The Meaning of God in Human Experience

April 3, 1960
Akron

The meaning of God in human experience is somewhat of a scandal to many sophisticates but "good news" to most of this believing world. God is a problem for some. For others, God is the strength of life, the coming fulfillment of all golden dreams when the rhythms of the temporal world finally come to a halt.

The reality of God is the great speculation of the human mind and heart. The big question is neither idle intellectual exercise nor undirected emotional expression, although many there are who have speculated unprofitably as well as those who have emotionalized without any direction from reason. In the SYNOPTICON, that great treasury of ideas from the great books of human time, the chapter on God is the largest. If all the books, sermons, dialogues and poems about God were placed end-to-end, there would be enormous testimony to the perennial vitality of the idea of God. But for many, the mass of contradictory conclusions based on differing foundations of evidence total somewhat less than positive assurance.

The teachers and writers have given many names to the meanings of God. The Yahveh of Moses was Aristotle's Prime Mover; what Zoroaster called Ahura-Mazda, Confucius named Heaven; Lao Tze taught The Way and so did St. Paul, but the theologies were more remote from each other in ideas than in time. Buddhism, in its beginnings at least, rejected all speculation about a creator god and emphasized the conduct of life. But the idea of Nirvana in Buddhism has profound implications which make it akin to God. There is a dimension of depth in human experience -- a power people have always recognized as creating and determining the ways of life.

To cite the fact that Jesus called this power, "Heavenly Father" and Karl Marx described it as "dialectical materialism" is to emphasize one of the real dilemmas of human dealing with the idea of God. If God is so variously interpreted in different places and ages, can there be a real, central meaning of certainty?

In the face of this difficulty, one can adopt the attitude of Charles Darwin, who said, "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on the whole abstruse problem. The mystery of the beginning of things is insoluble, and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.... The whole subject is beyond man's intellect, but man can do his duty."

Or, one can endorse another way, illustrated by a story told by a Rabbi in connection with the separation of Judaism into three divisions, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. (GOD AND FREUD, Leonard Gross, David McKay and Co., New York, 1959):

A man, cast away on a desert island, decided to build a city, thus preventing insanity by keeping busy. Using stones and driftwood, he kept constructing buildings. Many years later, he was rescued. Proudly he conducted his rescuers on a tour of the city. "That's my house over there. There's the temple. Here, the grocery store and post office. Beyond that is the other temple."

He was interrupted, "The other temple?"

"Yes," he replied. "That's the one I DON'T go to."

In dealing with the meaning of God in human experience, there is an assumption and a recognition that ideas of God are different -- everyone must tolerate temples in which he doesn't worship -- but the witness of the ages of man testifies that one of the marks of the human being is the search for and expression of ultimate concern, to use Paul Tillich's phrase for religion. The words, "God is our ultimate concern," would have the acknowledgment of most people. "Our ultimate concern is our god," could include everyone, for that which holds our highest allegiance is the determiner of our destiny and our god.

God has meant fear in human experience. Early man knew little of the orderly rhythm of seasons; was puzzled by the erratic durations of sun and rain. Sometimes the powers of earth and sky seemed frightful enemies when the volcanic avalanche roared and the lightning struck. When the floods rage and storms cripple our civilization, even modern man wonders a bit why God permits sudden death and wide destruction. God has meant fear.

God has meant selfishness in human existence. In THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, p. 52, (Yoselof, 1959), Stanton Coblentz made a penetrating observation in connection with the archaeological diggings at Chicken-Itza in Yucatan. When the site of the sacred well was dredged, a strange variety of objects was recovered. There were gold and jade ornaments, beads, bells, discs. Also there were little, human, female skeletons with remnants of tiny sandals still attached to the foot bones. In those cruel days, baby girls had been sacrificed to the rain god, thrown in the sacred well to persuade the god to send the rains. Coblentz comments, "Once more, it seems, man has made the gods in his own image -- an image of deep-rooted selfishness, unreachable except by appeals to physical hungers. One might therefore say that man had unknowingly made sacrifices to his own representation of himself." God has meant selfishness.

God has meant ignorance in human experience. Once people believed in sky gods as the arching heavens, blazing sun and star-lit night awed their sensibilities. Now we know something of astronomy and weather, and do not worship sky/nature deities. If mysteries are to be labeled "gods" only until knowledge and science unveils these secrets, then God is a symbol of man's ignorance.

Freud approached the idea of God as ignorance in human experience differently. He believed gods were created by man's ignorance of himself. Freud believed man created God in the image of man's father because, subconsciously, man did not outgrow his infantile dependence on, and fear of the male parent. Freud thought his theory demonstrated in the Judeo-Christian religions where "god is openly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child."

God has meant manipulation and exploitation in human experience. When Paul preached in Ephesus, Demetrius sounded the alarm to his fellow silversmiths. Diana was the principal deity of Ephesus. A considerable portion of the business of the silver-smiths consisted in fashioning silver medals of Diana for sale to pilgrims and tourists.

Demetrius was candid. "Men, you all realize how our prosperity depends on this particular work. If you use your eyes and ears, you also know that not only in Ephesus, but practically throughout Asia, this man Paul has succeeded in changing the minds of a great number of people by telling them that gods made by human hands are not gods at all."

After more inflammatory talk, linking their self-interest with their goddess, the mob of silver-smiths created an uproarious riot in the city. Paul was endangered and only the placating words of the town clerk prevented a great deal of trouble. Paul had to leave Ephesus.

The religion of Diana of the Ephesians was manipulated to protect the economic monopoly of the silver-smiths.

This is not an isolated incident in history. There have been many unholy alliances in the name of religion which have been compacts of exploitation. When Marx called religion the "opium of the people," he was emphasizing this aspect of the meaning of God. Diana has had many relatives.

These less hopeful varieties of the idea of God as fear, selfishness, ignorance and manipulation should not be ignored in evaluating the cultural and historical growth of religion. The blunt words in the Wisdom of Solomon (14 12/21) should be stern reproofs of over-sentimentalized or selfish religion. In commenting on the various ways men have created their gods, that ancient writer notes,

"Because men in bondage to misfortune or royal authority
Clothed sticks and stones with the Name that cannot be shared with others
And then it was not enough for them to go astray about the knowledge of God,
But though living in a great war of ignorance
They call such evils peace."

There should be no surprise in the awareness that man has made images of God and that the idea of God consistently undergoes alterations. Human interpretations of experience are widely different and deeply puzzling. There is a contemporary illustration which may help us with the confusing but compelling idea of God.

Clinical psychologists make extensive use of the Rorschach ink-blot test as a device to assist in interpreting personality difficulties. The ink blots are shaped in indeterminable, but suggestive form in colors which stir the emotions. Each person finds different meanings -- animals, persons, birds, situations. Some people harmonize form and movement. Others see in the blots the images of their own inner conflicts. There is no more uniformity in interpreting the ink blots than there is in the human personality itself. The point is, the ink blots are the same basic fact, variously seen and interpreted by persons who have different wishes, fears and illusions.

The meaning of God in human experience is like unto that. In various times, under differing historical situations, persons of unlike personality have reported their interpretations. The disunity of interpretation should never persuade us that the core of creation is not there. Back of all the interpretations is the basic reality after which the human being has always groped.

There is a story about an old mariner's map (UNIVERSALIST LEADER, date ?) which charted the North Atlantic waters thirty years after Columbus' voyage to the West Indies. Across the great unexplored land and sea masses, the unknown mapmaker had inscribed, "Here be giants, Here be fiery scorpions. Here be dragons."

A few years later, the map came into the hands of the explorer, John Franklin. He scratched out the old warnings and lettered across the map, "Here be God."

What is that reality beyond the giants, scorpions and dragons of our projected image of God? In my opinion it is this:

Man is conscious of being alive in a world he surely did not make; a world he will never understand completely; the forces of which he can never control absolutely; and the purpose of which remains shrouded in ultimate mystery. That this should be without a Creative Power and a Presence seems incredible.

Then, too, the meanings of God in human experience are more vital than fear, ignorance, or self-serving. God has meant other values, too.

God has meant growth in human experience. The poetic lines, "some call it evolution, some call it God," point the way. Change seems to be an indubitable fact of the universe and all that exists in it. The cell divides, the sexes reproduce. The strata of rock move, twist, and erode in the long geologic ages while new continents are born. Living creatures, born helpless, grow in physical strength, many survive to meet the hard test of environment and achieve the maturity of their species. The human personality not only grows physically, but guided by human experience which can be transmitted, fulfilled by human love and care, the child grows into the man holding moral values and high aspirations, There is a primal impulse moving in all things, initiating organic life, growth, change. Something there is which instigates growth. That vital, creative spark is one of the meanings of God in human experience.

God has meant justice in human experience. No one will deny that the mills grind slowly; that wrong sometimes seems "forever on the throne." Yet the idea of God has been strongly yoked to the necessity of moral dominion in human affairs. In his HISTORY OF WESTERN MORALS (p. 63 ff.), Crane Brinton points out there is a relationship between what the gods are believed to be like and what people believe to be good and evil. He illustrated the point by referring to the Homeric myths. "Athena is the patron saint of Odysseus, but Odysseus has to deserve her support, not just by ritual acts, but by being the kind of man Athena approves."

The two-fold proof of God for Immanuel Kant was "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Perhaps Kant did not know as much as we do now about the social and psychological origins of conscience, but there is a working-out of justice in human history. We finished off the Japanese with the atomic sword -- but it was two-edged, for now we are in dire peril of weapons of our own devising. Just retribution is a certainty. The uprisings in South Africa and the unstoppable march for racial justice in our own land are contemporary confirmations that white man must render justice for the long centuries of colonial exploitation. God is love, but love requires justice and that, too, is one of the meanings of God in human experience.

Mystery is one of the meanings of God in human experience. There are dimensions of depth in this world we did not make and cannot completely control. The cosmos is not chaos. J. J. Cohen phrased this when he commented in his book, THE CASE FOR RELIGIOUS NATURALISM, "God is that quality of the universe, expressed in its order and its openness to purpose, which man is constantly discovering and upon which he relies to give meaning to his life." There is a mystery, both shocking and awe-inspiring, in the awareness that at the heart of things there is a Power -- creating, destroying, preserving, transmuting, sustaining. We are part of this force, always. "A Zen master, asked where the enquirer could find the Buddha, replied, 'It is very much like looking for an ox when you are riding one.'" (The Beacon).

Yet this power -- so vast and wonderful -- impinges on us in intimate ways, too. William Ernest Hocking in THE COMING WORLD CIVILIZATION (p. 97), says, "it is part of ancient wisdom that we are averse to display -- the most powerful, the least self-assertive. In the Hebrew prophets and in the greater mystics, the Almighty is the still, small voice, or in the non-action of the Tao." Hocking points out that it is a clue, to the mysterious and paradoxical nature of God and meaning of God that deity is symbolized in a divine baby, a humble carpenter, a homeless man of sorrows who was disgraced publicly and executed.

This universe is mysterious. Its end, and our enduring place in its cosmic process are puzzles we cannot fathom. Yet one of the great meanings of God in human experience is that there is an eternal harmony to which we can tune our lives.

Shelley is now sometimes described as a poet of an age long-gone whose Romanticism has no place in our realistic, brutal time of pessimism and uncertainty. Yet his lines from ADONAIS seem to capture some feeling for growth, justice, love and mystery which represent some of the great meanings of God in human experience:

"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction, which the one eclipsing curse
of Birth can quench not, that maintaining Love
which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."