Authority

When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than the voice of compassion -- its message becomes meaningless. A.J. Heschel

An ancient understanding of metaphor

Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named. Not only will deductive arguments prove it, but the wisest Hebrews of antiquity, so far as can be gathered, will too. The ancient Hebrews used special symbols to venerate the divine and did not allow anything inferior to God to be written with the same letters as the word “God,” on the ground that the divine should not be put on even this much of a level with things human. Would they ever have accepted the idea that the uniquely indissoluble nature could be expressed by evanescent speech? No man has yet breathed all the air; no mind has yet contained or language embraced God's substance in its fullness. No, we use facts connected with him to outline qualities that correspond with him, collecting a faint and feeble mental image from various quarters. Our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole – our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole – but one whose mental images is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in his mind a richer picture, outline, or whatever we call it, of the truth.

Some things mentioned in the Bible are not factual; some factual things are not mentioned; some nonfactual things receive no mention there; some things are both factual and mentioned. Do you ask for my proofs here? I am ready to offer them. In the Bible, God “sleeps,” “wakes up,” “is angered,” “walks,” and has “throne of cherubim.” Yet, when has God ever been subject to emotion? When do you ever hear that God is a bodily being? This is a nonfactual, mental picture. We have used names derived from human experience and applied them, so far as we could, to aspects of God. His retirement from us, for reasons known to himself into an almost unconcerned inactivity, is his “sleeping.” Human sleeping, after all, has the character of restful inaction. When he alters and suddenly benefits us, what is his “waking up.” Waking up puts an end to sleep, just as looking at somebody puts an end to turning away from him. We have made his punishing of us his “being angered;” for with us, punishment is born of anger. His acting in different places, we call “walking,” for walking is a transition from one place to another. His abiding among the heavenly powers, making them almost his haunt, we call his “sitting” and “being enthroned;” this too is human language: the divint abies in none as it abides in the saints. God's swift motion we call “flight;” his watching over us is his “face;” his giving and receiving is his “hand.” indeed every faculty or activity of God has given us a corresponding picture in terms of something bodily. (Gregory Nazianzus)

What kind of authority?

Thomas Friedman points out that top-down, centralized, chain-of-command authorities are quickly becoming history as networks of participatory and relational authorities take their place. The shift from established authorities to emerging ones is a process of chaotic cultural reorganization whereby fragmentation is an inevitable part of the journey of change.
In an age of fragmentation, however, many people are tempted to revert to top-down authority as a way of controlling chaos. All the churches I visited are part of denominations in which some interest groups are attempting to centralize doctrine, polity, and praxis as an answer to fractured culture. What if the answer is authentic community? (Diana Butler Bass)

The role of God

But if the universe is completely self-contained with no singularities or boundaries, and completely described by a unified theory, that has profound implications for the role of God as Creator.

Einstein once asked the question: "How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?" If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God. Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we would know the mind of God. (Stephen Hawking)

Speaking about God

Exact talk about God breaks out of the bounds of ordinary language because of his deity. All language about him will be sketchy at best. Indeed the language of Scripture and the language of everyday life must be interpreted in one sense within the terms of everyday usage and in another within the community using the words.

Viewed from the standpoint of epistemological concerns, all the core of knowledge about God is at best a probability not to be deduced from the word that named the divine essence or induced from a human search for the relevant data. (Frederick W. Norris)

For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the "meaning" of a word is its use in the language. (L. Wittgenstein)

Do we need Immortality?

We may believe that God looks upon us with love and compassion, but that does not seem to me to be any guarantee that he wills our everlasting existence -- that is a further (very large) step. We are taught, to be sure, that God wishes to bring us to eternal life; but it is a glaring confusion to equate eternal life with endless survival. As the notion of of eternal life is used in the Johannine writings, for instance, it is spoken of as a present possession, a quality of life, not a limitless quality; nor is it something that happens after death but in this present lifetime. (Grace Jantzen)

(Not so) Omnipotent!!

Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is be both able and willing? whence then is evil? (David Hume Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere, and cannot consistently adhere to all three. (J.L.Mackie)

What is the result of recognizing that the proposition 'God is omnipotent' does not mean that God can do anything that is logically possible? It is not, as Mackie and Process theologians assume, to limit God's power, or to say that limited power is all God has. To say that, one would have to be able to make sense of the notion of 'unrestricted power', and I have denied that possibility. Even analytic philosophers say that it is no restriction of God's power to say that he cannot do what is logically impossible for him to do. If it is logically impossible for God to ride a bicycle, that is, it makes no sense to talk of him doing so, not being able to ride a bicycle is no restriction on God's power. (D.Z. Phillips)

The deceit of false religious practice

Many people follow religious teachings because everyone else follows them, and not because of any spiritual need. Because people live lives full of faults and failings they adapt their religion to suit their lives in order to relieve their conscience. In so doing, people are lying to themselves. If we accept without reasoning false religious teachings which we should examine by the light of our reason, we lose the capacity to reason. Our freedom consists in learning to think with our own minds. However, following false religious teachings means taking on faith three kinds of false beliefs:

• the belief that it is possible to learn by experience that which does not make sense according to laws of experience -- or belief in miracles;
• admitting as a basis for our moral self-improvement beliefs which we cannot grasp with our reason -- or belief in mysteries;
• the belief that we can, by mysterious and supernatural means, induce God to influence our moral behaviour -- or belief in grace. (Leo Tolstoy)
  

There are two sorts of atheism, one of which is a purification of the notion of God... -- Simone Weil

Let's start with an easy one! The whole theme of Advent had me thinking about the reality of God and some of the language we use to talk about God. Much popular writing about God seems to go around the idea of the existence of God which raises great problems about what it means to say God exists, but the reality of God is a different issue. Dreams are real. Fears are real. Love is real. Stories and metaphors are real. God is real. In the same way that we wouldn't say that dreams or love exists we shouldn't say that God exists; nor do we say that love and dreams don't exist-- existence doesn't come up in this context. But one does say that God is real. How God is real should frame the discussion in examining our texts.