Who, or what, is God?
We are in the season of Advent. As we discussed at last week’s Thursday gathering, it is a time of waiting. But what are we waiting for?
Many of us wait for concrete realities. This could be on an individual level, stuff like a job offer or medical news, or systemic changes that bring pay equity or dismantle unjust institutions. But this season also holds our spiritual longings, our cosmic waiting—for restoration, for peace, for God.
But what does it mean to wait for God? If we don’t stop to ask what or whom we’re waiting for, we might as well be characters in a Samuel Beckett play. And this question, it turns out, is not so easy to answer. The doctrine of God we likely all used to agree on—the omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving personal version—turned out to be one of so many playing cards, precariously holding up a certain worldview.
The house of cards toppled.
But did every card fall? Is there a God? If so, what kind of God is there? Let’s remember it’s Advent, when we also remember the birth of Jesus. This remains my primary answer to what God is like—God is like Jesus. Forgiving, including, humanizing, patient, and sacrificial. Above all, loving.
So there’s my sense of what God is like… but what is God? If we say Jesus is God in the flesh, or that he is God’s Son, what does that mean? What God is in the flesh or begetting a child?
I only raise this here and now on the blog because I think Advent is a good time to ponder mysteries, like Mary did in her heart. While I don’t have any easy answers, I did want to introduce you to some theological ideas that I have found intriguing. I’m no expert on this stuff—theology proper (a stupid term for the study of God’s nature) is not my specialty. But it might interest you to know that classical theism, the theological playing card I was going on about earlier, is not the only game in town.
Classical theism probably doesn’t bear much explanation, since it was baked into most of our church experiences. In this school of thought, God is a Person (or three) who created and sustains the universe from outside of it. God is totally separate from the created world… so separate that They exist outside space and time as we know it.
Note: while this piece is presenting you with some alternatives to this view, there are plenty of fantastic, brilliant, and kind people the world over who continue to believe in this kind of deity. While I think it is very open to valid critiques, those critiques are not the point of this blog post!
Panentheism (note that this is a different word from pantheism) means something like “all things are in God.” This view is distinct from both strict theism, which again holds that God is separate from all things, and from pantheism, which holds that God and the universe are one and the same. Panentheism is sort of like a combination of these two views. God is in, under, and through all things. Everything in the universe is part of God—but God is still more than all that (i.e. God is “transcendent”).
Note: if you hear me indicate that I believe in God, though my relationship status with belief is “It’s complicated,” this is more or less the sort of God I believe in.
Unlike the next two ideas, which are more distinctly associated with Christian theology, panentheism crops up in many strands of the world’s major faith traditions.
Here’s a book that looks interesting on this.
Open theism is a type of theism that breaks from its classical cousin by placing limits on what it means for God to be all-powerful and all-knowing. The gist here (distilling down a bunch of really jargony philosophy stuff to the best of my ability) is that open theists believe humans have free will, and that for human choices to actually be free, God can’t have knowledge of what will be chosen. There are plenty of implications of this, including that while God is all-knowing about the present, They don’t actually know what will happen with certainty in the future as it pertains to human choices.
If you’re familiar with the old (tired) Calvinist vs. Arminian debates, open theism is like an extreme form of Arminianism, bolstered by a lot of scholarly philosophical work. (But not all Arminians are open theists, as many would say that people freely choose but God still knows the future.)
Here’s a blog post/website that explores this.
Process theology is a bit similar to open theism in that it modifies some of the divine attributes from classical theism. But process theology is really concerned with God’s relationship to time. While classical theists consider God to be outside of time—not experiencing a succession of moments but instead creating and apprehending all of history in one instantaneous act of knowledge—process theologians view God as being timebound. God thus experiences both time and, amazingly, change.
Many Bible-loving theologians embrace this process view because of how often God appears to change Their mind in scripture.
One of the features of both process theology and open theism is their emphasis on God being non-coercive. God persuades and loves but does not decree what people will choose nor overpower their agency. These two approaches both tend to focus on God’s presence with us, especially in our suffering.
Here’s a podcast episode with a popular young process theologian.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sticking with this nerdy reflection. I’ll close with a very brief story that illustrates another way I think of God. I’m an editor at the Christian Century magazine, and our publisher Peter Marty recently wrote an opinion piece about coincidence. In the thought-provoking little essay, he suggested that we should learn to embrace weird coincidences not as God’s preordained meddling, but as features of a sometimes-random universe.
I liked Peter’s piece, but I also liked a critical letter we received in response. Specifically, I liked the way the writer (Barbara from Colorado) referred to the Divine. She wrote, “one of the better ways to name what some of us call God is the mystery we can trust.”
The mystery we can trust. No matter which theological approach we take, and no matter which beliefs we land on, part of faith and religion and spirituality and God is mystery. We wait for the birth of the Christ child, Immanuel, God with us.
The mystery we can trust.
