What Do We Mean by 'God'?

A Little Book Of Guidance

Keith Ward

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281073283
• eBook ISBN: 9780281073290
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

'Language about God is something like the language of poetry… The poetic use of language is not to increase your information about the world. We know facts about the world without having poetry. The use of words in poetry is to evoke in us a certain attitude or way of looking at things or feeling about things. . . If this is the use of religious language, what sort of view of the world is it trying to convey? I think we might say it is trying to convey that the world is an expression of a reality beyond it. . .'
Keith Ward unpacks the meaning of the word 'God' and explains why we need to get rid of the crude and unhelpful assumptions that still abound. A book for all who are curious about how God, and God's actions, can be understood today.
Intended for people looking for answers to life's biggest questions, this little book of guidance will appeal to anyone, whether believer or non-believer, looking for a quick and easy way into the topic.

1

Who or what is ‘God’?

For many people today believing in God is really quite difficult. There are lots of ideas of God around which people find distasteful or unacceptable. For example, two of the best known paintings in the Western world portray God in ways that, unfortunately, give rise to quite false ideas of who, or what, God is. One is Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In that painting, God is shown as a very well-developed, well-muscled specimen of humanity with long white hair and a flowing beard. He is just like Adam but a little older and with a bigger beard. This sort of representation of God in art was, of course, quite unknown in ancient Jewish tradition, which expressly forbade the making of any images or pictures of God at all. In Islam, too, no pictures are allowed in mosques, which is why such beautiful techniques of writing in decorative Arabic script evolved in that tradition. It might well be held that Michelangelo, for all his genius, broke that ancient prohibition on picturing God, and subsequent Western thought has paid the price.

Another well-known picture of God creating the universe is seen in ‘The Ancient of Days’, by William Blake. Again, God is a well-muscled human being with a flowing beard and long white hair. In his hand he holds a pair of compasses, with which he is measuring out the world. When Blake drew this picture, he was in fact portraying the sort of God that he thought was a bad God, an interfering measuring God who squashed and repressed the human imagination. For Blake, this was a sort of anti-God. Unfortunately, most people do not realize that, and they take Blake’s picture to be a depiction of God as he really is.

These paintings have had an unfortunate effect, because they are such good paintings and because the power of visual imagery is so strong that we find it hard to get out of our minds the idea of God as a man with a long flowing beard sitting just above the clouds or in the sky. We can get more sophisticated, and say, ‘Well, I know that there is no actual physical form in the sky. We have been up there in space-ships and satellites, and we know there isn’t anything there. And I know that he isn’t just a little bit further away either, just beyond Alpha Centauri. No, God is not physical at all. He is a purely spiritual being.’ But even if we try to get sophisticated, we might still think of God as a particular being: a purely mental being, who thinks in much the same way as we do, one thing after another; who decides, in much the same way as we do; who makes up his mind whether to do this or that, and perhaps changes it at a later date; and who feels in much the same way that we do, so that he feels sad when we do something wrong and happy when we do something good (which must mean he’s depressed most of the time). In general, he has pretty well human feelings.

So God is seen as very much like an invisible human being, an immortal one; like the old Greek gods, he is human in character but immortal and invisible. This God is still a mind, rather like ours though better; he is out there somewhere; he is apart from us. He is perhaps just beyond the edge of the universe; he is a separate being. So we say that God is transcendent; he transcends everything in the physical universe. But he is, nevertheless, another mind.

But this is just as false a picture of God as is Blake’s or Michelangelo’s. It is quite essential, when we start thinking about God, to put this picture out of our minds completely. Whatever God is, he has never, in the orthodox Christian tradition, been thought to be a finite mind, even if very wise and powerful, somewhere in or just beyond the universe. That is why one of the chief ways the early Christians chose to describe God was to say that God is ‘infinite’.

Why must God be infinite?

When we say that God is infinite, we mean that God is not limited by anything else. There is nothing which sets limits to God and so makes God finite. God is not just one thing among other things of the same sort. But that means that we cannot think of God as a being, even as a very large being, who exists in addition to the universe – because if God were outside the universe, God would be limited by it and excluded from it. Theologians have sought many different ways of trying to express this point. Some have said that God is ‘not a being, but Being-itself.’ Some have said that God is ‘the unlimited ocean of being.’ Others have said that God is ‘self-subsistent Being’. The common concern has been to deny that God is another thing, something like the things in the universe, but somehow bigger and better.

The idea that God is infinite is a very hard one to grasp, and perhaps the best most of us can do is to think in terms of some picture which may help us to think of it. As long as we remember that it is no more than a picture, which may be as misleading in its own way as Michelangelo’s Old Man in the Sky, I would tentatively suggest the following way of thinking about God.

Instead of thinking of God as an invisible mind or person, somehow separate from us, try thinking of God as the one unlimited reality which includes us and the whole universe within itself. We are all finite and limited. But we are all parts of one reality which is unlimited and infinite; and that reality is ‘God’. So I suggest that we might try thinking of God as the one unlimited reality of which all finite things – you, me, the trees, the stars, the galaxies – are parts.

Of course, I am not just saying that the universe is God, that God is nothing else but the physical universe. That would be quite wrong. If I said that, I would only be using the word ‘God’ to stand for what everybody else calls ‘the universe’; and I do not mean that. But the universe can be seen as part of God. In the New Testament it is said that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28). Here is the idea that we are included in the infinite God.

If we say this, there is the danger that we might start thinking that, if we are ‘part’ of God, we are not free or responsible for our own actions; or that even evil things show what God is. To avoid this danger, we can use another picture and say that the physical universe is a collection of finite things which have their own proper natures, and many of these things have a real, though partial, freedom. God is completely different from anything in this universe, because God alone is unlimited and wholly self-determining. Nothing in the universe can ever be separated from God, and so everything is ‘in him’; yet all finite things have their own proper being which makes them quite distinct from God. God has to be so unlike the universe, so unlike all finite, limited things that we cannot even imagine God properly. That is why, in the Old Testament, images of God were prohibited. Any image is bound to get God wrong; any image is bound t...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Series title
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• 1. Who or what is ‘God’?
• 2. How does the universe point to God?
• 3. Does God have a purpose?
• Further reading