Defining God

“Isness without Limitation”

“In the biblical book of Exodus, Moses is told to hide along a section of rock because God is going to pass by and Moses is going to get to see God’s back. In one ancient commentary on the story, the best Moses gets is a glimpse of where God just was. This same Moses reminds the Hebrews that when they experienced God, they ‘saw no form of any kind.’ In the New Testament it’s written that God is the one ‘who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.’”

Rob Bell (What We Talk About When We Talk About God, p.87)

          In his book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg explores William James ideas about God, from The Varieties of Religious Experience; in particular, the “wholesale business” and “retail business” God. Borg refers to them as “wholesale God” and “retail God.” Borg writes: “The ‘wholesale God’ is God abstracted from the language of any particular religious tradition…this is God as ‘ultimate reality,’ as ‘Being itself,’ as ‘isness without limitation,” or from William James himself, ‘the More.” The “retail God” is the central character(s) in the sacred texts and stories of the world’s religions. The “retail God” is the human-like God that is personified, or spoken of as having personal characteristics,” or, indeed, a super-human person.

          According to Borg, the problem is not in personifying God to make God more personal, but in literalizing those personifications. He uses such expressions as “the right hand of God,” to support our assumptions that God has hands just like ours. Then, it is easy to leap to the conclusion that God is like us, thinks and acts like us, and approves or disapproves of what we humans believe or do not believe. Even to suggest that we know “the mind of God,” indicates that we think God has a brain, like ours, and then we can further deduce that God must surely think as we do. It’s only human to believe that, since we hold ourselves to be the highest form of creation, “made in the image of God.”

          No one has a lock on God—no one can define, and corral, and limit the creative force of the universe into any form, including human, and think that they have defined God. No human and no religion has the final say about what God is or is not. The only way to know anything about that which we call God is through experience. And that experience is as different as the many languages that humans have devised to describe it.

          Right now, I am sitting on my porch looking east to where the sun is rising. As it shines through the leaves in the “jungle” of my back yard, I catch a glimpse of God passing by, at least a glimpse of where God just was, or maybe where God will be later this morning. Maybe the light itself is God….or is it the cacophony of birdsong…maybe.

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                            Jane