Bad Lord! Transcending a Tainted G-Word

 

Last night, I played an audio book on centering prayer. I was sitting fully relaxed, as instructed, when the narrator began the process of selecting a mantra and innocently suggested that I might start by calling up my image of God. I was fully relaxed, unguarded, open to impulse, and a shocking thing happened--an eruption of vague but nasty impressions. A scowling sin-smiting Prig-in-the-sky. The fearful One. Who'd want to get any closer than absolutely necessary to him? I suffered what I already knew, emerging like projectile vomit, a disgust with a God-image that I'd learned as a child and can't forget, like PTSD from a trigger event.

I know that the ugly, threatening face in my subconscious is not what the devout mean by the word--at least not any devout that I respect--certainly not what writers on centering prayer mean. Cynthia Bourgeault describes the object of such prayer as "that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists" (p. 6), certainly not a jealous bigot-in-chief scowling down from a throne on a storm cloud. In adulthood--in addition to a 24-semester-hour theology program--I've privately studied religion for many years. I understand that Moses' angry war-god is not what I ought to imagine when I hear the G-word. I know that the God of theology is not the white-bearded Paul Bunyan of my childhood or of classical art. I'm not supposed to think of a hulking tyrant in heaven, but of the eternal all-good, all-wise, all-loving, all-present Source of Being.

            But it's a lot like being told not to think of a purple rhinoceros. Trying not to think is thinking of it. I need another word. Those toxic images, the hulking graybeard, the king, the prude, the bully, the punisher, bang inside me like a tune I can't get out of my head, stuck there for seventy years. Say the G-word, and nasty thoughts pop up unless I pay attention. I've learned to consciously repress them, but my mind is like a jack-in-the-box. They're  spring-loaded in it. 

I was listening to a Covid-era streamed church service while doing physical therapy stretches, letting the words float across the room, when the rector read the Apostles' Creed. What could be less provocative? But when he read, "seated at the right hand of the Father," there it was: an old man with a flabby left arm (otherwise, why the right hand?) and his wrinkly bum planted on a overdecorated chair. If God has a hand and is seated, he must have a bum, and if he has a bum, he either has an anus, two balls, and a penis or (like GI Joe) he doesn't. I don't know which is more unbecoming. An anatomically correct Jesus comes with incarnation, but a masculine God is ridiculous. 

          St. Augustine thought so too. For years he rejected Christianity, asking "Is God limited by a bodily shape, and does he have hair and nails?" (3.7.12, p. 34). Because men were said to be "made in God's image," he took the Christian answer to be "yes." Only when he learned from St. Ambrose to interpret allegorically that and other grotesque details in the Old Testament was he able to harmonize Christianity with a divinity. Augustine of Hippo could no more honor a testy, testicular God than I can (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/11/st-augustine-and-science.html). 

This grotesque mismatch, the contrast between the cruel Lord of the Old Testament and the loving Father of Jesus has been resolved several ways. The simplest is to reject the old tyrant out of hand--to consider him a devil or, at least, an inferior maker of a corrupt world. Many early Christian sects took this dualistic approach: Gnostics, Valentinians, Marcionites, Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars. The rejection of Yahweh (in contrast to the Father) within Christianity was not finally suppressed until the 14th century, when the Inquisition finished the work that the Albigensian Crusade had begun when it massacred of thousands of heretics. 

Another way to manage an unseemly God-figure is to read him allegorically, a method pioneered by Greek interpreters of Homer, adopted into Judaism by Philo of Alexandria, and carried to a new level by early Christian theologians, who saw pretty much everything as foreshadowing Christ or his teachings. The third-century theologian Origen. for instance, reads 1 Samuel 15, where the Lord commands Saul to kill "every man, woman, child, and infant" after a battle as merely meaning to exterminate personal inclinations to sin.

But passages like the Lord's call for genocide--transgressing morality and Christian love--are epidemic in the Jewish Bible. I'll confine myself to one vile chapter, 1 Samuel 15. Here, Samuel (who is God's mouthpiece because he says he is) reminds King Saul of his genocidal obligation, and Saul agrees. Sympathy for innocent babies is a nonstarter. Generations ago, Amalekites killed some Israelites, so innocent Amalekite children must die today. God commands it, the same God who blessed Abraham for being ready to murder his only son. 

After Saul defeats the Amalekites, he dutifully slaughters all the human kids, which is apparently pleasing to the Lord. Saul's mistake is not slaughtering the goat kids also (and sheep and cattle), which he keeps to kill and eat later. Samuel is enraged because Saul has disobeyed "my commands." His, not God's. He cries out to God all night, as if personally insulted, and then confronts Saul. Saul protests that he did kill all the Amalekites (except for their king), but all Samuel has to do is recite a poem about obedience, and Saul caves, blaming his soldiers and begging forgiveness. Samuel will hear nothing of it. Like a holy man of God, he chops the enemy king "to pieces before the Lord" (1 Samuel 15:33), curses Saul, and leaves in a huff.

Samuel murders a prisoner of war.

This reads to me like a proud, testy, bloodthirsty old prophet angry at being snubbed, but, if the Bible is to be believed, this isn't just Samuel's ego: "And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel" (1 Samuel 15:34). Read theologically, this is as repugnant as anything else in the chapter. The God of theology, the object of centering prayer, is not clueless and emotional. He doesn't appoint a king without knowing the outcome and, at least as important, he is impassible--not vulnerable to feelings such as sorrow inflicted by his creatures. He is not the kind of loose cannon likely to order me to commit random cruelty and then punish me for not carrying out his order communicated by a cantankerous all-too-human messenger. 

This sort of God-text can only be reconciled with orthodox Christianity or modern Judaism is by muscular non-literal reading. It can't mean what it says. This is, in fact, the traditional position in Christianity and Judaism. Hebraist James L. Kugel outlines the Four Assumptions that have guided scriptural exegesis for millennia, assumptions without which all those Biblical fables of misbehaving men smitten by a cantankerous all-too-human deity would be, on their face, scholarly curiosities--much like Homer's epics but inferior as literature.

The first assumption is that the Bible is "a fundamentally cryptic text" that often doesn't means what it says. My supposition that 1 Samuel portrays God as enjoying the slaughter of babies is, under this assumption, an obvious interpretation that is must be wrong (Kugel 14).

The second assumption is that the Bible contains wise lessons applicable to today's readers, even parts that directly address other time periods or that seem to be ordinary history or legend. If the lesson that a passage seems to teach is not uplifting, I'm reading it wrong, and, if I can't find a moral, I need to look harder. Scripture is a divine Rorschach blot in which I can read God's will--especially by lining up other, seemingly unrelated verses to build my case. 

This works because of the third assumption, that everything in the Bible is true and consistent--not only self-consistent, but consistent with whatever my particuolar orthodoxy is. Scripture supports true faith. If two verses contradict each other or any verses contradict my core beliefs, then I need to decode the "fundamentally cryptic text" differently. 

All of this is reinforced by the fourth assumption, that the Bible, though written over centuries in various human dialects, "is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directly or through his prophets" (Kugel 15). This does not follow from the other assumptions (a text of human origin may be cryptic, wise, and consistent), but it confirms them. Once interpreters have decided the Bible means--not what it says, but a patchwork of extrapolations--it is blasphemous to question them.

The God literally described in the Old Testament is a cruel, moody, jingoistic rascal, but that's what the Four Assumptions were invented to neutralize. My problem, obviously, is that in my early education, I didn't learn the denatured reinterpretations early enough, so I took toxic tales like Samuel's on face value. But the damage is done, the bad seed planted in my unconscious, so my best strategy now may be discard the Four Assumptions altogether and read the Old Testament as I read the Bhagavad Gita, as a source of ideas to take or leave as I see fit.

The gospels present much less of a problem, and Jesus remains a transcendent role model, though there is a jarring dissonance between the itinerate rabbi and the uber-person of the Trinity, so I'm a closet Adoptionist. The other roots of my negative image of the G-word are in the Pauline-Calvinist theology, also learned in childhood. God created a bear-trap garden, Adam stepped in it as planned, and so I am damned unless I am washed in the blood of Jesus--an emblematic figure on the cross almost totally abstracted from the charismatic teacher of the gospels. God is too stubborn or weak or indebted or theatrical (or something) to simply forgive me without staging a bloody crucifixion after he messed up in Eden. He had to correct his mistake by dressing up in flesh (or a third of him anyway) and so forth and so on. It's all, as Aquinas says, a big fat mystery, impossible to understand, but if I don't believe, eternal torture has been prepared for me by a God of Love (if belief without understanding is even possible).

Popular evangelical theology gives us an all-too human G-figure modeled on the Old Testament with New Testament additions. He is Zoroastrian in that he must pay a ransom to Satan or to his own unforgiving side (Mark 10:45, Timothy 2:5-6). He is Aztec in that only a human blood-sacrifice will do (Romans 3:24-25, Hebrews 9:11-19). I might stand in the courtyard of such a Sauron, bowing before a priest who dared to risk his presence. I might prostrate myself to avoid divine smiting, but I would never cozy up to him in centering prayer. The God of this theology is the antithesis of  the "invisible but always present Origin of all that exists," the opposite of Friedrich Schleiermacher's God whose one definable trait is love. There is a theology of a benign God, but my unconscious holds a nasty residue of another kind.

In The Mind's Road to God, St. Bonaventure describes a process akin to centering prayer, his 1259 discovery of divine peace on Mount Alvernia. His revelation is simply to let go of discursive thought, even the high-minded kind that explains away Samuel's God. "Little account," Bonaventure writes, "must be taken of human language but much of the internal experience of joy." After quoting from the theology of the pseudo-Dionysius, the same mysterious Greek writer who inspired the Rhineland mystics and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Bonaventure advises emptying the mind as a preparation to meeting God: 

"Push on boldly to the mystic vision, abandon the work of the senses and the operations of the reasoning faculty, leave aside all things visible and invisible, being and non-being, and cleave as far as possible, and imperceptibly, to the Unity of Him who transcends all essences and all knowledge. In this immeasurable and absolute elevation of soul, forgetting all created things and liberated from them, thou shalt rise above thyself and beyond all creation to find thyself within the shaft of light that flashes from the divine, mysterious darkness" (Bonaventure, p. 72). In the same vein, Nicholas of Cusa writes that nothing a human can conceive is true of God (p. 58), the author of The Cloud of Unknowing that God "may well be loved, but not thought" (Underhill, p. 64).

Maybe I am not alone. Satanic rags may cling to everybody's God-image. Some must be blessed with imagery less grim. Maybe, the problem is best overcome by following the advice of Bonaventure and dismissing conceptual thought more or less wholesale. There is a hunger for transcendence, for peace grounded in "the Origin of all that exists." Perhaps (and I recall Wittgenstein's language analysis here) a goal of reason is to discover its own limits, like Thomas Aquinas, to ultimately see theology as "straw" and consign it to contemplative flames.

References

Augustine. Confessions. Barnes and Noble, 2007.

Bonaventure. The Mind's Road to God: A Translation of St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Martino, 2012. A reprint of the 1937 Burns Oates and Washburn edition.

Bourgeault, Cynthia. Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. Cowley, 2004.

Frenette. David. Centering Prayer Meditations: Effortless Contemplation to Deepen Your Experience of God. Soundstrue, 2014. Audiobook.

Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. Free Press, 2007.

Nicholas of Cusa. The Vision of God. Translated by Emma Gurney Salter. Cosimo, 2007.

Underhill, Evelyn. Practical Mysticism. Renaissance Classics, 2012.