God And Intervention?

[glintofpewter]

Everything - history of art, art materials and methods, philosophy of art, current definition of art, individual skills and personality - has to come together for the next new great work of art - and everything that comes after to maintain the reputation of that art work. A single great work of art does not spring from one mind. Certainly, the very great artists met their moment with considerable skill, talent, etc. But like Micah they do not exist without context. Jackson Pollack's wife, Lee Krasner, helped form the intellectual context for his paintings. Without her contribution he may not have made great paintings and certainly the art world would not have been ready to accept his paintings as art. His reputation for having made great art may not survive. One writer has dared to suggest that Pollack, Rothko and others were one-hit wonders of not much talent.

 

One other art history example: the development of the conceptual and technological means to sculpt the human body in movement and three dimensions. The human figure in Egyptian sculpture has little movement or gesture. Cultural, religious, political ideas were coherent with this view of a rigid and confined human figure. When an Egyptian artist is skilled and talented enough the human-become-God figure extends into three dimensions but there is no movement portrayed. It is a fixed universe where a person's place in society is fixed.

 

In Greek art the development continues eventually producing great works like the Nike of Samothrace and the Discus Thrower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discobolus. Technique, material, conceptual development all contributed, but in some ways the most important was the new idea that in government is that individuals are equal and free. Then artist is free to portray a human figure, not a deity, free to move. Without democratic ideals, good marble, or bronze casting technology, skill, and talent, Discobulus would be mythic image in bas relief.

 

As you suggested, Norm, religion comes from the same place as art, architecture and literature. There are few places in the modern world that reveal this more than the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston Texas.

 

The Chapel has two vocations: contemplation and action. It is a place alive with religious ceremonies of all faiths, and where the experience and understanding of all traditions are encouraged and made available. Action takes the form of supporting human rights, and thus the Chapel has become a rallying place for all people concerned with peace, freedom, and social justice throughout the world.

http://www.rothkochapel.org/

 

Religion, I think, is part of a larger human project about learning how to play nice in the sandbox, about the development of such ideas as human rights and democracy. While those who conceived the Charter for Compassion and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa have roots deep in Christian tradition, neither project required a meddling God. But they owe their truth, their potential, their importance to the many who have come before, who believed in God, to the ideals and values that developed in religious cultures over the millennia.

 

Walter Goldschmidt’s ideas about the affect hunger of an infant, of the bond between mother and child, as foundational to development and maintenance of societies is where I would start. The infant demands food, care, and attention from the mother. Culture, society and belief systems influence how the mother responds to the child which influences how the child develops. Goldschmidt believes that as the child grows up it is this same affect hunger, this hunger for positive response to its own existence, that molds the child so that its behaviors and beliefs match those of the society. It becomes the glue which holds the group together. This biological and evolutionary mechanism provides for holding, carrying and developing a society, its culture and its system of beliefs, a religion.

 

Systems of beliefs arise out of more than one motivation and worldview and are adapted for more than one purpose. George Lakoff’s books highlighted the strict father and nurturing mother frameworks for politics and religion. Researchers suggest anxious people in need of certainty tend to be conservative in their religious beliefs. Similar research says nice things about us liberals. Anxiety about whether one would find food or be food was one motivation leading to the development of a meddling God. Learning rules for living in a nurturing community was, perhaps a motivation for a personal God, relational God.

 

It has been suggested that the Hebrews, when adapting mythical stories common in the region added a moral element to them so the creation story became about the fall, or hubris of humankind, and the flood narrative became about punishment for misdeeds. Stories not about capricious deities but about individual moral responsibility. (For those who are easily upset I remind you that these are not literal stories; they are stories to hold several layers of truth and I am only referring to one.) Societies look for moral authority. An unfalsifiable authority is best. God often works. The bogey man is a favorite at summer camp. The Ten Commandments seemed good enough but Priests found it necessary to add 600 amendments.

 

Which the prophets felt necessary to critique. Isaiah: include, not exclude the outsiders. Amos: may justice roll down like water. Micah: Do justice, love mercy, care for the poor, the hurting, the widows, walk humbly. Why?. Because we are all equal in the sight of that unfalsifiable authority who has become the unconditional lover, through whose eyes we see an ever evolving and expanding view of who is us. And an expanding awareness of individual moral responsibility.

 

Democracy is the result of an evolution of ideas about how to live together, of the importance of the individual and of the particular context that arose in Athens. In the West all our ideas of government begin in Athens. And I think, in the West, without the development Judaeo-Christian ideas about justice, mercy, and the importance of individual morality there is no democracy. Are democracy and Christianity/religion joined at the hip? No, I don’t think so. But I would argue that you couldn’t have democracy without the evolution of religion.

 

There are other layers to this religious complexity. Two are the need for meaning and the need to provide context for our experiences of the numinous. We are desperate for meaning and a sense of purpose. Even atheists succumb to this need according to studies cited by Jesse Bering in The Belief Instinct. In religion others find meaning and purpose.

 

Atheists, nuns and Buddhists monks meditate. Pentacostals speak in tongues and psychiatry clients go to their special place. According to Andrew Newberg, the activities in the brain are similar. The differences might be in the meaning attributed to the experience. Beauty, nature, loss of sense of self, the take your breath away experience of standing in front of a lush color field painting by Mark Rothko. These experiences are ineffable but we look for ways to provide context. For many of us it is hard to let them be without ascribing meaning.

 

Don’t take this personally but I think “If we invented God why don’t we take God’s place,” and “religion is for the superstitious” are simple questions that can only be answered by those who ask them and questions that fail to recognize how deeply related are humans and God. Not a supernatural God, but God as idea, God as ideal, God as highest value.

 

I don’t believe in a God I can talk about but to the extent that love and compassion are our highest values then it would be appropriate to say that God is love.

 

 

 

Take Care

 

Dutch

[BillM]

Panentheism seemed to me to fit the pregnant God image. I chose panentheism because it seems that God and the universe are not co-extensive, but because God is [larger] than the universe.

 

This image works well for me also at this time, Dutch. Of course, it is "only" metaphor, but it speaks volumes to me of how God "interacts" with God's creation. Creation is not something external to God's self, something that God must intervene upon using God's hands or "supernatural" power. Rather, God interacts with creation simply by sharing God's self with creation, just as a pregnant mother can't help but to share all that she is with the life inside her. Certainly, the mother can make conscious choices as to what is best for the baby she is caring, but we don't speak of pregnant mothers "intervening" in the lives of the infants inside. It is a symbiosis.

 

There are, no doubt, deists who do hold to the old school view that God created the universe, wound it up, and walked away. But that is not panendeism. In panendeism, there is no "where" for God to walk away to. And even if God could go somewhere, the universe, being "in God" would go with God.

[BillM]

Another aspect of this “pregnant God” image that I appreciate is that it virtually eliminates the God/mankind or divine/human dichotomy or “separateness” view that has historically dominated religion, Christianity, and deism.

 

The religion of my youth constantly reinforced to me how transcendent God is, how “other” he is, how he is not really here because, so it said, a holy God could not bear to be here in a sinful world. Sure, there are certainly scriptural passages that speak of God’s immanence, but those passages were seldom taught on. Instead, the focus was upon how our sin constantly separates us from God. The only remedy to this, so said my religion, was the blood of Jesus which, if I believed in it, somehow allowed God to pretend that I was not sinful. In an odd twist of how God perceives reality, he could not truly accept me as I really am. He could only accept me if he credited me with the “sinlessness” of Jesus which, again, means that he doesn’t really accept me for my own sake.

 

The “pregnant God” image dispels this superstitious “separateness” model by focusing, not on our sinfulness, but upon God’s compassion as creator and the source of life. Borg does an excellent job, IMO, of bringing out the notion that God’s compassion is “womb-like,” that God surrounds us as a mother surrounds the infant inside her. Yes, the mother is a separate person from her child, but there is no great gulf separating the two. In fact, though the blood of the mother and the blood of the infant never mixes, it is separated by only a very thin membrane. The mother’s “source of life” and that of the infant are almost touching. One feeds the other. One is the source, the other is the receptor. It is life and compassion which defines the relationship, not some arbitrary sense of holiness.

 

Such an image also has real-world implications for how we treat each other, because we come to see that though no two of us are exactly the same, we are all brothers and sisters with the same Source of Life. We are, despite our differences, all “in the womb” together. As Paul said on Mars Hill, we are all children of God. In him, we live, and move, and exist. Christ doesn’t come to save us from God, but to show us how to live as God’s children. This image appeals to unity, not to separateness. It calls us, as Jesus taught us, to love God and to love each other. And it dispels the popular evangelical, IMO, superstition that we are separate from God and from each other by some fictitious gulf.

 

Our world is rapidly becoming smaller. We see it every day. We need some fresh images of God that can help us to bind together in compassion and unity, not as a “pie-in-the-sky” hope for some future utopia, but as reflections of the unity that is possibly the very reality of the universe.

[Nick the Nevermet]

On this issue for me, IMHO, the problem with the way many evangelicals deal with the separateness of God is they use it inconsistently. In other words, God is wholly other for everyone else, but I've got an 'in'. Maybe I know exactly the right rules to be saved. Maybe I know the Bible is something I can totally rely on. Maybe I can be totally confident that I joined the right club, and everything will work out fine as a result. This inconsistent use encourages a spiritual arrogance. It seems to me that if you took separateness seriously, it should lead to a humility that one doesn't see in the worst offenders in the Religious Right.

 

Just my 2 cents, etc. Figuring out how different positions contrast is a useful activity, even if no consensus emerges.