God as Personal
My sister in law (now former sister-in-law) was livid. How could Cindy and I allow our children to read story books in which animals talked. We were all in Colorado for vacation with my parents and our children were reading some of their favorite stories (which had talking animals). My sister-in-law said that since animals could not talk it was inappropriate for us to allow our children to even, for a moment, think that animals had such human characteristics. It was anthropomorphizing at its worst.
Now for those of you who are unaware of the term, anthropomorphizing means giving human traits (speech, emotions etc.) to non-human parts of creation. The most obvious example would be Disney films in which tea-pots can talk and trash compacting robots can fall in love. However much we may enjoy such stories we know the difference between make-believe (talking fish) and reality (stuffed trout for dinner). We know that non-human creatures and inanimate objects, while having many endearing characteristics are not in the end human.
I raise the issue of anthropomorphizing because it is at the heart of our discussion of God as personal. As I wrote in a previous article, when the church moved from a Judaic to a Greek view of God, the universe and everything, it became an unwritten rule that Christians were to avoid any attempt at anthropomorphizing God. We were not, in other words to attribute to God any characteristics which might remotely be associated with human beings. God was not to be seen as jealous, angry, loving, or even, in fact, caring. God was the unmoved mover. God was the first cause. To attribute any sort of human attribute to God was to return to some ancient past in which people were superstitious and used inappropriate language about God. We were to react to such usage with the vehemence my former sister-in-law used when confronted with our children's books about talking animals.
This concern with anthropomorphizing God continues to this day. I still hear people in and out of the church castigating others for speaking of God in terms that might also be used to speak of human beings. The problem with such antipathy toward using human language to refer to God is that it ignores virtually the entire Biblical tradition…which regularly uses such language to describe God. Granted, while the use of human characteristics might be metaphor it is intended to remind us that God is not merely a force (ala Star Wars), a spirit that inhabits everything (ala pantheism), an ideal thought (ala much Greek thought) but instead a personal being who is interested in all of creation including all humans.
When we say that God is personal then, we are indeed saying that God while being other than us (creator not creature) is also in and of God's self a "Thou". Martin Buber in his wonderful book I and Thou (Simon and Shuster, 1996) writes about the relational character of God. That when encounter God we are encountering a "Thou" and not an "it". That when we encounter God, or God encounters us, we are engaging in a relationship in which we experience "another". This sense of encountering the personal is what I believe the Biblical writers were trying to get at when they used anthropomorphic terms to describe God. The encounters of human beings with the one, true living God, were encounters of very personal nature in which God was experienced as loving, caring, judging, calling, jealous and concerned (to name a few human traits). This sense of encountering the personal becomes even more real in the person of Jesus of Nazareth whose birth we will celebrate this week. I encourage you then, as you prepare to celebrate Christmas, to see it as a moment when the "Thou" we call God, becomes the enfleshed human being we call Jesus, who desires to encounter us in a very personal and loving way.
Next week: God as loving
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