In the beginning, God created man in his own image. Sound familiar? That idea has been circulating for at least four thousand years.
How about this one: in the beginning, man created God in his own image. Not quite as old, but popular enough. The exact formulation is essentially modern, but some Greeks and Romans were saying something very like it about their gods better than 2,000 years back.
So, option A or option B? One or the other is almost certainly right, but it’s unlikely that any of us will know the answers in our lifetimes (Warning: this statement void in case of rapture). Does it matter which idea is right? In a personal sense, there’s little that could be more important. In a political sense… maybe not as much as you think.
But even if you’re B all the way, it would pay for you to have some understanding of the people in the A camp, who this God character is, and how he became such a pain in the keester.
Some weeks ago, before every blog turned into the Fitzgerald Alert System, there was a flurry of God diaries. That’s good, because theological questions have been at the heart of societal and political movements since there were politics to move. Unfortunately, the tenor of many of the diaries came down to theological equivalent of “I know you are, but what am I?”
The trouble with statements such as “there is no God, and you know it,” is that it leaves the professed believer only three outs.
1) The believer is a liar, claiming a faith not really held
2) The believer is a simpleton, unable to give up superstition for reason
3) The believer is self-deluded, avoiding the unpleasanteries of reality (such as our own temporary nature) with an imaginary friend in the sky.
When you start your argument from such a position, is it any wonder you win few converts? Of course, the atheist who proselytizes in this way isn’t really interested in making converts. Like the fire and brimstone variety of Christian, this sort of argument is all about making yourself feel good by belittling someone else.
From the other side, professing that you need merely have “faith” is equally unlikely to gain points. First, because it’s often taken as tantamount to calling the non-believer a heartless bastard. Second, because it doesn’t mean anything to someone who is not already playing on the believer’s team.
Atheists and believers have a tendency to talk past each other, to the great frustration of both sides. That’s because they’re coming from different reference frames — and don’t go thinking it’s as simple as “yeah, one of them believes in logic and the other doesn’t.” Religious people have, and always have had, a great interest in applying logic to their beliefs. Many of the arguments of today are just shadows of fights that went on inside the religious communities hundreds, or thousands of years back (which is part of what can make it so frustrating when someone shows up one of the hoariest old chestnuts of argument and imparts it with a great dollop of “take that, idiot”). However, in discussing religion, even words you’ve used all your life become treacherous. What does it mean for something to be “true?” What is “real?” What constitutes “proof?” To paraphrase the immortal words of Edie Brickell, better get back into the shallow water before this gets too deep.
One point that’s raised over and over by critics of traditional religion is the cruelty, pettiness, and selfishness reflected in many religious texts, particularly the texts which follow that god worshiped by old Abram. To understand why believers and atheists see the same text in such a radically different way, it’s worth making a little time trip along the events of the Bible.
If you’ve got you’re life preserver buckled, let’s wind up the Way Back Machine, and set it for way the heck B.C. (or BCE. Your choice.)
In the beginning…
Before there were metal tools, before there was agriculture, even before Strom Thurmond, human beings conceived of a god who was the ruler of all things. This god hung the stars, caused the wind to blow, and created every creature. However, this god was completely beyond both human reach and understanding. There were no ceremonies to placate this god, no temples in which to offer sacrifices, no stories of this god’s coming or going or any fights against icky monsters.
And so, this almighty, all powerful god was forgotten.
That’s the origin of the God concept as postulated by theologian Father Wilhelm Schmidt. Father Schmidt studied “primitive” societies, and concluded that religion begins with a sort of vague monotheism, and only then moves toward “spirit worship,” and from there to polytheism. That sounds counter to the history we all learned in school (Sunday and otherwise). Isn’t it sort of a retrograde view of religion? It’s supposed to be spirits first, polytheism second, monotheism last, not the other way around.
Schmidt’s thesis is that a pure monotheism is unsatisfying. This all powerful “sky god” is so remote, so inaccessible, that he’s of little interest. Like Aristotle’s ideal “unmoved mover,” this is God reduced to a nearly mathematical concept. This God makes less impact on people’s lives than the value of the fourth digit in pi.
To replace this concept, societies all over the world developed a set of gods to split up some of the roles of the original absentee landlord. You know the drill. God of war. Goddess of the harvest. Demigod of hairy moles. While almost all of them retained a God in Chief at the top of the heap, they dialed this guy down a few notches from absolute omnipotence. It’s a lot more comfortable that way.
Enter Abram.
The way we all learned this story in Sunday School (or Hebrew School, or Madrasa) is that Abram wanders about in the desert, makes a deal to throw all his chips behind one god, gets a new name, and becomes the world’s first monotheist. But we have a great tendency to read these guys from our own perspective. Abram was no monotheist, and he didn’t become one when he changed his letterhead to say Abraham. In his wandering before and after hitting the city of Ur, Abraham readily threw over whatever gods he had worshipped before and adopted the pantheon in control over his new home. Then he gave up the city life and headed out into the Canaanite wilderness. Like most other cultures in the area, Abraham’s new neighbors had a council of gods overseen by one really sharp guy. It was this god that Abraham backed, a god named El Shaddai. The name has been translated as both “God of the Mountains,” “God of the Untilled Fields,” and “Mighty God.” Likely the meaning was something close to “God of the Everything Outside the City.” The Canaanites assigned the day-to-day duties of most god-man interaction to lesser characters like Baal, Anat, and Dagon (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!). El Shaddai got what’s left. El’s what you remains of the old sky god once a few more human accessible companions had been assembled.
In pitching his lot with El, Abraham didn’t cease to believe in other gods. He did, however, cease to worship them. While it’s not monotheism as we think of it today, it was an important step down the road. Similarly, Isaac and Jacob also made commitments to worship a single god no matter the situation — though it’s none too clear that they were backing the same horse as Abraham.
What made the semi-monotheism of the patriarchs more tolerable, more appealing, than the old sky god cult? Personal involvement. Abraham shares a meal when God stops by his tent to chat with a pair of companions (these days, we think of these other two folks as angels, but no doubt when the story was first being recorded, they were intended to be other members of the Canaanite pantheon). Jacob actually spends a night in a wrestling match with El.
Though they still believe in a variety of gods (all lumped under the name “elohim”), the patriarchs have already begun to attribute great power to El, while at the same time holding a direct, face to face relationship. El asks of these men the devotion they would normally split among all the elohim. In exchange, he promises them that they will be better protected and cared for than those who change their allegiance depending on the circumstance. Pretty good deal all around.
It wasn’t going to last.
The God Spiral
If a distant, impersonal God makes people lose interest, a direct, personally-involved God makes them extremely uncomfortable. It’s like having your mom along on all your dates. Each succeeding generation that followed Jacob had less direct contact with their ancestor’s God. By the time the Hebrews headed down to Egypt, there’s every reason to believe that they were functional polytheists again, spending as much time on sacrifices to Baal as to stubborn old El.
When we take the next big step, Moses meets a God very unlike the fellow who shared bread with Abraham. This God is not human, not even vaguely. This is the burning bush God, the pillar of fire God, the God who you can’t even look on without dying. God’s got a new name, too. He tells Moses to call him “Yahweh” (though he goes through some pains to claim that he’s still the same God who knew Abraham and Jacob).
With the new attitude and the new name, more changes are coming. God promised to help Abraham have a stack of descendents, but his deal with Abraham at first seems very personal. Now Yahweh makes this “covenant” a group experience, explicitly extending his coverage to all the Hebrews. In exchange, he extracts some new requirements as the Hebrews march out of Egypt toward a new home.
Here’s another thing they always get wrong in Sunday School: when the impatient Aaron helps to create the Golden Calf it wasn’t because they were forgetting the God of their ancestors and traipsing off after some Egyptian pretender. Nope. The Golden Calf was the symbol of El. Aaron even says it, “here’s the God that freed you from Egypt.” The Israelites were trying to get back to the God of Abraham. Only God doesn’t want them to go back.
When Yahweh orders the calf smashed up and the people punished, it’s the announcement of a new phase. God is going mystical. Abraham sat across a lunch from God. Jacob wrestled him in the dark. Moses sat in the mists of God’s presence. From now on, no one will get that close.
For the next several hundred years, God will remain a remote, enigmatic figure who speaks to prophets in dreams or in Elisha’s still small voice. He’ll be worshipped through elaborate ritual, guarded by an arcane hierarchy of priests. Having been uncomfortably close to God, God is now slipping away.
That’s the cycle that repeats through history and through cultures. A close, human-centric God is gradually replaced by more remote, unknowable deity. To address this, cultures erect ladders of priests stretching up to heaven, and create tiers of lesser spiritual beings to form a bridge to Earth. Bishops and cardinals. Cherubim and seraphim. No matter how elaborate this attempt to ford the gap becomes, eventually the structures fall, and God and man have to come face to face again.
As the World Turns
The Hebrew School students can turn off here (though I hope they won’t). This next phase could be about the embodiment of Krishna, Mohamed wrestling with Gabriel, or even Sidhartha and his time under the tree, but I’m going to talk about that peculiar man from Galilee, Jesus.
Jesus appears at one of those times when all the structures are falling. The temple cult is in disarray and disrespect. God has not kept Israel from being swallowed up in the Roman Empire, the temple leaders are drowning in legalisms and procedures, and Yahweh seems very distant. The world has passed through the philosophical storms of the Axial Age, and there is a terrific yearning on many parts of the planet for something new.
This wandering Galilean (who was probably not a carpenter, darn it), offers just the right medicine. He’s one of several itinerant rabbis shouting from the hilltops around Jerusalem, and has apparently spent considerable time hanging around with another firebrand of the time, John. However, when Jesus gets his message tuned up, he suffuses John’s “get your act together before God gets you” proto-brimstone, with an incredible message of social relevance and reversal. When asked, Jesus sums up the law as loving God and loving other people. If Jesus’ own message was to be summed up, it’s this: the first shall be last.
Jesus is all about overturning social conventions and knocking down barriers. Occupation, sex, age, race, class, wealth — all the things that divide the people of his age (and ours) — are sent reeling. Being rich is bad. Being important is bad. Jesus is the guy who shows up at a black tie event in jeans. Then he invites the catering staff to sit down and eat. There are few books you could read more radical than the Gospel of Matthew.
The message of the gospels is an incredibly progressive message. It’s not who you are that counts, it’s what you do. Jesus goes even further, calling on people not just to act, but to think about why they act. He never asks for brainless, rote imitation. He calls on people to make a huge, disquieting shift, to give up their lives and follow him. Not follow him to death, but follow him into the idea that a life spent in service to others is better than a life acquiring wealth. It’s such a wrenching, difficult idea, that people still work hard to convince themselves that Jesus must have meant something else. Surely.
After Jesus’ death, many of his followers will come to believe that he is an actual manifestation of God, that God has given them a chance to sit face to face with him and share a meal, just as he did with Abraham. That idea will persist. Unfortunately, it will sometimes come to overshadow what Jesus actually said.
The Moving Unmoved
All this may seem like a huge aside from the initial point about atheists and believers, and in a way, it is. But having illustrated the enormous changes that God has gone through over the course of history, let me say this: God is unchanging.
Huh? How can El Shaddai and his traveling partners be the same as Yahweh on the mountain? How can that guy be Yahweh Sabboath, lord of the armies, who leads Israel in all that middle of the book “smiting?” How can any of these violent old bozos be conflated with the Loving Father of Christ and with social radical Jesus? Even if they are all the same guy, how could anyone maintain that God hadn’t changed?
That’s not how believers see it. God hasn’t changed, people have. Much as some might maintain otherwise, neither religious ideas nor morals are fixed points. Slavery once seemed okay to a lot of folks (Jesus included). Whipping an animal to death in the streets wouldn’t have raised eyebrows not so long ago. The idea of a God who offered personal gain for personal commitment seemed good to nomads living at the edge of a wilderness. The idea of a God who was fiercely partisan, and who ordered the death of enemies seemed normal enough to people who were surrounded by other cults, many of them just as violent (when some of your neighbors are still involved with child sacrifice, your own little peccadilloes don’t seem quite so bad).
Instead of reading the story the way I put it down the first time, try it this way.
People from the beginning of time have had a sense of the numinous, the idea that there is something more. Something not only beyond our current understanding, but beyond any understanding. When people have sought this something — in meditation, in prayer, in ritual — many have found it profoundly moving. Many have sensed this other as a being, as something that both notices and responds to our presence. As God.
As people began to develop civilization, they built rules around all aspects of their lives. That’s what allowed more people to live together, to trade together, to fight together. It took rules to develop standard weights, coinage, and all the trappings of civilized life. These rules also extended into that sense of God, framing this experience in words and shared concepts that served to bind together communities. Some of those frames worked (hey, don’t think of a burning bush!), some didn’t.
At times, human beings found this God to be so close they could touch him. Could deal with him on an extremely intimate scale. At times, this concept of God was harnessed to the power of the state, using the glue that the shared “frame” provided as a means of holding the community together in the face of crisis. At times, this shared idea of God was used as a savage tool of destruction.
As morality changed, God’s fit into the social frame also changed. When society was about survival, God was about bringing the rain. When society was about fighting the neighbors, God was about armies. When society developed a concern for fairness, God became the champion of these new concerns.
If reading this sounds like a confirmation that man created God, that God is nothing but a big mirror in the sky, reflecting our own attitudes… well, you’re half right. We’ve often read into God what we wanted to see. On the other hand, people have received messages from God — like those of Jesus — that were profoundly upsetting and downright dangerous to their health.
If you try to read the Bible as if it’s the history of God, you’ll think it chaotic, inconsistent, filled with meaningless violence, and weighted by nonsense. It’s not that book. The Bible is the history of men and women. Of people trying to come to grips with the concept of God. Sometimes they caught a glimpse. Just as often they struggled on in the dark.
Through all this, God was unchanged. The name he gave Moses, the name he uttered from the burning bush, was Yahweh. Yahweh simply means “I am.” God is. What we do with him, is up to us.
As for truth, it’s all true. The garden. The flood. Job on his pile of rubble. Did it happen? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Not real. Not as integral to many people’s lives as their first kiss or the color of their baby’s eyes.
Seeking Compromise
The gulf between atheists and believers may be the most intractable gulf imaginable — wide enough to make the split over abortion rights look like a sidewalk crack. When I look back over this little essay, it’s clear enough to me that I haven’t even managed to drop a pebble into that void. Try as I might, I stand irrevocably on the believer’s side of the divide, and my best attempts to explain why come off like an arthritic man making shadow puppets.
I can only offer this to those who are really irritated by all the “God talk.” Remember the saying “God is love?” Take it seriously. Call it the “Charlie Brown Approach” to religious talk, only where Charlie and pals always hear wa-wa-wa from the adults, whenever you hear “God” or “Jesus,” just substitute the word “love.”
Think Love.
One nation, under Love.
Love Saves.
Does that sound so bad? I know there are many who will be quick to point out that many of our political opponents use God as a bettering ram to try and force through ideas that have little to nothing to do with love. All those things I said in the last section, about how people could use a shared concept of God for destructive purposes, apply now as well as in the past. There are certainly plenty of confessed believers who don’t act from love, who don’t practice what they preach, and who seem just as bad (or worse) than any jerk you’ve ever met.
You shouldn’t be surprised by that. There is no human being who makes any claim to morality who is not frequently found in breach of their own moral code. The only people who are not hypocrites, are monsters.
Think of this as an olive branch from the other side of the thought war. God is not your enemy. Neither are believers. Instead, the shared experience and references of those who believe can be a tremendous tool. Like Archimedes lever, this is an instrument that can move the world. It can server the progressive cause as well as the people trying to push us backwards.
Now, let’s roll up our sleeves, put our heads together, and go smite those guys on the other side (metaphorically speaking, of course).
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