Re-imaging God in a post-tsunami world

Catholic New Times, Feb 13, 2005 by John Shelby Spong

The theistic God, because of great advances in human knowledge, has been rendered unbelievable.

A natural catastrophe like the tsunami brings these issues dramatically and urgently into full view. The defenders of the traditional understanding of God try to make sense out of this tragedy by postulating a deserving guilt on the part of its victims or by telling us that the will of God in this tragedy will be made clear in time. These arguments are simply not convincing.

Those in our world who are emotionally capable of laying aside the now outdated religious explanations of antiquity are called 'secular humanists.' They come in two varieties: some are stoical humanists who work for the common good and who are willing to serve the whole society. In them, we see that idealism is not dead. Others, driven by their deep survival instincts, become corrupt, grasping specimens of humanity, looking out for themselves alone. If the judging God is gone, they reason, so is the ethical system that purported to reflect the will of God. They recognize no binding ethic so long as they do not get caught. They give us the Enrons, the WorldComs and the politics of greed that mark our recent history.

Those on the other hand, who are not capable of living without the security of their religious myths of antiquity, become the fundamentalists and the religious fanatics of our time. They vigorously deny their doubts and fears, and cover their insecurity by seeking to impose their particular form of religion on all others. Examples of this mentality abound in acts of terror and in the religious imperialism that we now observe in American elections. Neither alternative offers much hope for the future. We cannot return to yesterday. We must enter the world that is being born before our eyes and engage the faith crisis of modernity.

An inadequate image

Perhaps it is not God but our very inadequate image of God that has died. That should be welcomed insight, for any God who can be killed ought to be killed. So the first step in building a new, authentic way to think about God is to cease trying to keep yesterday's image of God alive. Divine artificial respiration is a waste of time.

When human life first emerged into self-consciousness, a creature had finally evolved who was not bound by time and space. Our minds can soar beyond our boundaries. We live inside the flow of time remembering a past that is no more, and anticipating the future that is not yet. We know something about the life force that surges within us. We recognize the power of love that enhances our life. We are aware that we can receive love, and once received we can give love away, but none of us can originate love. Love is a power that flows into us from beyond ourselves. We contemplate what it means to be unique. We have both a sense of who we are and a vision of who we want to be, which is the source of our discontent. These are the authentic parts of a God experience, which no other creature can share.

Yes, we have created our image of God--that miracle-working supernatural one--but we are not the authors of our experience of God. God is the name of the life within us that opens us to the miracle of transcendence. God is the name of love that comes to us from beyond ourselves. God is the ground or source of being out of which our own sense of being has emerged. Those are the moments when we discover oneness, embrace eternity and know why it is that we call ourselves spiritual beings.

What a difference this new angle of vision makes. Instead of seeing God as our judge eliciting our guilt, we begin to see God as the source of our empowerment. Instead of seeing Jesus as a divine visitor who came to rescue sinful humanity, we see him as the fully human one inviting us into his divinity, which is nothing but humanity transformed by wholeness. Instead of seeing the Holy Spirit as the source of our piety, we see Spirit as the source of expanding life. Instead of blaming God for tragedy and pain, or seeking to exonerate God from blame in an unjust universe; we accept our responsibility for building a world where every person has a better chance to live, to love and to be all that each of us is capable of being.

A coming new spirituality

We will use our intelligence and our ingenuity not to defend our dying God images, but to understand our world so deeply that we, not some distant mythical God, can be the needed bulwark against the natural fury of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and drought. Instead of being angry when we are victimized by evil or destruction that we cannot control, we will work together to build a safer world. Instead of seeing ethics as following some divinely established rules to please a parent God and avoid punishing wrath, we will learn to see goodness as those actions that enhance life making all of us more fully human. This means that we will also see evil as those actions which diminish our humanity making us more willing to hate than to love, more able to destroy than to build up. Instead of seeing life after death as a time to receive divine reward or punishment we will see it as humanity merging into divinity, and finitude entering into eternity.