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A professor of biology is an expert in the biological sciences. But what about a professor of divinity? Can one really be an expert on God, if “divinity” means “God”? I know the title is inherited from the past, but it seems to me a very unfortunate and misleading one. “Theology” means “words about God”, so it is clear that people can become experts concerning the words that have been used about God (which is not the same thing as God, of course). At our newer universities there are professors of religious studies – and that strikes me as a more modest and acceptable title.
I do not think people can be experts on God and employed as such, even in the University of Cambridge. The very idea of people claiming such over-familiarity with deity strikes me as ridiculous, even blasphemous. That would also have been the reaction of the ancient Jews, who considered the name of God too sacred to be pronounced.
However, I am uncomfortably aware that I am open to attack myself. Is not the very title of this sermon, Mistaken Views of God, utterly arrogant? Doesn’t it suggest that I myself claim to know all about God, or at least quite enough to put down those who have the wrong ideas? In fact, I would be the last person to make such a claim. Not for a moment do I set myself up as an expert on God who can lay down the law to all and sundry. The idea is absurd! For my part, I find some of the least attractive people are those who say that they know all about God and imagine that they have a God-given right to force their views on everyone else. They are also very dangerous.
It has always seemed to me that you do not necessarily get at what the word “God” is trying to evoke, by constantly repeating the word “God” – or the word “Christ” for that matter. Sometimes it might be better to stop saying these words. (Although a complete ban would be just as bad. In talking about God, people are trying to approach supreme value, and anything that can help them to do that is surely permissible.)
Fifty years ago, my mother died, very painfully of cancer of the bowel. I hope that nowadays medical science can help to lessen such pain more effectively. Towards the end she said to me, “I must have done something very bad.” This was the fruit of her early religious training: God, she thought, had sent her cancer as a punishment, though she did not know why or for what. I was appalled and very greatly distressed. “No, no no!” I cried. “You’ve done nothing. No!” She was a person of rare goodness and honesty who had never harmed anyone. Sadly, she had absorbed what I can only consider as a gravely mistaken view of God.
More recently, certain religious leaders have declared that Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed much of New Orleans was a punishment sent by God who was angry because homosexuals were being increasingly tolerated in the United States. Similar explanations were offered for the immensely destructive tsunami in South-East Asia in 2004. It was a divine punishment for sin, allegedly. This is a deplorably primitive view, blindly ignoring what we now know about meteorology and geology.
The fact of the matter is this: life offers us a package-deal. On the one hand we are given the privilege of life in an astounding universe which often overwhelms us with great beauty. On the other, we must exist with risk, chance, accident, pain, suffering, tragedy, disease, death. It’s a package-deal – you can’t have one without the other. With the magnificence goes the risk and pain. The only consolation is that when accidents strike, it isn’t personal: nobody is getting at us personally. Some, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoievski’s story, have refused to accept the package-deal, and said it isn’t worth it. There’s too much suffering. Give God back the ticket!
A very understandable point of view. In actual fact, though, most of humanity down the ages have accepted the package-deal. It’s only a tiny minority who have committed suicide. Remember William Blake’s verse:
Man was made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine.
The climax of the poetic drama, The Book of Job (in which both Job and God are fictional characters) can be understood in this way, too. Innocent, and despite his unmerited sufferings, confronted by the awesome universe, Job accepts the package-deal.
On a recent phone-in radio programme, an earnest young man informed us that the laws of this country were only man-made, and therefore inferior. The laws of Islam, from the Holy Quran, were given by God and therefore perfect and infallible. In my opinion this is a dangerous and frighteningly mistaken view of God. All laws are expressed in human language, spoken or written. They are all human creations, and none the worse for that – though of course some laws may be bad laws that need to be changed. I do not think that any legal system is infallible or divine. Lest I should seem to be anti-Muslim, let me say that I should say the same thing to any Jew or Christian who claimed divine infallibility for the Ten Commandments, for example. These laws, too, are human, humanly expressed. How could it be otherwise? Of course, they may reflect, and I believe they do reflect, basic fundamental values, and in that sense they may be said to reflect a divine, ultimate reality. All the same, they are humanly expressed, in human, fallible language.
In his book A Vision to Pursue, Keith Ward, recently Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, admits that all religious traditions will need to be revised to approximate more nearly to a fuller truth which none of them fully encapsulates. The truth lies ahead. We may feel encouraged by that. Although he is an official Anglican Professor, Ward sometimes comes to conclusions that Unitarians would share with him.
I always think that just as no one can give us a complete map of the universe, so no one is in a position to give us a complete account of God. In that case, we don’t know for certain whether a person believes in God or not. Even if they say they don’t, they may simply be disbelievers in mistaken views of God. Without being aware of it, they may nevertheless believe in God. The same goes for us. We may say we don’t believe in God, but even so, implicitly, we may still do so, even when we deny it most strongly. One practical result of this is that we must not kill people on account of their beliefs or lack of belief in God. You can never be one hundred per cent sure whether someone believes in God or not. Though many may find that confusing, it is to me, all things considered, an encouraging thought.
A distinguished American Unitarian minister, Dr Forrester Church of All Souls, New York, puts it this way: some Unitarians employ god language; some don’t. It doesn’t really matter, he says. “When people proudly tell me that they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in him either.” God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each. Call it what you will: Spirit, ground of being, life itself: it remains what it always was – an awe-inspiring, mind-bending mystery.
Even so, some may feel that to say that all our beliefs about God may be mistaken in one way or another is to reach a dismal conclusion. Let me be clear, I am not saying that all our beliefs on this matter are all the same, equally worthless. Some beliefs, surely, are more mistaken than others, and some are more helpful and inspiring than others. Here, as in so many places, we may apply the test that Jesus gave us: By their fruits ye shall know them.
A view of God that says that God is so angry with what a certain writer has written in a book that he demands that people should kill this writer – that belief seems to me woefully and dangerously mistaken. Surely, though, we may have insights that, although partial and far from complete, are still insights. In this matter of views of God, it seems to me that I operate with many different insights acquired over the years, often from great thinkers and saintly souls, and that I can take something helpful and inspiring from each of them. They may not all harmonise. They may not all fit easily together. I am not clever enough to make them all completely consistent. That does not cast me down too much. When we are trying to talk about ultimate matters, is it surprising that we find it difficult to be utterly clear? We may well often feel confused – and is that to be wondered at?
So let’s try to be more positive. When people use the word “God”, what are some of the helpful things that they are trying to point to? First, there is our human sense of mystery. Surely, the universe, when we think about it, is infinitely mysterious. It’s much vaster than we have ever thought. We now suspect that our present observable universe may not be all that there is. It is unimaginably vast, billions of stars in our own galaxy, billions of other galaxies beyond that – but still there’s more. Indeed, Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, has spoken about the possible “multiverse”. Everything in our observable universe seems to follow the laws of physics. So let us call this universe that we observe, not “the universe”, but a “domain”(because if “universe” means everything that is, there cannot be anything more). Many scientists now believe that there may be vast numbers of other domains, which may operate according to quite different laws from ours. So the whole universe, everything that is, is much vaster than we have ever imagined, more than we can conceive, domain beyond domain, mystery beyond mystery. (The idea of a “multiverse” is as yet pure speculation, of course.) The very fact that there is anything at all, that anything exists, is utterly mysterious. Time itself is utterly mysterious. The very fact that it is impossible for us to conceive of “nothing” is utterly mysterious. You remember Professor J.B.S.Haldane’s famous remark: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” So when we say “God”, we are trying to indicate mystery, mystery inexhaustible.
According to St Thomas Aquinas, whom Roman Catholics consider to be one of the highest authorities on these matters, God is not to be thought of as an object amongst objects. God is the condition that makes it possible for anything at all to exist. God is existence itself, the limitless ocean of being, as it were. Many people have thought along similar lines. They have thought of God as the Totality of all things, as the All, or as somehow in all – “Thou one in Al , Thou All in One”. People like the great Jewish Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, have said “God or Nature” – suggesting that nature is another word for God. St Thomas’s view is expressed in some of our Unitarian hymns:
O Source Divine and Life of all,
The Fount of Being’s wondrous sea!
Thy depth would every heart appal,
That saw not Lover supreme in thee.
That leads me on to another view of God. To see love supreme in the fount of being’s wondrous sea is a matter of faith, it is far from obvious. In the love that we see in Jesus and in the most saintly human souls – the love that is generous, suffering, victorious over suffering, victorious even when seemingly defeated – in this we find an insight into the very heart of life. We can’t prove it, but we can feel it. That, I suggest, is a Christian view of God, though not expressed in any exclusive way.
Another great Christian thinker, St Anselm, famously said that God is the highest that human thought can conceive of – or, to be precise, he said, “God is that than which nothing higher can be conceived.” Justice, “mercy, pity, peace and love” as William Blake’s poem puts it, are amongst the highest values we can conceive – and so, surely, part of what we mean by “God”.
Albert Schweitzer said that he experienced God in two ways. First, as the tremendous power manifest in the universe. Second, as the inner ethical demand known within himself for justice, mercy, and righteousness. The two are one, he believed, but how they are one he confessed he did not know. An impressive and helpful view of God all the same, or so I have always felt. Through the cold waters of the ocean which is so powerful and seems so indifferent, there flows the warm gulf stream of love. We let ourselves be seized, supported, and carried along by that vital stream. Thy depth would every heart appal, that saw not love supreme in thee.
The ancient Indians have spoken of God in two ways – as the Brahman and the Atman. Brahman – the universal energy; Atman – the same energy expressed within each individual, and these two energies are fundamentally the same energy: “Thou art That”, they say, the universal divine energy also expressed as the energy within each of us.
I always think that the Old Testament gives us one poetic word for God that I find very satisfying, inspiring and helpful. It speaks of “The Eternal”. God is that which is from everlasting to everlasting. The Eternal is, as it were, the undergirding river-bed in which the ceaseless flow of time is held.
Don Cupitt, the former Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge, in a recent book has pointed out that language about God has dropped out of our everyday speech. In ordinary talk we no longer mention God. For example, we would not say, “How’s God been treating you these days?”. For most people that would sound odd, forced, embarrassing and unnatural, and we wouldn’t say it. But we would say, “How’s life been treating you these days?” So the word “life” has been taking over from the word “God” in our ordinary speech. “Life” is becoming another word for “God”. This is no new insight. Over a hundred years ago, the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy memorably said, “God is what life is.”
In a sense, God functions as a psychological and existential reality. To put it in less hi-falutin, simpler words, God is a reality in the human heart. “Thank God!” we say after some happy deliverance from misfortune or distress. “God help me!” we cry out in our distress. Language about God is involved in our deepest experiences of sorrow, suffering, cruelty, horror and injustice. We cry out to God against these things, seeking the power to endure. Human life is so full of suffering, injustice, unfairness, tragedy, that we have to cry out. We have even to cry out against God. This is a fact shown in the vast range of human language, from simple swearing to the profoundest cries of dereliction: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is an important point, not always openly recognised. People not only cry out to God, they also need to cry out against God.
Another word which is helpful is “unity”. Unitarians have been very keen on speaking of the Unity of God, though what precisely is meant by that phrase is not always easy to say. It is trying to point to the connectedness of all that is. The universe holds together, and the word “God” points us to the connectedness. All things are related and are in relationship, connected, and the word “God” points us to this divine unity within variety.
So in all these different ways, helpful language about God is trying to awaken us to basic and inescapable realities: mystery, the limitless ocean of being, the very highest ideal that human thought can conceive of, justice, mercy, pity, peace and love, the warm gulf stream of love within the vast forces of nature; the universal energy that expresses itself also as the energy within us and within everything; the Eternal that is like a river-bed undergirding the flow of time; the marvel of life itself; the unity interconnecting all things.
Our best human response to all this must surely be reverence, humility, a desire to put our lives in greater harmony with the highest that we know. The heart of true religion is something very simple, but very profound: gratitude and appreciation for the privilege of life in an astounding universe, together with commitment to devoted care, because this is a world of suffering. Appreciation involves all art, science and philosophy. Care involves all government, welfare, technology, education, medicine. If you want it all in just two words: gratitude and care!
Not that this can be done or has to be done simply by repeating the word “God”. As I have already said, we know to our cost that many ways of speaking about God are mistaken and dangerous. Religion and the spiritual life do not necessarily depend on such language. A serious religious humanism is possible. Unitarians have known this for over a hundred years. The Buddhists have known it for over two and a half thousand years. Speculation, even about God, is not the deepest part of religion. Sympathy with the vast suffering that surrounds us, sympathy that leads to devoted care to relieve suffering wherever we can – that is more important than speculation.
Good people feel the sorrows of humankind.
This sympathy is the worship of God.
Good people work with all their power for the good of all beings.
This work is the worship of God.
(From The Hitopadesa)
Let our last word be that of the prophet Micah: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
Amen.