, not true love. But she may indeed sincerely believe that the object of her daughter’s affections will end up bringing only pain to her daughter, and she may experience her daughter’s pain with her. That is the only kind of “jealousy” God feels for us. That is the only reason the scriptures warn us so much against idolatry. We will end up just hurting ourselves.

Idolatry is bad, therefore, not because it offends God, as if God is a person who becomes upset at being neglected or mistreated. Idolatry is bad because it is dangerous. The danger it poses is that it so often leads to a loss of faith. What makes idols dangerous is that we eventually discover that they aren’t, after all, very good gods. Money lets us down. Lovers and friends cannot be everything. Success and pride end up disappointing. Even values and goods that seem ultimately good eventually let us down. Even “love” in and of itself may disappoint or fall short. That’s why “love,” at least in any of the ways we may imagine it in our limited human imaginations, can’t be substituted for “God.”

Negative theology teaches that even good images become idols if we imagine “that image” is truly and fully “God.” If we take “father” to be a necessary or sufficient “image” for God, we may stop believing in God when we find that “father” can fail. Many people have ended up losing their faith because they came to distrust their previous, insufficient images of God. They allowed their beliefs about God to take the place of the ineffable and unknowable God. When they decided that the grandfatherly, authoritative god of their childhood was not worth their respect, they lost their faith entirely. But the Christian teaching about the danger of idolatry should have taught them that their older god wasn’t God after all. Their idol led to their loss of faith. Once we really confront our idols or seek to depend on them for what we really need from God, those false gods prove that they are lousy gods. Idols are gods that ultimately fail us. That failure often leads to atheism. Idolatry is dangerous because it so often leads to atheism or at least to a loss of faith.

“God” Is Not God’s Name

Much of what I have been advocating regarding the ineffable nature of God’s being can be illustrated by disputing a practice of some Christians who avoid pronouncing “God” or even writing it out, substituting instead “G-d” or “G*d.” Some, no doubt, do so in imitation of Jewish avoidance of speaking the name of God as found in the Hebrew Bible, the Tetragrammaton: Hebrew letters usually transliterated YHWH. The word has no vocalization in Hebrew script, no vowels, we might say. Though it was translated as “Jehovah” in early English translations, most modern English versions use Lord, with small caps, to indicate where in the Hebrew text the Tetragammaton occurs. Many Jews traditionally substitute the Hebrew word for “lord,” adonai, or some other title for God instead of reading out YHWH. This practice is reflected also in the New Testament, where the Greek usually has κύριος, “lord,” when quoting the Old Testament, which it always does in Greek translation.

The rationale given by some Christians for using “G-d” or “G*d” is that such substitutions, in the words of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “indicate the brokenness and inadequacy of human language for naming the Divine.”71 But such an explanation at least elides the fact that the practice came from imitating conservative Jewish avoidance of pronouncing what is a “name” for God in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH. In doing so, such Christians are, in my view, turning the common noun “god” into a “proper name” in Christianity, an alteration that never should happen in the first place. “God” is not the name of the Christian god.

I believe substituting “G-d” or “G*d” for “God” actually compounds the theological errors it attempts to correct. For one thing, the practice too often springs, I believe, from a desire to find “pure” and “right” language about God, words that will avoid potential problems of the traditional word “God.” But this desire for purity in language is misguided and misleading. We have no pure words. Especially when speaking of God, but actually when speaking of anything, human language can never be pure. It can never avoid potential error. It is a fact of human language that all our words are tainted and may lead us or others astray. That is why we need to learn proper interpretation, interpretation that shows how Christian language may be appropriate but how it is also fallible.

The substitution of these different spellings and symbols for “God” is even more seriously misleading, as I hinted above, because it actually implies that “God” is God’s proper name, in the same way that YHWH functions as the name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament, on the contrary, never attempts to transliterate or translate “YHWH” into Greek. This may reflect no more theological sophistication than that the writers are themselves using Greek translations, which had already made the substitutions for them. But I prefer to take the New Testament as offering no proper name for god the father, the god of Israel, as a lesson that the Christian god has no name.

Instead of substituting “G-d” or “G*d” for “God” we should instead emphasize the theological truth that the Christian God in its fullness, that is, as the full godhead or trinity, has no name. We may certainly assume that God’s “proper name” could be “Jesus,” but we then would need to remind ourselves that “Jesus” is the proper name for only one person of the trinity, not the entire godhead. Or Christianity, out of respect for the Hebrew Bible, could revert to using YHWH for the name of its god. But as I argued above in the chapter on scripture, we should not assume that the Hebrew Bible, in any of its later editions or instantiations, whether as the Masoretic Text or some modern edition, is the Old Testament for Christians. And reverting to YHWH as the name of God for Christianity would be a significant departure from Christian liturgical practice and tradition, not to mention the practices of the New Testament writers. Unless we want to say that God’s personal name is Jesus or YHWH, neither of which option I believe to be commendable, we should get used to the idea, the very ancient, orthodox idea, that the Christian god has no name.

People—even scholars—tend too quickly to forget that “god” in ancient Greek was not a proper name. This is easier to remember when we read the texts in Greek because they so often use the word θεός (“god”) with the definite article ὁ (“the”). When reading Greek, it is easier to read ὁ θεός as “the god” rather than “God.” Unfortunately, using God without the article makes it easier to take it mistakenly in English as a name, a tendency made even more tempting by the fact that it is almost always capitalized when referring to the god of Christianity. It would actually be better for an orthodox understanding of the nature of the Christian deity to leave it uncapitalized and with the article. Perhaps we should say “the god” when speaking of the Christian deity, just as we speak of “the” holy spirit. It would remind us that “God” is not God’s personal name, and that for Christianity God has no name.

McCabe makes the salient point, moreover, that the term “god” is one Christianity took over from Greek polytheism. It is, he notes, a borrowed word. To Greeks the word denoted simply a god in general. They knew it wasn’t a proper name for any god. In fact, that is precisely why many non-Christian Greeks thought followers of Jesus must be atheists: they worshipped something that didn’t even have a name!72 But McCabe insists we turn this to orthodox advantage. God, he says, “is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.”⁷³ Reminding ourselves that “god” is a generic term for any god in Greek might keep us from slipping into the mistake of assuming our god has a name, and it is “God.”

I noted that this is an ancient Christian position. As Andrew Radde-Gallwitz notes, in the opinion of Clement of Alexandria, “We have no proper name for God.”⁷⁴ Lash explains why this is important: “Common names are names proper to individual members of a class: ‘tree’ names all the things that count as trees. Proper names are names proper to individual members of a class: all the readers of this text are human beings, but I am, I think, the only Nicholas Langrishe Alleyne Lash. But the incomprehensible and holy mystery we worship is not, I have been urging, a member of any class.”⁷⁵

Reminding ourselves that the Christian god has no name speaks to the ultimately ineffable nature of the divine in orthodox Christianity. It reminds us of the necessary unnameable nature of the god of our faith.

Faith and Despair

But what is faith? If faith is not simply believing “God exists” or “God is this or that,” if faith is not simply intellectual assent to some proposition about God, what is it? If I don’t have to believe that God is a grandfather in the sky, what do I believe that still constitutes faith?

As I have already implied, for many Christians, especially those familiar with the long Christian tradition of apophatic theology, faith sometimes boils down to a way of being in the world in which one lives as if the universe is meaningful and the ultimate meaning has to do with goodness and love. For some people, this can even be a decision. They know that the stories about God’s actions as we read them in the Bible may be “myths,” which is simply to say they are narratives that attempt to teach some truth about God’s nature by means of portraying God as if God were like a human person or an animal, when we know that God is not a human person or an animal. God is not really a physical person who walks in a garden. But the story may allow us to imagine God as our friend who seeks us out. “Myths” in this sense are stories about God that may be true on some kind of deep level but cannot be true in a simplistic literal or historical understanding. So some Christians, even if not believing such stories “literally” or “historically,” still decide to accept the idea that God is what supplies meaning to our universe, and that is a good and loving meaning. They decide to live their lives as if love is the ultimate, most important value of our world and our lives. For some Christians, that is, faith is a decision to live their lives under the influence of Christian teachings and values, including the assumption that the universe is meaningful, even when it seems not to be.

Other Christians don’t experience their faith so much as a decision, something they once upon a time chose or they choose continually. They rather experience their faith as something that chose them. They find they simply discover themselves comfortable in the belief that their world and lives are meaningful, and they attribute that meaning to the grace of a god who allowed them to rest in an indescribable and ultimately unprovable faith. Many of us, even having gone through periods of doubt and questioning, find that we still are content to recite the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed and to read and believe the scriptures, even when we know that those texts must still be interpreted in a never-ending, ongoing attempt to “find” the proper meaning in them. Yet we experience this more as a discovery we already believe and are content to live in a faith in God rather than something we must continually “stoke up” or decide to do. But this also is faith.

A classical word that designates this sense of a “way of being” or way of life is habitus, as I mentioned in chapter 1, “Knowledge.” The concept is Aristotelian and taken over by Christian theology. It is not the same thing as “habit,” which usually has negative connotations for us and is taken to refer to actions we regret but have trouble escaping. “Habits,” we usually think, are things we want to break. In examples suggested by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, here referring more specifically to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, chewing one’s fingernails is a habit; speaking French is a habitus: “A habitus is an acquired quality or disposition that makes it possible to act in a particular way—even inclines one to act in that way.”76 For most of us, driving a car is a habitus: we had to learn how to do it and to practice it for a time, but now we do it automatically and without thinking much about it.

As habitus, faith is a learned and regularly reinforced manner of living, living as if the universe and our lives within it are meaningful and as if that meaning is good rather than evil, love rather than hate. (Paul knew about living “as if”: see 1 Cor 7:29–31.) We have no proof the gospel is true. That’s what makes it faith rather than knowledge. We find we have developed a habit of believing, a habitus of faith.

This understanding of faith is itself empirical, however. I derive the idea of what faith is not from wishing it were so but from actually observing how I and other Christians I know “believe,” how we remain in the church willing to confess its creeds even when we know one may legitimately doubt, even when we know that other reasonable people do not believe. Whether we came to this faith and remain in it because of quite materialist socialization, whether we remain in the church out of habit, or however else one may wish to explain our experience apart from appeal to God, we choose to believe, or simply do believe, that we have faith because God gave us—and gives us—the miracle of faith. We have the habitus of faith by the grace of God. That is as good an explanation of faith’s existence as any other.

For other people, both Christians and non-Christians, it may be unsatisfactory to say that my faith consists in the acceptance of the proposition that the universe has meaning, or that there may be a “reason” for the existence of the universe, or that I have come to believe that life is ultimately about love, even though I admit that whether love exists or not is something we will have to take on faith rather than find “proved.” Skeptics of this account of faith may respond, “But that’s not what I mean. I mean do you believe that God exists somewhere ‘out there’?” To which the answer must be, “Of course not. That is ridiculous.” The reason it is ridiculous is that there is no “there” “out there,” either inside the universe or outside the universe, “where” God could “exist.” As we have seen, the doctrine of divine simplicity teaches that God is the ultimate One, with no divisions or multiplications. God is not someplace out there. In any case, in the end it doesn’t matter whether someone else accepts or rejects this somewhat minimalist account of what constitutes “faith” in its most basic sense. It is an empirical fact that this is what constitutes faith for many Christians, and that fact is proof enough that it is faith.

But if faith is an assumption that the universe and our lives in it are meaningful, the opposite of faith is not simply some ascription to a proposition that “there exists no God.” The opposite of faith is rather the horrible experience of coming to the conclusion that the universe and our lives are meaningless. For me, the true opposite of faith is not modern, and by now traditional, atheism or agnosticism. It is despair: the feeling deep down that our world and we are meaningless.77 Loss of faith is despair, which shows finally why idolatry is so dangerous. Idolatry doesn’t harm God. And apart from God’s compassion for us, human despair doesn’t harm God. Idolatry is wrong because it leads us to despair of our false gods and ultimately to the danger of despairing of life itself as meaningless.

A “Personal” God?

For many Christians, however, any faith that does not profess a “personal” God cannot be true Christian faith. Must one believe in a “personal” God in order to be faithful?

Unfortunately, most of the time it is not particularly clear what is meant by the term “personal God.” Is this meant in the same way we might talk about a personal trainer or a personal assistant? There is an old joke about the Episcopalian lady who, when asked by her neighbor if she had “accepted Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior,” replied, “But dear, that would be a bit selfish, wouldn’t it?” I believe that the easy way people talk about their “personal God” should be examined more critically than is typically the case.⁷⁸

There are, as a matter of fact, plenty of definitions of God in the New Testament that are rather impersonal. God is said to be πνεῦμα, which though usually translated “spirit” meant something rather different in the ancient Greek world than it does in this modern English translation. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, and as I will explore more thoroughly in the chapter below titled “Spirit,” pneuma was considered the “stuff” that energized the world, human bodies, and everything that was alive.⁷⁹ It was a stuff that enabled thinking, by working in the brain, feeling, by moving back and forth through the body, seeing, by traveling in light into the eyes and further into the brain, and hearing, by moving into the ears and then into the brain or the heart. Almost all ancient persons of the period of the New Testament documents would have assumed that pneuma was some kind of physical stuff, only of a very fine, invisible, rarified nature. But they would likely have heard the phrase “God is pneuma” as stating that God was the energizing stuff of the universe and the matter of intelligence and life. We may imagine they thought of pneuma the way many of us might think of oxygen or energy.

If we didn’t “know” that energy is just matter in another form (e=mc²), we also could consider that “god” is the energy that runs and sustains the universe. (I put “know” in quotation marks because for most of us what we “know” about physics and cosmology is just what scientists tell us to believe.)80 To equate god with what scientists call energy, therefore, would be to misidentify god with the stuff of the universe itself, and I will shortly explain why that is a problem for orthodox Christianity. But we may certainly say of God that God is what makes the universe run, that God is the force that sustains the existence of the universe. Those are perfectly orthodox things to say about God and may be inspired by the New Testament teaching that God is pneuma.

The First Letter of John defines God as “light” (1 John 1:5). Here, too, ancient people may have identified divinity with what we would see as physical light, that is, what we call the waves or particles of light. Christians would demur again from the exact equation, but we could easily see the text as teaching that God is the subsistence of light, the thing or force that underlies the existence of light, the reason light is possible.

The same letter offers this other definition: “God is love” (4:8). Note that the text doesn’t say God is a “loving person” or “God is someone who happens also to love.” Given the discussion on divine simplicity above, we can now recognize the difference: God is not a person who happens to love. God is love itself. Though “love” is a wonderful thing, perhaps the best thing of all, the word is nonetheless something more like an “abstraction,” a “force,” or a “state of being” than a “person.”

Though the first verse of the Gospel of John more exactly says, “The word became God” and “The word was God,” it is certainly not a stretch to say that God is logos. The Greek λόγος does mean “word.” But, as is well known, it also refers to speech more generally, to a conversation, a speech given on some occasion. It also means “rationality” or “reason” and can come to be “meaning.” So we may take John 1:1 as offering the definition “God = rationality or meaning itself.” As I’ve put it already in the chapter, God is the reason there is anything at all, the logos of the world, not to be identified with the world, but its reason. This may be somewhat like what the author of Colossians means when he says that Jesus, as the image of the invisible God, is the force that “holds together” all things (Col 1:17). God is like gravity, only different.

Another doctrine taught by the New Testament may, surprisingly, be relevant here. Some writers speak of God as working in the universe and toward human beings in “foreknowledge” or “preordination.” God is the reason some people believe and others do not (Rom 9:11–22). God “destined” Christians for salvation (Eph 1:4–5). God is the one who knows what is coming but may not yet exist. 1 Pet 1:2 speaks of the “prognosis of God” as God’s foreknowledge, implying that God is outside space-time; God is the meaning of the universe beyond time. All this is much like the way ancient Greeks thought the universe functioned: through “fate.” In this way of thinking, God is the “mind” of the universe. For us, this might be like thinking of God as the software of the world. At least, that wouldn’t be far from the ancient conceptions, including perhaps that implied by early Christian notions of predestination and election. We can live, if we live at all, only within the “will,” the “mind,” of God.

All these ideas, read off the pages of the New Testament even by the modern means of traditional historical criticism, at least give us postmodern Christians permission to think about God in what may feel like “impersonal” ways indeed. A Christian faith need not avoid imagining the God of our belief with images that are more “impersonal” than “personal.”

For some people these have been the only ways they could “believe in God” at all. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) rejected the dualism of his time, promoted to a great extent by the science and philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650), that posited “nature” as one thing in existence alongside another realm in which existed God and whatever else was thought to be “supernatural,” such as possibly souls, angels, demons, or whatever. Spinoza did not at all reject the existence of God; he just insisted that God was the unified, eternal, infinite intellect that sustains “Nature.” God is “the universal, immanent, sustaining cause of all that exists.”81 God is the cause for the sustenance of motion in the universe. Spinoza could speak of “substance,” but he didn’t mean merely physical matter. There was also thought, which is substance but not physical matter. That nonphysical “substance”—call it “thinking substance” perhaps—which is absolutely necessary for the existence of all of nature, is, for Spinoza, God. In the end, for Spinoza God is the fullness of Nature.82

There was nothing particularly new in these ideas about God and nature. Spinoza’s thought has a great deal in common with ancient Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, though I think it would be a mistake to call Spinoza a Stoic.⁸³ Spinoza’s notions have much in common with the second-century CE physician Galen, who could talk about “Nature” as if it were a “god” just as much as Zeus, or more so.⁸⁴ Albert Einstein was deeply influenced by Spinoza’s theology. For Einstein, the order, beauty, and harmony of nature, the regularity of nature—one could even say its “laws”—was what Einstein called God.⁸⁵ Like Spinoza, Einstein rejected any idea of God as a person who intervened in “nature,” judged and rewarded or punished human beings, or any such thing. Faith, to Einstein, was his firmly held belief, even in the face of new theories in physics that might suggest otherwise, that the objective world exists independently of our observations and is ruled by consistent laws. Einstein insisted he was neither an atheist nor an agnostic, and he was willing to call his beliefs religious. As he put it, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”⁸⁶ Einstein could speak of “the infinitely superior spirit” or “a superior reasoning power” of nature.⁸⁷

What Spinoza and Einstein were rejecting was not God, but the belief in a separate realm of existence alongside nature that could be dubbed the supernatural. What makes their beliefs unlike what I have been describing as “orthodox Christianity,” however, is not their rejection of “the supernatural” but their willingness to identify God with nature. Orthodox Christian doctrine, I have been attempting to illustrate above, has always attempted to avoid identifying God with the universe or anything in the universe. But Christian doctrine has done so by teaching the radical transcendence of God apart from nature, and yet God’s radical immanence throughout nature. God is not another thing beside nature, but also God is not to be simply equated with nature. God is the reason for the existence of everything that exists, whatever we may include in “nature.” But that need not lead to a positing of a realm of other created things (angels, souls, whatever) that exist in a different realm we call the supernatural. As I have argued elsewhere, the “supernatural,” in the way modern people have posed it since at least Descartes, did not exist for almost all ancient people either, who just assumed that nature included everything that is, at least up until the period of late antiquity, say, the fourth or fifth century CE.88

I am proposing that a viable postmodern Christian faith may appropriate forms of Christianity that existed before the split between “the natural” and “the supernatural.” We need not have our reality split up into two separate realms of created things, “nature” and “supernature,” in order to avoid identifying God with nature. That was the mistake of much modern Christian teaching since the Enlightenment. The mistake made by Spinoza and Einstein, however, was a different one, but from the point of view of orthodox Christianity a mistake still. That was the mistake of identifying God with nature. We avoid both mistakes by saying that the only uncreated being is God. Everything that exists exists because of God and exists, as far as we know, as part of the universe. Yet God is not the universe or anything in the universe. We don’t need a realm of “the supernatural” to retain faith in God.

This avoids unnecessary and unfortunate thinking about “laws of nature” and “miracle.” According to much modern thinking, “miracles” are events in which God “breaks into nature” from the outside and “overturns or goes against” the “laws of nature.” That is, however, not what ancient Christians meant by “miracle.”⁸⁹ For one thing, very few of them, if any, used any notion about “laws of nature.” The Greek words from which we take the various words we use for miracles—“sign,” “wonder,” and “miracle” itself—all just meant something amazing, out of the ordinary, wonder producing, awe inspiring. It is only a modern idea that “miracle” by its very definition is an act of God or some other “supernatural” agent that is impossible according to the “laws of nature.”90

As a prominent and brilliant (and Christian) philosopher of science, Bas C. van Fraassen, has demonstrated, we ourselves don’t need, and scientists can’t prove, the very existence of “laws of nature.” Van Fraassen convincingly argues that the concept may have done service in some developments of modern science, but it was an invention we don’t really need, one that does not actually matter for the real doing of science, cannot be proven, and is philosophically unlikely.⁹¹ The belief that acts of God must be an intervention of the supernatural into the natural realm, breaking God’s own constituted “laws” of nature, moreover, just seems to many of us theologically suspect and maybe offensive. As McCabe notes, even though Thomas Aquinas used a Latin term that could be considered a precursor to the modern “supernatural,” “Aquinas didn’t see miracles as God intervening to interfere with the world. God, thinks Aquinas, cannot literally intervene in the universe because he is always there—just as much in the normal, natural run of things as in the resurrection of Christ or in any other miraculous event.”⁹² Or, in a phrase I quite like, Paul J. DeHart says, “God’s presence and revelation do not ‘punch a hole’ in the world; God meets humanity, both in Christ and in culture, not apart from but in the very historical contingency of the human act.”⁹³

None of this is to say we must deny the possibility of miracle. It is just to think about such events differently. Instead of thinking of them as “interventions” of “the supernatural” into nature or as events that “break the laws of nature,” we consider them signs of the constant creation and sustaining of the universe by God. The actions of God are seen as part of our universe, God not being completely separable from our universe or, better put, the universe being impossible apart from God’s presence. God does not “need” the universe, but the universe cannot exist without the immanent being of God “under” it or “containing” it.

The modern natural/supernatural dichotomy (and for the most part as a dichotomy it is “modern”) has historical relevance. But its theological relevance should be to cause us, in a more “postmodern” age of Christianity, to abandon thinking of “miracle” or “the supernatural” in the modernist (scientific and fundamentalist!) Cartesian dichotomy and rather think of miracle as the marveling attribution to divine power of events in our world we cannot fathom. There is no need for “supernatural intervention” or “suspending the laws of nature” in a postmodern—scientific as well as theological—environment.

And, to get back to the question that prompted this section, there is nothing wrong with thinking of God as a “person,” but the more sophisticated our theological thinking becomes, the more we should keep in mind that portraying God as a person is mythological thinking. There’s nothing wrong with mythological thinking. As human beings, we can hardly avoid using stories or narratives with which to “think” God. We can hardly avoid attributing human characteristics to God if we participate in most worship or liturgy at all. But we should realize that just as calling God a “father” could be misleading and dangerous—and by attributing human and historical actions to the unknowable god of the universe is therefore “myth”—so calling god a “person” does constitute a “myth” and therefore may be misleading, as are all myths, even good ones.

God in the New Testament

I have spent much space in this chapter warning about how anything we can say about God will necessarily be false in some sense, so there is no reason to take uncritically any particular image, description, or doctrine of God from the text of scripture. But we may indeed read the New Testament to inform how we think of the nature and character of God.

Above, I spoke about scriptural portrayals of God as the creator of the world, making all that is from nothing: creatio ex nihilo. This is a doctrine about God I believe we may return to regularly with profit. As I pointed out above, however, we would do better to think of God’s creation of the universe—and us in it—not in terms of a “once upon a time” past event. Rather, we should remind ourselves that God is constantly creating. And we need not see that as some kind of “supernatural” intervention in nature. The miracle of God’s creation of our world lies not in God’s “punching a hole” in the universe but in God’s ongoing, gracious, loving supply of all that is good. We look at every child as a miracle and a fresh creation from God. We rejoice in the passion of a lover as a creation of God. We cherish the love of our family and are reminded all the time that God, as creator and miracle worker, rewards us with all good things—not for anything we have done or not done but because of God’s unavoidable nature of giving us good things. It is impossible, against the very nature of God, for God not to give us good things. That is what it means to worship God and thank God for the ongoing and sustaining creation of the universe. We become grateful beings and learn to live our lives with the habit of gratitude and joy in the universe and in our lives in it. Even in smaller things, like the fun and comfort we take in a loyal dog or a playful cat and what they bring to our household, is a sign, a sacrament, of God’s creative action in our world. The New Testament teaches us all this by teaching us that God is the creator. And by teaching us to look at the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.

The doctrine of creation is fairly straightforward, both in scripture and in our confessions and creeds. We might, though, use the New Testament a bit more creatively to learn about the nature of God. The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, is usually taken as a passage about ethics: how we should learn to live. But right in the middle of the sermon in Matthew’s version, Jesus says, “Therefore, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). In Luke, which presents much of the same material but in a “sermon on a plain,” the saying is somewhat different: “Be compassionate just as your father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). This is a sign that the sermons are not to be read merely as an ethic or a string of behaviors taught by Jesus to people, though they certainly are that. Here we are informed more explicitly what we may have picked up throughout the sermon: these behaviors are right because they reflect the nature of God.

We are to be peacemakers (Matt 5:9) because God makes peace—and not war! God is the one who mourns when we suffer (5:4). God is the one who suffers without retaliation (5:38–41). The point of the beatitudes is not that people should seek to be persecuted (5:11) or to grieve (5:4) or perhaps not even to be “poor in spirit” (5:3) if that is taken to mean “poor-hearted” or sad. In those cases, the beatitude is promising relief from current hardships and suffering, signifying if nothing else that God is not the one who causes the suffering but the one who will bring relief.

Many of the beatitudes do teach an ethic. People should hunger and thirst for justice, be merciful and compassionate, be pure in heart, and be peacemakers. But this is precisely because these are imitations of the nature of God. Peacemakers are particularly called “children of God” (5:9). And those who are pure in heart see God, no doubt, because that is God’s nature also (5:8). The beatitudes, therefore, as we interpret in a bit more creative way, may be taken as teaching us the nature of God. God is one who relieves those who are “poor in spirit,” who comforts the grieving, who raises up the lowly, who fills the hungry and dispenses justice, who is merciful, who makes peace, and who saves the persecuted. These activities and traits identify what God is.

Other passages may also be read more creatively to teach us what God is. Note, for example, how many of the salutations or closings of New Testament letters repeat some of the same benefits: “Grace to you and peace from God” (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Gal 1:3; Eph 1:2; Phil 1:2; Col 1:2; 1 Thess 1:1; 2 Thess 1:2; Tit 1:4; Phlm 3; see also 1 Pet 1:2; 2 Pet 1:2). “Grace, mercy, and peace” (1 Tim 1:2; 2 Tim 2; 2 John 3). “May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance” (Jude 2). These are the things God provides because these are the things God is. The sense of well-being that many people express in their spiritual experiences of the divine are captured in these: the feeling of gratitude for gifts and the freeness of the gift; the experience of forgiveness and being a recipient of mercy; an inexplicable sense of peacefulness. On those occasions, and would that they were more frequent for more people, we are experiencing those sensations because we are experiencing the presence of God and coming to know God’s true nature.

God’s Gender

Some New Testament parables give us the opportunity to think about God’s gender. Obviously, the most common way to talk about God’s gender, both traditionally but most commonly today also, is by using male pronouns and terms. But there are parables that might be taken to suggest otherwise. According to Matt 13:13 and Luke 13:21, the kingdom is compared to yeast “that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” The parable reads like an allegory: the yeast is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew) or God (Luke); the flour is the world; and thus the woman must be God.

In the twentieth century, biblical scholars often argued that the biblical parables were not allegories and that interpreting them as allegories, where each detail was supposed to “stand for” something else symbolically, was anachronistic and wrong.94 Many of us were taught that such allegorical interpretation of parables was a mistake of premodern or medieval Christian interpretation. Parables, we were told, generally make one point, and to interpret them as elaborate allegories was “eisegesis.” This is itself, though, a modernist prejudice. Even the biblical writers provided allegorical interpretations of their own parables, as the interpretations of the parable of the sower in the Gospels themselves show (see Mark 4:13–20, and par.). For those of us not limited by a concern to reproduce the exact meaning in the mind of the ancient author, or of Jesus for that matter, there should be nothing holding us back from offering allegorical interpretations of biblical texts. It just so happens that many of the parables supply great opportunities for allegorizing. And with this parable, we could therefore say that one teaching of the parable is that God is female.

I find this interpretation of the parable especially interesting because I am familiar with some cultures in which making bread or some other particular food tends to be always associated with women rather than men. In many Latin American cultures, for instance, men may indeed do quite a lot of cooking and other food preparation, but it has long been traditional for tortilla making to be strictly “women’s work.” Over years of traveling in Central America, for instance, I saw women preparing tortillas every day. I never saw a man doing so, though that need not mean it didn’t happen. But in my experience in Latin America it has regularly been considered women’s work to make the ever-present tortilla. Perhaps, therefore, the parable is playing on some ancient assumption that women would normally make the bread, and so it would be fitting for God here to be represented as a woman.

Luke provides another such parable. He tells of a woman who had ten coins but lost one (15:8–10). She lights all the lights, sweeps the entire house, and searches every inch until she finds it. But Luke doesn’t leave the story there. He proceeds to add that she is so glad that she calls all her friends and neighbors and tells them to help her celebrate because she had found the one lost drachma. Then Jesus concludes, “I tell you, it is just like that. There is celebration among the angels of God when one sinner repents.” And again, the parable lends itself to allegory: the friends and neighbors are the angels of God, the coin is a sinner, and therefore obviously the woman is God.

There are other hints in the Bible that God is female. In many ancient Jewish texts, “Wisdom,” which is from a feminine word in Hebrew and in Greek is one that even we today use as a female name, Sophia, was taken to be a female consort of God or sometimes to stand for God herself. And there are other biblical images portraying God as a mother or caring nurse. Though the Bible tends to refer to God with masculine language and imagery, there are opportunities enough to meditate on the femaleness of God.

Some conservative scholars argue against using anything but masculine pronouns for God. Elizabeth Achtemeier, for example, after some unconvincing other arguments, ends up basing her case on a rather simplistic proclamation: “The Bible uses masculine language for God because that is the language with which God has revealed himself.”95 This is classic question begging. The very debate is whether we should take masculine language about God to be such an obvious “revelation” of God’s intentions. The entire discussion is about whether or not the Bible should be interpreted as a revelation that God is male. And Achtemeier seems not to realize that she is, after all, interpreting, as if God just spoke to her “his” intentions—as divine “revelation” about God’s gender. Against the kind of rejoinder I would make against Achtemeier—that God is so totally “other” than everything in creation that we must be wary of claiming what we certainly “know” about God—she just insists that we know him now because of his self-revelation, as if revelation gets rid of the need to maintain our acknowledgment of our ultimate ignorance of God’s exact nature—for instance, that he is male rather than female. In another essay in the same volume, Roland M. Frye goes so far as to say that “God the Father” and “the Son of God” are not ways we name God among other ways, but these particular terms “become transparent equivalents to the divine reality, words by which the divine persons are called, addressed, recognized, or known.”⁹⁶ Given what I’ve already written so much in this chapter, one should understand why I find such talk about “transparent equivalents to the divine reality” not only baffling but utterly idolatrous. Those who claim so confidently that they know that “Father” is God’s proper name suffer two cases of arrogant idolatry: they insist they know God’s one and noninterchangeable proper name, and they enshrine their own patriarchy and misogyny as gods.97

Robert W. Jenson, it seems to me, gets himself into theological and ideological difficulties because of his insistence that only masculine names can be used for God. He insists, though there is absolutely no way to prove any of this, that “monotheistic discourse cannot be conducted without personal pronouns for God, and within Judaism and Christianity these cannot be feminine or neuter.”⁹⁸ I see no reason to accept either claim. Monotheism is possible without personal pronouns. And if the only proper representatives are thought to be particular ones and not others, the theologian has just again descended into idolatry. God cannot be identified with any particular word.

A corresponding theological mistake made by Jenson is his way of speaking about the church in its relation to God. If God is male, then for Jenson Israel or the church must be female, which leads his rhetoric into ways of speaking about females in relation to males that are misogynist. His language regularly contrasts the inferior, dependent female in contrast to the superior, dominant male: “When the church accepted that her Lord had deposited her in history, that the time between Resurrection and fulfillment would not be a historical instant but had occupied and therefore might yet occupy a succession of generations, she might have confessed her hope refuted.”⁹⁹ The passivity of the female church and the activity of the masculine god pervade his rhetoric and therefore his theology and thus implicate it in the ideology of patriarchy.

Jenson believes he knows the precise and only proper “name” for the divine. He argues that the exact terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are the personal name of God. “The triune phrase offers itself as the unique name for the Christian God, and is then dogmatically mandated for that function by its constitutive place in the rite that establishes Christian identity. The church is the community and a Christian is someone who, when the identity of God is important, names him ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ Those who do not or will not belong to some other community.”100 Jenson apparently knows God so well that he can tell which people God doesn’t want in church just by hearing what “name” they use for God. And that “unique” (the only permissible name for God) must be the two-thirds masculine name of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (Holy Spirit isn’t “masculine” either in Greek or English). These statements strike me as the worst kind of false pride—and idolatry.

Kathryn Tanner has addressed the subject in a thoughtful essay on whether or not Christian liturgy should be altered to reflect better current beliefs about the fundamental equality of men and women, male and female, in broader Western culture but also in many churches. She does so by first surveying patristic discussions which show that many church fathers were uncomfortable with some possible interpretations about the fatherhood of the first person and the sonship of the second. For example, according to the “zero sum” understanding of procreation in ancient culture, fathers necessarily lost something of themselves when they gave up what they had to give up of their own bodies in order to produce offspring.¹⁰¹ But it would be heretical, the church fathers thought, to say that the Father lost anything of himself in begetting the Son. This notion prompted these early church theologians, as Tanner illustrates, to insist that different terms and images should be used, as they are used in scripture, to talk about the relationship between the Father and Christ, such as light source and its radiance or fountain and the flow of water that comes from it, along with several others. These authors also know that scripture itself sometimes uses feminine images, such as “Wisdom,” with which to speak about the first or second person of the trinity. The ancient theologians go even further, however: they think analogically about the Father’s generation of the Son by comparing it to Mary’s generation of Jesus, thus attributing a feminine “begetting” to God also.

The main point made by the patristic writers is that once we recognize the “gendering” of “father” and “son,” we are better off if we do not limit ourselves to those terms but use others as well. As Gregory of Nyssa puts it, “There is no appropriate term to be found to mark the subject adequately, we are compelled by many and differing names, as there may be opportunity, to divulge our surmises as they arise within us with regard to the Deity.”102 As Tanner summarizes, “Multiple terms are not a bad but a good thing; and that, it is supposed, is why one finds so many in the Bible.”¹⁰³ Given that the exclusive use of masculine terminology for God or any of the trinity tends to lead to female subordinationism and the oppression of women—as is well proven simply by history and empirical observation—not only may we, but we must use different ways of speaking about God and each person of the trinity, including feminine images and terms. Love and justice simply demand it.¹⁰⁴

God Is Love

My invocation of love provides a useful segue to the conclusion of this chapter. At the center of scripture and repeated several times in the New Testament is the insistence that love is the very nature of God and the most important value and guide for both law and gospel. As is well known, when asked what was the most important command of the Jewish Torah, Jesus pointed to love of God and love of neighbor. Paul did the same, except he went so far in a couple of places that he left off the command to love God and said simply that “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal 5:14, NRSV). To see that this was not a mere slip of the pen for Paul, we can point to his later letter to the Romans, in which he repeats that every other commandment is “summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Rom 13:10, NRSV). Most people assume that certainly the command to love God takes precedence over the command to love other human beings, but Paul would have none of it. Paul would not have rejected the commandment to love God. He assumes it. There is no possibility of love at all without the source of love, God. So the love of God is simply assumed as the source of love itself. But anyone who thinks love of God can be done without love of neighbor is deluded. We demonstrate that we love God only when we are loving others.105

Many other texts could be cited to emphasize the utter centrality of love in the gospel. Paul’s famous chapter 13, on love, from 1 Corinthians is one of the most impressive. But even 1 Timothy, a text many of us think of as ideologically problematic in its hierarchy, support of slavery, and even legalism, makes the same point: the “goal” of all law and instruction “is love from a pure heart” (1 Tim 1:5). At the end of this long chapter on theology and the nature of God, the first, best, and final answer is, “God is love.”

Notes

1. There is confusion in our sources about whether Marcion taught that the creator god was merely “just” or perhaps bungling or whether he was actually evil. I am convinced by Sebastian Moll that the earliest and best sources depict Marcion’s Demiurge as actually evil, not simply “just.” See Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion; and “Marcion.” For other recent scholarship on Marcion, see Foster, “Marcion,” and the various essays collected in May et al., Marcion, especially the essay by Löhr, “Did Marcion?” 131–46.

2. See Ptolemy’s Epistle, in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures.

3. See Origen, De principiis 2.5.2, and discussion in Moll, Arch-Heretic, 18, 57.

4. Greer, introduction to Origen, Origen, 7; Origen, On Prayer 23.3, p. 127, in Greer, Origen.

5. See De principiis 4.2–3.

6. For studies of the embodiment of God in the Hebrew Bible, see Kamionkowski and Kim, eds., Bodies; for discussion of God’s body in ancient Jewish and Christian sources, including the Bible, see Moore, God’s Gym.

7. Thomas Aquinas got around the problem of Old Testament depictions of the embodiment of God by pointing to the statement in John 4:24 that “God is spirit” and admitting that the other portrayals were, in a phrase of Fergus Kerr, “unavoidable anthropomorphisms.” See Kerr, After Aquinas, 77; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.9. This assumes that the Greek πνεῦμα referred to something not “physical,” an assumption that may not have been shared by the author of the Fourth Gospel. For my argument that πνεῦμα in the ancient world was almost always considered what we would think of as a “physical substance,” see Martin, Corinthian Body, 21–25; and chapter 5 below.

8. The term occurs many times in Mark, Luke, and Acts, with fewer appearances in John (3:3, 5), in the “Pauline” corpus (Rom 14:17; 1 Cor 4:20; 6:9, 10; 15:50; Gal 5:21; Eph 5:5; Col 4:11; 2 Thess 1:5), and in Revelation (12:10). This list does not include many other references to God’s or Jesus’s “kingdom” in slightly different wording or when the term is a verbal form designating their “reign” as kings. Matthew’s preferred terminology is “kingdom of heaven,” probably a pious circumlocution, but the reader would no doubt have known that the “king” of that kingdom was God or Jesus or both.

9. As I will explain below, from a Christian point of view it is not true to take God to be an entity “of the universe,” but I am here describing what I take to be the dominant beliefs of people in the ancient world, almost all of whom assumed that their gods were part of the cosmos. Perhaps a few philosophers of the late ancient world might have disagreed, but their notions of divine “transcendence” never trickled down to the vast majority of the populace.

10. See also John 19:15 for a reference to the emperor as “king.”

11. As Kenneth Burke argued many years ago, we must be ready to analyze the ideological uses of all kinds of literature, which he illustrated by reminding us that shepherds protect sheep—and then sell them for slaughter: Rhetoric, 27. See also the discussion meant to show how “shepherd” is an analogy that may in some ways work for “God” but certainly in other ways does not: McGrath, Theology, 24.

12. The works were written under the name of Dionysius, meant to refer to “Dionysius the Areopagite” mentioned as being with Paul in Athens in Acts 17:34. No one knows who the actual author was or exactly when he wrote, but scholars date the writing to sometime in the late fifth or early sixth centuries.

13. Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 2 140C. I use the translation by Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius. Reference numbers are to the chapter of the work (thus, here chapter 2 of Celestial Hierarchy) followed by the column numbers and letters of the Corderius edition of Migne. For the Greek, see Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum, which uses the same means of reference.

14. So also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.9, citing Dionysius.

15. See Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 45; McCabe, God Still Matters, 27.

16. Speaking of the biblical authors, Dionysius says, “But they prefer the ascent through negations. This way draws the soul out of what is connatural to it, and leads it through all divine conceptions which are transcended by the One that is beyond every name and all reason and knowledge, and brings it into contact with Him beyond the uttermost boundaries of the universe, insofar as such contact is possible to us” (Divine Names 13 981B). This translation from Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 96. For translation of the full texts, see Luibheid and Rorem cited above. See also the description Gregory of Nyssa gives of Basil’s “ascent” toward the unknowable God in Against Eunomius II: 89 (GNO II, 252:24–253:17), quoted and discussed in Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 231.

17. See the discussion in McCabe, The Good Life, 73–74. McCabe notes that the Latin Vulgate has enarravit and concludes, “Anyway for John, what we have in the Word becoming flesh is a narrative and not a vision. Not a seeing but a listening to and sharing in a story. In becoming flesh the Word becomes a character in a story, a persona” (74). For reading John as full of puzzles and riddles, see Martin, New Testament, 152–67.

18. See the analysis of the Isaiah passage in Landy, “I and Eye in Isaiah.” And compare Ezek 1.

19. Stromata 5.11.71; trans. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, 57.

20. To the Greeks from Common Notions (Gregorii Nysseni opera 3.1:21.20–22.3), trans. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil, 200. See Radde-Gallwitz in general for the relationship of the moderate negative theology of the Cappadocians to that of others.

21. Sermo 52.16 (Patrologia Latina 38.360). See McGrath, Theology, 104.

22. Divine Names 1 589B.

23. Ibid., 7 872A-B. I take this translation, only slightly modified, from Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 88. I have altered Louth’s “Of him there is . . .” to “From him there is . . . ,” which I believe more clearly reflects the meaning of the Greek.

24. From John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, book 1, chapter 4; Thomas, Summa 1.2.2; trans. Bauerschmidt, Holy Teaching, 48.

25. For some recent discussions of the return to apophatic theology made easier by postmodernism, see Hoff, “Dekonstruktive Metaphysik”; Hoff and Hampson, “Cusa”; Hoff, Spiritualität.

26. Kerr, After Aquinas, 185, drawing mainly from Summa Theologiae 1.2–11.

27. McCabe, God Still Matters, 27; see also McCabe, God Matters, 40.

28. God Matters, 40.

29. Ibid., 41, quoting Thomas but without reference. See also Bauerschmidt, Holy Teaching.

30. “On Denying the Right God: Aquinas on Atheism and Idolatry,” 158. Elsewhere Denys Turner speaks of “the land of unknowing that is God.” Thomas Aquinas, 143–44.

31. Barth, 232. Barth’s theology is replete with such statements. See, for example, Church Dogmatics I/2, p. 750: “Of God it is impossible to speak, because He is neither a natural nor a spiritual object.”

32. Tanner, Christ the Key, 53.

33. McCabe, God Matters, 7.

34. Martin, Corinthian Body, 4–6; Inventing Superstition, 13–16.

35. I have no interest in figuring out when and where the category of “the supernatural” was invented. There are no terms in the classical Greek or Roman worlds that could be translated that way, in spite of misleading modern English translations. But with Pseudo-Dionysius, we do at least find an author (writing in the fifth or sixth century) who speaks of things that are not “contrary to nature” (παρὰ φύσιν) but “above nature” (ὑπὲρ φύσιν). See, for example, Divine Names 6 856D–857A. The same author uses also an adverb for knowledge derived “supernaturally” (ὑπερφυῶς; Divine Names 2 649D). Much later, Thomas Aquinas uses the Latin adjective supernaturalis and shares notions of transcendence with Dionysius. See the impressive listing of references in Murray, “Spiritual and the Supernatural.”

36. Divine Names 5 825B. So Boethius: “Eternity is the complete and total possession of unending life all at once” (Consolatio Philosophiae, book V, prose 6; English: Rand ed., Stewart, et al., eds., Boethius. I cite the quotation from Coll, Christ in Eternity, 14, who proceeds (same page) to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas similarly: “God is eternal in the sense of being distinct from time.” According to Brian Davies, the idea that “eternity” and “time” are completely distinct not only is important for Thomas but also is “a virtually constant tradition” from late ancient Neoplatonism through medieval theology. “Eternity is the life of the intelligible world without successiveness.” Davies, Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 103; see also 103–9.

37. McCabe, God Matters, 6; see also Eagleton, Reason.

38. “God is not a determinate object in the world.” Williams, Resurrection, 84.

39. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 4.

40. Ibid., 43.

41. Richard Norris, “Trinity,” in Rogers, ed., Holy Spirit, 26.

42. The saying has been variously attributed to Epimenides and Posidonius. For discussion, see Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles, 144–45; Barrett, Acts of the Apostles, 2:847–48. I believe Fitzmyer’s rejection of a Greek philosophical source for the saying is overly skeptical: see Acts of the Apostles, 610.

43. See Nicholas Lash’s criticism of this model in his Holiness, 80–81.

44. In a wonderful piece of “creative” exegesis—that is, one not bound by the strictures of modernist historical criticism—James Alison takes Jesus’s use of mud to heal the blind man (John 9:6) to link back to the use by God of clay or earth (Hebrew: adamah) to create “man” (Adam): “So, here, what Jesus is doing is the act of finishing creation.” Faith Beyond Resentment, 6. The pun doesn’t work in Greek, and it is quite unlikely, I think, that the author of the Fourth Gospel knew Hebrew. But this is just the kind of creative interpretation I’m advocating in this book. We need not satisfy the modern philologian or historical critic in our interpretations. Alison cites John 5:17, “My Father is working up until the present, and I also work” (16), as indicating the ongoing creation by God, in work of both the Father and Jesus. See also 17: “The Sabbath is the symbol of creation not yet complete.”

45. Markham, Understanding, 111.

46. I use “eschatological” to refer to any emphasis on “the end” or any expectation of future fulfillment of current promises, whereas “apocalyptic” refers to more specific elements taken from ancient apocalyptic literature, such as the expected Parousia of a messiah or other deliverer, a battle between good and evil, a final judgment, and final reward or punishment.

47. McCabe, On Aquinas, 53–54.

48. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, for example: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”

49. Matt 6:25–34. As always in this book, the translations from the New Testament are mine unless otherwise noted. “Of God” is in brackets in my translation because it is in brackets in the Greek New Testament I use here (United Bible Society, 4th rev. ed., 1983). Since Matthew’s preferred wording is “kingdom of heaven” rather than “kingdom of God,” it seems odd for “of God” to be his wording here. That observation, accompanied by the fact that some ancient manuscripts leave out “of God” or have other wording here, prompts the editors of the Greek to put the words in brackets.

50. “And when man is placed under the Word and under the command of the Word, he is really free. Free from worry about himself. But also free from worry about others. And free from worry about the whole development of human affairs in the Church and the world. . . . But the very prayer, Thy will be done, is in fact an admission that I need not worry about it, because that is not my business.” Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 275.

51. Johannes Hoff and Peter Hampson point to Nicholas of Cusa as especially depending on the idea that we see God in the beauty of the cosmos: “The idea that the cosmos is theophanic or ‘God showing’ and so praise worthy is thus at the heart of Cusa’s worldview.” They cite here especially De Venatione Sapientiae 18.51; 19.54. See Hoff and Hampson, “Cusa,” 122.

52. Schoot, Christ the “Name,” 144.

53. Greer, introduction to Origen, 8.

54. Küng, Does God Exist?, 333. Most of the text is in italics in Küng’s original.

55. Ibid., 333–44; here again, most of the text is italicized in the original.

56. My posing of this difference in emphases is really only an appearance or impression. In reality, Protestants have always embraced the incarnation and immanence, and Roman Catholics have always acknowledged transcendence.

57. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius, 67 (2 649C).

58. But see the excellent explanation by Turner, Thomas Aquinas, 119–21, 226.

59. See Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 85, and references there cited. Much of my Inventing Superstition is an attempt to argue for and illustrate the derivation of fundamental philosophical and medical ideas from earlier political theories and ideologies of the Greek democracy and its opponents.

60. See, for example, my analysis of the ideology of “concord” (homonoia) speeches in ancient rhetoric: Corinthian Body, esp. 38–47; summarized to some extent in chapter 7 below.

61. Chadwick, Augustine, 120.

62. Alcinous, Handbook of Platonism 10.4, trans. and with introduction by John Dillon, 18. (I have altered the translation slightly to fit the syntax of my sentence.) See discussion in Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, 50. We should note that Alcinous was apparently not a Christian. The point about “participation” is well explained by Kathryn Tanner, though she is speaking here generally about divine simplicity, not about Alcinous in particular: “One can say God does not participate in being but is it: to be God just is to be. In God there is no distinction between what God is—God’s essence—and God’s existence. To participate in being is, by definition, not to be it, if participation means participating in what one is not; and therefore with participation arises a distinction between essence and existence, the very composite character that constitutes created things.” Tanner, Christ the Key, 8–9.

63. As Hauerwas puts it, “Aquinas was right that only God is pure act. Only in God are existence and essence one. Accordingly, our language about God is necessarily analogical, which means that theology has the task of helping the church not say more about God than needs to be said.” Hannah’s Child, 52.

64. McCabe, God Still Matters, 26.

65. Note the way Fergus Kerr similarly explains the doctrine in Thomas: “Denying that God is a being with qualities, as created beings are, leads to a conclusion some readers find bizarre. In particular, since God is not a being with properties, we cannot say that God is, for example, wise or just, as if wisdom, justice, and so on, are qualities that God might or might not have. On the contrary: ‘God must be his own godhead, his own life, and whatever else is predicated of him’ ([Summa Theologiae] 1.3.3). No doubt, we may go on picturing God as a being with virtues; but that remains an anthropomorphic conception.” After Aquinas, 77.

66. A form of the word (as a noun rather than an adjective) occurs in Eph 6:5 and Col 3:22 to urge slaves to “singleness of heart.” In Rom 12:8 it is used to encourage people to give in “simplicity” (in the KJV; translated as “generosity” in the NRSV).

67. Robinson says she learned the quotation from her brother but didn’t know where he got it. The saying may have originated with a book attributed to a legendary figure of scholastic mythology, Hermes Trismegistus, Liber XXIV philosophorum, II: “Deus est sphera infinita cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia vero nusquam.” See Hudry, ed., Le Livre des XXIV Philosophes. The author and date of the composition of this philosophical compendium are unknown, but it is probably medieval. The saying seems to have been known by Alain de Lille (c. 1128–1202/1203), Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), and even several Puritan theologians. The idea, or something like it, is referred to or quoted from ancient times to modern. Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, 86.

68. For discussion of the strange absence of such instruction about afterlife in Paul’s initial instruction to the Thessalonians, see my New Testament, 210–12, summarized briefly in chapter 6 below.

69. For my own take on the topic, see Corinthian Body, 179–89.

70. Lash, Matter of Hope, 132.

71. Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 3n9. Schüssler Fiorenza first began using the spelling “G-d” in But She Said and Discipleship of Equals. By the time she wrote Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, Jewish feminists had objected to that spelling, mainly because it “suggests a very conservative, if not reactionary, theological frame of reference” (191n3), so she shift ed again to “G*d.” I find both spellings actually do the opposite of what Schüssler Fiorenza wants to do: they tend to highlight the “naming” function of the letters, precisely because such substitutions look like an imitation of a Jewish attempt to avoid saying the Hebrew “proper name” of the deity.

72. See, for example, the Martyrs of Lyon 52, found in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.1.52.

73. God Still Matters, 3.

74. Clement, Strommata 5.11.82. See also Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, 53. Clement gets the point from Plato. See Parmenides 142a; and commentary in Clement of Alexander, Les Stromates: Stromate V, 2:265–66.

75. Lash, Holiness, 14.

76. Bauerschmidt, Holy Teaching, 135n11.

77. I hasten to add that I do not here mean psychological depression, which I take to be a medical—and often biological or physical—condition for which people ought to seek help and healing.

78. For some problems with the term “person” when applied to God or the “persons” of the trinity, see Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, pp. 355–59.

79. See my Corinthian Body, 21–25, 123–29; see now the fuller exposition in Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology.

80. For one author’s attempt to explain what science “knows” or just accepts as “true” even without understanding, see the many examples provided by Potter, You Are Here. His discussion of e=mc² occurs at 150.

81. An excellent introduction to both Spinoza’s life and philosophy is Nadler, Spinoza; this quotation is Nadler’s words (229), describing Spinoza’s views.

82. For these several points, see Nadler, Spinoza, 187–88, 210, 231.

83. A major goal of much of ancient Stoicism was the complete extirpation of the passions, and there were Stoics who believed that the goal was attainable, not by many people, but by at least a very few great men (see Martin, “Paul Without Passion,” in Sex and the Single Savior, 65–76). Spinoza believed that wise people would control their passions but that their extirpation was not possible.

84. See Martin, Inventing Superstition, 109–24.

85. Much of my description of Einstein’s “theology” comes from Walter Isaacson’s biography, Einstein.

86. Ibid., 384–85, quoting from Kessler, ed., The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 322 (entry for June 14, 1927).

87. See Isaacson, Einstein, 388, for these terms. For other points of this paragraph, see also 20, 84, 334, 384–93.

88. See Martin, Corinthian Body, 4–6 et passim; Martin, Inventing Superstition, 13–16.

89. Note, for example, that for Augustine miracles cannot be “contrary to nature.” As he says, “Nothing intrinsically impossible falls within divine omnipotence.” Contra Faustum Manichaeum 26.3–5; quoted from Chadwick, Augustine, 79. So also Thomas Aquinas: “Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.” Summa Theologiae 1.1.8.2; I quote Fergus Kerr’s English here, preferring it over the Dominican (Blackfriars) version. See Kerr, After Aquinas, 138.

90. For a string of attempts to define “miracle,” see the several citations furnished by Licona, Resurrection, 134–36n3.

91. Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry. For a further attack on scientific epistemological foundationalism, see his Empirical Stance.

92. McCabe, Faith Within Reason, 101–2.

93. DeHart, Trial of Witnesses, 274.

94. The best-known advocate of this view was Joachim Jeremias, Parables of Jesus (I believe the first publication in German was 1947). The point had been made extensively at least as early as Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (1888–99), and repeated by C. H. Dodd in lectures at Yale in 1935, published as The Parables of the Kingdom, which Jeremias admits heavily influenced his own later work. At any rate, especially since the publication of Jeremias’s work, the argument against “allegorizing” the parables has been nonstop in modernist historical criticism, repeated countless times by New Testament scholars.

95. Achtemeier, “Exchanging God,” 5.

96. Frye, “Language for God,” 42.

97. See, for instance, Torrence, “Christian Apprehension,” 120–43, in Speaking, at 132. Many of the authors of this collection make the same or similar errors—errors of simple logic as well as of Christian theology. For cogent arguments against taking “Father” to be God’s “name,” see Thompson, Promise, esp. 175–78. I disagree with Thompson’s views of scripture, at least as they seem to be in this book: she speaks as if “revelation” is something we simply get from scripture historically; she continues, that is, to mask somewhat her own interpretive agency.

98. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 5n4.

99. Ibid., 23–24.

100. Ibid., 46.

101. Tanner, “Gender.” For explanation of the “zero sum” ideology of antiquity, including its importance in medical theory, gynecology, and gender ideology, see Martin, “Contradictions of Masculinity.”

102. Gregory of Nyssa, “Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 5:308.

103. Tanner, “Gender,” 409.

104. Many other theologians these days advocate and practice gender variation in naming God. Herbert McCabe does so in a way that is both playful and makes the point, simply by alternating, as in this example: “So God’s concept of Herself, if He had such a thing, and God’s enjoyment of Herself in this concept, if He had such enjoyment, would not be things other than God but simply divine, simply God.” God Still Matters, 60. I could not have said it more “queerly.”

105. Note the point made by Sarah Beckwith, quoting Thomas Aquinas, that it is impossible to separate love of God from love of neighbor: “This would have been quite alien to Thomas Aquinas, for example, who said that love of God includes love of neighbor because ‘it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor.’” Shakespeare, 156; citing Summa Theologiae 2.2.25.1 and 2.2.58.1.ad6. Karl Barth also repeatedly makes the point that love is the most central point of the nature of God. See, for example, Church Dogmatics I/2, pp. 371–401. He considers but ultimately rejects equating loving God with loving neighbor: pp. 402–3. I think to make that reservation is to uncouple love of God from love of neighbor; it strikes me as a misguided attempt to emphasize the sovereignty of God over the love of neighbor. I insist the two loves simply cannot, in Christian doctrine or practice, be separated at all.