Council of Nicea
(Sistine Salon)
All we have to talk about God are metaphors (last post). But God can’t be contained in any construct we can hold in our brains. This dichotomy invites us to revisit one of our most familiar metaphors for God; a “person.”
Through the centuries, we Christians have had a somewhat divided mind on this point. On the one hand, at the Council in Nicea (325AD) we decided that God was “one substance, three persons.” Once we used that word, “person,” we couldn’t help but insert into our tradition a deep, visceral sense that God is a person like you and me. We hear the Bible stories in which God acts like a person (has feelings, thinks thoughts, does deeds), and we walk away with a reduced version of God in our heads. We contain the uncontainable. We shoehorn God into a “like-me” box.
But on the other hand, our scriptures and mystics keep telling us not to fall into this trap.
One of our saints, Julian of Norwich, stands in this tradition; insisting we not reduce our irreducible God into any image; even one as familiar to us as “Father,” or “King,” or “Bridegroom.” One of the main themes of her life was to tinker with our images of God.
As our Western, Roman sensibilities kept pushing on us, a standardized God that everybody in the Empire could conform to, she insisted we not. Hers was an appreciation for Mystery and the Unknowable Unknown.
As our mystics have always done, she tried out all kinds of images for God, jumping easily from one to another, acknowledging that God is beyond any one. She spoke of God as “energy;” alluded to the Divine as “the soil from which life emerges.” She imagined God, not as an external being “out there,” but as Presence in everything. She spoke of “smelling God,” and “swallowing God in the waters and juices of the earth.”
Julian insisted God is not an entity separate from humanity. For her, God is the very energizing force that animates humanity. See God, she encouraged us, as the heart of creation, the presence of Love at the center of all that is. The deeper we move into the human soul, the closer we become to the Divine. The nearer we are to our true selves, the more we sing the song of Divine love.
Hers is a very different way of framing God than “one substance, three persons.”
And as we mentioned in the last post, different metaphors for God lead us on very different spiritual journeys. As our current Western Christian experience bespeaks the need for a better framing narrative, a good starting point would be trading our image of God in for a new one.
I really enjoyed this. The description of God is beautiful. However, I can’t help but wonder if you have ever written anything that I could show to my mother.
angela:
i don’t know your mother, but i suspect she’s conservative christian. this means, she’s steeped in the static, person, images of god.
so, can you show her things i write?
probably not.
i decided a while ago that there is a church on just about every corner speaking the language of enlightenment christianity, but there was nowhere i knew of in our city speaking the language of quantum christianity.
so i’m doing my thinking/talking with the latter group.
it usually upsets the former group (my mother too).
d.
judy:
some time ago, i read a quote from heinrich zimmer; a professor, philosopher, historian, and student of how different cultures talk about god, the divine, the transcendent.
i won’t get the quote right, but it was something like this…
there are three great things.
1. the greatest things cannot be talked about
– this is the realm of god, the transcendent
– things beyond the world of perception
– what’s on the other side of big-bang induced time/space?
– what is human consciousness?
– is there purpose and meaning in existence?
– what is god?
these things cannot be talked about, because we are by nature subsets of them. in other words; whatever god is, god is bigger than we can imagine, bigger than we can fit into rationality. if god is forest, we are tree. forest can contain tree, but not visa versa.
so we can’t talk about these greatest things.
2. the second greatest things…
are our attempts to talk about that which cannot be talked about. these are our efforts to fit the unfitable into metaphors, images, and so forth.
– this is when we try out images for god
– when we speculate about the nature of human consciousness
– etc.
3. the third greatest things…
those things we speak of with confidence.
– “the sky is blue.”
our common mistake is to talk about 2nd greatest things…
– thinking we’re talking about 1st greatest things…
– and doing so w/ the certitude of 3rd greatest things.
no, we just can’t talk about god with any confidence at all.
but our efforts to do so, are one of the most meaningful and beautiful things we human beings do. we hammer out meaning for our existence in these efforts. we hammer out the highest aspirations of human being-ness in our efforts.
but, we need to build into our efforts, a given; that we’re going to get it wrong – incomplete at best.
this gives us two things…
first, humility. it keeps us from the kind of “i am right, you are wrong, and so, i reject you” certitude that so often religious people demonstrate
it also gives us the freedom to jump from image of god… to image of god. extracting from one all the benefits it has to offer, and setting it aside and taking up a new one when the time comes.
so, yes…
i’m suggesting we revisit our images of god. the “person” image has become a static assumption for most christians. i’m suggesting we keep those images, but embrace others as well.
and in particular, i’m suggesting we revisit the non-person images of god. they have been part of our tradition all along, and they might serve us better for a while.
but when i make that suggestion…
there’s one thing we know. any new images we might try on together… are going to be wrong/incomplete.
but incomplete… can still be beautiful.
incomplete can still help us orient our lives to god.
incomplete can still help us find meaning in being human.
d.
but robert… shock is fun.
some time ago, our secretary told me our church gets hate mail from good christian people for the rethinking we’re doing. she’d been protecting me from the mail because she didn’t want my feelings hurt.
i told her not to protect me any more. i love the controversy! i love the reaction. it makes me go back and question all the more deeply, seek our tradition all the more deeply.
and in this case, since all we have of god are images, we really ARE trading our god in for a new one.
d.
“perception” that’s a good word.
“idea” that’s another.
but even with these vocabulary improvements, we still face the same problem. god cannot be contained in our brains.
consequently, any “perception,” or “idea,” or “image,” of god we have, is by definition inadequate, incomplete.
but again, let us not despair!
our efforts to talk about god using “perceptions” or “images” is beautiful, meaningful, and transformative.
so “idea” away…
“perception” away!
but let’s hold our ideas, perceptions, and images with a light grasp. we may need to trade them in for a new one later.
d.
So…I’m just messing with semantics here? It really doesn’t matter what word we use to describe God in a word?
judy:
once we take seriously our christian doctrine of “the transcendence of god;” that god cannot be contained in a statue, a drawing, a word, or a mental construct…
then you’re right; it doesn’t matter what word we use. any word we choose is simply code for “that which we glimpse, that cannot be fully talked about.”
we have a social consensus that the word “god” will serve as that code word, but that can become a problem if, because of that consensus, we fool ourselves into believing that the code is anything more than that.
we are grappling to explain a deep experience. and not grappling very well.
recall the quote: “the greatest things cannot be talked about…”
this is that.
d.
you may have seen me avoid using the word “god.”
judy:
once we take seriously our christian doctrine of “the transcendence of god;” that god cannot be contained in a statue, a drawing, a word, or a mental construct…
then you’re right; it doesn’t matter what word we use. any word we choose is simply code for “that which we glimpse, that cannot be fully talked about.”
we have a social consensus that the word “god” will serve as that code word, but that can become a problem if, because of that consensus, we fool ourselves into believing that the code is anything more than that.
we are grappling to explain a deep experience. and not grappling very well.
recall the quote: “the greatest things cannot be talked about…”
this is that.
d.
you may have seen me avoid using the word “god.”
tricia:
last night i was reading a book that talked about the history behind how we got the doctrine of the trinity. it told about a debate between the early christians in antioch, and those in alexandria, over how to think about jesus and how jesus is related to god.
the book is called “spiritual bankrupcy” by john cobb.
here’s what he said:
The other great theological controversy focused on the relation of the divine reality that was incarnate in Jesus to the one to whom Jesus prayed as his Abba. If they are properly to be distinguished, are they different aspects or features of one and the same Being, or are they actually distinct divine beings? If the latter, are they hierarchically ordered, beginning with the Father? The victorious conclusion was that they are distinct, but that even though the Son is begotten from the Father, the Son is coeternal and coequal with the Father. In Alexandria it was argued that although they are distinct persons, they are coconstitutive of each other. Although the debates were mainly about the Father and the Son, once their relation as distinct persons who were coequal was established, the status of the Holy Spirit could be described in a similar way. Thus the orthodox trinitarian doctrine was born. The participants in the debate were trying to present a rationally coherent answer to real questions that arose among believers. To that extent….
For the sake of the unity of the church they agreed to compromise language that was, at best, perplexing and, at worst, incomprehensible. Once this was established as orthodox, the church demanded assent without being able to explain exactly what was assented to. This initiated a new epoch in the life of the church.
Belief in obscure propositions without even understanding what they meant became a requirement pressed on people based on the authority of the church….
Theologians, on the whole, continued to make as much sense as they could of the compromise statements, such as the trinitarian one. They did so in diverse ways….
—
he then goes on to talk about how the eastern church differed from the western in the way they interpreted the trinity.
the take-home message for me…
we don’t know what we’re talking about when we try and pin god down to a doctrine. we didn’t then. we don’t now!
doctrines are very helpful. they are the 2nd greatest things” i talked about in response to judy above; “our attempts to talk about that which cannot be talked about.” as such, they are beautiful and help us make meaning.
however, they must be held with a light grip…
we should be able and willing to update them, when (as in our time) our worldviews are in flux.
and for goodness sake, we shouldn’t be dividing ourselves and hating one another over them!
d.
Doug, it seems that most of us find it difficult to confront uncertainty without finding an explanation, a reason, a ‘Why?’
I suspect that we use our culture, intellect, cognition, explanations from leaders, traditions etc to reduce the uncertainty to a manageable level.
That helps us survive, but is not enough to help us thrive.
The internal search for better understandings of the un-understandable is likely to need language, images, metaphors, interpretations as necessary steps on the journey.
Unfortunately, each new step requires a consequential review of all the previous held supporting thoughts – the internal ideas infrastructure. And that review may produce further uncertainties which need new language, models, metaphors to continuously manage the cognitive dissonance.
So, it is tricky to manage the unmanageable.
or to speak about the unspeakable. tricky! yes.
that’s the dilemma. we humans are in constant need for meaning making, and the tools we use are language, mental constructs, framing narratives and so forth. it’s how we’re wired.
and then we run into the spiritual, the religious, the transcendent; the great mysteries of being.
– “why is there something instead of nothing?”
– “what is the source of being and consciousness?”
– “what is human nature? what is divine nature?”
and when we get glimpses of transcendent experience that inform those deep questions (which we do), it is natural that our first instinct is to take those glimmers of experience and shoehorn them into language and mental construct. and in fact, our efforts at doing so are often quite beautiful and helpful. our spiritual/religious narratives give us meaning like few others.
the only problem is the tight grip we hold on our narratives once we have created them. we assume that our thoughts about god are capital-T, Truths, not transient images or metaphors. our ancient doctrine keeps insisting that we return to a starting point of humility and acknowledge that all we have to talk about god are passing metaphors. it insists that god cannot be contained in any thought we can think – even our favorite “our-father-in-heaven” thought.
the implication for me as i’m tinkering with my god-images, is that as soon as i formulate a different way of imagining god, i’m doing the very same thing; containing the uncontainable. of course i am. that’s just the nature of being in this human experience.
what i’m suggesting is that this is ok, normal even.
and, i’m suggesting, as christians, we have been given historical permission to update our cherished metaphors about god on an as-needed basis.
and, i’m suggesting, during this moment of historical tumult, we’re in a pretty severe “as-needed” moment.
so off we go! let’s reimagine our cherished images of god with abandon!
woo hoo!
(and by the way, good to hear from you, jack. i’m emailing you right now to set that skype appt.)
d.