Ch. 6 The God Statement
Theme Song: Testimony – Robbie Robertson
“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.” ~ John Henry Cardinal Newman, “Letter to Mrs. Froude, June 27, 1848”
The Original God Statement
“Do you believe that God is a person, a concept, or a force?” asked my very dear but very conservative Christian friend. By the time of this relatively recent questioning, I had been married to a Presbyterian-raised, avowed Taoist in a Moravian church because my mother thought the Unitarian Universalist church looked like a lecture hall. By twenty-nine, I was divorced and amid that turmoil I had composed my original God statement to satisfy a nagging feeling that had haunted me since I stopped attending the UU Church before making a “This I Believe” statement. During my thirties, I had dated men from a variety of faiths including Jewish, Catholic, Episcopalian, more Presbyterian, and a few who professed a vague spirituality not affiliated with organized religion. God was a topic rarely touched upon in any of those relationships. During that extended time period, on the rare occasions when I was asked about my beliefs, I would say that I was more Christian than anything else. Notice my very dear but very conservative friend did not ask me if I was Christian for Christianity to him was very clearly defined and I clearly did not make the cut since I did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, the literal interpretation of biblical accounts, the virgin birth of Christ, the bodily resurrection and physical return of Christ, or the substitutionary atonement of Christ. The God of my very dear but very conservative Christian friend seemed to be extremely, if not primarily, concerned with being believed in, blindly if necessary, and specifically by affirmation of a particular set of propositional assertions which were not equally available to us all and which had no real bearing on how we lived our lives. It was the Nicene Creed with side orders of vanity, inerrancy, and literalism. While I did not find that combination digestible, I balked at being dismissed from the Christian banquet entirely since I still considered myself a fringe member perhaps relegated to the kiddy table. I threw myself once more into the world of Christianity, right, left, and in-between. In the end, I decided that indeed I was not a Christian but I did believe in God as a Force of Love.
I have found that if you profess to believe in God but do not fit neatly into a pre-designed box, people who do fit neatly into a pre-designed box will find you troubling even if you have no intention of causing trouble. Of course, your mere existence outside the box will highlight the box's existence which might trouble those box dwellers who deep down understand that God cannot be boxed in no matter how lovely or sophisticated the box. Your non-boxed devotion will be doubted and your intelligently articulated beliefs will be deemed incomprehensible. I admit that it is true that we outliers tend to take the via negativa path of describing what God is not rather than affirming what God is. Since negative theology is associated with mystics, I am comfortable with the company on path via negativa but I also appreciated the challenge of composing a mostly affirmative God statement. Here is my first draft circa 1995:
God is eternally good and fair. If God were not good and fair, then I would have no interest in knowing or pleasing God. If God is good, then God is not cruel, impatient, or egoistic. If God is fair, then God would not have established one true religion in a time and location removed from vast portions of humanity. I believe that a good and fair God’s essential truth and love are equally available to all of us in all times through immanent presence and transcendent longing. I believe that God intervenes only through this transcendence and immanence and our incarnating of God’s will.
I believe that God is a mystery and that our primary life responsibility is to seek God and to live out God as best we can. I believe that our best tool of discernment is love. While our understanding will never be complete and our living out will never be perfect, we are called to continue to strive towards God. I believe that in our moments of loving understanding we share God’s eternity and that is our salvation. I have no expectation of a personal afterlife. I feel privileged to love and attempt to live out God in this life and that is enough. It’s not about me; it is about God. I believe that we are in the process of unraveling the mystery of God on personal, societal, and global levels by increasing our intellectual understanding and capacity to love and by experiencing glimpses of God in mystical union and heartfelt devotion and trying to incorporate those mystical glimpses, intellectual insights, and capacities to love into our living of life. We share with God the desire for homecoming of Creator and created.
I believe that organized religions say more about man's reaching out to God than God's reaching out to man. I recognize that organized religions were formed and are sustained by imperfect men with biases and agendas; therefore, I do not believe in the inerrancy of any holy book or decree. Man does sometimes get it right so I think that searching one or more organized religions for the beauty, truth, or peace therein is a worthwhile endeavor which may supplement our private, essential relationship with God. Specific to Christianity, I believe that Jesus was a man filled with God’s goodness who understood and lived out God. To the extent that Jesus’ thoughts and actions were more in keeping with God’s than our thoughts and actions, Jesus was more Godlike than we are and should be emulated. I think we are all children of God who have the potential to lead our lives in Godlike ways. I believe that God is bigger than the world yet pervades the world with invitation and presence and challenges us to incarnate God’s will in the world.
I grant you that the preceding was my God statement and therefore it is bound to make sense to me. More than one of my friends, folks with graduate degrees not that it really matters but still, has read that G-o-d statement and then asked me if I was an atheist (broadly defined). It was in response to that response that I first declared myself to be GOD-centric. Agree or disagree with me as you must but I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that my life has not been centered on God: the matters of love, goodness, and fairness that I imagine most concern God and my ongoing concern to better understand and love God. I am GOD-centric and I invite you to be GOD-centric too. If you are a loving person who cares about goodness and fairness, you are welcome on GOD-centric's very big ferryboat.
