Category: Theology

The Immanence of God

For a long time, I’ve seen God as a transcendent presence in the universe. I assumed God to be outside of our present reality, as a distant observer. I wrote about this in a post a couple of years ago, wrestling with deism and using the Clockmaker metaphor for my understanding of God.

But this conception of the Divine has never set totally well with me. Something seemed to be off about it, about a distant God. Because I have also always believed in the idea of God as in all things, in all of us and all of Creation. But I could never reconcile these two competing ideas.

immanenceRecently, that has all begun to change. It began with my reading of The Divine Relativity by Charles Hartsthorne. This work, a seminal text in the canon of process theology, posits God not as wholly supreme and dominant, but as relative and personal. Hartsthorne’s conception of God is one defined by its relation to Creation, and to us. God is not an omnipotent king, looking over the world with perfect foreknowledge and control over our actions, completely absolute and thus unable to be affected by us. Instead, God grows and changes in relation to us, based on our own actions. Now, this necessarily implies some sense of limitation on God, but that is an acceptable thought if you think of God choosing to limit God’s self in order to more perfectly be in communion with us.

Although the text was dense and highly academic, I really feel drawn to this conception of God. This still doesn’t mean I believe in a God who works active miracles and changes in the world; Harthsthorne thoroughly dismantles this idea as tyrannical and illogical, which I completely agree with. However, I do think God is relatable, and is affected by our ability to act and interact with the Divine Being.

My thoughts of this have continued to expand on this subject recently as a result of Richard Beck’s series on immanence and transcendence over at Experimental Theology. Beck dismantles the idea of a wholly transcendent God and really sums out my feelings:

The irony of transcendence, often celebrated in praise music as the “awesomeness” of God, is how it tends toward disenchantment. With God exalted as King ruling over and above creation, God is subtly pulled out of creation. Rather than indwelling God evacuates creation.

Transcendence also tends toward deism, furthering our disenchantment. When transcendence is emphasized, highlighting God’s separateness and Otherness from creation, God’s actions in the world are conceptualized as intrusions, miraculous suspensions of the daily flux of cause and effect. But as science has progressed these miraculous intrusions are harder to believe in. And when you starting doubting the miracles of the transcendent God you, by default, find yourself in deism. A God who is out there, somewhere, but a God who doesn’t miraculously intrude upon creation.

Basically:

Transcendence + Doubt (mainly in miracles) = Deism

I love this. This is exactly the dissonance and problem I’ve been struggling with in my understanding of God. And in his next post, Beck provides an answer to this problem: immanence. Or as he calls it here, a sacramental ontology:

In a sacramental ontology there is an overlap between God and creation–an intermingling of the earthly and the heavenly, the human and the divine, the mundane and the holy, the secular and the sacred, the natural and supernatural, the material and the spiritual.

With a sacramental ontology the world is “haunted” by God continuously from the insiderather than through episodic and miraculous intrusions from the outside. Creation itself, because it is “charged with the grandeur of God,” is miraculous, sacred and holy. Creation is an ongoing and unfolding miracle rather than a disenchanted machine occasionally interrupted–if God answers our prayers–by an external miraculous force.

To rethink a famous metaphor, creation isn’t a mechanism, a watch separate from the Watchmaker. Creation isn’t a machine. Creation is alive.

God exists in all things; not in the sense that all things are God, but in the sense that God is all-enveloping. Hartsthorne makes this distinction by replacing the term pantheism (all things are God) with panentheism (all things are in God.) God is not separate or distant; God is near, one with us and all of creation. God is personal and loving, not impersonal and dominant.

I’m still working this out in my personal theology, and how it affects everything. But I do know this: it reaffirms my commitments to liberation theology, universalism, social justice and environmental justice. It adds a layer of depth and sacredness to all Creation and all human beings. Sacred worth is all around us; we must do our best to preserve it where it is and revive it where it is fading. The Immanence of God deserves no less.

 

 

A Defense of Christian Communism

The following is an extended quote of German theologian and Professing Church member Helmut Gollwitzer, taken from the edited volume Called to Community, which I am currently reading for an upcoming book review here. I found his defense of the socialist (or in his words, communist) reading of Luke 2 very convincing.300px-Christian_Communist_symbol.svg

We should not in the very least weaken Luke’s text. The commentaries of some New Testament scholars make the meaning quite clear, while others try to smooth it away. They say, for instance: It turned out very badly for the first church in Jerusalem ,what they did there. The hasty distribution of the little bit of property they had eventually resulted in their having nothing at all. Then among all Christians of that time they were called “The poor of Jerusalem,” and a collection had to be made for their support.

All right, Luke might have said, perhaps in their enthusiasm they did not do it very cleverly. Then you do it better, more effectively. Think out communism in which one does not become poor but through which all people are really helped! Enthusiasm must also include some common sense.

Other commentaries say, and probably we too: Yes, that was a voluntary communism, a communism of love, not a horrible communism of force like we saw in the Soviet Bloc!

Quite right, says Luke, so show me your free-willingness. Where is your communism of love? Perhaps it has come to this forced communism because the hungry people have waited in vain for two thousand years for the Christians’ communism of love!

Others argue along a different set of lines, claiming that it is not the abolition of private property that concerns Luke but rather an inner freedom from possessions.

True, Luke might say, they may have retained title deeds over the disposal of their property, as the historians claim. But what belonged to them they put at the disposal of the church with the one goal, as it says here, that none among them went short. So keep the titles to your private property, but come along with what belongs to you, with the one goal – that no one among us suffers need!

The Difficulty of Being Nonviolent in a Violent World

As I shared here, I will be posting a few of my papers and reflections from this first half of my first semester at Phillips Theological Seminary. This piece was written for a discussion board in my Vocation Matters class; our topic was violence and pacifism, and the ethics of each. The book I reference here (and in quite a few of the pieces I’ll share) is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which really is a masterful work.

The idea of pacifism is one I have struggled with for a while. One of the early formative voices in my Christian journey was Shane Claiborne, and especially his book “Jesus for President.” For so long, based on readings there, and contemplation of Scripture, I have taken a hard pacifist stance. I think Jesus’ instruction to “turn the other cheek” was sincere and fairly unambiguous.

However, despite being pretty set on this in theory, I have still struggled with the practicality of it internally. How does pacifism work in real life? What if someone is attacking my family? What is someone is attacking me? What if our nation is actively under attack? What if a violent act is the only way to prevent an atrocity? When does the act of pacifism in effect become violent in its inaction? All these questions trouble me.

But I have managed to come to some conclusions on the topic. For instance, personally, I believe nonviolence and a pacifist stance is one of my callings in the world. I am inspired by the actions of Gandhi and King and Mandela and others who have stood against violence with nonviolence, and thus proved the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of violence. I believe widespread acts of nonviolence can change the world for the better. I think it important to stand against the use of violence by the state, in whatever form that takes. I identify with John Ames II here, in his role as a pacifist pastor. As a representative of Jesus and the Church, I believe I have a duty to stand for radical nonviolence in a violent world, holding on to my ardent belief that it can change things, one small act at a time.

I also understand that, if I was a national leader, I would have a specific obligation to protect those who have entrusted me with that leadership. Sometimes, that means the use of violence. Ideally, that violence should be tempered with ideas such as Just War theory. Personally, I think it would be an act of violence to stand aside as someone is under attack, especially my own family. I have an obligation to protect my children, even if that means using violence. While I can’t imagine ever owning a gun, I think some sort of weapon or tool that could deliver proportional violence in the act of defense would be advisable. Here, I see the position of John Ames I, who felt that nonviolence in the face of such a violent thing as slavery was in fact violence. To not act was ethically wrong, even if the acts taken were undesirable in other contexts. The difficult part becomes not being caught up in that violence after it is no longer necessary, which Ames I seems to have become for a time.

Ultimately, I have realized something that was quite useful to me: we are imperfect people in an imperfect world. Bad things can and will happen. Sometimes, there is no good option, and no perfect response. Sometimes, the best thing that can be done is also something that would considered “Wrong” or “unethical.” That is the nature of the world. That’s why I think the role of secular leader and church leader are both crucial, to counterbalance one another, in the hope of creating a better, more peaceful world.