FOUNDATION FOR A THEOLOGY OF GOD
Reverend Vann Knight
September 21, 2003
Today I want to talk to you about your theology of God.
What is theology? Theology is the study of religion or religious beliefs. More specifically, it is one’s study, one’s ideas about God or, as I like to put it, one’s wisdom about God.
How do we begin such a venture? This year, I’m going to share with you my most significant theological work. For the next ten months, roughly once a month, I am going to preach a sermon on “Developing A Healthy Theology of God.” This will give us an opportunity to reaffirm some things that we already believe, but it will also give us an opportunity to let go of some old wisdom and to replace it with some different images, different ideas about God.
It is my sense that most of the problems that we have with God have absolutely nothing to do with that reality called God. Most of the problems we have are with the theology that we inherited as children and that has been confirmed for us in different ways through the years. It is my sincere hope that, as we go through this process, that in one hand you will have an eraser - or if you don’t use erasers, have your hand on the delete key or on the mouse so that you can drag some non-helpful theology to the trash. In the other hand, have a scanner that will be putting new information into your memory. I want you to have images and concepts that work for you. I want you to be able to drop the old that’s not working and to find images and concepts that work for you, that are actually healthy and helpful to you.
Theology is always put in the language of faith. There is nothing that I will say to you that has been proven to me. I have no way of proving any of this to you. Therefore, if you find yourself either committed to or trapped by the old enlightenment concepts of empiricism, which says only that which has been proven scientifically is real, or by positivism that says the only valid way to know is through that empirical method, then I’m not going to be of much help to you.
But if you can allow that the religious venture is a different kind of venture from the scientific venture and that in religion we use metaphorical language to point to a reality that is beyond definition, beyond naming and defining, then this may be helpful.
More than anything else, I do not want you to feel that you should adopt my theology. You are the religious authority, and you will decide your theology.
What’s going to make this hard is how entrenched our childhood images and our childhood theology is. You can get rid of the theology that you got as a late teenager a lot easier than you can get rid of the theology that you got when you were two to eight years old. For some of us it was healthy, but for others of us it made the concept of God so crude that as adults, we rejected it.
In this community you can be an atheist; that is a valid position for anybody in this congregation. The term “God” can be useless to you and nonsensical, and that’s okay. Most of us would declare, whatever else we are, we are agnostics; we simply don’t know. On one hand, I am a person of faith and the things I will be saying are faith affirmations. On the other, I recognize that I don’t know; I believe that this reality is beyond our capacity to know, to define, to describe.
But we work with it. Why? Is theology the central thing in religion? Not for me. Theology is important, but the central focus of religion isn’t getting the correct notion of God or the correct notion of anything else. For me the central purpose of religion is maintaining or reestablishing consciousness of indivisible union with the holy. The heart of religion is consciousness of the holy in every aspect of life, awareness that there is nothing in life or in death that can separate us from the holy.
So why is theology important? Because our theology, especially our theology of God, influences how comfortable we are in the world, how comfortable we are with others, with ourselves, and how comfortable we are with death.
Let’s begin with some examples of what we have to work with. First, most of us grew up with the language that God is a person, and if not a real person, some sort of super person. I’m going to tell you my theology. God is not a person. Old man, white beard. Erase that.
Second and very close to this, if this reality is not a person, this reality certainly is not a man. We grew up hearing the pronoun “He” to reference this reality. In the last twenty years some of us have referenced this reality by using the pronoun “She.” This reality can be referenced by “He” or “She,” but only if we understand that that is metaphor, poetry. These pronouns simply accommodate our communication with one another. Rather than going through an hour explanation, we have developed these code words. “God” is nothing more than a code word that represents a reality that is meaningful or not meaningful to us in some degree; but we can rest assured, whatever that code word means to you, it does not mean that to the person sitting next to you. There will be a lot of similarity, but there will be differences.
Religious metaphor does two things. Religious metaphor says, The reality to which I am pointing is like this, and then immediately that metaphor whispers in your other ear, The reality to which I am pointing is also not like this. For example, the metaphor God as father. There are ways in which perhaps God is like our father. But there are also ways in which God is not like father; there are ways in which God is like mother, and there are ways in which God is not like either mother or father. If we are going to take religious language seriously, we cannot take it literally. We have to understand it metaphorically, poetically, as pointing to a reality that ultimately is beyond language.
So if God is not a person, what are the other challenges we have? One is that we often struggle to name this reality. You see me struggling every week. How do I find some words to point to a reality; and no matter what words I use, those words are not adequate, and sometimes they may even be misleading. And yet we struggle, how do we name God? Some of you pray, and when I pray with you, one of the things that I want to know is, how do you address the one to whom you pray?
And let me give you a little bit of technical theology here. When the Christian scriptures use that word “name,” they are not talking about a sound that identifies a person, like Joan or Bill. Rather, name symbolizes character, essence. And so when one speaks in another’s name, one is in harmony with that person’s character or essence. And so the name of God is not a sound. It is that essence which is beyond description.
The other thing closely related to name is that the reality is beyond our capacity to define or describe. The only thing I can do is to stand here and point. And it is only in your own mind and heart that you will be able to see some vague image of what I’m pointing to.
The Taoists say, we may know or we may not know, but we will never know if we know or don’t know. As I bring this material to you, on one hand I will bring it to you as a person of faith, and on the other, I will bring it to you with humility, knowing that I don’t know. And I would invite you to hear it that way, to hear it not as a scientist, because none of this can be proven. So I am asking you to come, bringing whatever faith you have and whatever doubt you have. And your faith will never be any stronger than your doubt; however deeply you can doubt, that’s the depth capacity of your faith. Both faith and doubt are essential.
One last thing. Go back and look at your childhood. Go back and see those crudest images that trouble you most. Look at those images that have become a protective barrier, a shield. If you stay attached to your crude images, it allows you to dismiss God. But once you see that those images may have little or nothing to do with God and a lot to do with how you were taught, then it may require you to open yourself up, to let something new grow and develop in you. That is my hope.