I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
I was recently talking to someone at a party. He didn’t know what I did for a living but we found ourselves discussing the subject of religion in today’s global politics and how much it seems that people are reasserting the importance of belief in God within today’s world. And all of a sudden he turned to me and said, “So, would you say that you believe in God?” And I replied, “Well, tell me the kind of God you’re talking about and I’ll answer the question.”
I asked for that qualification because I am conscious that what we mean by this easily used three-letter word (GOD) has become extremely important in today’s world. Increasingly, popular definitions of God are being shaped by people – both religious people and the critics of religion – who have what I perceive as a very restricted view of what that word might mean. It often seem to me that the “God” referred to is the originator of dubious moral actions, irrational behaviour and, frequently, more or less total intellectual disengagement. This is a “God” who causes much of what is wrong with the world, as numerous bestselling books are pointing out at the moment. So I find myself wanting to agree with the title of Christopher Hitchens’ provocative book and say, this God is indeed “not great”. This is not a God I believe in.
An understanding of God as the cause of things, good or bad, is what I think the man at this party was asking if I believed in. He wanted to know if I believe in God as a kind of explanatory hypothesis for the universe? He wanted to know, when I ask the great philosophical question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” do I resort to this concept that history has called “God” as some kind of answer? And I suppose in some sense I would have to answer, yes, I do. But I think that we have a problem when the way in which we primarily understand God in today’s world is as the instigator of a cause and effect relation.
This reduces God to simply the answer to a puzzling question. Why is the world here? God is the answer. Why was my cancer cured? God is the answer. Why did I decide to blow up a train full of people? God is the answer. And the trouble with that kind of thinking is that when we ask, “Why wasn’t my cancer cured?” “Why are there terrorist atrocities in the world?”, the answer also becomes God. Or, if it doesn’t, it’s because we retreat into the kind of intellectual disengagement I mentioned earlier: “Well, there must be a reason… and one day I’m sure God will make that clear to us.” Either way we still externalise God in terms of a cause-and-effect relation, “God as the answer” or “God HAS all the answers”.
So we see God primarily as the cause of things or as the one who refuses to cause other things which we would like to happen. That’s why the most common religious position today, particularly in British society is one of what I call “deism-plus-special-incursions”. Deism is the belief that God has created the world but has little to do with its daily running now. That seems to be a very popular view. And to be religious today is really to believe that on top of that God may make some extra “special incursions” into our world to cause a few, largely inconsequential, things to happen.
But if this kind of God – the God who causes things – is our primary or overriding conception, then God really is reduced to just a causal agent, albeit the most important one. And I think that’s a lot less than what God really is. Once God is viewed as the answer to a problem it seems to me that a strong element of finitude has been introduced to what must remain infinite. God has become the philosopher’s object. Whereas God’s infinite identity means that God can never be any kind of object. God is always the eternal subject of reality.
There is a rather nice story from Hindu folklore that explains what I mean:
A guru teaches his followers that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. But a questioner asks, “What supports the tiger?, and the guru replies, “It stands upon an elephant”. So the questioner asks again, “What supports the elephant?” and the guru replies, “It stands upon a giant turtle.” So the questioner asks a third time, “What supports the giant turtle?”, and the guru smiles and replies, “Well you see, after that it’s turtles all the way down.”
God is not the turtle at the end of the causal chain. God is something far more fundamental than that – it’s turtles all the way down! And consequently, using the word “God” is to rather abruptly cut off an infinite stream of reality that really can’t be contained in a word, or within human concepts or categories. We should, at very least, be conscious of their limitations when we use religious language.
Last week Fr Stephen spoke about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his concerns about the problems with “religion” as many people conceive it. Bonhoeffer was responding to precisely these concerns, moving from a God who is an agent who causes things to happen in the world (like a big version of a human being!) towards the kind of God who is revealed in the Christian Faith. Bonheoffer actually thought that, rather than being a causal agent, or even the cause of things, God is fundamentally the fullness of Reality. God is what is most real in our world, both transcendent and fully immanent in such a way as to make talk of God being the cause of things a nonsense. Another theologian has put it like this:
…the Christian religion does not think God starting from… the cause, or within the theoretical space defined by metaphysics, or even starting from God as a concept, but indeed starting from God alone [through God’s revelation of God’s infinite identity in the world].
Something of the totality and infinity of God – the God who is more than just the cause of things – is precisely what is revealed in this extraordinary passage from the book of Revelation. The God who just causes things might be seen simply as the “Alpha”, but here God reveals God’s own self as, “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”. This is the God who does not just make things, causes things, and then goes away. This is the God who is “making all things new”. And that is not just a prophecy for the future; it is, as William Blake saw, a statement about God’s pervasive activity of healing and renewing and drawing people together – the new Jerusalem that is being built here, in England’s green and pleasant land.
God is not just the answer to our questions, the gaps in our reality, God is the only reality. God is all in all. And that is realised in the Kingdom of God which is not just “caused by God” but made real by God in the person of Jesus Christ and is present to us through the whole of Creation as we turn toward our Creator.
So the upshot of what I am trying to say is that I often think the word “God”, particularly as it’s used today, is not a very helpful one. It’s interesting to note that, as a name for the divine, “God” is, in fact, used far less in the Bible than “the Lord” which we heard in our Old Testament lesson and psalm. “The Lord” describes far more than merely the God who causes things. “The Lord” is the One who has revealed himself through the people of Israel and through the Church. The Lord is not a concept but the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, Sanctifier of all – the One who enters into relationship with His beloved creation, because this One already exists in relationship as Three.
So would I say that I believe in God? Well, I believe in the Lord. I believe in the Alpha and the Omega, the Holy One who is making all things new and who gives the gift of life from the spring of the water of life. I believe in the One who is gift and life and love. I simply don’t see that kind of “God” written about very much these days. So it is left to the Church – to you and me – to tell other people about this Living One who is known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen
Marion, God Without Being, p.36