Running Into Trouble With God

March 19, 1961
Rochester

God is my subject today. But my object is to trouble you by proposing that uncritical beliefs about God may be shallow enough to wreck the vessel of faith. Furthermore, if your mind moves with your heart, you may discover a new horizon of meaning, for when the little gods are cast away, then, one day, the vision of the one god who is overall and through all and in you all may come to you.

A teacher of religion who is also a psychiatrist, Dr. Earl A. Loomis put it this way (p. 14), “There are three categories of God we must deal with. The first is God as he really is – and this we can’t ever know. The second is the idea of God as he is taught in our churches, the true, pure, gentle, lovely, benevolent, loving God. But there is a third category of God and here’s where we run into trouble. At some point in his life an individual begins to develop a private notion of God.

Consider God as a “private notion” and why it gets us in trouble.

Some years ago in a place far from here, a woman was quite indignant with me when I said that it was difficult for me to imagine God as a person – that while “heavenly father” could convey the image of creator, it was unsatisfactory for me to describe God. This good woman informed me vehemently, “If I didn’t have absolute faith that God was exactly like my dear dead father, why, life would not be worth living.”

This is the private notion of God and it can run into trouble. Human authority, particularly when speaking with too much authority, so that fears envelop the child or wild wishes glorify the parent or restrained hostilities create guilt feelings – all these emotional difficulties can place one’s parent on the throne of God.

There are other kinds of difficulties which run into trouble on this score. Sometimes the person who has a strong, but expressed wish for power over other people, will create for himself a vision of an all-powerful God whose power over people cannot be denied. Thus the god who is worshiped is not the eternal presence of love and creation but the distorted image of one’s power-hungry self.

Even though the maturing effects of a reasonable religion may dilute the self-image which is worshiped as God, these will continue to be the vibration of our self-image distorting the vision of God we seek to worship.

The great mystics of all religions have always claimed that the vision of ultimate reality comes only when our self has been forgotten and thus unencumbered by our [illegible] wishes and secret fears, we are able to contemplate the purity, [illegible], beauty and goodness of all that is.

But the mystic is rare among people and most of us have to contend with the difficulty that the one creating God of absolute goodness may be obscured by a number of lesser trivial gods of our anxieties and greeds. We run into trouble with God because we hold two faiths. One of them official, when we assent to official statements about the historic god of faith. The other faith, privately held, may be polytheistic, worshiping many gods.

A sociologist from another land though that the real god of the American people was the automobile; another distinguished scholar disagreed, saying that the god of middle-class America was the baby; other articles have been written to demonstrate the various gods we tend to worship – the glamorous movie star who is the sex-goddess; the almighty dollar; the god of material success; the god of social standing. Who can look long at the political hurley-burley and not be persuaded that there are many who have deposited all effort and hope on the altar of the god of political power. We have many depositories for our faith and worship.

In the current issue of the Universalist Leader there is a paragraph by Maude Royden about Shinto worship. “In the temples of Shintoism there are no images of gods. High up on the wall, but tilted so the worshiper sees himself reflected in it, there is a looking glass. A Shinto priest explained this by saying that no believer can see more of the godhead than is already in his heart; the mirror in which he sees only himself reminds him of this.”

This Shinto symbol emphasizes the difficulty we have with our personal version of God. True it is, that the believer can really experience God only in himself. But the experience is laborious to one who seeks God, for always our own self is reflected in the mirror of inwardness. We run into trouble unless we remain aware of this inescapable confusion between the self we admire and the true God we seek.

The poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, once said, “the world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ’God’ with the wrong blocks.”

Because the self does get in the way when we try to see God, many persons ignore God except as he may be taught by a religious faith.

The limits of personal freedom are defined by a church which pronounces on matters of faith and morals, or on a church which requires creedal subscription or particular testimony of faith.

Dr. Loomis (THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE, p. 44) tells the story of the little girl observed by a neighbor. Pushing her doll carriage, she said “hello” as she walked by. Not long afterward she walked by again. Curiosity aroused, the neighbor asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m running away,” the little girl said.

“But,” the man said, “you just seem to be going around the block, around and around and around.”

“Yes, I know,” the little girl answered, “I’m not allowed to cross the street.”

Not only does one not get far when severely limited by the church in what he believes God to be, but also one must recognize how much ideas of God have changed in the history of religious faiths.

Our own Judeo-Christian tradition is replete with these confusing changes. In the law codes of Deuteronomy we read (24/16) that God commanded Moses, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers....” In II Samuel (21), however, we read that God had caused the crops to fail and that he was appeased and restored the land only when the descendants of Saul were hanged for his sins.

This is not a contradiction in a divine, unerring book, for we know that this is one instance among many where recognition of historical realities explains the difference. The story in II Samuel is a much older historical strain than the Deuteronomic law code of the 6th century B.C. A more primitive custom of revenge prevailed. The Deuteronomic code reflects a later time and more enlightened ways.

The point is that we run into trouble with God if we believe that he changed his mid about punishing children for the sins of their fathers. The idea of God had become transformed and people attached different moral qualities to him. As the moral standards of the people change, the character of their god alters and reflects the development of their social laws.

Take another instance: (Genesis 32/30) After Jacob’s famous wrestling match by the stream of Jabbok, that patriarch says, “I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved.” But when you turn to the 18th verse of the first chapter of the gospel of John you read “No man hath seen God at any time.” There is no need for laborious and awkward theological devices to reconcile the contradiction. An ancient, [illegible] story is not likely to agree with the elaborate theology of the Hellenized gospel of John, particularly when they are separated in time by considerably more than a thousand years. A different viewpoint about the nature of god should not surprise anyone. It would be ridiculous to argue that God had changed his mind as to whether he had been seen face to face at the river ford of Peniel.

In his book GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE, Harry Emerson Fosdick has a particularly fine chapter on the “Idea of God and how people’s beliefs about God changed. “

“Beginning with a story god or on a desert mountain, it ends with men saying ’God is spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth...

“Beginning with a god whose highest social vision was a tribal victory, it ends with the God whose worshipers pray for a world-wide kingdom of righteousness and peace....”

We run into trouble if we fail to acknowledge that the idea of God changes with people’s beliefs about the ways they want to live. When monarchs ruled their kingdoms, God was regarded a mighty king. As monarchs disappeared when their day had past, so the idea of God changed and people eagerly used Jesus’ concept of Heavenly Father.... As the masculine-dominated family beings to evaporate under the influence of society’s changing place for the status and authority of women, so God is referred to as less and less as the universal male parent. This is more obvious in the growing exaltation given to Mary by the Catholic Church, but there are many other indications as well.

Looked at from the standpoint of the multitude of ideas of God’s nature and power, held in different places in times, we cannot escape the judgment that God is a word-symbol which articulates the hopes and aspirations and prohibitions of a social group.

There is another sobering aspect to the idea of God illustrated by a story told of the famous surgeon, Sir William Asler. He was the honored guest at a London hospital and during the tour of inspection noted the abbreviation system on the patients’ charts. “SF for scarlet fever, TB for tuberculosis, D for diphtheria, and so on. All the illnesses seemed pretty well under control except one indicated by the symbol GOK.

“’I observe,’ said the famous doctor, ’that you have a sweeping epidemic of GOK on your hands. This is a symbol not in common use in American medical circles, just what is GOK?’

“’Oh,’ said one of the doctors, ’when WE can’t diagnose, God Only Knows.’”

As man’s diagnoses have become more informed and accurate, GOK appears less and less – once God was thought to be the thunderstorm and the lightning bolt, his hand touched the avalanche and stirred for the mighty water. Now men know more about these natural forces and do not see God directly in their force.

Does this mean that God is a symbol of our ignorance? That as knowledge grows his kingdom diminishes. Particularly, if we dispel all our scientific ignorance, will we then have no place or need for God?

To think of God as a symbol or a myth is not to denigrate the idea. God, as a symbol, is the way man ventures a grand comprehension of his hope for a high destiny and his commitment to more noble ways of living.

Myths have been defined as “the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves. A myth is a large controlling image that gives “philosophic meaning to the facts of ordinary life. Without such images, experience is chaotic, fragmentary.... Myths perform the historical function of religion – they unify experience in a way that is satisfactory to the whole culture and the whole personality.” (MYTHS AND MYTHMAKING, Henry Murray, p. 355).

I was tempted to end the sermon at this point. I said I wanted to trouble you by pointing out the self-images that are reflected in personal ideas of God; attention has been called to a few of the attendant varieties of ways that God is a symbolic myth of central ideas and social controls of cultures.

Of course it is beyond the capacity of human experience, to know God as he really is. Some of you may think me either naïve or sentimental to affirm that one should not halt the search for God because people individually create God in their image or nationally use God as a symbolic premise to secure obedience to society. Our age has become analytical, skeptical of all we cannot see, critical of everything we cannot shape into a material artifact or a balanced equation.

Although we cannot know God as he really is, there are yearnings which may grasp realities not easily subjugated to logical propositions or verifiable experiment. The priestly writer of 1st Chronicles (16/26) might have been thinking along these lines when he notes, “for all the gods of the people are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.”

There is an anecdote printed in the SRL (12/10/60) which is helpful. The reporter’s little nephew said he was going outside to play with God.

“How do you play ball with God?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” the boy replied, “I just throw the ball up and God throws it down to me.”

The little boy knew that there is order and law in the universe. No matter what word symbol we use for ball or God, toss it up, it will come down. There is organized principle in this universe and the marvelous discoveries we make seem to confirm rather than deny that though we ever see through a glass darkly, that shadowed image stirs our hearts to deep ponderings about eternity and our place in a vast scheme of things.

Of course many profound scientists and philosophers see no reason for supposing that a creator god with purpose started it all. Many believe life an accidental alignment of the completely random behavior of atomic particles or amino acids or something. There is no proof to refute that belief.

Some of us, however, obey our hearts and take the leap of faith that behind all the confused experiences of our brief living, there is organized purpose for which our word “intelligent” would be completely inadequate. Or as the persuasive philosopher who wrote the letter to the Hebrews said, (11/3) “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”

This conscious faith does not com to most of us by another’s arguments. I do not believe that a faith in God deep enough to engulf in sensitivity all the vast troubles and fine hopes of this world comes easily with an unquestioned acceptance of routine beliefs. A faith for troubled time sand hopeful hearts comes with the experience of examining our self-images and saying”God is not that”; of looking critically at our national idols and saying, “God is none of these.” Our troubled lines sometimes achieve the blessing of deep faith by the authentic experiences of some aspects of the Creator. In the breathtaking experiences of the beauties of a mountain lake; or the shaking moments when thunderous surf crashes on ancient rock; in the times of higher human communication when persons demonstrate sacrificial [illegible] by their gifts of themselves to great cause; in the sense of presence that exists when one sits with a person whose life is ebbing fast and with eyes dim, but not fearful, looks on the past, present and future; when life begins – on these experiences one is beyond the expression of words but not thereby short off from the search for the presence of God.

Do you know the story of the rich man who wanted to collect jade (Earl Loomis – THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE, p. 59)? Although rich the man did not relish being cheated, “so he determined to seek instruction in jade grading from the most famous jade connoisseur in the world. Through a friend he was introduced to an expert on jade, and learned that the course consisted of twelve lessons and would cost a thousand dollars.

“That’s all right,” he said, “How do the lessons go?”

“You come here every week.” (p. 58 ff.)

Life is something like that. In our search for the deep things of most meaning, we grow in wisdom and understanding by distinguishing the false by the true and the true by the false. The lessons may be costly and indirect, too. But like Wordsworth in those “Lines Composed Above Tinturn Abbey,” we can persist in

“that serene and blessed mood,
In which the health of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of Joy,
We see into the life of things.”

APPENDED

Running Into Trouble With God

GOD AND FREUD, Leonard Gross, David McKay Company, Inc. NY, 1959
p. 38-39

“It was his study of psychiatry that finally brought Dr. Earl A. Loomis, M.D., to an understanding of the extreme variations in his religious life. He found out that, like many other people, he had not been taught an adequate conception of God.

“there are three categories of God we must deal with,” he explains now. “The first is God as he really is – and this we can’t ever know. The second is the ideal of God as taught in our churches, the true, pure, gentle, benevolent, loving God. The purest rendering of the religious message gives you this God.

“But there is a third category of God, and here’s where we run into trouble. At some point in his life an individual begins to develop a private notion of God. God is supreme; his father is supreme; therefore God must be like his father, only more so. If the father is rough, unkind, unpleasant, prohibitory then what is God if not all these things?

“God thus becomes an authority; eat this, do that, don’t don’t don’t. God is like the ancient Hebrew God. Yahveh is a jealous God to be feared, a God to whom we must make sacrifice.

"If love of God means destruction of life, then we’re in love with a Moloch."

His reference was to the Canaanite idol to whom children were sacrificed as burnt offerings in biblical times. While such sacrifices are unknown today, Dr. Loomis contends there are uses to which god is put by unenlightened individuals that are virtually as dangerous.
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Edwin Arlington Robinson quoted by Charles Milligan in the Xn Register, “The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ’God’ with the wrong blocks.”