What is God like?

People in our country seem to be abandoning religion. Or at least they are abandoning churches.

Is this a bad thing?

It’s not a new thing. As I read the Old Testament book of Chronicles, I am struck by how much of the history of the Jewish people was a history of abandoning the religion of Abraham and Moses. Often the abandonment was the people’s turning to other gods. But I suspect that a lot of their abandonment was a simple tossing aside of the faith handed on to them—busy with other stuff.

Then a prophet would arise and call the king back to true worship. The king was always central to the story.

 

Coercion

Kings coerce. They order and punish. Is that what is needed in order for religion to flourish?

When it comes to religious issues, we have quit ordering people around and punishing them when they deviate. We have decided that God doesn’t want that. So what does God want?

God wants people who relate to God freely, and lovingly. Churches exist to help people do that.

Here is how we should be helping them.

 

People of the Book

They say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions of the Book. All three faiths take writings seriously. The reason they do that is because they believe that writings, stories and all the things that grow out of stories, are our best tools for learning about what God is like.

And that is the fundamental question, at least for these three faiths: what is God like? Our religions are schools of what God is like, and to explore the question we use a book.

What is God like?

Perhaps there are some people for whom that question is not important. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, some of the people think about God all of the time, and (almost) all of the people think about God some of the time, but all of the people don’t think about God all of the time. And maybe some of the people never think about God at all.

All of the people think about God some of the time. I think of children, who ask questions like “Why is there anything?” Or of people facing death, who can wonder about what God thinks of the way they have treated others. Certainly people who suffer seem to be drawn to religion.

And conversely, people who do not suffer can forget all about religion. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to know what God is like. We of the western world are rich. We suffer, but we suffer alone. We want the camera to see us smiling. And as long as we are smiling, we are embarrassed to let others see us being concerned about what God is like.

 

Let’s start with the essentials

First of all, none of us knows much about what God is like.

Start with the question of whether there is a God in the first place. We can’t prove that there is. It seems reasonable to assume that if something happens, there must be a cause for the something (one of Aquinas’s arguments, I believe). But just because it is reasonable doesn’t make it certain.

On the other hand, nobody can prove either that God doesn’t exist. The issue is not amenable to empirical proof. Which means it is an issue of faith.

That shouldn’t bother us. We operate on faith 99% of the time in our lives. If I had to be sure about everything, I would be afraid to step out of the door in the morning. Maybe the earth in front of the door wouldn’t really be solid the next time around.

Okay, so we can’t be sure that there is a God, any more than a husband can be sure that his wife really loves him. Still, things go better if the husband can believe that his wife really loves him. Sometimes husbands are deceived, but not always, and it is reasonable for them to trust in that belief.

Once we’ve gotten past that hurdle, the next question is, what is God like?

Here is where religion steps in. Our religions, at least our Book religions, are schools of what God is like. If they are not that, they are nothing. Perhaps one of the reasons people these days toss religions aside is because their religion does not seem to be helping them to know more about what God is like.

Religions are not in the business of entertaining us on the sabbath, or making the world better, or helping us live happier, or even of making death easier to face. They can do all of those things—Jesus did a lot of those things—but that is not why religions exist. They exist to help us know God better. Knowing God better can lead us to live better lives, but we shouldn’t confuse the effect with the cause.

The Book religions present us with a life project of knowing God better each day, no matter how many days we have. They do that by starting with the Book, and then using the Book to draw us to one another and then to do things with those others—actual physical behaviors—that are the results of our reading the Book. Some of those physical behaviors are “worship”—because what the Book teaches us about God suggests that if God is who the Book says God is, we ought to respond with courtesy and grace, and join with others in our response.

That is how we become religious people. We learn about what God is like, we respond with courtesy, and we do this with other people because that is what the Book suggests and doing it with others makes the experience come alive. To paraphrase an old sociologist, Emile Durkheim, doing religion with others can add zest to our lives.

 

Our Books are dangerous

The sacred texts of these religions of the Book are creations of people who did not know God very well. They knew God better than any of us do when we are starting out, but some of the ideas presented in the books are ideas that we no longer think are good. For example, “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

That should not surprise us. Jesus taught things that earlier sacred books did not teach. He said that he didn’t come to abolish those books but to bring them to perfection. He brought them to perfection by teaching us things about God that the sacred books before him did not teach, like the idea that God is more like a parent than like a dictator.

We people of the Book get into trouble when we think we have to use every word of our Books as a guide to how we should relate to God and one another today. We Christians believe that the earlier Book people did not see God as three persons—admittedly a hard pill to swallow—but the story of Jesus seemed to leave us no other choice. This makes us part ways with Jews and Muslims, but we believe that Jesus did not tell us to make Jews and Muslims into Christians. He told us to make “disciples,” and a disciple is someone who is learning (the Latin root of the word means “to learn”). We are to invite others to share in the project of learning what God is like. And we know that others can teach us a thing or two about that—things not necessarily in our Books.

That means that we should be going through the world like fellow learners, with the hope that anybody we meet might teach us something about God.

We Christians believe that when Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were that we should love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves—and that every person on the face of the earth is our neighbor—Jesus perfected a lot of the older moral norms.

Love is a difficult thing to define, which is probably why it is hard to find a definition of it. It is also probably why we can say we love our neighbors and then go out and kill them.

 

Love

Here is a working definition of love that has served me for the last thirty years or so. There are surely better definitions, but this one is the best I’ve found so far.

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with others, including God.

For practical purposes, when I am sharing this definition, I leave out the word “passionate,” because passion is not under our control. We can’t produce it on demand. It’s a gift. And since it is a gift, for practical purposes, if we want to talk about love, we can bracket “passion” and hope that respect and vulnerability and faithfulness will gift us with it.

“Respect.” The first characteristic of love. Respect is just courtesy, and most cultures have customs of courtesy. Striking someone physically seems to us, at least in our culture, disrespectful. We say it violates a person’s physical integrity. That’s why we don’t use the rod in spite of the warning that we might spoil the child. We’ve gotten past that.

Our culture seems to see the gun as essential to safe living. If striking someone is disrespectful, how can shooting someone be respectful? Not to mention entering people’s neighborhoods with tanks, throwing exploding munitions at them from mikes away, and annihilating them with atomic weapons?

We do all these things not because we really want to be disrespectful, but because those things make money, and we too often put money ahead of more important things in life. Jesus said we cannot serve God and money.

But I’m getting away from my topic.

Love is also vulnerable. It is when another person “opens up” to us in genuine vulnerability that our hearts open up in love of that person.

And faithfulness. Faithfulness means that each involvement with another human being, even starting with the check-out clerk in the store, can be open to future involvements, to future interactions. Faithfulness keeps us from “using” people. We want to be able to greet them with warmth even weeks or months from now.

The four gospels are one of the Christian’s most important books. Surely the gospels show us a Jesus Christ who was respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. And because we believe that Jesus was God, we believe that God is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in dealing with each human being. Which means that we can no longer fear God as one who might condemn us to an eternity of hell because of a moment’s behavior. 

Exploring the doctrine of hell would take me away from the main point I am trying to make here. But I can say one thing: the way we describe hell may be one of the reasons why so many people walk away from religion.

 

To sum up

We do religion because we see religion as a good way to learn about what God is like. Many of us may not worry much about what God is like, but many of us experience moments when we do want to think about the question. Churches exist to help people to learn what God is like. Jews and Christians and Muslims use a book as their main tool in learning. Then they surround the book with other ideas and rituals, and in the process they can experience life as more bearable and even more delightful.

That won’t fill huge churches, but it will fill small ones. When churches get too big, what God is like gets crowded out by keeping the lights on. We don’t need lights. We need our Books and one another.