This is something that has increasingly come out my readings of Catherine Keller and John Robinson, although neither of them say it as such. The premise is that we just don't think any more of a God in a theistic sense; that we think of this as being not only silly and naïve, but also dangerous and oppressive (see much liberation theology or eco-feminist work as to why), and yet, that there is something more than flat and dead, mechanical, secular humanism (to use Robinson's description).
There's several ways that I've come to this. Thinking about the Trinity, and interpreting it in a narrative (rather than an ontological) sense, we have the time of the 'Father' (theism), then the time of the 'Son' (Jesus), and then those who follow Jesus as radical, political liberator (in the 'Spirit'). Jesus, then, "dared to accept the role of sonship, of standing in God's stead.” (The Human Face of God, 217-8) “Put the other way round, henceforth 'God' is to be represented no longer simply as a personified being over man's head, but in and by man and his responsibility.” (218) “'God' now means, for us... that by which he is represented, his surrogate – the power of a love that lives and suffers for others.” (218-9) In short, Jesus showed that God isn't an 'other', a being, but God is only ever perceived (and therefore, is only) in action.
In Exploration into God, Robinson writes, "[the Bible] describes reality much more readily in terms of verbs than substantives." (p.35 ...and if God is 'ultimate reality' as Paul Tillich claims...) Robinson goes on, "The reality [of God... is seen] in action, in suffering, rather than in words." (55, my emphasis) He pulls from Thomas Aquinas (of all people) and writes, "there are common nouns and proper nouns - and 'God' seems to fall into neither category," (58) - so is God not a noun?
Here's a paragraph from my recent paper From Ground to Ocean: (Ful)filling the Abyss. (The 'tehom' refers to the Hebrew word in Genesis 1, which Keller associates with 'deep' and 'ocean of infinite possibility'.)
But we must remember our question: Is the tehom God? And how does the creature/creator, the divine/cosmic, relate to tehom? The short answer to the second of these questions is 'creativity'. In the bottomless tehom, the infinite potential, there is nothing and everything. 'God' is the differentiating, the distinguishing of these potentials. “'[E]verything' in a state of potentiality is no thing,” (Face of the Deep, 180) and so this 'chaotic buzz' needs a decision to be made, a decision which eliminates some possibilities while selecting others to be created. To help describe this Keller uses 'divine' as a verb: “[A] primal Other not separate from but within God – différance in precisely the sense of the originary non-origin... this radical genesis divines the potentiality of the tehom. Its creativity does not create by itself. By itself it makes no difference... The great cosmic decision has been traditionally, with justice, named the creation; its agency, the creator.” (180) The tehom by itself, the potential everything, is no thing – it makes no difference because within it no difference is determined, or rather, divined. God, then, is the process of actualising/ realising/ differentiating/ choosing/ divining the tehom, in an interconnectivity where God is nothing without the potential to be (the tehom), and the tehom is no thing when it is merely potentially everything – without the divine, without being divined. “If the godhead, or rather the godness, 'in' whom unfolds the universe can be theologised as Tehom, the ocean of divinity, the divinity who unfolds 'in' the all is called by such biblical names as Elohim, Sophia, Logos, Christ. ... [T]he names Tehom and Elohim may henceforth designate, if not 'persons', two capacities of an infinite becoming.” (219) Is Tehom divine? Yes, but not by itself, for Tehom as mere (only/oceanic) potential is no thing without Elohim. And is Tehom God? No. For while “Tehom has taken on the names and aura of a certain godness, [it] has never been identified with 'God', nor with the All; it 'is' not pan or theos. It signifies rather their relation... The relations, the waves of our possibility, comprise the real potentiality from which we emerge. So tehom, metonym of the divine womb, remains neither God nor not-God but the depth of 'God'.” (227) Finally we reach a place where we can divine the highly nuanced difference between Tillich and Keller.
Hurm.... isn't there a direct analogy to your post with a artists and paint. If God is the artist, creating the world from the void, then the void is the paint. Like you say, the void is not God, as the paint is not the artist.
ReplyDeleteThe paint requires action, (the verb of painting) to create the art. Without this action, the paint is not art. But the fact that action is required does not invalidate the fact that there is an artist as well.
Or in more general terms, I don't see why the fact that the presence of divine action, to create that which is divine, suggests there is no divine object.
It could be either. Actions can be generated by objects (in the case of the artist), or just exist in their own (eg falling). So, in the case of the void, God could be a divine object performing a divine action on the void to turn it into that which is divine (the universe). Or like you say, God could just be the divine action and there is no object.
If you were to expand it into a paper though, you would need I think to bring it closer to our world. Ontalogical syntax, as relates to the creation of the universe is all very well, but how does that relate to the God of today?
-Iain
Thanks for the comment.
ReplyDeleteThe thinking is that in the beginning (which is not really a beginning but an ocean of possibility), there was no-thing, including nothing divine (no God). The very de-scision (think scissors, 'cutting-away') for a particular possibility to be actual rather than just potential is not done by anything because no-thing is there to do it. In the potential, it happened. And with it came existence and all that now is came from that decision. So that first decision, even though it is a very small one, has been given credit of being "The Creation". The language would really have to be: "________ divines the tehom," but since we require a subject in our grammar, that blank non-subject has been filled in with the (mistaken) noun "God".
In terms of how to God (to divine) today, it's all about the actions. When a person shows someone else their oppression and leads/helps them out of it, they are divine. Not that it has to be a person, anything (even a non-thing) can divine. Think divination. Not necessarily the magic, but the concept of it is in determining the right way (of action). To divine, to embody the divine (or even, incarnate, in-flesh), is to live/act the right way. It's been said, the kingdom of God is the path, not the destination.
As a sidenote, I was excited to discover the in the Latin Vulgate, John 1:1 is not "In the beginning was the Word," but "In the beginning was the Verbum." In Spanish, it is, "In the beginning was the Verbo." The "Word" sounds like it can be a particular, single concept (instead of being the "Words of life" or something), but the "Verb" makes it into action, something that has to be done in order to be at all.