Names of God and the Mystery

 
Names of God

In my last few postings I have been exploring our attempts to image God who ultimately is beyond our knowing and understanding.  However, that is no reason for us not to use all the power of mind and heart to explore the mystery in which we dwell.

I think we have to confront two problems which we have made for ourselves:  in the Christian tradition we seem to have reduced the images and names of God to one - Father; and we have a sense that we have ‘captured’ the heart and meaning of this Mystery. It is as if the Trinitarian mystery is too much for us to struggle with.  Now, I don’t for a moment have a problem with the use of ‘Father’ - it is founded in the Scripture both as Father of Israel and ‘Abba’.  It holds an important place in the tradition.  However, to reduce the names for God is to actually do a disservice to the tradition of Scripture in which many names and images of God are celebrated.

Is ‘God’ a noun or a verb?

We use the word ‘God’ as if was a proper name rather than a class of beings that humans worship.  It really does not tell us much about the qualities of this being.  In these terms, our society worships many gods from success to fame to fashion to money.  However, the great monotheist traditions claim that there is only one being in this genre we call ‘gods’ and that being alone must be worshipped.

Nicholas Lash in Theology for Pilgrims[i] asks the question, ‘Is the word ‘God’ a noun or a verb?’  He goes on to quote J.R.R. Tolkien who pointed out the tendency in English to turn verbs into abstract nouns e.g. ‘truth is the same word as ‘troth’, a pledge or promise.  Lash quotes Franciscan Thomas Weinandy ‘Persons of the Trinity are not nouns; they are verbs and the names which designate them - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - designate the acts by which they are defined’[ii].  So, the names and attributes given to God in the Scriptures are more than names they indicate activity.  In God the name and the action are inseparable.  ‘The holy mystery of God simply is the giving, the uttering, the breathing, that God is said to be and do.[iii]

Scripture

The name God revealed to Moses (Ex. 6:2-3; Ex. 3:13-16) is generally translated ‘I am who I am’, however this does not do justice to the dynamics of the word.  It is more a sense of one who brings things into being, an active being, a promise - ‘I shall be that which I shall be’.  The names and qualities of God in the Hebrew Scriptures indicate action.  For example fidelity is a central quality of God in the Scriptures.  In fact, one could read the whole of Scripture as God’s fidelity to Israel and ultimately all creation; God the redeemer of Israel is also the faithful God; God the creator is also the faithful God.  Even the biblical sense of God’s anger is an aspect of fidelity - it is always to call people or the nation to conversion.

In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is God’s fidelity - and all that implies - made flesh and therefore action.  So, if in God name and act are one thing, it is impossible that God be unfaithful to God’s self and God’s self-expression which is creation.

It is truly worth playing with the images we have had handed down in the tradition, even if it fractures the language.  God fathers; God mothers; God faithfuls.  So, when I name God Father or Mother, I am naming an act of sustained creation, protection, fidelity, tenderness - all that that act implies.  When I name God Friend - as Jesus invited us to do - I am naming an abiding act of befriending.

The Scriptures represent people, over thousands of years, trying to name the Mystery that they experienced as one who called, adopted, and protected them.  They used the images to hand in their culture and time.  One of the images I like to ‘play’ with is ‘rock’.  God is Israel’s rock and fortress.  So, images of stability, eternity, strength etc.  However, they knew nothing about tectonic plates and how they shift and change with huge continent-shaping effects - powerfully and inexorably.  Now, think of that eliciting a quality of God:  do we not have huge shifts that change our lives?  Sometimes they are slow like the slow moving of continents; sometimes they will be like the clashing of land masses.  Can this experience of ‘rock’ be God enticing, calling, and leading us to change and move from the known to the unknown, to become more human therefore more God-like? 

While new times, experiences and cultures will change how we understand and image, we also need to use scholarship to understand the original context for the biblical images.  Images such as redeemer and father have rich and socially important aspects of meaning throughout the history of Israel.

Because all names and images of God are poetry and analogy, they have the power to be constantly revitalised and therefore open us to the Mystery.

Incomprehensibility of God[iv]

This brings me to the matter of the mystery of God, the fact that God is and always will be impenetrable mystery even though we see God’s footprints in creation, in each other and above all in Jesus.  The Hebrew Scriptures and St. Paul saw God’s creative action in the world as incomprehensible (cf. Rom 11:33-35 - the great doxology to God’s wisdom and mystery), later theology understood it as God’s nature and characteristic of God’s freedom.  The danger is that we understand this as naming a remote God, a God unwilling to reveal the mystery fully and who keeps humans subservient.  However, this quality of God should be understood in the context that God has indeed revealed the Mystery in Israel and in Jesus and we name this Mystery with words such as fidelity, redeemer, Father.  God’s incomprehensibility touches on our finitude - we are limited, always ‘on the way’ to maturity. 

We have very few models of reciprocal relationship between people.  Adolescents perceive authority as oppressive; the slave had no freedom from the authority of his or her owner; and even the model of marriage as reciprocal relationship is a recent understanding.  Our culture tends to frame unequal or authority relationships in terms of domination/submission. The startling thing about the God of Scripture is that God’s absolute power, freedom and mystery are the very ground of God’s loving self-communication in creation.  We, in all our finitude are the manifestation of this mystery and in that relationship with Divine mystery we find our own freedom, truth and identity.

To return to the question of the grammar or God, God’s incomprehensibility or mystery is not simply an attribute of the nature of God, it is an aspect of every act of God, every name or quality we give to God.  So, God’s fidelity is incomprehensible; God’s compassion, God’s justice, God’s redeeming and God’s love are such that they manifest the qualities that take us beyond what we know, they take us into the dark luminosity of Mystery where we find our own mystery.

In the incomprehensible freedom and love, God has communicated the Mystery which will be our journey for all eternity.  We are the expression of this as I quoted in Link ‘The God who in and through Jesus reveals himself is human, and the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine.’[v]  For this reason the great name of God for Christians is the God of Jesus.

Living the mystery

So, is this question simply a bit of academic esoterica with little or no relevance to our lives?  As I wrote in a previous post Link the images of God deeply influence how we perceive reality, ourselves, our relationships.

In faith, we encounter a God who acts, whose actions and identity are completely congruent, who is true to God’s self.  We learn trust, and that surrendering to this Mystery is in no way a loss of identity or freedom, rather it is the opposite - here we find our freedom and our true self.  It is as if the whole of salvation history and the whole of our personal history are about learning to be who we are created to be - the image of God in creation.  God is very patient.

Living the mystery in trusting surrender means that our faith, to be faithful, is about act. It is living out the name we bear.  Maturity in faith means that who we are - created in the image of God - and what we do become more congruent - so our fidelity over time more closely resembles fidelity of God, our acts of justice and love more closely resemble God’s justice and love.

For this reason prayer and service are inseparable.  Together they draw us into the Mystery and make the Mystery manifest in the world.  Together they transform us personally and collectively.  In the end, however, we will always be confronted with the incomprehensible mystery we name of God of Jesus and this mystery will have no end.  When 1 John 4:8 calls God ‘love’, the writer is naming the very life of creation, the very being and breath of all that is, love.  Even human love is ultimately mystery and the joy of love be it marriage, friendship, parenthood or the many forms love takes, is to explore the mystery and be delighted be each new insight.

Ephesians 5:1 urges us to ‘be imitators of God as dearly beloved children’.

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[i] Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2008), p. 21f.

[ii] Ibid p. 23

[iii] Ibid p 23

[iv] Cf. Karl Rahner, ‘The Human Question of Meaning in the Face of the Absolute Mystery of God’, Theological Investigations, Vol. XVIII, tr. Edward Quinn, (London, Darton, Longman & Todd , 1983), pp. 89f

[v] Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’, Theological Investigations, Vol. IV tr. Kevin Smyth (London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966) p. 116

God Images and Faith Maturity

God Images and Faith Maturity

Cultural God images

Whatever our belief or non-belief, we all carry around with us images of God.  These ‘pictures’ work in both our conscious mind and our unconscious therefore they go a long way to shaping attitudes, beliefs and actions.  We absorb these images through both religious and secular cultures, from family, school, media and so on.  Whatever name we give to the deity, it is always accompanied by a cluster of images and more often than not linked to authority figures.

The most powerful god images that operate in us, shaping self-image, beliefs and relationships are those that we have taken for granted or are not consciously aware of.  Therefore they are unexamined and unquestioned.

The images of God that have dropped unreflected into our minds show an anthropomorphised god who is either an angry, punitive deity, one who sends suffering for punishment or ‘character building’ or even the ‘magician’ god who bends to our will - just to name a few stereotypes around in our popular culture.  These stereotyped, concretised images either work as ego-support so that we hold onto something definite and containable that reinforces identity, or they become the reason to reject all images of God.  When these are the only images available a person either lives in a dependent, closed relationship with the deity and thereby colouring all their relationships, or in rejecting those images fail to see that they have rejected a false god.

Within the Catholic tradition, I am frequently appalled and grieved at the level of faith understanding that many good people struggle through life with.  As children, they inherited a catechesis that actually made the images of God irrelevant to their adult lives.  The teaching church has been remiss in not presenting faith education as something that needed to develop and change as people matured. 

All images inadequate

All theology is an exercise in poetics, metaphor and symbol, but we have frequently forgotten this and reduced symbol to the reality, so distorting both the symbol and the reality to which it points.  God is not an elderly, bearded man!  Neither is God just another being like us only writ large.

Ultimately, all images are inadequate to name the Mystery we call the God of Jesus; however maturity in faith demands we question those images we carry in us and hold them up to the mirror which is Jesus, Word incarnate.  In doing this we allow the symbol to break open to new meaning.  The paradox is that the more we allow our received images of God to be made conscious and considered the more we will free ourselves from destructive, binding images that lurk in our unconscious.

Even the best of our images of God will always be inadequate and even wrong to some extent.  Newman[i] said that we can only replace one erroneous image of God with another.  This is simply because we are trying to name the Mystery who is being and life itself.  There will always be a tension between God revealed in Jesus and in creation and the unfathomable mystery of God who is life itself.  Unknowing is the corrective to thinking we have comprehended or grasped the God of Jesus.

Finding more adequate images

The life of faith is not isolated from all that a person is - individually and socially and if this life of faith is to mature, it requires the exercise of both mind and heart. 

We tend to want to hold onto what is important to us, to insulate it against change.  However, in order for something to remain alive, fresh, relevant and transformative it has to be renewed from time to time.  So, with our God-images.   If the core of faith is to remain liberating for us, we, both as individuals and as church, need to hold our beliefs and in particular our God images up to the light of Scripture and the lived tradition to find new content and new ways to name the Mystery that is God and also the mystery that is humanity.  For example, fatherhood as a social construct is different in many aspects in our society from that of Jesus’ time.  Our God-language must speak to our time and culture so that the Gospel continues to confront and comfort.  The Scriptures use so many images and names for God but we have tended to limit them to a few. 

There is a passage in Terry Pratchett’s novel The Fifth Elephant[ii] which brings the need for change to keep something precious relevant.  Sir Samuel Vimes is shocked that the throne on which the dwarf king has just been enthroned upon is a fake. 

Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again.  “This milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see.  Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade.  And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation… but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family?  And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y’know.  Pretty good.  Will you tell me this is a fake too?”

It is not easy to question what and how we believe because it takes courage to let go of the known to launch into the unknown; to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar; to allow new images to replace or expand familiar ones.  However, it is, in fact a glorious adventure of mind, heart and spirit.  This adventure means we have to then ask questions about our prejudices and assumptions about life, politics, justice and people as we allow the more profound and truthful God images to transform us

Prayer and knowing

While intellectual enquiry is essential to maturity of faith, it will only take us so far.  Faith is about a relationship, and like all relationships, it needs nurture so prayer is the heart of growing in maturity, understanding and love.  In prayer we allow the God images we carry to be broken open, until we are brought to a place where all images fall away and we know beyond cognition.  St. Bonaventure[iii] writes of this contemplation as driven by desire, i.e. love, ‘If this passing over is to be perfect, all intellectual operations must be given up, and the sharp point of our desire must be entirely directed towards God and transformed in him.’  And this is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

 We take into prayer our personal lives, our beliefs, our culture, the totality of who we are and allow who we are to abide in the presence of the Mystery who is the source of all being.  In this we open ourselves to be changed and converted from the always inadequate god of our imaginings.  God is always and everywhere awaiting our coming, our attention, our love in order to draw us into this relational mystery.

There is an important dictum:  We become what we contemplate.  So allowing ourselves to be open to God is to become more like God of Jesus and thereby more profoundly human, after all, humanity created and redeemed, is the icon of God.  However, this humanness will always, to some extent be somewhat out of step with the culture in which we live.

There are three things we need to do in order to pray well:  One is to be present to God in absolute honesty - as honest as we are able to be at a particular time.  God can take it!  The Scriptures teach us that God loves our honesty.  Secondly, we need to very gently, kindly and firmly put ego aside for a while and allow ourselves to be curious, vulnerable, surprised, unsure and above all directed to the ‘Other’.  Finally, we need to learn to listen, attentively, humbly, fully. 

In this way, our limited God images slowly, like a good marinade, soften, break open, change and we open our heart and mind to Reality which we name Trinitarian.  By the way, these three points are good for human communications also.

To pray with an open heart and mind, with honesty and surrender will take so from the limited, unreflected upon images of God that lurk in our minds and hearts and influence how we live our lives and how we live with each other.  It is called conversion.

The Book of Job

Like all good literature, the story of Job has many layers, one of the threads is the story of Job’s ‘conversion’.  Job was faithful, upright and wealthy.  He lost his wealth and his children.  Job’s friends who came to comfort him spoke long and piously about God’s will, while Job rants and laments - ‘Perish the day I was born’ (Job 3:3).  He calls God to account.  For most of the book God is silent.  Then He speaks to Job, not answering Job’s questions but simply and humorously taking him on a journey through creation and rebukes the well-meaning friends for ‘not speaking rightly of me’ (Job 42:7).  Job surrenders - he has encountered God as he never knew him before. ‘I heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.’ (Job 42:5)

Job’s story could well be a paradigm for our own growing maturity into the Mystery who envelops us and delights in us and who prays in us.

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[i] John Henry Newman, The theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and certainty, ed. J.D. Holmes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 102

[ii] Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant, (London, Corgi Books, 2000) p. 405

[iii] St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, tr. Ewart Cousins (New York, Paulist Press 1978) p. 113

Photo courtesy of Beverley Anne Jansen