Where did the "omnis" go…or for that matter where did they come from?
God is omnipotent (all powerful). God is omniscient (all knowing). God is omnipresent (all present). God is omnibenevolent (all loving).
These are the attributes of God that most of learned in Sunday school and church. They were drilled into our heads in order to insure that we were aware that God was not like us but was completely different. God was other. In his Creeds of the Church (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1973) John Leith (one of my former professors) quotes the 1646 Westminster Confession. "There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory." This God is certainly "other" but is this really the God we encounter in the scriptures.
I ask that question because the God we encounter in the scriptures hardly looks like the God of the Westminster Confession. The God we find in scripture barters with Abraham (Genesis 18:16-33), argues with Moses (Exodus 4), gets really angry (Exodus 32:7-10), changes "his" mind (Exodus 32:14), forgives (II Samuel 12:13-14), calls prophets (Isaiah 6:1-13), loves the world (John 3:16) and comes enfleshed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (John 1). The God of the scriptures appears to be a very different kind of God; a God who is willing to get down in the muck and mire of creation, to listen to and be impacted by human prayers and even to suffer and die for creation itself.
This being the case, how then did we move from a God who was intimately involved in human relationships to a God who is seen as completely other and who moves human beings like pieces on a chess board according to "his own immutable counsel"? The simple answer…the Greeks. The more complex answer…that as Christianity moved from a Hebraic centered world into a Greek centered world, the God views of the church changed. The very "earthy" God of the Jews had to give way to a very "transcendent" God because an earthy God was a scandal to the Greeks. Greek gods were "timeless, immutable, impassible, incapable of being affected…in all, (and) not merely in some respects." (Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 104)
This view of God was an outcome of Plato's philosophical views which argued (and this is a very simplistic rendering of his philosophy) that the physical world was an imperfect copy of the perfect transcendent world (in a sense the spiritual is perfect, the physical is imperfect). Thus for the Greeks it was necessary to remove God from the daily grind of human existence and elevate God into the philosophical stratosphere. Only by so doing would God be worth worshipping. This Greek view of God then became the norm for the church early on and continues to dominate our thinking even today.
Unfortunately this reworking of God gutted any thought or discussion of God as relational. God became distant and remote, unable to feel or experience anything. Thus even Jesus' death on the cross became a mere transaction on God's behalf rather than an experience of God's own suffering for humanity. One of my goals then as I said last week is to return us to understanding God as the one who is creative, interactive, personal, loving, purposeful, judging, and forgiving; in other words the God of the scriptures. By so doing I believe we will not only return to our Biblical roots but we will enrich our own relationship with God.
Next week: God as creative.
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