The God beyond

Karen Armstrong in her newest tome, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 75), notes that the Jewish theologian Philo, an Alexandrian contemporary of Jesus, argued that knowing God's essence was impossible. However, one could know God's power by observing God's actions in the world.

She then traces two thousand years of human attempts to describe, to define, the sacred reality that transcends human existence. Reason, faith, and science all fail in their attempts to define that transcendent, sacred reality.

Some moderns have reached a point where anything that defies exact definition, direct observation, and precise measurement lacks credibility. Such views embody a form of scientism, belief in the scientific method to answer all questions and to provide all knowledge. Scientism, as with all forms of belief, relies on unproven assumptions. For scientism, the most important unproved foundational presumption is that the scientific method can in fact answer all questions and provide all knowledge.

In contrast, Armstrong’s journey from nun to popular theologian seems to have brought her full circle: from believer to agnostic to one who proclaims the existence of an indefinable, transcendent sacred reality.

A group that I lead in the parish I serve is studying Bishop John Shelby Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). Spong, in his own inimitable, attention grabbing style, tries to give voice to a God beyond any human construct, a God known in love rather than in God's aseity, i.e., existence originating from and having no source other than itself. Spong contends that the Jesus experience became normative for Christians because people experienced the transcendent sacred reality through their encounter with Jesus, for first generation disciples through the historical Jesus and for successive generation disciples through previous disciples. The god whom humans can define is necessarily an idol of human fabrication and not the elusive transcendent reality known through its actions rather than in its aseity.

Recognizing that language about God is necessarily and inherently metaphorical (or mythical) may shatter treasured idols and creedal formulations. However, that recognition marks passing beyond those idols and formulations to move closer to the transcendent sacred reality that mysteriously and unconditionally embraces us with life-giving love.