Have Your God Call My God
Friday, May 7, 2010 at 8:53AM | by Otter The original question on a homeschooling forum thread was "What Is The Greatest Threat To Christianity?" A few people offered up "Christians" as the answer, and I suppose that's sometimes true... though as I posted yesterday, sometimes Christians can just rock the world.
Anyway, one thing led to another, and we got to this epistemological question:
How would I be able to tell the difference between the "physical things that reveal god" to me and "just physical" things? How do I know they are "revealing god to me"?
I think that depends on how you define God.
Which is why in that thread I pegged the greatest threat to Christianity as being an unclear definition of Christianity.
If Christianity holds (as it sort of does, most of the time) that God is "above" nature, irreducibly separate from it, you're S.O.L. on this score. You can't really posit that God is so far removed from creation but that wiggles in the natural realm still point to him.
Transcendence helps a bit.
John's vision of the logos is helpful, but it should be noted that in John nobody has seen the Father but the logos, so that's not ultimately solving the problem. It brilliantly accounts for the freaky-shit activity of transcendence while still preserving God as Ineluctably Other, but it does finally throw down on your ability to believe in the divine meaning of freaky shit in space and time.
If on the other hand you're defining God in terms of that presentation of nature to the self, you're (1) erasing the distinction between natural and supernatural; and (2) able to speak about ALL natural events or events in nature as being the presentation of God.
"Panentheism" shrieks my inner Athanasian bishop who vests himself in my superego. Yeah, well, whatever. I'm interested first and foremost on whether we mean anything when we talk about God, and I'm not sure we do unless it's that when freaky shit happens to us and we're able to call it "good," we worship like good natives at the flick of Being's Zippo.
Putting it another way, either God is totally impenetrable or God is totally penetrating. But you can't really find another option, epistemologically anyway. You can say with John that God has a "transcendent" feature, a space-time extension of herself: but you can't really talk about it much. You have no more grounds for saying "God revealed himself in scripture" than you do for saying "God revealed himself in rainfall." And if both are true, you really do have to look inward at the image of God, and that's a pretty terrifying thought that quickly separates the humble from the arrogant.
Reader Comments (2)
Why can't God equally reveal Himself in scripture and rain? I'm confused, as usual.
Jennifer, of course there is no reason. But I'll blog about this soon: rain is fundamentally a different thing than the Bible. The Bible is a product of consciousness, in human language and requiring (not accidentally as rain does but from first to last) an interpretation. Rain, in other words, has a life of its own quite apart from what we make of it. The verbal speech of god (if any) depends on our own thought. It is interpretive, not absolute. That contains remarkable potential, but also a burden theists are sometimes loathe to accept.