Why Christianity is a Polytheistic Religion
Posted by John on January 17th, 2008 at 6:50 am · 9 Comments
And I’m not even going to touch the Holy Trinity.
Christianity is broad enough to encompass different gods, including the following:
- A distant god who took the cosmic equivalent of an extended coffee break while leaving the Bunsen burners going under his/her grand experiment.
- A big cheery Santa Claus of a god who has an army of
elves angels working for him, finding someone’s keys here, giving an emotional boost to a bereaved widow there, and listening sympathetically as hundreds of millions agonize over (their angry boss|the joint in Suzy’s sock drawer|gambling debt|abusive spouse|the big game on Saturday|war|Liyang Peng doesn’t love me, dammit).
- A pissed-off drill sergeant god (with clean language) who wants us to get off our butts and start protecting Israel, bombing cities harboring Muslim terrorists and reciting the Ten Commandments in class. He makes a check mark on his clipboard every time you touch yourself or kill a baby (it’s a really big clipboard).
- A tough-love god, who is deeply pained that your lack of belief (or that you believe in the same god as Mitt Romney) or your homosexuality is going to result in the psychic equivalent of being slowly roasted on a spit for infinity.
- A nebulous god who is beyond description and characterization, who is everywhere and nowhere, but who is somehow kind of an amorphous hippie (without the hair and dope) and who personifies compassion and pulses love into all of creation.
Some of these descriptions are modeled loosely on the conceptions of god that came out of a national survey by Baylor University a couple of years back. You could force some overlap between these (admittedly unflattering) descriptions, but some characteristics cancel each other out–there is no reconciling every conception of god (not even a paradoxical version, because some descriptions reject paradox, but I guess you could have a paradoxically nonparadoxical…my head hurts). Some beliefs limit God’s power and concern to this earth and to humanity, others make God the creator and ruler of the multiverse. In some his gender is very well defined; in others it is irrelevant.
You could argue that there is only one doctrinally correct set of characteristics for God, but this doesn’t change the fact that Christians, in practice, worship gods with character traits more diverse than the Krishna’s blue skin, Ganesha’s elephant head and Kali’s many arms. They just call them all by the same name and pretend that they all believe in the same thing. Christianity may be monotheistic from each individual’s perspective (though once you include the many Marys and the pantheon of Catholic saints, even this definition starts to break down), but collectively, it has as many gods as Olympus.
I’ve been through my own string of gods, from the grampa-like hugs-all-around god in my late teens, to the impossible to please boss god of my early twenties, to the I sired you and abandoned you god of my mid- to late-twenties, before I killed him off completely in my thirties. I considered for awhile with the more metaphorical god (“The Ground of All Being”) of the existential Christian theologians like Paul Tillich, and was deeply drawn for a time to the helpless, suffering god of Simone Weil who cut himself off from the universe in the act of creation and who could only watch in anguish (I may be misconceiving this, but that was how I read Weil).
To you theists and former believers out there: do any of these seem familiar to you? Has your concept of god changed over time? Believers, have you found a way to reconcile multiple concepts of God, either personally or theologically? Unbelievers, can you add any more to those I’ve listed in this post?
Tags: Atheism · Belief · Christianity · Gods · Religion
