Theological Musings
by C. Grey Austin, Ph.D.
Installment XVIII -- October 1994
Karen Armstrong, in A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam (Ballantine, 1993), notes that concepts of God
have changed over the centuries in response to the social and political needs
of the adherents of those three "religions of God," and that they continue
to change. In her final chapter, she observes that the idea of a personal
God is increasingly unacceptable, and she speculates about what may replace
it.
When I began writing and sharing these "Musings" my attention was primarily
on my unhappiness with the concept of a personal God. Gradually I shifted
the emphasis toward a cosmology that would be scientifically acceptable,
and I was able to find, by analogy, some aspects of spirituality in that
cosmos. Now I am ready, after restating why I find concepts of a personal
God unacceptable, to suggest a fully spiritual alternative cosmology to fit
a scientific age.
What's wrong with a personal God?
1. I understand a belief in a personal God to be an expression of a sense
of communion with a divine presence, and I honor that experience, but I find
an anthropomorphic view of God -- however metaphoric -- to be a very limited
view of ultimate reality and one better suited to a pre-scientific era.
2. When belief in the existence and nature of ultimate reality is expressed
in terms of a God as a being with human qualities, it suggests to me a God
who may choose at any time to set aside the order that sustains our natural
world in order to accede to the wishes of individuals or groups who have
some favored status with God. Implicit in the belief that God hears and
responds to individual prayer requests, decides who will die and when, causes
rain to relieve drought, and threatens California with another earthquake,
is the assemption that God can be controlled by believing the right things,
saying the correct words, or performing the prescribed rites -- that God
can be persuaded, as it were, to place certain individuals or groups in some
favored status. This view portrays Ultimate Reality as a cosmic bellperson
or a compulsive meddler.
3. The identification of God as person or parent is further complicated
by the gender issue and by the paucity of good parental models in today's
society.
4. A belief in God as person places God out there, close perhaps, but Other.
It defines a relationship in which human beings are placed over against
an example of perfection, and can only feel diminished and powerless in the
comparison. A concept of God as personal Other may fit a doctrine of original
sin for which a redemptive human sacrifice is required, but it does not,
in my view, support a belief in original blessing. I have come to believe
in oneness-wholeness-unity rather than the dualism of God/humanity, divine/human,
perfection/sinner, sacred/profane, inner/Other.
Bridge
I believe that I have now settled that issue for myself, and I do not expect
to revisit it. I do not believe in a God who can be portrayed in human terms
or who acts as an individual consciousness to make judgments or decisions
that set aside, for any reason, the natural order. Because that view of
a personal God has been such a stumbling block for me, I am attempting to
construct (or discover) a cosmology that is no less spiritual but that does
not need a personal God as its centerpiece. Paul Tillich and Teilhard De
Chardin have offered their formulations, as did Lao Tzu some 2,500 years
ago, and now I am in the process of formulating mine. (This is a process
that I wish every church would foster.)
Many years ago I heard "God" defined, generically, as that which is "supremely
significant and ultimately real." I believe that each of us, in our quest
for empowerment, for a Self, needs a frame of reference. We can be grounded,
centered, connected only insofar as we have a sense of how the universe works
and where we belong within it. For our own health and wholeness, we each
need to know what is, for us, supremely significant, ultimately real, and
integral to the way the universe works. Whether we refer to that reality
as "God" has nothing to do with the degree of spirituality we can experience
in the universe.
No religious formulation, no statement of faith, including mine, is factually
true. All are metaphor, poetry, analogy, myth -- attempts to put into words
and into minds some awareness of an ineffable reality that defies definition.
I suggest a concept that acknowledges what we know from modern science but
is not limited to what we can see, smell, touch, taste and hear, either personally
or through scientific instrumentation.
My Cosmology
1. Energy is the essence of life, the prime characteristic of the universe.
Everything that we experience as matter, including ourselves, consists of
tiny energized particles moving in space. Matter is illusory.
2. There are certain universals -- forces like gravity and electromagnetism,
processes like evolution and photosynthesis -- that are embedded in the nature
of the universe, and in us. One may envision the entire universe as being
alive with these and other forces and processes that scientists have identified.
3. I envision, additionally, the entire universe energized, virtually humming,
with the energy and intelligence of love and its correlates, creativity and
healing. These energies may be pictured as existing and moving in the spaces
between the particles, along with the other universals. The cells of our
bodies, for example, communicate the need for physical healing to one another
and activate the healing process from within. (Two M.D.s have just won a
Nobel Prize for expanding on that idea.)
4. The mind-body connection is such that we create, or at least affect,
our own reality by the ideas that we hold, the beliefs that we affirm. Quantum
physics teaches us that there may be no objective reality, that what we observe
is always affected by the presence of the observer. It also teaches us to
think of reality, not as a structure of building blocks, but as a network
of interrelationships. I can envision, then, a connectedness in which my
mind is part of universal mind, and my consciousness is part of universal
consciousness, as, perhaps, my unconscious is connected with universal archetypes
through my participation in the collective unconscious. What I think and
who I am -- my being -- is interrelated with all being through what Sam Keen
calls "a universal principle of unity." I affect all and all affects me.
I am one with all.
5. I may think of myself as a spiritual being learning to become human (rather
than a human being trying to become spiritual), and if that image is helpful,
then I can see myself as partaking in the totality of divinity, affecting
and being affected by all spiritual activity. I become co-creator with all
creativity.
6. It may not be necessary to this view of ultimate reality to think of
oneself as eternal in some reincarnational sense, but it helps me to think
of myself as a soul who appears periodically in earth-school to learn lessons
that move me toward a state of development in which I may become a spiritual
guide and teacher to those who are open to that guidance. In this view,
I find support in the writings of Brian Weiss and Gary Zukav, in the literature
on near-death experiences, and in pre-Nicean beliefs of Gnostic Christians.
7. Everything comes to me as a gift (grace) for my learning and development.
I need only to open myself to the vast riches that are all around me and
within me.
8. The appropriate response to grace is gratitude.
9. The appropriate expression of gratitude is to chop wood and carry water,
that is, to find and to express the spiritual in the ordinary, to be grace
for others.
10. In my participation in the whole, I share in the wisdom of all. That
wisdom within me is accessible through meditation, receptive prayer, dreams,
intuition, and other ways of non-cognitive knowing that may be thought of
as the voice of the Christ within or the Buddha self. Within me is the
wisdom to find abundant life in the Kingdom of God (New Testament), walk
in harmony with The Way [Tao Te Ching], find peace in every step [Thich Hnat
Hanh], and live in beauty with all that exists [Navajo].
11. There is a gestalt to this that I begin to experience, not as loss of
individualism but as an identification with all nature, all life, all humankind,
and with those ultimate energies and forces that nurture and sustain and
give meaning to life. When I become immersed in the unity of it all, I sense
the need to express that oneness with all in art, poetry, music, and dance
because the total reality is beauty more than it is theology. It sings in
me; I dance it.
12. In all this, I feel kin to those elder brothers and sisters who are
examples for me -- Jesus, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, selected saints of all religions
and of none, shamans, healers, and you contemporary good people who read
this.
13. All of the great religions counsel to look within for wisdom, and within
me I find the presence and power of the forces, processes, energy and intelligence
that pervade and activate the universe. I also find in here the darker facets
of my experience that hinder me from being the authentic Self that I have
the potential to be. I can more easily place all humankind in my big story
of cosmic possibility that I can cope with my own story and let myself be
transformed into the person I could be. Yet the task is not to be perfect,
but to be perfectly me, flaws and all. The flow of abundant spiritual life
is mine to experience insofar as I become open to it all.
14. Implicit in our connectedness, in our identity with all, is an ethical
imperative. It is not enough to find individual spirituality (an oxymoron,
I think); my expression of gratitude for the grace that I experience must
be played out in an ecological commitment to leaving to those who follow
us a planet that is enhanced in its beauty and liveability. The current
paradigm of progress and pollution is antithetical to spiritual growth.
Concluding Comment
We stand in a long tradition of personifying the forces that affect us.
Whether out of the need to explain mysteries, or to placate and control sources
of potential disaster, or to find a recipient for the gratitude that wells
up in the heart, or to account for experiences that feel transcendent, humankind
has named gods and goddesses. Not all cultures, however, have gone this
route. Taoism offers The Way -- a path to be followed -- without a God to
create it or to be worshipped along the way. I draw that concept from Taoism;
I draw Jesus, as teacher and example, from Christianity; and I draw the meditative
practice of mindful awareness from Buddhism. I find great overlapping in
the world's religions, and I sense even more than I have yet found. My commitment
to Oneness requires a cultural and religious inclusiveness that is an additional
source of enrichment.
* * * * *
What I've been reading lately:
Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam. (Ballantine, 1993)
Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit. (William
Morrow, 1994)
Joan Borysenko, Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.
(Warner, 1993)
Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.
(Doubleday, 1992)
Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God. (Bantam, 1994)
Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe. (HarperCollins, 1991)
Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul. (Fireside, 1989)
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(Copyright 1997 by C. Grey Austin, all rights reserved.)