{"id":1518,"date":"2019-04-15T17:04:38","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T16:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2019-05-10T23:32:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T22:32:10","slug":"saying-things-about-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1518","title":{"rendered":"Saying things about God…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A little while\nago, I noted in connection with the statement \u201cJesus is Lord\u201d not only that it\nstates by implication that Caesar (or your king, president, prime minister or\nparty leader) is not Lord, but also that the very making of the statement\ninstantiates (to at least an extent) what it proclaims. Government is always to\na great extent by consent; it takes a fairly modest proportion of a population\nto deny a government actively to make it incapable of governing, even where\nthat government is very repressive and totalitarian. A ruler is a ruler, to a\nhuge extent, because you and others think<\/em><\/strong> he or she is a ruler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a performative\nspeech act, in the same way as \u201cI now declare you man and wife\u201d actually makes\na couple man and wife. I grant that in order to make a ruler, you need a large\nnumber of such performative speech acts, but the principle holds good in\ngeneral \u2013 and in any event, the statement \u201cJesus is Lord\u201d creates an allegiance\nwithin you. In this way, one can easily see how the Kingdom of God, in which\nJesus is Lord, is an \u201calready but not yet\u201d situation; it is already<\/em><\/strong>\nthe case in those who proclaim it, but not yet<\/em><\/strong> in that the whole body of\nhumanity has not yet proclaimed it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing this on\nPalm Sunday (I note that it\u2019s very unlikely I\u2019ll finish writing it on the same\nday), I can readily understand the Roman reaction to crowds of people loudly\nproclaiming Jesus as he rode through Jerusalem. The very action of proclaiming\nhim was a rebellion against Caesar. I note in passing that those who these days\nworry about Muslims having a \u201cdual allegiance\u201d are probably correct \u2013 in my\ncountry, Catholics were accused of that from the time when Henry VIII split\nfrom the Catholic church until really very recently, with considerable\njustification as, for many years, Catholic nations were being encouraged to\ninvade us and re-establish \u201cthe true faith\u201d, and following our Civil War the\nsame attitude was taken for some time towards many nonconformists, as a\nconsiderable impetus for the rather short lived \u201cCommonwealth\u201d was found in some\nof the more ardent strands of Protestantism, for example the Diggers<\/a> and the Levellers<\/a>. (Americans may\nnote that the Pilgrim Fathers were from one such sect, though they were no\nlonger being persecuted by the time the Mayflower set sail). The Romans were\nreacting very much as do those who worry about Muslims (or, indeed, Jews) in\nthe States, or the British governments from the 1500s towards Catholics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, to my\nmind, members of any<\/em><\/strong> religion should have an allegiance first to God, and only\nthereafter to the nation, or, in the case of non-theistic religions, to the\nway, the Tao, the principles. That holds particularly good for Christianity,\nwhich has a weakness for turning itself into or selling out to empire, starting\nwith the Constantinian turn and going on to the imperial papacy of the Middle\nAges, the smug self-satisfaction of the European empires of the 16th<\/sup>\nto 19th<\/sup> centuries (whether it be the Spanish, the French, the Dutch\nor the English, all took with them their missionaries and considered themselves\nto be \u201cenlightening the heathen\u201d), or the casual arrogance of American\nExceptionalism which just knows that God is a proprietary feature of the\nAmerican Way and can imagine that a lying, cheating, adulterous narcissist is\nGod\u2019s chosen instrument to lead the \u201cfree world\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is probably\nworth pointing out that those same 16th<\/sup> century Diggers and\nLevellers were prominent examples of the concept that allegiance to God trumped\nallegiance to country, and that this mindset was very much a feature of the\npost-Civil War concept of the country, in a secularised form in which the rule\nof law and the will of the representatives of the people were sovereign over\nthe notional leaders of the country (whether monarchs or prime ministers). Their\nlineal successors are now our Socialists and Social Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this is\nvery well, but I\u2019m also writing this nearing the end of Peter Rollins\u2019 \u201cAtheism\nfor Lent\u201d course, which I\u2019m doing for the third time. Some of the writers we\u2019ve\nbeen contemplating would see what I\u2019ve written above not as a matter of\naccording power to an entity (whether Caesar or God) which actually exists\nabsent such proclamations, but as actually constituting that entity. In that\nvein of thinking, if Muslims talk of \u201cAllah, the Merciful, the Compassionate\u201d,\nthey are looking to constitute the meme of Allah as being merciful and\ncompassionate. Some Theologian friends of mine will cheerfully talk of theology\nas being an \u201cimaginative construction\u201d, which is at most a hair\u2019s breadth from\nthis way of thinking; some Magician friends will say that it is something\nslightly more than an imaginative construction, but it is still actually\ncreating the entity of God. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can agree, I think, that what we mean by \u201cGod\u201d is not less than<\/em><\/strong> an imaginative construction; it should be abundantly clear that even in a completely atheistic world, our talk of God creates a God-concept and so a force which operates in our concept-space independently of whether it corresponds to something in the real world. Let\u2019s face it, our talk of money creates such a force, and money these days does not have any real existence \u2013 no-one considers that billionaires are such because they have in their possession more than a billion pound coins, for instance (nor are those pound coins really \u201cworth\u201d a pound each, other than because we believe them to be).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Magicians\nthink that they are creating something akin to archetypes in the collective\nunconscious, and that those archetypes can have real physical effects. In\ncalling God \u201cmerciful and compassionate\u201d, we are therefore actually making God\nmerciful and compassionate, in calling God all powerful we are making him or\nher all powerful, and in calling God loving we are creating a loving God. I\nhave sufficient suspicion that there may be a grain of truth in this way of\nthinking that I really do not like language like \u201csinners in the hands of an\nangry God\u201d or of consignment to everlasting torment for the unfaithful, just in\ncase by so describing God we are making a God who is actually like that \u2013 we are\ncertainly creating a psychological force within some of us which can be very\ninimical to us, and can cause untold grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what if, in\nreality, there IS a God, and what we say about God is potentially true,\npotentially false? Yes, we have the nasty and insidious thought that we may be\nblaspheming by describing God as wrathful if, in fact, God is endlessly loving\n(or vice versa). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, however, I think of the image of the Eastern potentate from which we derive a concept of God as sovereign. Yes, you extol his power and might, and that helps to make him powerful and mighty. But you also extol his compassion and mercy in the hope that that might persuade him <\/em><\/strong>to be compassionate and merciful (or even loving) in circumstances where he is anything but those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is with those thoughts rattling around in my head that I was looking through some of the Psalms recently, and thinking that we may be doing just that; we may have a weak God whom we are calling powerful, we may have an ignorant God whom we are calling all-knowing, a heartless God whom we are calling compassionate, a legalistic God whom we are calling merciful and an unfeeling God whom we are calling loving. Perhaps the terms we use most of God are exactly those qualities God actually lacks? I could also worry about faithfulness, constancy, justice and, perhaps above all, the possibility that we are dealing with a wholly unpredictable God, one who does “play dice” (as Einstein famously suggested God did not), not just on a subatomic level but in all respects…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And perhaps,\njust perhaps, if we redouble our efforts to call God those things which we\nwould want God to be, we may get a God like that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little while ago, I noted in connection with the statement \u201cJesus is Lord\u201d not only that it states by implication that Caesar (or your king, president, prime minister or party leader) is not Lord, but also that the very making of the statement instantiates (to at least an extent) what it proclaims. Government is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1531,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions\/1531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}