Manufactured ideas of God

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022721.cfm
Deuteronomy 26:16-19
Matthew 5:43-48

Sometimes we need a different approach to help better understand who God is. We’ll never fully grasp the notion of God, of course. The entire purpose of eternity for created beings is to spend our days learning more about God, in order to become more like him. Our curiosity will never run out. We aren’t meant to catch up to God, finally equalling the divine. In our earthly quest to find God, over many millennia, we have regularly re-imagined and then recreated God in order to better fit our sense of limitations. It’s not surprising that we as limited beings also imagine that God is limited. We often can’t help ourselves to think that the best we humans come up with is what God must be.

Reviewing history's manufactured ideas of God, then, might help to better zero in on who God actually is. According to our faith’s teachings, several attempts at corralling God to fit our imaginations most assuredly do not resemble God. I found it a great exercise to go through. I hope it helps.

I ran across a paragraph in the Catholic Catechism, number 285, under the title Catechesis on Creation. It’s not a startling bit of teaching. The section takes a simple descriptive view of myths over the eons that have improperly explained God. 

For context, this summary of “Who God is Not,” as it were, sits in the Catechism quite early on. It’s the baseline for our thinking about God which the Catechism goes on to correct. It calls them "myths." I go so far as to say these faulty depictions of God are heretical. That doesn’t make all mythical believers heretics — until they know the difference and still insist upon their position, that is. Thankfully, that’s up to God to decide, not me.

Jesus sparked this review for me. This Saturday’s gospel taken from Matthew 5 includes verse 45. “… for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”  God allows for us to be just or unjust. He doesn’t hold back his grace, love and Word from anyone. Plus, no matter what we may insist upon as a definition of God, God is still who he is. In the end, certainly, it’s better to listen to what God says than what conjecture concludes. How far, though, has conjecture missed the mark?

I subscribe to the Christ-follower view of God in the Catholic Catechism. My recognition to those who are offended by my Judeo-Christian certainty. Ultimately, this is God's problem, and that points out the necessary human condition. No apologies. Just recognition. 

Our God brings the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, Jesus the Christ’s Word, and the Father’s authority as the true God. This God speaks to us. The Catechism is built upon the foundation of a holy Church rooted and lived in the Holy Scriptures. The Church, along with its communion of Saints in heaven, reigns with Jesus as the King. That’s my premise. As Catholics, we take the truth as revealed by God. It is not hubris, or superiority that makes us believe. It is faith. So, for a list of things that explains how Christians know who God is not, let’s review:

The Catechism in paragraph 285 begins our short study on untrue gods with this sentence. “Since the beginning the Christian faith has been challenged by responses to the question of origins that differ from its own. Ancient religions and cultures produced many myths concerning origins.” It is these myths that we’re going to hear about. Myths sounds less caustic than heresy. I may go too far by calling them heresies, but since certainty is blunt, here’s the first myth cited by the Catechism.

“Some philosophers have said that everything is God, that the world is God, or that the development of the world is the development of God (Pantheism).” 

The pantheist position aligns God to creation’s construct. They believe in God, but identify God as everything within creation. That is, we all make up the divine, along with the material world and everything in it. Most nativist religions operate with a form of pantheism, putting God into animals and the sun and the water and the wind. God is improving along with creation, then, because God is the evolving creation itself.

Our Catholic response to Pantheism, in its simplest form, is that God is not whom and what is created. He “is” the creator. He preceded creation, and had no requirement for it. Creation is the free act of God’s love, not his duty or his necessary dwelling place. Also, God isn’t improving through creation, because he’s already perfect.

The lovely sounding assignment of oneness of God in creation negates God’s difference from the universe. God’s incarnation, then, is not a seminal, divine event in Pantheism. It’s the full story. Not so, says our faith. The incarnation is an act of love, not evolution.

That leads the Catechism to the next two heresies, somewhat related to each other — Dualism, Manichaeism. “Others have said that the world is a necessary emanation arising from God and returning to him. Still others have affirmed the existence of two eternal principles, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, locked, in permanent conflict (Dualism, Manichaeism).” 

Our faith teaches us that evil is not equal to good. Evil is the absence of good. Light and darkness do not compete as two gods. Manichaeism takes this dualism idea to a darker place, saying the world is the actual evil and must be eradicated. Good must leave the world, and the dusty, dry world must go completely dark.

Our faith says God did not make a mistake by creating the universe and everything in it. Creation freely can object to God, and has done so. God is repairing and restoring creation to his glory, without caving to any of evil’s demands. God will eventually win out everything, allowing evil and its followers to reject him with all the consequences of that hateful decision, and welcome his faithful to join him in love. The duality argument does not consider that God allowed evil. If evil’s existence only came through created beings, and not from God, we have proof of God’s deference to our free will to choose him, or not.  

From Dualism and Manichaeism, the Catechism brings up Gnosticism as another heretical development. “According to some of these conceptions, the world (at least the physical world) is evil, the product of a fall, and is thus to be rejected or left behind (Gnosticism).” 

The fall of Adam and Eve did not ruin the physical world permanently. Ruination exists only so far as a governing God allows. Creation, then, governed by an intervening God, is considered redeemable by an actively merciful God. We cannot accomplish this redemption without God, and history reveals our failures to do so. It’s understandable, then, that those who see only our ultimate failure (ending in death) as proof the world is unredeemable. God has not stopped evil, because he cannot. Instead, halting evil is the Gnostic’s mission. Gnostics take dualism to a whole new level of battle. God is like us in the struggle to win, says the Gnostic. Elites, or gifted superior beings, are the kingpins of Gnosticism. They’ve got special knowledge on spiritual matters, variously assisted by a fretful God. They have the keys to this knowledge through artifacts, secret formulas, and processes to take evil on and win.

Our faith tells us even the least among us, in education, power, status, money, and circumstance, are dwelling temples of the Holy Spirit. Everyone who accepts this indwelling has a place within the Body of Christ under one King through the Father of us all. We are all witnesses of God’s love, not allies to bolster perceived weaknesses by God against a formidable foe. Death, evil’s most formidable weapon, has actually defeated. We die as martyrs to this truth to be ultimately resurrected, not as defeated warriors left to dust. Our lives, though, lived as God prompts us will help to restore the world.

“Some admit that the world was made by God, but as by a watch-maker who, once he has made a watch, abandons it to itself (Deism).” 

The heresy of this position is that God is unknowable. Therefore, deists believe God doesn’t answer prayers. It’s quite close to the idea of agnosticism, not knowing whether there is a God or not. Strictly speaking, a Deist is an agnostic who denies we’ll ever know the question of who God is. An agnostic isn’t a heretic, strictly speaking. They just admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about. A Deist believes they know what they’re talking about.

Our faith believes God does speak to us, in innumerable ways — the Word, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the graces of the Father, creation itself, the communion of saints, and the connection to each other as brothers and sisters with Christ. We have both evidence and guidance, always and everywhere. 

Finally, others reject any transcendent origin for the world, but see it as merely the interplay of matter that has always existed (Materialism). 

I like that the Catechism puts this one last. It is the most honest of all the heresies, in my view of things. Materialism, armed with its science and technology followers, admits that since it can’t figure out who God is then it is best to just give up and have a beer and a taco, and hang out at the beach. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Honesty is a laudable principle, but when it comes from a place of fatalism, of dog-eat-dog, and of elevated selfishness, well … it’s simply blatant rejection of God.

Though the list of these mythical positions is pretty short, given everything that humans could come up with, I like the simplicity of these groupings. Over time, we’ve all probably toyed with these different gods. It’s only when we set ourselves down and let God speak to us that the formulation of our faith can begin.

Our current isms list out as communism, capitalism, socialism, libertarianism, and so on. They’re not mentioned here. But, take whatever governmental structure you want to rely upon and foster, and I say each will choose various positions between totalitarianism and liberty. That is, arguing over what is evil, and then clamoring over how to judge the evildoers. We are continually fraught with this conflict. 

The Catechism agrees. It ends the discussion on these mythical views of God, which I extend as heresies, with this statement. It is a kind, redeemable statement: 

All these attempts bear witness to the permanence and universality of the question of origins. This inquiry is distinctively human.