God

Question 1

What is Monotheism?

Answer 1

• Religious belief in early Israel moved from polytheism to monotheism, as encapsulated by the Shema prayer in Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One’.
• Biblical monotheism is ‘ethical’ monotheism. In the Old Testament, the covenant agreement between God and Israel is based on God’s moral commands: the Law of Moses, centred on the Ten Commandments.
• In the New Testament, Jesus quotes from the Shema to say that love of God and love of one’s neighbour as oneself are the greatest commandments.
• Moral obedience is at the heart of salvation to God’s Kingdom.

Question 2

What is God as the omnipotent creator?

Answer 2

• Although some Christians believe that God created the world ex Deo lout of God’s own being), most believe that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing), mainly because creating simply by words of power is the act of an omnipotent / unlimited Creator.
• Some Christians reject creation ex nihilo (for example, Process theologians) on the grounds that this belief is based on a mistranslation of Genesis 1:1-3, which is really suggesting that ‘creation’ amounted to God putting pre-existing chaotic material into an ordered form.

Question 3

What is God as the controller of all things?

Answer 3

• An all-powerful Creator must by definition control everything and sustain everything.
• For some, God’s omniscience leads to theological determinism, meaning that because God must know the entire future, there is no way the future can be changed, so humans cannot make free choices, and in effect are controlled by God’s omniscience.
• Others follow the kind of view developed by Aquinas, that God is timeless, so he sees the results of our future free choices but does not cause them.
• To be able to choose freely is particularly important for good moral behaviour.

Question 4

What is God as transcendent and unknowable?

Answer 4

• Belief in God’s transcendence follows from his omnipotence and omniscience: such a God cannot be known by mere human minds, so God must be unknowable and outside space and time.
• This, for example, is Rudolf Otto’s view - that God is holy and numinous.

Question 5

What is the doctrine of the Trinity and its importance?

Answer 5

• The doctrine of the Trinity is ‘perceived’ (rather than found) in the New Testament writings.
  o The classical doctrine of the Trinity affirms that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God in three persons, each possessing God’s characteristics (such as his omnipotence and omniscience) in equal measure, and differing only in terms of their inner relations.
  o God exists as one substance in three persons (hypostases). All three persons are eternal and uncreated. The three persons are mutually indwelling’ (the doctrine of perichoresis)
• The doctrine of the Trinity brings together the main historical and doctrinal truths of Christianity concerning sin, atonement and redemption.
  o The concept of the Trinity makes it possible for humans to have a personal relationship with God, since the Father and the Son are immanent within creation, although the Godhead remains unknowable and transcendent.
  o The Trinity can also be seen as a model for personal relationships, for example, in Moltmann’s idea of the ‘social Trinity.
• Study of John 10:30 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 shows us the difficulties in understanding whether the New Testament sees Jesus as literally ‘the’ Son of God (in the Trinitarian sense) or as a son of God in the sense of someone close to God.
  o In John 10:30, the fact that some of the Jews wanted to stone Jesus for blasphemy because they understood him to be identifying himself with the Father, seems to suggest that Jesus did see himself literally as the Son of God.
  o However, another reading of the passage is that Jesus simply told them they were wrong, and that by claiming to be the Son of God he was simply saying that he was doing the work that God had predestined him to do.
  o In 1 Corinthians 8:6, some think that Paul is using the language of the Shema to equate ‘God as Father with ‘Jesus as Lord’” but again, the words can be read in a quite different sense, to the effect that although Jesus’ mission was so important for the human race that it was right to call him Lord’, that title does not mean that Jesus was the [Lord) God Rather, Jesus was God’s instrument in creating the world.
  o The Church clearly did come to understand that Jesus was the Son of God in the Trinitarian sense, but the New Testament texts may be steppingstones along the way to this understanding.

Question 6

What is God as Father?

Answer 6

• Calling God ‘Father’ reflects the practice of patriarchal societies in the Ancient Near East, in which the oldest male ancestor in the patriarchal families had complete power.
• God reveals himself to Moses as the ‘God of the Fathers’ (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). He is the Father Creator, and is also Father in relation to his Son Jesus.
• His actions are those of the patriarchal father, in that he instructs humans to be fruitful and multiply; he ordains different roles for men and women, and punishes disobedience.
• He also displays the love of a father for his Son, Jesus.
• The most anthropomorphic aspect of God as Father is the incarnation of Jesus as God’s Son.
• Within the Trinity there are at least two male persons’: Father and Son.
• Jesus frequently addresses God as Father and taught his disciples to pray to God using that title.
• The Aramaic for ‘Father’ is Abba, which is the word Jesus would have used - a word that signifies God’s approachability as the Father of all people, and St Paul uses the word to suggest that by crying ‘Abba - the Father!’, all people become sons of God.

Question 7

What is God as Love?

Answer 7

• The issue of God’s love relates to the question (in the problem of evil) of why an all-loving God allows evil to exist.
• God’s love is the basis of the covenant for Israel.
• It is encapsulated by the suffering and death of Jesus since these atone for human sin.
• The greatest gift of the Spirit is love.
• God is love, and this is the basis for loving others.
• If God is love, then love describes the relationship between the persons of the Trinity, and further requires love to be the basis of human relationships also.
• The kind of love Jesus is talking about is agape, which Fletcher uses as the basis for his Situation Ethics.
• The belief that humans are made in God’s image means that God’s love must be reflected in the human capacity for agape.

Question 8

What is God as King?

Answer 8

• God’s nature as Father links naturally to that of God as King, with its attendant metaphors of God as sovereign ruler.
• This kind of imagery is seen clearly in Isaiah 6, where the prophet has a vision of God enthroned in the Jerusalem Temple.
• It is also seen in the ‘Enthronement Psalms’, where God is portrayed as a warrior king who leads the hosts of heaven.
• The most important aspect of this royal imagery is its use in the New Testament to portray Jesus as Messiah, although the role of Jesus as Messiah is much wider since Jesus brings about the Kingdom of God.

Question 9

What are the challenges of understanding anthropomorphic and gender specific language about God?

Answer 9

• Understanding anthropomorphic language about God is difficult in the sense that to describe God as having human actions, human emotions and a human body reduces God to the human level.
• How could such a God be the Creator, or save humans from sin, or be worthy of worship?
• To describe God as Father and King is clearly gender specific and relates to the patriarchal model of society in ancient Israel.
• The royal line in Israel is almost exclusively male, so within that model it would be inappropriate to refer to God as Mother or Queen.
• The real challenge here comes from feminist critiques of anthropomorphic and gender-specific language, since it seems very difficult to reconcile the anthropomorphic, patriarchal / male-orientated language of Christianity with feminist concerns If the revelation through Jesus was binding for all the future, this means that the patriarchal model must be used in the twenty-first century, whereas that model is arguably redundant.
• Monotheism reinforces the position of the dominant male, and the fact that at least two members of the Trinity are male adds to this problem.
• Moreover Jesus, although he was kind to women, appears to have had no commitment to feminist principles.
• Feminist responses vary.
• Some remain Christian within the Church as it is, arguing that had Jesus taken a feminist stance in the first century CE, Christianity would probably never have got off the ground.

Question 10

What is the view of a Process God as neither omnipotent nor creator?

Answer 10

• The view that God is not the Creator stems from the Process reading of the Genesis ‘creation’ stories.
• These do not teach ‘creation out of nothing.
• As the older Babylonian stories show, the Hebrew in Genesis is talking about God creating order out of pre-existing chaotic material.
• Both God and physical matter are eternal and uncreated, and they exist panentheistically: the universe is in God and God is equally in the universe.
• God is not the Creator, but is therefore ‘creative”, persuading the universe into the form that we now see.
• The ordering of the galaxies and of life on earth is the result of this ongoing persuasion.
• If God did not create ‘from nothing, then equally he cannot be omnipotent, since his power is limited by preexisting matter.
• Using the analogy of the unity of human and animal minds and bodies, we can see that God is the mental aspect of reality, and the universe is God’s ‘body’.
• Just as the ability of the human mind to control its body is limited, God’s power over the universe is limited.
• Process Theologians argue that the most likely explanation of the universe we observe is that God is not the Creator; nor is he omnipotent.
• This raises the question of whether or not such a God is worth worshipping.