I’ve recently found myself nodding along with a number of
Christian writers and speakers, almost as if I’m part of the group. “Well, that’s weird”, I thought to myself. If
I really broke it down, these beliefs are just like anything else lacking sufficient evidence, so why do I
like what they’re saying so much? I realized that despite my lack of belief, I’ve
started developing a hypothetical theology.
A theology built around values that make sense, and a God that would
embody those ideas. My hypothetical
theology isn’t tethered to a particular book of alleged inspiration, just what
seems to me to be common sense, and valuing of humanity. It agrees with the part of the traditional
philosophical definition of God contained within the ontological argument, that
God is that which none greater can be conceived. While I don’t think this argument necessitates
God, I think it’s a fair definition.
With that definition in place, here are some of the basics of the
hypothetical theology I’ve started to form (and as always, I could be wrong about everything):
God is superior to a
human being
Taken literally, I doubt many would disagree with this
statement. But in practice, it’s perhaps
the least believed in concept in Christianity.
Imagine, if you will, a child stealing a pack of gum. The child’s parent, upon discovering the
theft, confines the child to a bed and applies a mildly acidic lotion to the
child’s entire body. The pain is immense
and constant, but is not fatal. The
parent ensures this lotion is present every day, all the time, for the duration
of the child’s life. We recognize this
scenario as absurd and unjust. And yet
we are asked to believe, on a much more hideous scale, this is how God treats
sinners, only with God, the sinners never get the mercy of death. Somehow God’s “nature” demands this, though
the maturity gap between God and human must surely be greater than parent and
child. We wouldn’t accept it from a person, but we’ll try so hard to justify it
for God.
Or consider a close friend who meets someone new, and
decides to end the friendship with you, crowning this new person as best
friend. Out of insecurity, we subject
our former friend to the same punishment as the thieving child. We wouldn’t accept it from a person, but God
is allowed to be eternally insecure over those who leave the faith.
Time after time, the behavior of God, as described by the
authors of the Bible, is far worse than we would ever accept from a mere
fallible human being, but because BIBLE!, we’ll fall over ourselves making
excuses for God’s behavior. In my
hypothetical theology, God is not an asshole, and if someone says she is, they’re
wrong. A God that forgives is greater
than one that does not.
God does not have a
favorite genitalia
I suspect that even complementarians would admit that if
they were in charge of things, the male superiority they’ve extracted from the
Bible would be done away with. They’ll
assure us that they’re just trying to obey the Bible, and it’s not their fault
that women aren’t allowed to lead. But
as we’ve all experienced in day to day life, sometimes our mothers have more
wisdom than our fathers, and our sisters more than our brothers. But if we’re talking about God, it’s
different. In my hypothetical theology,
gender bias is recognized for what it is – the privileged men of thousands of
years ago enforcing their own privilege, and stamping God’s name on it. A God that doesn’t have a favorite gender is
greater than one that does.
God is not mute
Many Christians have embraced a strange idea without knowing
it; The only words God ever spoke have already been spoken. The Biblical authors can be trusted to have
communicated them correctly, and every human being since is so unreliable that
they must be prevented from changing or adding to these previously expressed
words. We don’t think so highly of the
iron age in any other arena. We reject
their medicine, their hygiene, their lust for war, their science, their
polygamy and their sense of style, but we’ll totally trust them to give us all
the words we need from an all-powerful, totally living God. This all-powerful God has been stuffed into a
book, and if the believer were marooned on an island, their only method of
knowing what God has to say to them would be whatever verses they’d
memorized. On this point, I think the
Mormons are right. It doesn’t make any
sense that God just arbitrarily shut up 2000 years ago. An accessible God is superior to a silent
God.
We can’t accurately
imagine God in its entirety
A huge piece of what created problems for me and my faith is
that I was taught that God can be heard, understood, followed, trusted, loved,
and rationalized. I don’t think it makes
sense to say any of these things. When
we speak of light years, that light travels 671 million miles an hour, and
would take 100,000 years to cross the milky way, we can assign words to these
ideas, but we can’t truly understand them.
With light years, we at least have a relative frame of reference with
which to speak of distance and time.
With God, we’re left stumbling in the dark. We’ve never seen someone or something that’s
even close to all knowing, let alone omni-present. Yet we speak of God as if we can understand
him. We assign silly concepts to God
like being unable to tolerate sin, as if that would be any big deal to an
entity that can be everywhere all the time.
We assign emotions of jealousy and anger to God, as if our “sins” can
somehow truly offend an entity that exists at all times of history
simultaneously. We pretend we know God’s nature, and that’s why people must be
divided, built up or held down. And by
mere coincidence, when we speak of God’s nature as an individual, it is we, as
individuals, who tend to benefit from our understanding of God (I’m doing this
right now). Rare would be the religion
that believes God looks more favorably on another group, another individual, or
another set of ideas.
The infinite is not something we can understand. Omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, these
are incomprehensible concepts that we try to bottle up, and then we base our
worldview and our behavior on the scraps we can hold onto. In my hypothetical theology, most of God is,
and will always be, an unknowable mystery.
And that God is greater than a fake one locked inside a book.
