((Blog editor's note:) Another in the series from one member of our group, looking at the Apostles' Creed in segments.)
Pantocrator - The ruler of everything
[ From Latin pantocrator, from Hellenistic Ancient Greek παντοκράτωρ (pantokrátōr). ]
‘I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth’, and I’m not going to lie: that hasn’t always been easy. With so much suffering in the world, so much wrong, so much pain and hunger, and sheer incomprehensible darkness, this doesn’t just come across as hard to swallow — it comes across as downright offensive. I have wrestled with the triad of all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good, and am very aware that that is a circle that cannot be squared no matter how much freewill you apply. I have clung to the mystery writ large by the Book of Job and felt my fingertips slipping. I have denied a Creator and braced myself against the cold winds that blew through my life thereafter; and then somehow, without even realising it, I have come to see that I was wrong.
In the West, we have culturally spent so much time proving God’s existence via tried and tested arguments from the world around us, that we have lost track of where our stories about God have come from. I could not accept a Watchmaker who set things in motion then watched and washed their hands. I could not respect a Creator who set us up to fail, or an abusive figure who doled out arbitrary rules, which were always going to get broken, and who seemed to relish in an overkill of retribution and punishment. That God I had to hate, or I had to believe didn’t exist.
Well: that God doesn’t exist, yet tragically the tradition that talks God up is so mixed in with our Western cultural tradition (witness the classical terms I have used in this piece) that we don’t recall that that is not the God that we experience, nor is it the God revealed in the persona of Jesus.
To answer questions, of where the world has come from and why this or that happens, we have built up logical arguments and extrapolations that seek to make the world, and to make God, more intelligible — but in so doing we have lessened them. Our tradition is rooted in the Bible, rather than the Upanishads, the Pāli Canon or the Qu'ran. As, over time, we have treated the Bible like a book of information, not inspiration, in so doing we have set pitfalls for our own faith.
The Bible isn’t given us to answer our questions of natural science, geography, or history. We have other stores of experience, sources of evidence, and the wonder of the questioning mind, to deal with such things. The Bible is a store of spiritual experience, a treasury of moments and characters that have inspired countless generations. It is a tapestry and mosaic that brings together countless people over time and space. It is something living, something amazing; we look to it for signs and clues, not simple facts — it is inspired and inspiring.
When God creates in the Bible we do not see God at the ex nihilo [Latin for “creation out of nothing”] moment of bringing forth from nothing. The ‘beginning’ in the Bible is a beginning point from which to tell the tale. En Arche [the ancient Greek words at the start of Genesis, and the Gospel of John, with the primary senses of “beginning", "origin" or "source of action”] bears resemblance to our fabled ‘Once upon a time’: it tells you this is where the story starts, what has gone before doesn’t matter, you don’t need an exact date to place it, its relevance isn’t limited to a single instance. There are multiple ‘beginnings’ in the Bible; that isn’t a problem, as they are all places to begin telling the tale, the greatest Tale, the story of God and humankind.
The Bible doesn’t say anything about how God made the world, but it tells us again and again that God is what makes the world possible. God is what sustains everything, everything we see in flux, no single thing constant and remaining, all things distinct yet somehow united: God is what makes the many and the one possible. The God that we cannot see in God’s many and oneness, yet revealed in the world. We do not know God apart from the world; we cannot talk of a time where God sat and planned, before the world came into being. It is in and through the world around us, the world we live in, the body’s world, that we know God, the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).
We do not encounter the world as a question, no matter how much we may question the many things in it and that happen here. We are accustomed to try to ask ‘who made the world?’ because we have permitted ourselves a sense that this will validate our belief in God and all that comes from that. It won’t and it doesn’t. Trying to separate our experience of God from our experience of the world digs a chasm we cannot cross. When we ask about 'why the world’ we are asking about some certain part of it, something we can imagine or point to, and in every instance, we do not need ‘God’ as the answer to that question. The question about ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ answers itself: because there is.
Left to ourselves the world would present itself as a fact, a reality to be got on with, in the way other animals do; but the Bible, when it tells us about Creation, presents the world as something else. The world becomes a sign, not just a fact. The Bible is inspired by that God revealed in the world, and the Bible inspires us to see God there. Those first two chapters of Genesis tell a tale that will be referred back to again and again throughout the Bible: God walking in the garden with humankind, God looking for us, us hiding from God, choices and consequences, change but ever the same.
I believe in God the Almighty, omnipotent, the source of all potential, all that might be. God is not a wizard or an Olympic lifter; the bearded guy in the clouds is too little, the Watchmaker too mean. I could not believe in those puppets and shadows, but I can embrace a certainty that everything comes from something, that everything is held together and somehow in all its multiplicity is one. I can believe in God as all that might be, more than all that is and ever was but the foundation of it all the same.
I believe in God the Maker of Heaven and Earth. I do not know the how of things but I do know that the world, as the Bible tells it, was made for God to walk in with humankind, and I know that that has never changed nor ever will, no matter how often we hide, or how often the plan seems to go wrong.
I can find answers with my reason for all manner of things that happened in the world, choices and consequences, both foreseeable and not so. I know that understanding why something happened doesn’t make it ok — we can learn from it but that doesn’t change it or expunge it. But that’s consistent, because we don’t encounter in the Bible a God who makes everything ok, a God who protects all the righteous and deals out comeuppance to the wicked, quickly and easily. We do not find a God in the Bible who has a store of good things if you just ask nicely enough, if you just believe strongly enough. We do not encounter such a God there, just as we do not encounter such a God anywhere. If we struggle to believe in God as the Almighty and the Maker of Heaven and Earth, perhaps the question we should be asking is not ‘have we been betrayed by God’ but ‘have we betrayed ourselves and others by preaching a deity who never was’. The God of the Bible is ever present not separate from the world. The God of the Bible is seen in the world acting through those who answer God’s call. God is shown looking for us, walking with us, talking to us.
If you struggle to believe in God the Almighty, perhaps it’s time to ditch ‘God of the-ATM-in-the-sky and get-what-you-deserved-on-earth’.
I believe in God the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
