Talking of God

MOST people think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. But in fact, it is hard to think about God. Many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it.
They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a ‘being’ at all, and that we really don’t fully know what we mean when we say that he is ‘good’, ‘wise’ or ‘intelligent’. People of faith know in theory that God is utterly transcendent, but they seem to assume that they know exactly who ‘he’ is and what he thinks, loves and expects.
All that we know and experience of God – the God of Israel and Jesus Christ – is that this God desires a unique relationship with us which does not in any way enhance God but fundamentally changes us.
We tend to tame and domesticate God’s ‘otherness’. We regularly ask God to bless our nation, save our Queen, cure our sickness or give us a fine day for the picnic. Politicians quote God to justify their policies, and terrorists commit atrocities in his name. We beg God to support ‘our’ side in an election or a war, even though our opponents are also God’s children and the object of his love and care.
There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive.
In some ways the modern God resembles the God of remote antiquity; a theology that was either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept. Many people in the pre-modern world knew that it was very difficult indeed to speak about God.
Some of the greatest Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians made it clear that while it was important to put our ideas about the divine into words, these doctrines were man-made and, therefore, were bound to be inadequate.
They devised spiritual exercises that
deliberately subverted normal patterns of thought and speech to help the faithful understand that the words we use to describe mundane things were simply not suitable for God. ‘He’ was not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we could understand.
We could not even say that God ‘existed’, because our concept of existence was too limited. Some of the sages preferred to say that God was ‘Nothing’ because God was not another being. You certainly could not read your scriptures literally, as if they referred to divine facts.
“No one has seen God: it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” John 1.18 The Good News is that in Christ Jesus we have the incarnation of God. He shows us what God is like and what we can become with his help. Through him, with him and in him, we find the fullness of life we were created to enjoy. 2/4/10

PS We need to be careful when talking of God. We know so little, but what we do know through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is crucial.
Peter Knott SJ