Is God A Good Idea?

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill
Delivered April 20, 2008 at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY

If I gave everyone here a crayon and a piece of paper, and asked each of you to draw a picture of God as you imagined God in your growing up years – as you were taught to think about God or picture God when you were a child, perhaps in church or in the temple of your youth – my guess is that most of us here, 90% of us, would not have any trouble whatsoever sketching our memory of God’s image on a page.

And my guess is that most of us, 90% of us, would draw very similar pictures.

Essentially, they would be variations of Michaelangelo’s Old Man of the Flowing Beard Creator God as He looks down on us from the Sistine Chapel. Or, depending on whether we grew up in a good mainstream American Protestant church, we might picture a younger version of Jesus as the Caucasian Good Shepherd with shining blue eyes.And now if I asked you to turn that piece of paper over, and sketch an image of your current-day concept of God, the way you currently picture or imagine God, what do you suppose would happen?My guess is that 90% of us would have blank pages. Some of us, no doubt, because God has ceased to be an important reality in our lives. But even for those of us who still hold some belief in a divine reality, even for those of us who dare to pray on occasion, the once-concrete personal image of God has evolved into an all-but-impossible-to- picture abstraction, hard to name let alone image, hard to describe let alone represent.I want to be very clear from the first sentence of this sermon that the question I am considering this morning is not “Is There A God?” Ever since the Enlightenment debates of the 18th century, that phrasing of the question rarely leads anyone into spiritually fruitful territory.Since the existence of God is empirically neither provable nor unprovable, arguments over that yes-or-no proposition do little to convince skeptics, and even less to discourage believers. Such arguments resolve nothing.A more useful spiritual exploration, I think, comes from asking a more open-ended question. We might more reasonably ask ourselves if our traditional notions of God still make any sense, either as an explanation of life’s purpose, or as a guide for purposeful living. As we arrive here on the cusp of the twenty-first century, is God still a good idea?In what ways does this Divine idea continue to shape us and shape our culture for better or worse? And if the idea of God is a reflection of cultural thinking and cultural imagination, to what extent are we really free, regardless of the culture at large, to imagine a new conception of God any time we want? An idea, say, more in line with our own image and likeness, more reflective of our changing mores or political and social sensibilities? Does God change with the times?Where can we begin even a short sermon-length exploration of the idea of God? The first thing to keep in mind in any discussion about God in our culture is that God is a Very Big Idea.Centuries ago, Saint Anselm’s classical definition of God was “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (quoted in Gordon D. Kaufman’s God The Problem, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1972, p.90)Thus, for example, God had long been regarded in the West as “the Creator of the heavens and the earth.” In this notion, whatever exists depends upon God for its being. There is no larger or more powerful idea of God than this ancient one of God as Author and Cause of All Creation.In one of our favorite Unitarian Universalist hymns, we sing of this image of God as “Author of Creation…Perfect in power, love and purity…Who was and is and evermore shall be.” In our reading from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita this morning, we read, “I am the beginning, the middle, and the end in creation… the Self that dwells in the heart of every mortal creature… In this world nothing animate or inanimate exists without me.”In the Bible, the most common appellation of God is “the Lord.” It connotes a Patriarchal God’s sovereignty over the world, God’s guidance of historical and natural process. As Harvard theologian, Gordon Kaufman points out, those who take this notion of God seriously apprehend all of life as participating in “the reality of God.” For them, the idea of God is reality, “the most Real of all the realities of experience and the world.” (Kaufman, p.92) In this view, God is the Agent and Creator on which all else depends.That is why, for those who believe in this way, debates about whether God really exists are almost incomprehensible. Remember some years back Time magazine asked Reverend Billy Graham for his reaction during the “God is Dead” controversy, and he replied, “God isn’t dead, I talked to him this morning!” It is safe to say, for one of Reverend Graham’s style of believing, it is impossible to imagine any reality apart from God.To many people, God is primarily an idea. For others, however, the idea of God is a personal reality, a reality who can be described in such personal terms as “loving” and “righteous” and “forgiving,” indeed even as “father” and “Lord.” (We’ll come to “Mother” and “Goddess” in a moment).Moreover, the world created by this God is infused with meaning and purpose as part of a Divine plan for all of life. “When God is taken to be real and significant, life is perceived, ordered and lived in certain characteristic ways… Attitudes, values, institutions, and beliefs are engendered by and with such faith.” (Kaufman, p.98)The second point to keep in mind in any discussion about God, however, is that the idea of God presents us with a lot of problems.Linguistically and semantically, we hardly know what the word “God” means anymore, and that’s just one problem we face. The conception of God as a Being “Up there in the heavens” who rules the world – the masculine Lord God of the flowing gray beard who looks down on us from the Sistine Chapel – this God is almost inaccessible to the modern mind. Our modern Western consciousness is now impacted by transcultural expressions of the sacred and the divine, by “more subtle Eastern concepts of divine reality and by more robustly primitive Western notions of divine power.” (Kaufman, p.12)Certainly, as Unitarian Universalists we want to honor and welcome the varied multicultural expressions of the godly and the holy. And yet we are not quite sure whether all these additional influences and eclectic referents help us or hinder us in the end in our efforts to recognize and revere the sacred center of our lives.So we struggle (as a sophisticated religious community ought to struggle) to understand new challenges brought into our midst by those who seek to broaden the old exclusive, masculine imagery by calling us to Feminist theological concepts of the Goddess and Earth-based images of the divine.Princeton theologian, Karen Armstrong’s impressive and scholarly and very readable work, “A History of God: The 4,000 year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1993) reminds us that in the 4,000 year history of the three great monotheistic religions of Western culture, the word “God” is only a symbol of a reality that ineffably transcends it, a Reality that includes the ultimate mystery, beauty, and value in life. (see Armstrong, op cit., p.396)Most of us who grew up in religious homes, says Armstrong, had our ideas about God formed in childhood, ideas which did not keep abreast of our growing knowledge in other disciplines. Most of us carried very immature notions of God into our adulthood. And when these immature ideas do not meet the test of adult crises of faith, we tend to abandon them, rather than adjust them to what we learn about living and dying along the way.I know that this was true in my own life, for example. Like most of you, no doubt, I was taught to believe in God as a Supreme Being “out there” somewhere, whose principal job, now that the world was fully created and set into motion, was to take an inordinate personal interest in my life, and respond, albeit in rather fickle
and mysterious ways, to my prayers and to my personal daily needs.I was twenty years old before the first really traumatic test of my faith in my childhood God arrived, and to my way of thinking at the time, God flunked the test badly. When one of my friends was killed in Viet Nam that year, my youthful trust in “the God out there” was shattered. The covenant of faith with God, that had seen me through childhood and adolescence, was demolished, I wanted nothing more to do with a God who could let such a terrible thing happen to my friend, let alone who allowed such terrible things to happen to good people every day in the world.The “death of God” in my young adult life left a “God-sized hole” in my heart for a number of years, but I had nothing to replace God with at the time.I was sure that I was inventing this experience, that I was the only person whom “the God out there” had ever disappointed, and that I was personally responsible somehow for God’s abandonment of my life.I came to think eventually that God was supposed to disappear with the arrival of maturity, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. God was one of those childish things, a childish way of understanding the world and how it worked. By the time I got out of college I was sure that mature people, educated people, scientific people, modern people did not need or believe in God. I thought that if “the God out there” did not exist then “a god in here” (in the heart) or a “god in here” (in the human mind) could not exist either.No one told me that God might be an idea, let alone that I was the keeper of this idea; that “the God in here” was potentially as limitless and as magnificent as my own religious imagination.When scholar Karen Armstrong started out on her exploration into the God-sized hole in her heart, she too made a similar surprising discovery.”I wish I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in religious life,” she writes.”It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear… that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high into my life, I should or could deliberately create a sense of God for myself…..I know now that others further along the religious path could have taught me that in an important sense God is the product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I find so inspiring.”Karen Armstrong’s book demonstrates that “the idea of God has a history, that it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings,” she says, “could be meaningless in another…. The statement ‘I believe in God’ only means something in context when proclaimed by a particular community.”As Gordon Kaufman of Harvard writes, “The conception of God as a Being “Up There in the heavens” who rules the world – the masculine Lord God of the flowing gray beard who looks down on us from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – this God is almost inaccessible to the modern mind. Our Western consciousness is now informed by transcultural expressions of the divine, by more subtle Eastern concepts of divine reality and by more robustly primitive Western notions of divine power.” (see Gordon D. Kaufman, God The Problem, Harvard Press, Cambridge, 1972, p.12)Over time in Western culture, our theologies have given us a hundred reworkings and reshapings of God to fit whatever century we’re in, to serve whatever crises and causes beckon. Besides the ancient notion of Yahweh, we’ve prayed to God the Father, the Creator, the God of History who stands outside and above the Cosmos of Creation. We turned to the God of the Philosophers; the God of suffering; the God of Providence; eventually the God of Liberation; the absent God of the Holocaust; the God of Mysticism. The Goddess of Matriarchy has re-emerged in Feminist thealogy.From the Personal God as a Being, we have reconceived God as Being Itself, the Ground of Being, Pure Immanence, Ultimate Concern. God as Omega Point, the God of Process. The God of vengeance, the God of Mercy, the God of Love. The God who has Died in the Twentieth Century. And the God who is eternal, the God of the human heart.Karen Armstrong underlines that “There is no unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’. …. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.”From the time of Freud’s psychological critique of belief in God as “immature projection” of the father image, and from the time of Marx’s sociological critique of religion as an “opiate of the masses,” there has been a strong liberal bias against the belief in God.But, as Armstrong’s scholarship argues, “there is an equally strong case to be made for arguing that Homo Sapiens is also Homo Religiosus. Men and women created religions about the same time they created the first works of art. The earliest religions expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world…. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something we have always done.”It is interesting to note that in every major poll taken every few years in America, between 97% and 99% of the population insist that they believe in God. And yet, we do not seem to exhibit much evidence of a society that believes in God; the behavioral signs in our culture are not reassuring. We do not currently exhibit much proof of a spiritually healthy society. In Europe, the churches are virtually empty, and there is a growing blankness where God once existed in the human consciousness. It was Jean Paul Sartre who first declared, “We have a God-shaped hole in the human consciousness where God had always been.”I would suggest to you this morning that mature religion is precisely about journeying into that “God-shaped hole in our hearts,” and over a lifetime of learning and exploration, discovering for ourselves that which is Godly and creative and eternal within the human spirit.The God of history, the “God out there,” may not be the god of the Twenty-first Century, who knows? This much is certain: the only God who will make the trip with us into the future is the God we carry with us in our hearts and in our minds. And that is a lot to think about.The ancient Greeks, you will recall, had a polytheistic world view wherein they honored and recognized many different gods and goddesses. Throughout their cities could be found various altars and little shrines set up to honor the different deities.In Athens, we know, in the Agora, the great marketplace at the heart of the city, there was always one such altar dedicated to “The Unknown God.” The Greeks acknowledged – with an honesty that modern religions could learn much from – that there might yet be some aspect of divinity that we human beings had not yet imagined or discovered.I think it well behooves us, whatever our convictions and certainties of faith, it is a reasonable act of humility to keep at least one candle burning at that altar to the unknown God, and to the divine possibility that it represents.How long has it been since you’ve tried to imagine God in your life? I’ll bet I know how you pictured God when you were a child. No doubt you’ve changed a lot since then. How do you picture God now?