Who is God? Part 2

Who is God?

Part 2: What lies hidden behind the name: “God”?

At the heart of the matter, is that we have all continued to use the word “God”, even though we now understand that word is dramatically different ways. I remember during one of my own periods of doubt we had a senior minister as visiting preacher. When he spoke, he betrayed not a shadow of a doubt about God. At the time, that was briefly encouraging because I thought, “Well, if he, in his senior position, continues in faith then I should be able to as well”. However, it wasn’t substantially helpful because he was disguising the issues that I needed to face up to, I realise now that he was talking about God in a completely different way to how I conceive him. I also realise that I am quite a literal thinker. As a boy, I had been told about this God, who is an independent agent, and I believed them. I see now that the senior minister who misled me was thinking of God using ideas like, “God is the ground of our being”, or “a sense of divine presence”. Of course, he was not deliberately misleading me. I imagine that in his own journey to hold onto faith, he had realised, like me, that the view of God he had grown up with was untenable (Note: not all Christians think it is untenable!), but, desperately clinging on – perhaps through tremendous travail – he had found a way to redefine what he meant by God. This enabled him to continue to believe in God, and once this is done, he is able to speak about God apparently exactly as he did before. His listeners then relate to him with their own understanding of who God is, and they all assume that he is talking about God with the same understanding that they have.

There is clearly a level of deception at work here, or, at least, a terrible lack of clarity. I say again that there is no deliberate deception going on, but it would be extremely helpful to clarify what we do mean when we talk about God. Especially for that great mass of people who have given up believing in God, they would benefit from understanding that those who do still believe are not simply being dim and refusing to have the wool pulled away from their eyes. They might even find the new conceptions of God deeply appealing. And, of course, for all those Christians struggling with their faith, it would be extremely helpful for them to understand what conception of God is being used when he is being spoken about, and assistance to find a view of God that each person can live with would also be enormously helpful.