Is God a Person?
The concept of a personal God is usually associated with the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Thus we have the idea that God is a being one can pray to, who will perhaps answer our prayers, or that God is a law-maker who makes moral injunctions, and so on.
I sometimes have debates with Christians on Medium about this issue, where I point out that most, if not all, other traditions consider the ultimate reality to be impersonal. This is a Ground of Being, a kind of pure consciousness, which is the source of everything that exists at many other levels (its emanations), and ultimately the material universe which could therefore be considered to be the ‘body’ of God. Examples would be Brahman in Hinduism, Ayin in Kabbalism, the Tao in Taoism. In Buddhism there may not even be an ultimate reality, since everything is considered to be impermanent and changing. There is nevertheless a state of consciousness to be sought in which one is beyond and free from these cycles of change; this may have some relationship to the Ground of Being.
It would seem that these different understandings are a debate between the Abrahamic and the Eastern religions. It would be surprising therefore to discover that Christianity has not always adopted this line of thinking. I’ve recently been reading noted theologian Karen Armstrong’s latest book, Sacred Nature. I trust that the title is self-explanatory (the subtitle is How we can recover our bond with the natural world). Although brought up a Christian, she is advocating a viewpoint similar to those of the Eastern traditions, that the natural world is a manifestation of the divine, not its creation.
She further claims that this was a view once held within Christianity: “As the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) had explained in his definitive Summa Theologiae, God was not confined to a supernatural heaven but was ‘present everywhere in everything’. God was not a being but rather ‘Being Itself’ (esse seipsum) (her italics), the divine essence at the heart of all things. God was all that is, Thomas taught, so ‘wherever God exists he exists wholly’. But Thomas’s theology was to be superseded with a radical shift in the Western conception of the divine. By the fourteenth century, students at the universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna were studying logic, mathematics and Aristotelian science before they began their theological studies, and when they arrived in divinity school, they were so well versed in logical thought that they instinctively tried to describe theological issues in rational terms” (p12–13).
She goes on to name some of the culprits associated with this change in understanding. The first is a name no longer familiar to the general public, although influential in his own time, John Duns Scotus. She says: “In Western Christendom, people were beginning to regard God as just another being — albeit of a superior kind — rather than ‘Being Itself’, and it was not long before they would break with the more traditional understanding of the sacred”.
The next three culprits she identifies are names much more familiar in modern times.
The first was Francis Bacon, who believed that he was acting according to God’s instructions in Genesis: “It was now time for philosophers to repair the damage wrought by the Fall and for humans to break with the ingrained — the pagan — habit of revering nature. They must control and subdue the earth as God has commanded. Nature was no longer a theophany, a revelation of the divine; it was a commodity that must be exploited”.
The second was Descartes: “Because the material universe was lifeless, godless and inert, nature could tell us nothing about God, the ultimate reality”.
The third was Isaac Newton. “Nature no longer had a sacred core; matter, he argued, was lifeless and inert, unable to move or develop unless acted upon by an outside force”.
She concludes: “When people claim today that they do not ‘believe’ in God, they are usually rejecting Newton’s God, the ‘Mechanical’ Creator who designed and dominated the universe. But this view of the divine is unique to the modern West… this narrow perception of the divine has never been wholly accepted in other religions. Many non-Western people still do not comprehend the full implications of our secular concept of nature” (p17).
As I often argue, it might be helpful in modern times to adopt the ideas of the ancient wisdom traditions. Is such a change what is required to rescue the planet?
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
