I actually mean to talk about the existence of a personal God, and how I think I don’t believe in one, but “Personal Jesus” is the name of a Depeche Mode song, and I like Depeche Mode. Now watch this, which isn’t about Depeche Mode at all, but is a video by Rob Bell, a prominent emergent Christianity writer/pastor.
The idea of a personal God that loves me is a fantastic, thrilling idea. I find it incredibly compelling. Rob Bell’s video makes me cry. I would like it to be true. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it is.
In his book, Finding Faith, Brian McLaren (another prominent emergent writer) discusses the choice between belief in a personal God versus an impersonal God and he quite lightly dismisses the latter as a fool’s notion. It’s interesting, because Finding Faith is otherwise a surprisingly even-handed. I mean, McLaren is definitely doing his best to help his reader figure out how to believe in Jesus, so he has an agenda, but even so he gives reasonably fair credit and acknowledgement to contrary ideas.
But not to this one. Why not? Like I said, he quickly dismisses the idea by saying that since God must be higher than us, and since we have personality and the ability to relate meaningfully to each other, then it doesn’t make sense for God to not be the same, only better. Like if we have personality he must have some sort of superpersonality. A similar theme runs through much of C. S. Lewis’s work. I guess it’s a fine enough idea, but it falls into what I believe is a trap: it acknowledges God’s transcendent nature, and then attempts to define him in comprehensible terms. Or rather, comprehensible terms plus. Where we have personality, he has personality like ours, but better in a way we can’t imagine. In my opinion, it’s an easy cop-out and ultimately reduces the Transcendent into the quasi-transcendent, which is not transcendent at all. The incomprehensible becomes the almost comprehensible, and thus really just another kind of comprehensible. Transcendence in quantity only.
Basically, Brian McLaren is saying that he thinks that his transcendent God should be so, and therefore must be so. I’m not convinced, mostly because I think if God exists, he is probably fairly resistent to our feeble attempts to corral him, measure him, and define him into something much smaller than he actually is. And I don’t think we really get to weigh in with our notions of “should” on the specifications of the supreme being. Although we certainly try (myself included).
In the end, I do not believe in a personal God because I don;t have the one piece of evidence that would be convincing: actual interaction with God. I pray, he doesn’t answer. I try to have conversations with him, he doesn’t talk back. I don’t even really have any assurance that he’s listening (other than my impressive array of “shoulds”). If God exists, he does not seem to interact with me in any way that would imply personality. And I’ve tried (and will honestly continue to try) from my end.
I guess other people claim to interact with God, and I can’t really refute what they claim, but it has never happened to me, so I’m going to have to move forward with what I’ve got.
Sailing to Byzantium 
I’m of two minds about the Divine these days.
My first thought is that God or Gods are an artifact of human consciousness. In this case, the Divine is an experience of an internal mental state like the experience of love, anger, or fear. God would then be intimately personal because each human consciousness holds its own God. When that human consciousness changes or ceases, so too does its God. The personal flavor of God is then rooted in his mirroring of our selves back to us. God then is created in the image of each human being, male or female created they Him or Her.
Or perhaps the Divine represents a reality outside of our consciousness. Something outside of our heads causes our experiences of awe and connectedness. In this case it seems that to be a human conceit to believe that we are created in its image. We would seem to have the same relationship to God as everything else. If we are children of God, then so are the flies and fishes, the wind and rocks.
It seems that we project human personality onto the root of the world because we experience our world through the lens of a personality. I find it highly improbable that the source of all being resembles us in any great detail. Human beings are then no more or less special to God than everything else. We’re just one particular phenomenon at one tiny sliver of time on one inconsequentially small rock in the unfathomable, empty immensity of the universe. The universe spent billions of years without humanity. I doubt that it missed us. Someday, humanity will cease to exist as we know it. Either a worldwide catastrophe will wipe out all complex lifeforms or we’ll have evolved into something new. Will the universe miss us then? It is the height of athropocentrism to see human personality at the root of reality.
In either case, there seems to be a real experience at the root of our belief in the Divine. We each experience it differently through the unique lenses of our selves. We’ve enshrined our experiences of whatever God is in various religions. The original purpose of religion might have been to collect and share all we knew about Divinity: what the experience was and how to trigger it. But religion has taken on a life of its own. Religion no longer serves just that purpose. By embellishing on the experience that started it all, we lose sight of what the Divine is and is not. Religion seems to be more of an impediment to experiencing the Divine than a help in many cases. In other words, we’ve entombed God in religion.
I am inclined to agree with you completely.
I am having similar thoughts about whether or not God is “personal” and have, in the last few months, stepped down from a Deacon’s post in my UK baptist church because I am having trouble with doctrine and some aspects of belief.
I have to say to Jonathan that perhaps one of the ways we are made in the image of God is in the sense that we are innately aware of moral absolutes and have free choice to do right or wrong.
There is nothing in revelation (the Bible) that describes God as a man, rather He is described as an omnipotent Spirit. That sort of being could not be further from what we are, earthbound, fairly impotent creatures.
So perhaps have to experience God intuitively rather than objectively, after all one cannot measure a spirit, or see a spirit but perhaps one can “hear” a spirit in some senses?
I think I understand where you’re coming. I, however, also question whether absolute morality and free will are also human inventions. When I start to investigate the details of those ideas, the way that contradictions and paradoxes arise tastes just like the those that arise for a personal God. Those ideas seem to have our fingerprints all over them. I tend to believe that absolute morality and free will are both just figments of our imagination.
Thinking of God as an immaterial spirit still makes him an object, something that can be found “out there”. (God as a spirit isn’t as clearly indicated in the books of the Bible as you may think. The corporeal nature of God is is a key LDS doctrine, so they collect biblical verses to support this position. Most of those scriptures are probably leftovers from when the Semitic gods were seen like powerful human beings, but the case can be made from the Bible that God is corporeal.) At least when I think of the afterlife and how we are supposed to continue to exist as spirits, that conjures up images of me as an immaterial object. If my existence as a spirit parallels God’s existence as a spirit, then God must be a separate spiritual object. I doubt that if God can be said to exist that we would ever be able to point to something and say “That over there is God.” I’m much more inclined toward some sort of pantheism or panentheism.
Hi Jonathan,
there are numerous scriptures which say “…the spirit of God came upon him…” and in Genesis God is described as a spirit hovering over the waters. Also the New testament in Joh 4:24 “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” I don’t know anything about the LDS view on this so couldn’t comment except to say that they show all the signs of being a cult and one should be cautious about anything that they say.
As for moral absolutes being human inventions you have disproved your own argument when you say
“When I start to investigate the details of those ideas, the way that contradictions and paradoxes arise tastes just like the those that arise for a personal God. Those ideas seem to have our fingerprints all over them. I tend to believe that absolute morality and free will are both just figments of our imagination.
That is what you would expect if man has devised a form of morality but the fact is we all know that it is morally wrong to lie. People who dispute this will have to explain to me why they cover up the fact that they are lying. You may say that it is because of the fear of punishment but I would retort that everybody is ashamed of lying even when there is no likelihood of them being punished for it.
I’m not sure where you are coming from when you say that “free will is a figment of our imagination”. We either have free will or we do not. We can either choose how to act in a given situation or we cannot. This is a matter of fact and not of speculation.
Difficult as it is to “picture” God we have to remember that He is completely other, completely outside of our experience and not within the created universe. I like to think of the omnipresent nature of God as being like an invisible substance (e.g. a gaseous substance) that fills the universe and all that is outside of it. God is certainly described in the bible as a God who is near at hand. | think that we are saturated in God and could in a sense “inhale” his spiritual life. I think that is partly what Jesus meant when He said the Kingdom of God has come upon you, it is literally all around us.
Those bible passages that say we will see God are most probably meaning see in the sense of understanding and experiencing Him directly rather that indirectly as we do now.
Regards
Bob
Questions about the afterlife are confusing because the common view of people living on as spirits is not the biblical view. The Bible talks about a physical resurrection and spiritual bodies, i.e. bodies filled with the spirit of God living and reigning with Him here on earth.
While Mormonism is my religious background (a faith that I no longer follow), I’m not really asking you to consider Mormonism. I pointed to a list of Biblical passages that could be interpreted to say that God has a body (which only incidentally is Mormon). You seem to interpret these passages metaphorically. That’s fine. What I want to get across is that your interpretation is not The Only True Interpretation of the Bible. The collection of books which we call the Bible is ambiguous enough that there are many equally reasonable interpretations.
… we all know that it is morally wrong to lie. People who dispute this will have to explain to me why they cover up the fact that they are lying.
Is it absolutely immoral to lie? I can think of many instances where I feel lying would be the moral thing to do. For example, when the Gestapo ask you if you’re hiding any Jews in your house, would it be moral to tell them the truth about the Jewish family in your attic? There are so many exceptions that I don’t think it’s accurate to say lying is categorically immoral.
I’m not sure where you are coming from when you say that “free will is a figment of our imagination”. We either have free will or we do not. We can either choose how to act in a given situation or we cannot. This is a matter of fact and not of speculation.
The deeper we look into the question of free will, the more our concepts come undone. Even a solid definition is elusive. I don’t know what your definition is, but there is a great deal of debate about whether or not we have free will and even what free will is. I wouldn’t call free will a fact.
I believe that our behavior is determined by the laws of physics. We have free will only in the same sense that a robot has free will. A robot can make choices based on its internal programming. We can do likewise. A robot’s choices cannot deviate from the dictates of its programming. Neither can we. We are certainly more sophisticated and complex than any robot created so far, but there seems to be an isomorphism between how we and robots make choices.
Anyway, the concepts of a personal God, absolute morality, and free will all seem like constructs borne of human misunderstanding. The closer we look, the less coherent and realistic they seem. The world makes more sense to me when I don’t try to fit it into these little boxes.
I forgot to mention that the Biblical passages that I was referring to as remnants of early anthropomorphic deities are those that refer to the finger, face, mouth, feet, back, and voice of God. Or Genesis 18 where Yaweh visits and converses with Abraham like any other man would. If we read these passages innocently, without the assumptions of our own religions, we see that the writers of the books of the Bible often thought of God as human in form.
Not to mention that all those Biblical verses about God being “spirit” aren’t really exclusive in nature. All they say is that spirit is part of what God is. They never rule out a material God.
Sorry Kullervo, I know a Bible-bash between LDS and Protestant reads on scripture isn’t remotely what this post was about.
True, but today I’m feeling like a permissive dictator, and I’ve pretty much already made up my mind on the actual issue in the post. So, bash away.