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| A section of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" in the Sistine Chapel |
I was leading a discussion with a group of senior high youth, exploring the various ways they thought about God. Or, rather, most of our time was spent looking at the ways they thought other people thought they should think about God. In other words, we were having a conversation about the kinds of ideas they'd heard other people use to describe "God," and, as you might imagine, much of it revolved around "God's" they didn't believe in.
One of them cracked us all up -- and stopped the conversation for a while -- by announcing that they'd always believed that people thought of God as "a buff Santa in a toga." For all it's shock value, I think it's actually a really good depiction of one of the ways lots of people think about "God."
For one thing, the conscious or unconscious image many people have of "God" is that of an old man much as Michelangelo depicted him -- white, somewhat long and wild hair and beard; male; white skinned; strong features; etc. This image of God has an ancient feel, as a figure for a long time ago, a time long passed. And while you or I might see the garment he's wearing as a robe, this young person thought of it as a toga. So there's the "in a toga" part.
The reason she or he (I honestly can't remember which after all these years) described this "God" as "buff" is that he (of course) is generally depicted as muscular, which, of course, is a traditional way of understanding, and personifying, power and might. This is, after all, "the Almighty." One of the traditional attributes given to this "God" is omnipotence. This "God" can do anything; there's nothing that he cannot do. (Of course, one of the great challenges to this idea is captured in the question, "Can God create a rock so big that he can't lift it?" One way or another, lovers of this paradox point out, God's power is supposedly proven to be limited.) To embody this attribute, this person all those years ago memorably described "God" as, "buff."
That brings us to "Santa." Right off the bat there's the whole white hair and beard thing. Admittedly, Michelangelo's God doesn't look all that much like Edmund Gwenn, (my personal choice for quintessential Santa), but if you were to put a red suit onto him and relax his stern face a little, he'd sure be able to get work in your local mall.
The real reason this person said he'd thought of "God" as "Santa," though, is God's reputation for bestowing gifts. This might be the inverse of the "God" whole doles out nothing but punishment. This "God" is the source of All Good Things, and will hear the cries and supplications of the faithful, rewarding them by answering their prayers. After all, aren't "all things possible with God"? Doesn't God perform miracles? Jesus is remembered in the Gospel of Matthew as saying, "Ask and it shall be given." (Much like, this young person reasoned, like writing a letter to Santa Claus.)
If the Westboro Baptist Church is the epitome of the God-as-Cop metaphor, as I wrote about last week, then something called the "Prosperity Gospel" could be seen as the ultimate expression of this boon-granting "God." The prosperity gospel teaches that your financial and physical health are an indication of your relationship with God. If you are faithful, keep a positive attitude, pray rightly, and, last here but not least, donate generously to religious causes, God will bless you with literal, material abundance. (If you don't, of course, he won't.) The Wikipedia article on the prosperity gospel puts it like this: "Prosperity theology views the Bible as a contract between God and humans: if humans have faith in God, he will deliver security and prosperity."
While this may seem a more benevolent depiction of "God" than the one that condemns, it is no less problematic, and has caused as many people to give up on the idea of "God" entirely, because this is not a "God" they can believe in.
In his controversial (and wonderful) book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Episcopal Bishop John Spong explains why he came to reject this notion of God. His wife had received a cancer diagnosis with a very negative prognosis -- she was not expected to live. He wrote,
"Because we were a well-known and publicly identified family in New Jersey, this news became public knowledge almost immediately. The religious resources of our people and our friends were quickly mobilized. Prayer groups throughout the diocese and even in ecumenical settings added my wife to their list of special intentions."Seemingly miraculously, his wife's cancer went into remission, and to the shock and disbelief of her doctors she lived for another six and a half years. And as the word of her near impossible improvement, he writes, "the people who were most concerned and whose prayers were the most intense began to take credit for her longevity, 'Our prayers are working,' they claimed.'"
You might imagine that someone, especially someone who could unquestionably be called, "religious," especially someone as "religious" as a Bishop in the Episcopal Church would have agreed with this interpretation. After all, "God" is a "buff Santa in a toga." All things are possible with "God;" nothing is impossible for the omnipotent and Almighty One. Yet Bishop Spong didn't react this way.
"Despite my gratitude for the embracing love that these people demonstrated, both for me and for my wife, I could not help but be troubled at their explanations. Suppose, I queried to myself alone, that a sanitation worker in Newark, New Jersey, probably the city with the lowest per capita income in the United States, has a wife who received the same diagnosis. Because he is a not a high-profile person, well connected to a large network of people, socially prominent, or covered by the press, the sickness of his wife never comes to public attention. Suppose he is not a religious oriented person and thus prayer groups and individual petitions in hundreds of churches are not offered on his wife's behalf. Would that affect the course of her sickness? Would she live less time from diagnosis to death, endure more obvious pain, or face a more difficult dying? if so, would that not attribute to God not only a capricious nature, but also a value system shaped by human importance and the worldly standards of social elitism?"Capricious. That's really the only word to describe this "Buff Santa in a Toga" God. Well, capricious and cruel. Because a God who can do anything, who does do anything if one lives a certain kind of live and prayers in a certain kind of way, yet at the same time allows 3.1 million children to die of hunger each year? It is estimated that roughly 1 person dies from hunger every 10 seconds. What else can you call a "God" who could do something to prevent that, yet doesn't? Cruel certainly comes to mind.
And when the cruelty of this understanding of "God" becomes unavoidably clear, people of good conscience can do nothing but reject the "God" being described. When I was doing my chaplaincy training at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, I engaged with a family whose daughter was dying. They were angry. They were furious at God. Years before this same daughter had been sick with lupus, yet after lots of prayers -- like those for Joan Spong -- their daughter had a full recovery. The doctors were flabbergasted that there was absolutely no sign that she'd ever been sick. In gratitude, this family began a radio prayer ministry, and they had many, many stories of people who had experienced miraculous recoveries which they all attributed to the power of prayer. The put everything they had into this ministry -- all of their resources of time, energy, and money. Yet here they were, after having done all that, and their daughter was sick again, dying, and this time God seemed to be doing nothing about it. What kind of God was that? And in their anger, they turned their backs on the "God" they had so recently revered.
I was lucky enough to study philosophy in college with a man named Richard Creel. He posited a different way of interpreting the concept of God's "omnipotence." His thought that, rather than denoting the ability to do anything, the word "omnipotence" really described the ability to "do anything that can be done." We live in a universe governed by laws (which, some would argue, God himself ordained). There are some things that simply cannot happen in this universe. Humans, for instance, simply cannot breathe underwater, or fly through the air, unaided. Those are things that just can't be done, so our inability to do them doesn't show any lack on our part. Similarly, Dick argued, God's omnipotence exists within the confines of the laws that guide the universe.
Even if you are someone who believes that God created not only the universe itself but also those laws which govern it and who, then, could certainly bend or break them at will or whim, I would think you'd also think that God had had a reason for establishing those particular rules. If so, then, why would God create rules that "he" knew he would at some point have to circumvent?
There are those who have answered this critique by saying that God created these Laws, knowing that he was going to circumvent them, in order to provide for us humans the experience of "miracles." It's also been said that "none can understand the ways of God," which is pretty convenient when a logical inconsistency is uncovered. The Unitarian side of the Unitarian Universalist tradition used to argue that if God gave us brains he probably intended for us to use them!
So let's return to Prof. Creel's assertion that the best way to interpret "omnipotence" is not "the power to do anything," but, rather, "the power to do anything that can be done." The Universalist side of UU ancestry often summed up their theology in three words: "God is love." Putting these two things together you get the description of God having the power to do what love can do.
This post has
already gotten too long. (Thanks to
those who’ve stuck with it!) I want to
leave with this last thing. At a great
many weddings people use the words from the Christian scripture of 1
Corinthians (specifically, chapter 13, verses 4-8) to describe what love is
really all about. If “God is love,” then
these words should be equally apropos if you wrote it like this:
Pax tecum,
God is patient, God is kind. God does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud. God does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
God never fails.
Pax tecum,
