Who or what is God?

I

If God exists, what is God Like?

The most basic question, I suppose, involves the existence of God. Assuming for a moment that the vast majority of humankind is correct and God does exist, the next fundamental and essential question would be, “What is God like?”  Who or what is this person or thing we call God?

Some answer:

• God is another name for the life force, the chi, that runs through all living things.

• God is another name for nature, the universe, multiverse, cosmos, everything.

• God is a mysterious higher power, unknowable, enigmatic.

• God is an omnipotent, omniscient, fearful judge.

• God is a tribal warrior.

• God is a sugar-daddy with access to a celestial warehouse filled with health and wealth for those who know the incantation.

• God is a puppet master, controlling everything and everyone.

Augustine saw God as aloof, immutable, unchanging, eternally existing in perfect tranquility and peace, undisturbed by anything.

Calvin proposed God as primarily concerned with perfecting God’s elect, and therefore causing or allowing everything, including evil, then using that evil to sanctify the chosen.

Following Calvin, Jonathon Edwards graphically envisioned God as furious with the lot of us, appeased only by venting God’s wrath on God’s son.

Contemporary influencers like John Eldredge, John Hagee, and Mark Driscoll promote a masculine warrior image of God.

Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and various other prosperity preachers see God as desiring and providing abundant wealth.

American white Christian nationalists like Greg Laurie, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, David Barton, Sean Feucht, Franklin Graham, Michele Bachmann, and Eric Metaxas (to name a few) see God as favoring an idealized version of the United States and thereby calling upon the faithful to use whatever means is necessary to take over government, education, media, and family life.

Does God favor the USA? Did God forget about the genocide of natives and enslavement of Africans? Is God unaware of systemic racism?

Does it not bother God that the Trump regime incinerated 550 million tons of food and 800,000 vaccines rather than send aid to those in need?

Is God undisturbed by the slaughter of innocent lives in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Congo, and the Sudan?

Is God not moved with compassion for migrant families ripped apart and people locked in cages without due process?

Does God rest peacefully as children starve? Or does God care? Is God a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief?

Does God cause children to get cancer? Does God shake mountains causing climbers fall to their deaths? (C. Everett Coop said so regarding the death of his son.) Does God cheer when bombs are dropped, genocide destroys cultures, and people are enslaved? Does God allow such evils to make people holy? Or, does God weep?

How does God feel about you and me? Is God furious with us? Are we so naturally evil that God can’t bear to look at us? Do we deserve to be tortured forever? Did Jesus jump in to take the beating for us so God, after God eventually calmed down, could offer us forgiveness?

Is God a magical Santa Claus, a cosmic vending machine, who exists to make you happy and very wealthy? Or is that Mammon?

Is God a man’s man, like Teddy Roosevelt or John Wayne? Has God set things up so men are in charge? Or is that misogynic toxic masculinity that ignores the stuff about neither male nor female?

Perhaps God is a one-issue voter. All that matters is making abortion illegal. Never mind feeding, educating, and caring for the child after birth. Is that pro-life or just pro-birth? How can you be pro-life and approve of the death penalty, or applaud what Israel is doing to Gaza? How can you be pro-life and cut off aid to starving children?

Is America the Promised Land, the city on a hill? Is America the greatest country on earth, the last great hope for humanity? Or should that be the Kingdom of God? When, exactly, was America great for the indigenous and those of African descent?

The answer to the question regarding the nature of God is of paramount importance. It affects who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

• God is everything is another way of saying God is nothing.

• If God is aloof, distant, or impersonal, we’re pretty much on our own to make the best of things.

• If God is strict, harsh, no nonsense, I live in fear.

• Worse, if God is a furious torturer, I live in abject terror.

• If God is all about rules and I imagine I’m keeping them, I’ll be full of hubris. If I can’t keep the rules, I’ll berate myself and try harder.

• If God is a magical cash cow, I’ll do my best to learn the code to unlock my greed.

• If God is macho warrior, I want to be one of his commandos rather than one of his victims.

• If God is some sort of peaceful life force, I’ll spend my time in self-imposed bliss, ignoring the cries around me.

Does God have a personality, or is God a force of nature? Judaism, Islam, and Christianity see God as personal – not in the sense of having a body or other distinct physical form, but personal in the sense of being capable of communicating with humankind, and personal in the sense of providing guidance, bringing about justice, and so on.

At least three statements about God make Christianity unique: God as Trinity, God as suffering-servant, and God as human. Christians see God as being eternally in community – perichoresis: God in continual loving relationship within the divine self. The triune divine dance. Christians see God entering history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and bearing, taking on, participating in, the suffering of God’s creation. Those three elements – God in loving community, God as suffering-servant – , and God incarnate are not only distinctive, but radical and unprecedented.

For most of us, our initial ideas of God come from our parents or primary caregivers. That’s problematic because human caregivers make mistakes, lose their tempers, get irritated, say dumb stuff. Some are abusive. Some are mentally ill; others are addicted to destructive substances. Still others are absent, physically, emotionally, or both.

Later in life, our ideas about God undergo further revision at the hands of faith communities, preachers, teachers, and peers. That may also be problematic. Some churches are abusive. Some preachers are proclaiming a God who is nothing like God. All the America first, Superman-God, macho-God, and prosperity-God stuff is proclaimed from pulpits. And none of that is biblical.

I wasn’t raised with much theology. For a while when I was young, we were kind of Methodist, but we didn’t work at it. I did, however, on occasion, feel a Presence, a loving, divine numinous presence that I somehow knew was Divine. In my teens, I was heavily into philosophy and world religions – I was seeking meaning. I also had deep compassion for the hurting, broken, disadvantaged, so I volunteered to tutor inner-city kids, protested the Vietnam War, supported civil rights and second wave feminism. I joined a faith community committed to peace and justice.

Then I got swept up in the Jesus movement. I had more radical numinous experiences and ecstatic times of personal worship. It was lovely.

But the whole movement was soon swallowed up, some of it into Catholicism (which mostly turned out rather nicely), some of it into Pentecostalism (which resulted in the New Apostolic Reformation), and most of the rest into conservative white evangelicalism (which has given us Christian Nationalism). The evangelical and Pentecostal portions, along with conservative Catholicism, have themselves been highjacked into a far-right brand of the Republican Party.

I got swallowed up with it. I became a subtly racist, subtly misogynist, not so subtly homophobic, Reagan Republican. I am sorry. I repent. I am recovering. Please forgive me. I knew not what I was doing.

At some point, I began to realize that my view of God was askew. My God didn’t look like Jesus, yet Jesus said that if we had seen him, we had seen the Father. He said that he and the Father were one. He said he always did what the Father wanted. He said if we loved him, we would obey him.

My comfortable theology collapsed. With the help of scholars, teachers, and loved ones, I am re-studying the scriptures. I took a long hard look at what Jesus said, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. I discovered a God of self-sacrificial, other-oriented, universally accessible, cruciform love. My world-view is being replaced with a radical new ideology, allegiance to Jesus and the Kingdom of God only. I’m learning that in this kingdom, the last are first and the greatest is the servant of all. I’m relearning to wash feet, go the extra mile, and turn the other cheek.

In this kingdom, evil is conquered with self-sacrificial love and death is overcome by dying. Kingdom people are filled with empathy, generosity, and forgiveness; never with revenge, coercion, or violence.

Our job as humans is to love God, love others (all of them), love ourselves, and love and care for nature.

• Love includes environmental stewardship.

• Love means solidarity with the poor, abused, war-torn, enslaved, marginalized, disenfranchised, undocumented, sick, mentally ill, incarcerated, hungry, starving, addicted, homeless … those Jesus referred to as the least of his siblings.

• Love means opposing war, violence, and all that harms or kills.

• Love means opposing nationalism, militarism, and materialism.

• Love means alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, welcoming the alien stranger, accepting others, healing the sick.

• The only way others know our Christ is by our practical demonstrations of love.

I have come to see that God is exactly like Jesus. There is nothing unchristlike in God.

In my heart, I am personally convinced:

• God is pure perfect cruciform love.

• God is kind, gracious, forgiving, welcoming, for us.

• All our sin is forgiven, gone, expunged.

• God loves us just as we are.

• God likes us and enjoys being with us.

• Death is the door to everlasting life.

• God is in the process of making all things new.

• God invites us to join in making all things new.

• Jesus will come again and set all things to rights.

• We are created in God’s image.

• Nothing can separate us from God.

• Nothing can make God stop loving us.

• In God’s arms, we are eternally safe.