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
elvesangels 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?
9 responses so far ↓
1 TammyT // Jan 17, 2008 at 12:33 pm
This is all very familiar to me. It’s the kind of thought process that turned me off of religion altogether for a long time: if there are so many people out there who are absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt certain that their version of God is the right one, how can any of them be right?
In all versions of God, it’s either he/it wants us to live up to some demand or he doesn’t. In the first case, I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God. In the second, it doesn’t matter if God exists or not, so why worry about it?
2 Brian // Jan 17, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I would say that in some sense believers may indeed have misconceptions about God, but much of this may simply lie in God’s dealings with us. Just as one man may take on aspects depending upon situation, why not God? I myself can be professional and dispassionate at work, and then loving, tender, and passionate with my wife. My children will often find me giving, warm, loving, playful, and forgiving, but at other times stern, punishing, strict, or even “mean”. I can have a drink with my father, or advise an alcoholic friend to avoid it entirely. I can be violent, threatening, even murderous to those who threaten my loved ones. Yet there is not a Brian of War and a Brian of Wine and a Brian of Fertility and a Brian of Mercy…just me. If I can reveal myself in such complex, seemingly contradictory ways and yet still be one me, I think that God can do the same, and yet still be one God.
Just my input.
pax vobiscum
3 Rich // Jan 17, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Well, opinions are as numerous as the people expressing them, and so in that sense you will have all these various aspects of a Christian God expressed over time, though the ones you mention don’t resonate with me.
I’ve always seen (and have never had trouble seeing) God as Father. One who wants me to experience life’s fullness and richness — including the pain — as part of growing up. Inspiring, encouraging, giving good advice, but allowing me to fall down, to make bad choices, letting me get beaten up and bloody and hurt at times — all part of growing up. And this has not been hard for me, having grown up in a wonderful family with a very loving father (and mother) who themselves modeled much of these “gospel” principles in their parenting of me and my siblings. We remain a close, loving family — a tangible reality that keeps me going, and lends credence to the teachings of the Christ, taking them (for me anyway) well beyond the abstract (”if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine…”).
I also very much like how Brian expressed himself:
4 xJane // Jan 18, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I like Brian’s simile about having different personalities. Although I would hope that people who meet me at work & then socially don’t think I’m a completely different person. I would hope that I do indeed have one personality and that it comes across in all I do. At the same time, I wonder how many people who believe in one of those xian gods can agree that any of the others listed are the same god.
Rich: I have a huge problem with the metaphor of God-as-Father precisely because it gets humans off the hook for a lot of stuff. It encourages us to be children in the metaphysical sense and trust that our nebulous father will get us out of trouble. I think a much more encouraging metaphor is God-as-Friend. Someone who you can go to for strength in times of trouble, who you enjoy hanging out with, and who encourages you to be a better person. I have seen my relationship with my parents grow and develop beyond the merely parent stage, into friendship; but I have found no encouragement for a similar development in people’s relationships with their father-gods.
5 Lessie // Jan 18, 2008 at 10:05 pm
One through four are familiar to me. I also encountered a chauvinist father God who liked to toy with my psyche about whether I was really equal to my male counterparts or not. And with that, a mother God who wasn’t willing to stand up for herself and tell her daughters that she was there.
Now I seriously doubt God’s existence all together. I wouldn’t call myself an atheist yet (because life without God still scares the sh*t out of me), but if God is there, then I want to know what the hell is going on.
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7 Erik // Jan 21, 2008 at 12:36 am
There’s another problem with the Teacher/Father God. For someone to learn and grow from an experience (however horrible) one must live through it. If your toddler walks out onto the rails with a train coming in the distance, then you have to cease being the teaching father and become the protective father. Yet even as I write this people (mostly female, probably) suffer horribly through experiences they will not survive and, thus, cannot learn from. God as parent would be a failure.
8 xJane // Jan 21, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Following helping my sister with the birth of her most recent son, I’ve been thinking about the concept of God-as-Mother. It makes more sense to me, although it is still a flawed simile.
A mother creates her children out of nothingness and out of her own flesh. She nurtures them when they are still part of her, but then releases them into the real world. She is still their protector, but they fade ever further from her ability to protect them.
Just thoughts…
9 JpM // Jan 28, 2008 at 2:43 pm
May be God dont have to be any of the above since he is the God of my spirit, and His character is exposed through me/and you. That is if I allow him to be the God of my/your spirit
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