God the ruler of everything - continuing the review of the Apostles' Creed

((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.

The missing man - Remembrance in Ringwood Meeting House

Some years ago our new group of Unitarians and friends started meeting in the Meeting House in Ringwood.  The Meeting House had been owned by a Unitarian congregation until the 1970s, in continuous operation as a place of worship for dissenting Protestants since 1727.  We think of ourselves as their natural successors.

Like many other churches in the country, the Meeting House congregation lost some of their number in the Great War of 1914-1918, and they commemorated their loss on this board.

A few years ago, someone investigating their family tree visited Ringwood, looking for the name of a family member on the town's War Memorial; but it wasn't there.  However, in dropping into the Family History archives held at the Meeting House, the name was found on the commemoration board.  In this way it was revealed that there was a name missing from the War Memorial.

This weekend we remember the loss of all military personnel and civilians who have placed themselves between us and danger, that our liberty might be sustained.  We remember how much we risk, when we allow our human discourse to descend into rancour and anger.  And we live with a sense of gratefulness, when we are able, that life is ours to live; life that we cannot create but only nurture or let wither.

At this time of grief, grief for and remembrance of so many things, I heed this message from Stephen Lingwood, a Unitarian minister in Cardiff:

"Unitarians must recognise that the world and human nature do not reflect perfectly the image of the divine..... it is nevertheless worth saying that we live in a world where things are imperfect: that there is a problem in human experience.  And it is not merely a technological problem that can be solved by technological thinking.  It is not simply that the world is organised in such a way that causes suffering and pain, and if we found the right way to organise it these problems would vanish.  That was the thinking of many in the past, and it could be argued that it was the thinking underlying the atrocities of the twentieth century.  Technology and technocratic thinking did not lead us to become better human beings, it simply made us more efficient at killing....Rather, the problem is theological: it is a problem inherent in what it means to be human, and it is a problem that requires a theological solution, or, in other words, salvation."

If you are saddened or troubled in these times, try the poppy meditation here:

Poppy Meditation

Perspective from an anxious 2020

[We take a break from our running series of contemplations on the Apostles' Creed, which will be taken up again in due course.  This post is by a different member of our group.]

Not at the end, but in the middle:

The Universe will collapse into another big bang;

    but beforehand

Galaxies will collide;

    but beforehand

The Sun will overheat and expand, swallowing and burning up all its planets and planetary matter;

    but beforehand

The Moon’s orbit will continue to enlarge, causing it to depart the Earth, causing great changes on Earth;

    but beforehand

Tectonic plate activity will have swallowed up Earth's current land mass and will have formed new geological shapes in its crust;

    but beforehand

The supercaldera at Yellowstone Park will have exploded and thrown a dust mantle around the Earth, blocking out all sunlight;

    but beforehand

Life on Earth shall long ago have forgotten humankind and carry on in ways almost alien;

    but beforehand

Several ice ages will have come and gone;

    but beforehand

The human species will have come to an end, probably having made itself and its ecosystem of other life forms extinct;

    but beforehand

My family, and everyone I know, will die after a course lengthened by human knowledge of medicine and food production, having lived lives more or less exploitative of the Earth; our lives profligate, cruel and unthinking, or not so much

None of this can be fixed:  so what’s to worry about?

This worry is partly about whether I am doing it “right”

But there is no greater adult or adult substitute looking over my shoulder to see and judge what I am doing

So it’s tempting to think that I have to be my own judge and jury; except that there’s conscience

And where does conscience come from?

The operational rules of biophysics that confer evolutionary advantage are embodied in human conscience

But where do the operational rules of biophysics come from?

When the universe collapses into another big bang, expansion, subsequent collapse, and continuing process, the operational rules that govern that, where do they come from?

Well:

All there is      is the ground of being.

And everything.  In those terms.  Is all.  Alright.