Wrestling with God
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| Jacob wrestles at a place he names Penuel, "Face of God" |
There can't be a much bigger question in the Abrahamic traditions than God.
I am a confirmed atheist with regard to many retrograde God-concepts. I'd sooner be a polytheist than a theist in the tradition of the brutal war-god of Abraham and Moses. Before the Babylonian Exile, most Hebrews weren't monotheists, but monolatrists, acknowledging many gods but honoring only their own. It was a dogfight between their Yahweh and Baal, and Yahweh won. Mediterranean cities and tribes had patron gods, often with their worship centered in sacred places. Yahweh preferred Canaan, finally settling in Jerusalem years after trekking across the Sinai with the ark. Early in the Bible, he is even more extremely local, creating audible footsteps in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8), sending messengers to see if Sodom is bad (Genesis 19:21), walking bodily past Moses (33:21-23). Only in the post-Exilic books, backdated to the first Genesis creation story, does he become cosmic, not just an invisible tribal strongman and lawgiver.
As the patron of a small, feisty nation, Yahweh is jealous and cruel, commanding genocide against competing tribes. The Book of Psalms is all about selfishness, assuming that whatever pleases David (or the psalmist speaking in his name) pleases God. When David's enemies suffer, it's good, "Destroy my enemies," he prays (Psalm 143:12). Why? Apparently, because they're his enemies. For a universal, ethical God, Philistines would be coequal brothers in a beloved creation, but the universal creator God who respects all nations--the God of Christianity and Islam--is absent from the Pentateuch. If Moses's moody, genocidal god did exist, it wouldn't be a stretch to call him Satanic. Some heretical Christian sects, in fact, did.
St. Augustine seems to have agreed. He rejected Christianity for years because of the anthropomorphism and moral crudity of God as portrayed the Hebrew Bible, and converted only after Ambrose of Milan taught him to read the text allegorically, as figurative and not literally true (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/09/bad-lord-transcending-tainted-g-word.html). Orthodox theology after Augustine described God as not only all-knowing, all-present, all-good, and immaterial, but changeless and impassible--meaning never reacting emotionally. All references to an angry, jealous, offended, or judgmental God are myth or analogy. Orthodoxy rejects the being that they describe, substituting a more abstract universal father and shifting all the human personality to Jesus, who was a historic person.
Three years ago when I analyzed self-identified "atheist" memes, I noticed that many people call themselves atheists simply because they agree with St. Augustine. They reject the same absurd and moody Paul-Bunyan-in-the-Sky that Augustine did, having associated a bronze-age theology and bad role models with Christianity (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/05/reading-atheist-memes.html). Their agreement with orthodox theologians makes them reject the God of their grassroots churches. As I said then, if a bad god is God, I'm an atheist too.
There are any number of God-concepts, and it's meaningless to say you believe unless you specify which one. Orthodox theology--which I take as the best reference point--assures us that the real thing (or non-thing, being illimitable) is inconceivable. Still, even if God is beyond human understanding, statements of belief affirm understandings, even if vague ones.
I like to call myself an agnostic Episcopalian, like James Hall, a philosopher whose work I discussed (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/07/if-creator-of-universe-god-of-judaism.html), but that may be euphemistic like a guy who tried to pick me up once calling himself bisexual. Most God-concepts are implausible or irrelevant to life, even if not morally objectionable. There's no point in detailing them all, but I will mention one where I differ from most believers. That's the idea of God as Wishmaster. Janis Joplin lampooned this in "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz," and I've explained my skepticism with the usual obsessiveness (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/praying-for-stuff-trouble-with.html). The idea of God waiting at a service window in the sky to take my order, even if the service isn't reliable, seems downright silly. If God were an omniscient wish-granting Genie (rather than, say, the foundation of Being or my best intuition of that foundation), then (as the scriptures say) wouldn't he know my needs before I mentioned them (Matthew 6:8)?
Prayers that take the rhetorical form of addressing God seem usually to be self-addressed anyway, or addressed to a listening group in the case of a public prayer.
If I thank God for food, I'm not trying to make God feel good, flattering or chatting him up, but noticing my dependency on a food chain outside of my ultimate control and evoking the demonstrable benefits of gratitude.
If I pray God to help me do something, I focus on the task, augmented by a sense of supernatural blessing.
If I pray for something outside of my powers, I offload my burden, blunt the frustration of powerlessness, and generate hope.
If I pray that a friend will recover, I express love.
Martin Luther King's prayer, "When our eyes do not see the gravity of racial justice, shake us from our slumber and open our eyes, O Lord," is performative language. With no need for a heavenly middleman, King's words generate in human hearers an intended effect, an awareness of racial injustice.
Any prayer dedicating a group of people to a common purpose generates solidarity and resolve in them--demonstrably and by well-known mechanisms--regardless God's approval or existence.
Private, meditative prayer produces demonstrable effects on mood and health--terms that may even trivialize its profound effects.
Another function of God is to command absolute duty. God (or God's law) is a moral absolute, obligating a believer and justifying sacrifice. We can turn to King again. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he justifies lawbreaking to other clergymen because we're only bound by "a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God." Divine law, not human law, should rule behavior. I agree that many 1963 Birmingham laws violated gospel ethics, but in Alabama at the time, many professed Christians disagreed. I was there and knew them. For them, segregation was God's law, just as slavery had been for their great-grandparents, who condemned abolitionists as rebels against the divine order (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/11/american-rsce-toxic-construction.html).
Today, many self-identified Christians are equally quick to condemn transsexuals and same-sex couples, claiming that--even in cases where human law attempts to enforce Christ's Golden Rule--God demands that they disobey and treat their neighbors uncharitably. Churches are among the last places to look for social morality (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/12/weighed-in-balance-churches-moral.html).
Even if God (or Nature, His earthly twin) is often invoked to sponsor privilege and oppression, we might be worse off without Him. Sousa Mendes was Portugal's consul general in Bordeaux on the southern border of France in 1940 when Hitler invaded from the north. Refugees crowded the town, trapped at the border without visas. Mendes, as consul, could save them with a stroke his pen but had been forbidden to by his government. Seeing the tragedy around him, Mendes signed tens of thousands of forbidden visas, setting up an assembly line in his office, and saved at least ten thousand Jews. Mendes was an aristocrat and bon vivant, twin brother to Portugal's foreign minister and father to fifteen children by two wives and a mistress, but he sacrificed it all in flagrant civil disobedience, dying in poverty and disgrace.
Still Mendes seems to have had no regrets. When the Portuguese government condemned him, he answered, "I would rather stand with God against man than with man against God" (Tigay, p. 76). Even if all nations claim God on their side in war, it's hard to see how anyone could doubt whose side Mendes was on--not after the moral toxins of war had cleared their systems.
Earlier, I discussed Hugh Bentley, whom I met in Phenix City, an Alabama town that years before was run by murderous gangsters. Bentley, a quiet merchant and Sunday School teacher, led a movement that expelled the mob, persisting even after he was beaten and his home bombed. Like Mendes, he saw human tragedy and felt a calling. Reflecting on Christ's sacrifice, Bentley recalled telling his minister, "I'm willing to pay whatever price it takes" (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/08/divine-calling.html).
Mendes was Catholic, King and Bentley, Baptist, but their God is universal. They were brothers in faith with Gandhi. When God is a guarantor of this kind of pure moral courage, not a flag waving over social privilege, this is something to be worshipped. If I lack belief, may God forgive my unbelief.
These objects of belief, even the high ethical ones, are God-portraits--pictures drawn from needle-thin human perspectives (as if through a wrong-way telescope). In this sense, even the best is false. One traditional picture, the graybeard king on a throne, I particularly reject, indeed any portrait implying a human body. The Source of Being cannot be in the usual sense, which would make it inferior to itself. He (using a human pronoun only because English devalues "it") is by definition nonexistent, being existence itself. We may be comforted by our local rituals and yearn for ego-perks such as divine blessing, forgiveness, and immortality, but to the extent that we operate quid pro quo, worshipping because we expect favors in return, we are worshipping ourselves.
One commentator (I've forgotten which) wrote that if we believe that God will torture us forever in hell and do not love him just as much as if he would bless us forever in heaven, we don't love God at all. We love ourselves. This is both obvious and counterintuitive. Anthropomorphic terms and their associated emotions cloud the issue. Of course, a torturing human father would not deserve love, but the analogy fails there. God is unconditional being, the transcendent I-am. To the extent that we set limits, we reject him. We deny Being and torture ourselves.
This sounds abstract, but it's about real human experience. Anyone who looks honestly at the evidence realizes that--whatever our rituals of denial and belief, whatever comforting old books we recite--we face the real possibility of oblivion at the end of life, the loss of our precious memories, and this can be almost frightening as hell. Do we still love Being under such conditions? Do we embrace What-is as fearlessly as if this weren't the case? Do we trust unconditionally? Abundant life, I think, requires a yes answer. It requires dying to be reborn. Living through dying. Letting go to embrace. Accepting Whatever as a sacred All. In the vernacular, trusting God. Only by loving What-is can we live fully in its flow in the footsteps of Jesus.
Abundance may be achieved on the cheap by telling comforting stories, but more fully, I think, in contemplative prayer or the spiritual practices of mystics. More suddenly, it may spring from the Schleiermacher's "sense of absolute dependence" that I've discussed in relation to Kris Kristofferson's "Why Me?" and Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/05/absolute-dependence-edwards-spider-and.html).
Reference
Tigay, Chanan. "The Righteous Defiance of Aristides de Sousa Mendes." Smithsonian, November 2021, pp. 68-82.
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