HAS GOD GONE SILENT?
(An Edited Excerpt from Beyond Denial)
Today I’m remembering a talk I gave on spiritual practice at a conference. Afterwards, someone asked to talk with me about prayer, and said poignantly, “I still pray … but is anyone really there to hear it”? Her words reminded me of a phrase I hear a lot in theological circles: the “silence of God” in our time. Has the Divine actually gone silent? My personal experience says “no.” But for many moderns, the answer is clearly “yes.”
To address this sense of God’s seeming silence, we need to start by re-examining our prevailing Western ideas about what God is. This begins with focusing on a core concept of Western theology: that God is a person, or in some way a person-like being.
In my ministry, I hear many people tell me that portraying the Godhead in an anthropomorphic way like this (as if the Ultimate were a person) is a paradigm that no longer speaks to them. Put simply, it is an approach that is no longer anywhere close to being intellectually viable.
But despite the widespread decline of belief in that traditional view of the Divinity, there continues to be a large number of people in our culture who nonetheless still “believe in God” (in whatever ways they might conceptualize that Divinity), and who devote a great deal of energy to serious spiritual pursuits. In short, there is no lack of spiritual interest per se around us. But what mainstream forms of Western religion so often lack these days are broadly effective articulations—or, more to the point, effective re-framings and re-interpretations—of the main themes at the heart of their religions, and most especially their prevailing ideas about the nature of the Divine.
Given the inherent and ongoing human heart-hunger for ultimate things, our religions need to develop new ways of presenting spiritual truth to today’s people in ways they can hear and understand, speak about and access. Doing so calls for a broader spiritual vocabulary that “works” for the contemporary mind. And this very much includes moving beyond those outmoded, anthropomorphic God-concepts I mentioned earlier.
Moving in that direction must begin with giving careful and sustained thought to the nature of religious language. This means, first, remembering that skillful theological speech must make the distinction between truth (what actually exists) and verbal statements about what is true (including doctrinal and credal statements).
And secondly, our reconsideration of religious language must include a reminder that the nature of the Godhead is inherently ineffable; i.e., it cannot be expressed either directly or fully through any human words or descriptions. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the theologian Paul Tillich both demonstrated in the last century, language can at best only point toward what it tries to describe, but can never reveal it fully or adequately.
All God-concepts, then, are necessarily metaphorical in nature. Metaphor itself is a valid and invaluable tool for pointing toward ineffable things. But over the course of history, the metaphors that various spiritual traditions use—and that their peoples understand and respond to—inevitably change. And when that happens, religious leaders need to be ready to revise, and if necessary replace, the range of metaphors that they use to describe the Divine.
The important implication of all this is not that our theological statements—including our creeds and doctrines—may change, but that, over time, they must change. (And, it should be noted, this also applies to all our cultural, scientific, and philosophical paradigms, not just those of religion.) Like all living things, our ways of understanding the world must continue to find new forms of expression.
Our worldviews, in other words, must continually evolve.
And in the process we may need to let go of some of our old worldviews entirely, if and when they outlive their usefulness. The nature of the Godhead, then, may be unchanging in its deepest essence. But our concepts about God—including all specific beliefs and creeds, doctrines and dogmas, terminologies and articulations—are inescapably in flux and continually subject to the need for revision and change.
At the conference I mentioned earlier, I spoke also with a thoughtful older woman who had been raised to believe in a God that was a literal old man, with an actual white beard, on a physical throne. But even though she has long since let go of such primitive God-concepts, the Divine is still vitally real to her. She has learned that many human ideas about that larger Power are transient. But in the face of that, she has been willing to let her childhood God-pictures shift and grow. And she has let some of them go completely. Our religions as a whole need to be willing to follow exactly that example.
What might such a post-anthropomorphic paradigm for the Divine look like? The key starting place is to understand that the Ultimate is not a person or a person-like being, and consequently does not perform the same functions that human persons do.
To cite a few specific examples, in a post-anthropomorphic view, God does not “act” or “decide.” God does not “permit” or “prevent” specific events. Nor does God “choose” or “elect” favored groups, or “judge” those who act wrongly. All of those activities—acting, deciding, judging, etc.—are functions specific to human personhood, and can thus only be engaged in by persons. I believe strongly that what human religions or spiritual systems are trying to point to when they speak about God has real and actual existence. But since that Reality we are pointing toward is not a person, we need to stop misleading ourselves and our people (partly through outmoded language) into thinking that the Divine chooses to “act” or “make decisions” in the same ways that human persons do.
If the Godhead, then, is not a human-like person, what can we say about what God, in fact, is? Here is a quick sketch of some options. We can think, first, of the Divine as Being itself (a phrase often used by the thirteenth- century Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, as borrowed from Greek philosophy). Or we can frame God as the Ground of Being, a term favored by the twentieth-century Protestant writer Paul Tillich.
In the writings of an earlier Protestant thinker, Friedrich Schleiermacher (often called “the father of modern liberal theology”), one of the main names he used for God was “the Universe.” Interestingly, although this term has found favor as a “name” for God in some parts of today’s New Age community, using such terminology is largely disdained by church people today (probably because it is deemed to imply a supposed “pantheism” to which mainstream Christian thinking has remained doggedly opposed).
We can also understand the Divinity, variously, as the world-generating Life Force; as the universal Intelligence operating nature’s laws; as the underlying Consciousness and Energy that sustains life. Or we can think of God as the all-connecting Continuum that holds the uni-verse together as a uni-ty.
The experience of my life tells me that what I am referring to when I speak of “God,” or “the Divine,” is a real and present power. But the spiritual paradigms—and terminology—about the Ultimate handed down to us from previous times must undergo greatly needed changes, and expansion and re-configuration.
For those of us involved in religion today, one of our main jobs is to proactively affirm and shape the unfolding of such creative changes in how we think about the Divine, not ignore or resist them.