How do we see God?

Continuing a series of addresses based on questions people in the congregation have asked….Today’s question came from a young person who no longer attends our church. Influenced by modern biological science which either rejects notions of God outright or says that ‘God’ is an evolutionary trait that has enabled people to survive in the jungle of life the question was, “Is God simply a Human Construct?” (To explore the question further see Jesse Bering, The God Instinct) I have chosen not to address the question directly as most people in the congregation would find it puzzling.

A few years ago I did a survey of a church group I was leading. I asked them if they saw God primarily as a Being who was located somewhere else or did they see God primarily as a Spirit power alive around them. The response was interesting. They were evenly divided with about 50% of people slotted into each view. A good discussion followed about our ways of seeing God. All of us knew of course that God was bigger than any of our images and pictures of God, but we all admitted that we had images and pictures and they were very important in shaping our faith.
It seems to me that most people when they are young see God primarily as a Being. The form of this Being takes many shapes, and I’m aware of some kids who see the minister as God which is a particularly scary prospect. A more common view sees God as sitting somewhere beyond the clouds watching us – I think I saw God that way. Prayers, like the Lord’s Prayer, speak of God as a Father in Heaven which locates God somewhere else – but I wasn’t quite sure where. The idea of God as a ‘parent figure’, of course, is strongly reinforced in our scriptures and three aspects of this image are important. God is bigger than I am, how I live matters to God, and God is a deeply loving being whose love is unconditional and strong beyond our knowing. There is great truth in these images. There is also another common aspect to this image of God located somewhere else, and that is that God sometimes chooses to ‘come down’ and intervene in our world. Many passages in our scriptures seem to presuppose this with God spectacularly stepping in to change the course of history. One image that I recall vividly from my youth is that of Moses leading people through the Red Sea which is miraculously held back by God’s intervening power. Clearly Moses was a great man of faith to be able to call down God’s presence, lift his staff and divide the waters. Jesus, of course was divine, and one way of seeing this is that he was someone who could work all sorts of miracles channeling the dramatic intervening power of God.
This is the way many Christians understand God. It is also the way many agnostics and atheists fundamentally understand God too. Yuri Gagarin the first cosmonaut in space who circled the earth proudly announced to the world that he didn’t see God up there. His atheist leaders were happy with the news. If you read or listen to modern anti God campaigner, and I might say theologically illiterate, Richard Dawkins, it is this sort of God he’s so passionately critical of. God out there somewhere, watching, ready to pounce if we do wrong, manipulating events, ready to step into the world and end things when the time is right. When I read Richard Dawkins best selling book The God Delusion I’m quite uncomfortable because the God he rejects so vehemently and brutally along with all Christians is not a God I know.
For me, I confess I have never thought of God as having a body that could be seen other than in Jesus. Even when I think of God as a Being I sense this is just a way of seeing and not literally how God is. In fact sometime in my journey of faith another view of God became my dominant view of God. In this view I didn’t see God as a being separate from the universe, maybe sitting up there somewhere in heaven, but as an encompassing reality all around us and within us. God was not so much a concrete physical reality, a being of some sort, but primarily it made more sense to me to see God as an encompassing presence. In one of the few places the Apostle Paul describes God he says simply God is all around us, and in God we live and move and have our being [Acts 17: 28]. We live within God, we have our being in God. God is not far off ‘out there’ as the Athenians seemed to think, but is close and encompassing all that is.
Psalm 139 also speaks of God this way and it’s no surprise it’s one of my favourite Psalms. Where can we go to escape God’s presence the Psalmist asks. The response is that –
If I ascent to heaven, God is there.
If I make my bed in Sheol [which is the depth of the earth], God is there.
If I go to the farthest limits of the sea, in other words travel as far as I can around the world, God will also be there. [Ps. 139: 8-10]. The passage refers to the ancient way of looking at the universe with heaven above, Sheol beneath, and the earth in between. Nowhere can you escape God’s presence. Nowhere can be said to be outside God.
The image of God from passages like these is that God is not so much a Being who intervenes, but God is more like the invisible air that surrounds us, even dwells within us, and is a constant source of life. We have our being in God. Irenaeus, an early Christian leader, who I talked of earlier in the year, wrote around 200AD, “God contains everything, and yet is contained by nothing”. Everything is in God, but God is more than everything.
I don’t think of God primarily as having form, or that we can talk of God’s existence in the same way as you or I exist. God simply is. I also realize that some of us have very concrete ways of looking at things and that my image of God won’t make much sense to everyone – we are different. I’m not asking you to see things my way – but I am reminding us that our scriptures are full of different images of God and we need to discover which images work best for us, which are true for us. I even like to ask those who say they don’t believe in God about the God they don’t believe in, because I sometimes find myself saying to them that I don’t believe in that God either.
I have found my ‘encompassing presence’ understanding of God liberating. I used to think God created the earth as a completed event sometime in the past, and then sat back to occasionally poke and prod what he had created from a distance. I now see the universe as alive with God’s presence, and the very life of the universe is the life of God. Creation is not all about what happened ‘in the beginning’ but continues to happen now. I see God alive in creation and as Elizabeth Browning says every common bush is alive with God, but only he or she who sees takes off their shoes. Taking off our shoes is of course something we do in God’s presence as a sign of respect. I see creation as sacred because it contains the living presence of God. Creation is therefore not something simply for our use or to make quick profit from, but something we can marvel at and something that can feed our souls with the living presence of God.
I don’t view God occasionally choosing to zap down and do something miraculous usually at the behest of a great person of faith as I used to. I see God more of divine presence which is already there. This presence often waits to be invited in, and it seems to me that our lack of awareness of God and our inability to invite God in blocks God’s presence. There is a divine purpose longing to come into being but through our ignorance, blindness, or sinfulness, we block the way. When I pray for healing, I’m praying that we might be open to divine energy, wisdom, and love which is already there. When we get on the same wavelength as God, when we are in tune with the presence of God, powerful things can happen. Instead of divine intervention I prefer to speak of divine interaction, which I think fits the whole message of Jesus and his human ‘God with us’ ministry.
I realize the original question for today’s address was ‘Is God simply a human construct?’ I think we all make images that we believe in and put our trust in about God. That’s how human beings work. I believe we need to talk about those images and critically measure those images against our experience, our traditions, and our scriptures. Inevitably in a world that has been shaped by science and other discoveries we will think and image God differently to our ancestors. That’s how life has always been. But for me God is not simply a human construct, however important in my head. God is beyond us. God is bigger than us. In our tradition Moses met God in the bush that burned and was not consumed. He took off his shoes, and asked God his name. The response was simply “I AM WHO I AM!” or “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.” God ‘is’, and I have never been able to make sense of life, and find a peace in my soul without God who is both beyond me and yet encompasses me with purpose, love, and grace.

Dugald Wilson 7 August 2011