What sort of god do you affirm or deny?

Everyone carries around with them an idea in their mind which they call ‘God’/’god’, and which they choose to either affirm or deny the existence of. What is immediately striking is that everyone has their own personal ideas about their deity concept. This is true even limiting ourselves to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which Christadelphians should know since they deny the doctrine of the Trinity which most other Christians affirm, but it runs much much deeper than this with many different historic and contemporary ideas about God that go far beyond what most of us have ever heard of.

The fact that everyone carries around a different idea of God in their mind should make us more open-minded towards others in that just because we superficially disagree with someone about God that doesn’t mean we are talking about the same God concept, and may actually find we have more in common with them than we think.

I’ve heard Christians recount conversations they have had with atheists where they mention ‘God’ to the atheist only to be told by the atheist that ‘god’ doesn’t exist. This has prompted more questions and when the Christian has delved a little deeper she has discovered that she is also an atheist to the idea the atheist has of ‘god’. The Christian agrees that the version of ‘god’ the atheist describes is a ‘god’ that ought to be rejected.

So the chances are that if you identify as a Christian you will believe in a ‘God’ that many other Christians reject. And if you identify as an atheist you will reject a god that many Christians also reject. This is sort of stating the obvious because there are many competing churches as well as, perhaps to a lesser or less vocal extent, competing atheisms.

It is interesting, then, to think about your own concept of deity and critique it. To be able to do this I think we first need to categorise some ‘God’ ideas.

One way that ‘God’ has been categorised is into four types:

• Super-being
• Hyper-being
• Ground-of-being
• Event

Perhaps you will identify your deity concept with one or more of these flavours, while others you may not have thought of before or even understand without further thought, research and reasoning.

We’ll look at each of them in sequence to find out a bit more about them.

1. Super-being

This type of god is the basic form of god and has been around since times of old. It is a metaphysical being that is just like a human being (usually a man) but is ‘super’. It is the projection of a person onto something much greater. That is to say that it has all the regular human characteristics; love, hate, compassion, generosity, jealousy, but in much more abundance. It has eyes to see what is going on and a mind to make decisions and then change them later. It has agency in the world and will work events according to its capricious ends.

We can think of gods like Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite as good examples, but a little earlier in history Baal, Asherah, El and Yahweh would have been understood in this way too.

Interestingly Zeus is the root for the Latin Deus from which we get English words like Divine and Deity. So the idea that God is a super-being comes through to us even in the development of contemporary language.

This sort of god is easy to turn into an idol and if (or, more likely, when) this happens it is really an idol of yourself – ‘God is like Me but better’.

2. Hyper-being

This next type of god is still a metaphysical being but is so super that, as humans, we are simply unable to come close to describing it. It is the infinite super-being, a god so big and far removed from humans that every time we think we have found something out about this god we have actually fallen short. When speaking about this god people have said things to the effect of, “He is like a father, but not in the way that we understand ‘a father’, like our own father. He is like a father that cannot be described using language or experience.”

Each time we put words together to describe this god we have actually created an idol because god is above description, above language and above expression.

If we think this god has done something for us then we are wrong, god is above doing things for mere mortals – who are we to him. This type of god is remote, imperceptible and cold. If this god exists we shall never know because there is no way to find out or describe It if we do.

Interlude

Most Christians today hover somewhere between Super-being and Hyper-being. They have a concept of god that has been handed to them from the way their community interprets the Bible. Some will conceive a more anthropomorphic version of God, others will move further towards the unknown God.

These are not all the versions of God though, we still have two to go and these move beyond the traditional monotheistic ideas of God, although they are affirmed by some Christians.

Ground of being

This next type is one that is often associated with Paul Tillich, a famous Christian theologian from the early 20^th Century. The idea is that all beings are created, including (if they were to exist) the Super-being and Hyper-being, and if they are created they cannot be the creator, hence the understanding that God is, in fact, Ground-of-being. The foundational presupposition from which ‘being’, among other things, arises.

In this concept god is not a being, but an essence. God is that from which everything originates, the underlying stability of the universe. Like the Hyper-being this god cannot be conceived, but this time it is because Ground-of-being is more fundamental that cognition and allows thought to exist. Cognition is subordinate to Ground-of-being so minds cannot conceive or describe Ground-of-being from an external viewpoint. It is the presupposition that allows a subject (us) to ask a question about an object (god). Without Ground-of-being it would be impossible to ask, “Does God exist?”, because if we lived in a universe without Ground-of-being then then the volatility would mean that the question couldn’t even be formulated.

Ground-of-being is an ontological description of God onto which cosmological and teleological descriptions can be overlaid, but don’t need to be of necessity.

Event

This is the last category for god and is different again from those described above. In this concept God is shown (or exists) in the same way ‘Love’ or ‘Democracy’ are shown (or exist), i.e. in actions or ‘events’. These things don’t have a physical presents although they are metaphysical objects. We can observe and study them and they are part and parcel of the human experience.

• If there were no people to carry out a democratic process could democracy still exist as a model: yes.
• If there were no people to care for each other could compassion still exist as an ideal: yes.
• If there were no people to contemplate God could God still exist metaphysically: yes. 

In this reading of reality natural processes largely progress unhindered but from time to time events unfold that go against the normal entropic decay and provide new insight into the human condition and make life better for those who experience them. Regular natural processes are peppered with the divine which breaks though when people act with transcendental love, rather than selfishness, towards others.

Second Interlude

These second two ideas about God are very different, but still held by people who self-identify as Christians. They are not even descriptions of a ‘God’ that has agency in the way that the God as a Being has agency. Perhaps it’s more about the arc of the universe heading towards a place where people are more loving rather than about day to day intervention like the historic gods.

What have I done with this information?

I think it’s very easy to keep the same idea of God/god when you deconstruct your beliefs. I think this is more or less what happened to me when I lost my faith. I simply rejected an idea that needed rejecting. Since then I’ve come to realise that this is what I have done – I continue to reject an incorrect idea. But that is not to say I’ve rejected all gods, which is impossible, or that I unavoidably reject someone else’s ideas about God of which I have little access to, and could be very alien to my way of thinking.

If you'd like something more on this subject then you could start here: