A Personal Tyrant? The Trouble with Almighty Kings
There is something rotten in metaphors that personify God, that call the creator a he (or even a she). If God is like a human being, he's like a bad one. The worst form of human government is that of an "almighty king," especially if his officers insist he's never wrong. Suppose the king threatens to torture you unless you praise him. That would be despicable. But eternal torture? That would be infinitely despicable. Suppose a king invents arbitrary laws, governs by fear, and condemns you for being born. No matter what you've done, you're criminal because of your ancestry, but he will "save" you if you worship him. Suppose you lived in such an unjust kingdom. Wouldn't the high road be rebellion--anything not to abet such a tyrant?
If God is subject to human standards, then the purest moral stance is that of Satan in Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n" (1:263). The powers and policies of the Abrahamic God imagined as human whims are monstrous enough to make Satan's rebellion an act of moral decency. A human with a god-complex is so likely to turn evil that personifying God--seeing absolute power in terms of human power--creates a nightmare of megalomania and insane blood sacrifice. The metaphors of anthropomorphism, of a giant out-of-control dictator, not only break down in our historical context, but turn and snap at all human decency like rabid dogs. The God of the Old Testament is a God of hate, not love, and if we personify him, situate him to a human moral frame, he is the Hulk on a bad day. "You won't like me when I'm angry."
The trope of father isn't much better. It seems to call for understanding in terms of the culture of the Middle East, where (as a Kuwaiti friend explained) there is no clear demarcation between youth and adulthood, no sudden transition at eighteen or twenty-one. A good son (like a daughter before marriage) belongs to his father's household and is bound to obedience as long as the father lives. When he returned to Kuwait and married, my friend expected, like Gloria and the Meathead, to share the father's house, and the father would govern the family as long as he lived. When the father died at whatever age, my friend would become the next father. This construction of father aligns with the construction of king, but with more hope of loving care. The familiar Aramaic Abba (or Daddy) by which Jesus addresses God is a giant step away from the trope of a mad king. But, still, a human father is finite in power and duration. The son isn't held in infinite thralldom. He hopes that, whatever benefits his father enjoys, he will enjoy in his turn. Of course, nobody really wants the powers and honors of God (nobody sane anyway), so the trope breaks down again. God is better personified as a father than as a king, but it's a flawed metaphor.
Classical theology holds that any terms describing positive traits of God are analogical, not literal. If we say God is good, we don't mean he's really like a good person. Instead, he has (or rather is) a purer form of goodness. Meister Eckhart phrased this radically: "I am good, God is not good." Behind this distinction is Plato's theory of forms, which has structured Christian theology from its beginnings. For every earthly thing, such as justice or a horse, there is an eternal idea. All occasions of justice and all material horses are imperfect images of perfect ideas, like shadows on a wall in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. God is what human goodness only approximates. God is the eternal idea of perfect goodness combined with wisdom, justice, love, and every other virtue. So, insofar as God is a "person," he is perfect personhood, unentangled with earthly all-but-almighty kings or quasi-eternal fathers. His absolute power that, unlike its human counterpart, does not corrupt absolutely.
The trouble is that hardly anybody today is a Platonist. The existence of a meaningful word such as justice doesn't imply, as Plato thought, a unitary idea-in-the-sky. Most words work by signifying overlapping, non-exclusive clusters of things that may not share any essential traits--the phenomena explained as family resemblance in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). The members of a family may all look recognizably alike even if no one of them has all of the defining family traits such as a built, skin tone, and nose. Words are not not unitary ideas, but they shift according to context. An uncle left babysitting young children and told to play "games" with them is rightly blamed if the parents come home to find a game of strip poker. Not all "games" are games in a given sentence.
This suggests that it is impossible to imagine universal "goodness" (or universal anything) completely disconnected from corruptible human examples. Without a human context, goodness is an empty word. So a personal God--absent a Platonic mind-frame--is corrupted by non-ideal attributes of actual people, especially parents, pastors, and other authority figures. An anthropomorphic deity, God imagined as an almighty king or eternal father in human shape, is an invitation to atheism.
My earlier review of atheistic memes confirmed that most of them are based on the perceived gullibility and bad character of theists (the ad hominem fallacy) or on naive forms of anthropomorphism, mocking God as an "imaginary friend" or seeing him as a graybeard in the clouds (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/05/reading-atheist-memes.html). These memes make sense as far as they go, but they miss the point. The God they reject is a straw man, a poor forked spirit of moods and vanities. He may be the God of their churches, even their pastors' sermons, but serious theologians have rejected him too for the last fifteen hundred years. These memes support Zulfiqar Ali Shah's premise from my last post: that much Judeo-Christian atheism results from anthropomorphism. Nobody believes in Zeus anymore. Yahweh, Allah, and the Father resemble Zeus at their peril.
Dressing transcendence in human form creates absurdities and moral objections. Consider a human ruler who condemns all of his subjects to torture because of one ancestor's disobedience but somehow manages to nullify his own order by faking his own suicide-by-police (or by-centurion), which apparently mollifies him (but only if you believe it does). There's much more nonsense created by pulpit stories that cast God in the role of an invisible man with superpowers and an angry, primitive character. The core of the problem is that, whatever he is, if he is, God is unquestionably not a human being. Any personhood is a personification of What Is. And What Is is, even if we can somehow relate to it, isn't ours to judge.
One way to get over this, given that all language about God is analogical anyway, is to use non-human analogies immune to moral judgement. A falling tree may be destructive, but unless we imagine a personal intelligence pushing it over, it isn't evil. It can't be blamed. It is what it is. Rather than imagining a king in the sky giving a desert tribe rules that he'll smite them for breaking, imagine a map showing roads in a forest. Suppose that you peruse the map in your Jeep at the forest's edge. It shows the route to a resort where you have a reservation, and, given that it's accurate, you need only follow the map, steering correctly at Y's and crossroads, sloshing through mud holes and ignoring paved side roads. If you do, you'll pull up in the parking lot. If you don't, winging on impulse, you may drive off an unmarked bridge-out or sink into an snake-infested swamp. But that's not the map's fault. The map is not punishing you.
The map isn't merciless just because it shows only one good road. It isn't tyrannical because you'll suffer if you don't respect its authority. The road to the resort is where it is. The map is a scripture revealing in terms of inked paper (or even the tablets of an anthropomorphized storm god) the experience of someone who has successfully driven to the resort, a record to help others drive there. There may be other roads to the resort that the mapmaker was unaware of, but she can't be blamed for that. She knows what she knows and is trying to help. The map is a service, advice immune to moral judgement. It shouldn't be blamed for anthropomorphic quirks of style or bad consequences of not following it as long as it indicates a good road--by analogy, as long as it guides readers toward a good life and death.
Of course, a problem with this demythologized style of religion--reducing the trope of a God-man to inanimate metaphors, abstract doctrines, and practical instructions--is that, though it removes the cloddish mythological gods that invite atheism, it also eliminates perks associated with religion. We can't pray to a road. If we love a road, it's not the way we love a father, and we can't imagine a road's loving us back. A road can't listen or answer. It may be returned to but can't forgive or have mercy. The same route analogized as a "man upstairs," however cranky, gives wiggle room that a strip of dirt doesn't. We may praise a good road, but not thank it. Even though some religions, such as Taoism, classical Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta function without a personified Divine Ground, the Abrahamic traditions are deeply entangled in imagining God as a super-person (even Islam, with apologies to Zulfiqar Ali Shah).
Schleiermacher saw all religion as personal intuition of the infinite situated in the phenomenological (not to say material) universe, an encounter that varies according the capacity of the individual. When a person seems to encounter God, the encounter often is (but need not necessarily be) infused with personhood. Our human fullness is the fullest we relate to. Still, the infinite subsumes all the universe. It isn't merely the "genius of humanity," the shrunken form in which human beings encounter God. Schleiermacher answered Bishop Sack by saying that he respected all forms of piety, and did not wish to eliminate anthropomorphism. "Without some anthropomorphism," as B. A. Gerrish summarizes the German reply to the bishop, "nothing in religion could ever be put into words" (p. 63).
If Schleiermacher had written two hundred years later, he might have placed the terms of an anthropomorphic God under erasure (sous rature), a strategy introduced by Martin Heidegger and extended by Jacques Derrida. A word "under erasure" is crossed out but allowed to remain legible as a way of indicating that it is necessary but inadequate, that it fails to produce a complete meaning. A word is used under erasure because there is no better one, but its meaning differs explicitly from that of the un-erased word. Derrida extends uncertainty to the whole language system, but God as person seems to be a particularly questionable cluster of meaning.
Anthropomorphism is both embraced and dramatically contradicted in the Bhagavad Gita. Hindu gods are anthropomorphic with trademark traits like saints in Renaissance Italian painting. Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu and, through him, of Brahman, the ground of Being) is a blue-skinned flute-player beloved of women. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, speaking as Brahman, tells his friend Arjuna that worshippers of other gods truly worship him, their source, but that the worship of limited gods brings limited rewards--maybe only a few eons of bliss before a worshipper falls back into the suffering of death and rebirth. Only the one God leads to the goal of life, eternal escape from suffering (9:20-28). Arjuna begs to see Krishna's ultimate form, the form of Brahman itself: "If you think I am strong enough, / worthy enough, to endure it, / grant me now, Lord, a vision / of your vast imperishable Self" (11.3).
What follows, most of the Book 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, is a mind-blowing imagination of the unimaginable. I recommend reading for yourself what I will only sample. God's reality is as bright as a thousand suns. "I see you everywhere," Arjuna goes on to say, "with billions / of arms, eyes, bellies, faces, / without end, middle, or beginning, / your body the whole universe, Lord" (11:16). Krishna-Vishnu-Brahman fills the universe with teeming light, and not all beatific. Krishna's "billion fanged mouths / blaze like the fires of doomsday" (11:24).
There is no "problem of evil" with a universal God encompassing everything, a transcendent absolute that devours ego-desire. "I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all things," Krishna announces as Arjuna cowers begging for mercy (11:32). Finally, Brahman-Vishnu mercifully assumes the anthropomorphic appearance of beautiful blue-skinned Krishna, a kind human friend, but the point has been made. God is not "the man upstairs," or anywhere else for that matter, however much we may desire to restrict him to human protocols.
References
Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Harmony, 2000.
Gerrish, B. A. A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology. Wipf and Stock, 2001.
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