Thesis #1: Theism as a way of defining God is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So most theological God talk is today meaningless unless a new way to speak of God is found. From my Twelve Theses drawn from the book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. If horses had gods, they would look like horses! That elementary insight is never fully embraced when human beings talk about God. We arrogantly suggest we can speak of what God actually is, when all we can do is describe our experience of God. This theological delusion prevents us from facing the fact that our "gods" look very much like expanded human beings. The argument that God is personal, because we experience God in personal ways, quickly descends to the conclusion that God is a divine person, who acts like a supernatural human being. The two assertions are not the same. The God thought of as a supernatural being is normally conceived of as a male figure living above the sky. We portray this deity sitting on a throne, keeping record books on the basis of which he judges the people. This supernatural being also acts to protect the people in danger. There are no atheists in foxholes, we say. He also is thought to enjoy human praises, to hear human petitions and to grant boons to petitioners. To do so, this Deity is sometimes said to act in miraculous, invasive ways. It is so obvious in these incidences that believers have simply expanded human qualities in order to reach an understanding of divinity. Human beings, we recognize, are limited in knowledge; but God, we say, is not limited, so we call God omniscient. God, unlike us, is deemed to possess infinite power, so we say that God is omnipotent. Human beings can be in only one place at a time, but God, not bound by such a limitation, is said to be omnipresent. Human beings are mortal. God we define as immortal. Surely the qualities that we have traditionally located in God are reminiscent of those things that mark an expanded human existence. This theistic God also seems to act like a tribal chieftain possessing miraculous power and using it for the benefit of a favored nation. In the biblical story God was said to work for Jewish goals visiting plague after plague on Egyptians. God split the Red Sea allowing the Hebrews to escape to safety, then closed it to drown the pursuing Egyptians. This God was clearly pro-Jewish! He fed the Jews in the wilderness with heavenly manna and quenched their thirst with water drawn from a rock. If the people were obedient to the divine will, this Deity, the chief priests and prophets said, could be counted on to fight their enemies so they could win their wars. As ancient people struggled with the exigencies of human life, they began to envision a time when the rule of this God would mark the life of the whole world. The painful and tragic elements of human life would disappear: the deaf would hear, the blind would see, the lame would walk and the dead would be raised. Facing the perils of our mortal struggles, people sought God's intervening power. These are the human hopes which form the content of our theistic definition of God. So deeply has this theistic content captured the common definition of God that one who rejects it is said to be an "a-theist." But this human God construct, this theistic definition of the deity, has fallen on difficult days as knowledge has expanded over the last 400 years. More and more things we once attributed to our invading, external deity are now understood without any reference to God. Sickness, we know today, results from germs, viruses or some physiological or hereditary weakness. It is not the work of a punishing deity. Cures come through antibiotics, surgery and chemotherapy, not from divine intervention. To assert otherwise is to be forced to explain why those who are not cured did not merit God's favor. As these divine explanations are pushed to the edges of life, by the advance of science God becomes what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has called the God of the gaps. That is, God is the explanation inserted into the gaps of human knowledge in order to explain the inexplicable. But with every new scientific discovery, the gaps that need a supernatural explanation have become thinner and thinner, and God becomes further and further removed from the center of life. Finally the distance becomes so great that God ceases to be a reality even in the minds of believers, and the drift into godlessness grows. Very quickly, after God no longer matters as a coping power, the dismissal of God follows. In many ways this is the situation in which modern men and women live today. Faith has been badly eroded. Religious explanations now seem neurotic. God has become a shaky hypothesis without any real work to do. God no longer sends the weather, heals the sick, fights our wars, or protects us from peril. There is little need for an unemployed deity in our world and so this deity is increasingly ignored. Theism ultimately gives way to atheism. But is theism the only way to understand God? I do not think so. Throughout western history a subterranean minority voice has always been part of Christianity which has never spoken of God in supernatural or theistic terms, as a superparent, or a divine Mr. Fix-it. That tradition is called mysticism. It sees God in the words of Rudolf Otto, as the "mysterium tremendum," the inexplicable presence, the symbol of transcendence, otherness, the emerging life force that produces an expanded consciousness. It portrays the deity in non-personalistic terms as the source of life, the source of love and the Ground of Being. It challenges that concept of God as a heavenly power relating to human beings as a parent relates to a child, creating passive dependency in the life of the worshiper. This mystical understanding of God calls its adherents out of childishness into a radical new maturity. It manifests itself in a human willingness to accept responsibility for our own actions, to see ourselves as lives through which the power of the divine can enter and shape human history. If one listens, one can hear echoes of this understanding of God even in the New Testament. Paul speaks of the God "in whom we live and move and have our being." The Johannine Christ is made to say "I have come that you might have life and that you might have it abundantly." Jesus is portrayed as arguing against a theistic understanding of God when he suggested that the people who perished when the tower of Siloam fell were not more guilty than those who survived. I believe that a case for the divinity of Christ can be made apart from the traditional supernatural framework of theism that defined Jesus as the incarnation of that external God who entered this world by way of a miraculous birth and departed by way of a cosmic ascension. The divinity of Jesus was first an experience which later was interpreted theistically. But the experience of God present in Jesus is not to be identified with supernatural myths that surrounded Jesus, but with the God experience that marked his existence. Jesus lived so fully that he revealed the Source of Life. He loved so completely that he revealed the Source of Love. He was so completely true to his own being in the way he lived out his own humanity that people saw in him the very Ground of all Being. That is why the ultimate Christian experience is captured in the Pauline exclamation "God was in Christ" that drives us to the meaning of the life of Jesus. Yes, I am convinced that there is a realm of spirit, transcendence and otherness beyond the limits of my physical existence. I use the word God to speak of this realm. I experience the inbreaking of this realm in those moments when life is expanded, when consciousness is enhanced and when eyes are opened to view dimensions of life beyond our normal boundaries. I do not expect a supernatural being from this realm to invade my world to accomplish some miraculous purpose. I do expect human life to make this realm known in the quality of our lives, in the wastefulness of our love and in the expansion of our being. I do believe that in this mysterious realm of the divine, our love and our caring can loose energy that embraces us, makes us whole, brings healing power, and invites us to share in that which is timeless. I further believe that those of us who know this reality are responsible for acting it out so that it impacts our world and transforms it, calling us into a new awareness of the holy. Finally, this is what leads me to say that I see God in Jesus of Nazareth; and he becomes Christ and Lord for me because he penetrated this realm as no one else has done and his life made clear what God as the Source of Life, the Source of Love and the Ground of Being really is. Those of us who are disciples of this Jesus call ourselves "The Body of Christ," which means that we are called to be agents of the life, sharers of the love and enablers of the expanded humanity revealed in his being. Perhaps the time has come for men and women of faith to recognize there is no divine supernatural being who inhabits the sky. There is only a divine presence deep in the heart of life, bubbling up in each of us, waiting for the opportunity to emerge in the expansion of our being. So I turn inward to meet God, and the God I find there is the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth. When I give that God away, I become a revealer, indeed a bearer of God in this world. In this sense we human beings are the workers of miracles. We are the persons through whom that holy presence we call God enters life and invites others to enter that which we call the realm of the divine. The incarnation of God, a phrase that we once used to speak of Jesus, becomes now expanded to include the incarnation of God in each of us. The Reformation of Christianity, the delivery of this faith system of yesterday from the irrelevance to which the knowledge expansion has doomed it, must start here, where passive dependency is removed from religion and where we come to understand that in our expanded humanity God is revealed. It was that experience that forced the first Christians to say Jesus is Lord. In and through his humanity, so full, so whole and so free, the holy and transcendent God was met. A Reformation Church will be built on that conviction.   --Return to Contents |