Friends, welcome to The Book of Common Words, where we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through podcast, poetry, and prose about my life, art, and the Christian faith. I’m your writer, Aaron. This publication is 100% reader supported. Thanks for joining me in this exploration.
I spill a lot of words talking about God.
Trying to understand God, to make sense of the source of existence itself, seems futile when you stop and think about it. Even still, something in me drives me to decipher the divine. There is an urge in me, a hunger really, to understand what we mean when we talk about God. This force, this storm, in my heart and my head forces me to contemplate just who God is and what meaning God has in the world.
And I do mean it exactly the way I phrased it as well: what meaning does God have in the world? I was raised to believe that God gives meaning to the world, and while I still believe that the definition of what is rests solely upon the essence of what we call divine, I am at the same time driven to ask what good understanding a glimpse of that divinity is—or does, for action begets action—in the tangible, matter soaked world we walk in, live in, are born into, and die in the middle of.
What good is God?
Having a framework for talking about God doesn’t do one iota of good in the face of racism, bigotry, sexism, poverty, injustice, and tragedy. We might be able to give a rational definition of God and God’s actions, but that in and of itself doesn’t change anything. In fact, having a framework to talk about God in the face of heartbreak and horror can be more damaging than the forced silence of unknowing. At least with the latter you can remain in solidarity with the tragic. Being able to offer some sort of explanation and meaning to cancer, addiction, hatred, and death often times removes us from the event, gives us space from the occurrence, and masks our emotions with an air of smug assurance rather than remaining raw and bleeding with those discarded by the side of the road of life.
So again, what good is God?
Here is where my impetus towards theological thinking comes to wither and die. I ask this question over and over and over. I have yet to find a satisfactory answer. Sure, I find reasons to keep going, reasons to keep looking, to keep searching, but I don’t find the answer my heart can finally rest upon. It’s as if the answer is playing hide and seek with me. I catch a glimpse round a corner, a faint whisper down the hall, and set off running towards that hint, only to find an empty room. Then another hint peeks round the door frame and I’m off again, chasing the elusive meaning of God.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find it once and for all. I don’t know if it can be found once and for all. I don’t think it’s supposed to be found once and for all. It seems to be that any time we nail the Jello of the meaning of God to the wall we are immediately left with nothing but new questions, new perspectives, new unsatisfactions. The moment you define God, you have failed to define God.
We say that God is beyond, beyond time, beyond comprehension, beyond reality itself. Such a big God cannot be boxed into something as neat as a definition, and every time we give a definition to God we only succeed in giving a definition to an idolatrous idea about God.
All our speech about God, the language we use to help us understand anything about the what and the who that God is only metaphor. There is nothing concrete we can say about God. We can’t say God has two arms and two legs, even though the Bible refers to God in anthropomorphic terms. Does God have a literal face? If so, with eyes fixed forward—again, metaphor—how could God be omniscient considering all that was behind the back of God’s head that couldn’t be seen?
What about wings? Some scriptures describe us as hiding in the shadow of God’s wings. Does this mean God has literal wings? Do they spout from God’s back—again, metaphor—or are they in place of the arms?
Physiology aside, do we have anything other than metaphor to speak about the nature of God? We say that God is holy. We know that holy means consicrated, and that holy can be defiled and desecrated. God, as omniscient, exists all places at all times. This includes some places where holiness is desecrated on the regular. So, is God defiled? Or is God not truly omnipresent? Different parts of the divine nature of God—and aren’t we anthropomorphizing divinity by ascribing human emotion and motivation to God—seem to contradict one another. Love and wrath. Mercy and justice. The unchangingness of God and new actions God takes.
All of these words we ascribe to God are nothing but metaphor, way’s we have for attempting to understand the being—or rather the source of being—that is God.
So, we are left with a hand full of inadequate metaphors to speak about this divinity we worship, all of them lacking, and none of them—even all of them together—able to give us anything truly definable about God.
Enter Jesus.
Enter Emanuel.
Enter incarnation.
Jesus is the only non-metaphor we have for talking about God. While all our apophatic and cataphatic language about God hints at things about God, speaking about what God is not and seeking metaphor to grasp what God is, in Jesus we get to see and experience God in a direct way.
We are told that Jesus didn’t grasp to be something equal with God but rather took the form of a slave, and in slavish obedience—even obedience unto death on a cross—willfully donated himself for us and for our salvation. We see that nature of Jesus in action with tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes, and outcasts. Jesus touched—an intimate action—lepers and made them clean. Jesus spoke to women whom others disregarded. Jesus commissioned women to carry the news of his resurrection to the confused and fearful disciples.
Jesus did things. And we are told Jesus is God. Ergo, God did things.
God did things. In the world. In this place of atoms and molecules, of particles, waves, and quarks. On the earth we walk and in the sky we breathe, God did things because Jesus did things. And the things God/Jesus did can be summed up in one term, one word, one set of letters we ascribe hope and meaning to.
Love.
God did love because Jesus did love. In this is love: not that we have loved God but that he loved us and commissioned his Son as the means of mercy for our sins.1 This is what love is. We were—we are—loved by God before we could love God. This is the nature of God, and the only reason we can talk about it is because of the physical actions of Jesus. Without Jesus, “God is love” would mean nothing to us.
And so, I find myself back at meaning, back at the meaning of God. There is something different now, though. I no longer think that God means nothing in the face of personal, systemic, and cosmic evil. I don’t ask, “what good is God?” because I can see what good God is. While metaphor still rolls off my tongue when speaking—or failing to speak—about God, there is something concrete now to anchor these metaphors to, something to hold them up against and see if there truly is any substance.
Jesus gives meaning to God. Jesus is the answer when we ask, “What good is God?” Jesus is the defining solid—and solidarity—that we have when we speak about God and God’s meaning.
And now I can see that the meaning of God I have so desperately spilled thousands and thousands of words trying to sus out, trying to articulate, trying to grasp, is here in my neighbor, in the oppressed, in the hurting. If Jesus sat and ate and drank and died in solidarity with people, then the meaning of God is those very relationships that sit at my doorstep and graze my fingertips. God’s meaning becomes my meaning. Connection. Communion. Community. Being with others not as a solution to the problem, not as a teacher to unravel the problem, but as a balm, a friend, a neighbor to be with in the problem.
The meaning of God is love. It was the impetus for creation, for restoration, for resurrection. God revealed God’s self to the people of this broken world so that God might be in a relationship with us, that we might learn to be in relationship with each other. Real relationship. Not the flimsy, self-serving things that pass for relationships much of the time. But relationships in which love—that self-donating, self-emptying thing that Jesus brought and wrought on the earth—actually occurs.
The metaphors we use to talk about the divine are still as breath in the wind, however they now blow as the Spirit does. We—especially those of us dedicated to thinking about God in public spaces—should be anchored and obsessed with love; not cheap desire or affection. It is our divine mandate, the meaning of the God we worship, and the reason we are the ones who walk in, live—love—in, are born into, and die in the middle of this tangible, matter soaked world where God matters.
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- 1 John 4.19, The Second Testament, Scot McKnight ↩︎