All God, All the Time

This article (pasted below), was published in the Boston Globe this Monday and reviews some of the religious language and appeals to God that have been abundant in our political and public discourse lately. I am interested both at the author’s questions of who or what this God is – what roles humans tend to put God into or project on God, and how that fits (or doesn’t), with the biblical rendering of God – the aspects of God that are unknowable and point to the “otherness” of God.

I think that Christ is ‘God with skin on’ for Christians, so for me, Christ defines God in a particular way and rules out a few of the cosmic and open answers that this author leaves the reader with. But his questions remind me that our country’s political discourse has not, in fact, tended to point to Christ’s teachings or Christ’s views on discipline, the supreme court, sanctity of life, etc. – even self-proclaimed ‘born again Christians’ like President Bush and evangelicals who personally profess Christ, do not (to my knowledge), appeal to Christ in political discourse as much as they point to God for legitimization. So I wonder how much that limits, changes, or confuses all this God talk – and if certain groups (not just evangelicals, but yes, including them/us), possibly use ‘God’ to mean whatever they want it to mean, instead of doing the harder work of reflecting on what Christ might want in a particular situation, or whether Christ would use that arena or means to a Christ-like end in the first place.

Of course appealing to a specific religious belief system (like using ‘Christ’ instead of what is sometimes a more effusive term like ‘God’), would obviously offend and somewhat alienate people of other faiths in our country, and I am not necessarily saying that I think we should tout that ‘Christ would want so and so specific action’ to be done on the supreme court. But that is sort of the message that is already being communicated, only with using language of ‘God’ and failing to define it or contextualize the name. The ‘what would Jesus do?’ craze always struck me as a positive and very powerful idea that required a lot more work then buying the bracelet and shopping at Christian book stores – it might really mean, for me and everyone else who got a wristband/necklace/bumper sticker, that our lives would look a lot different. It just seems too easy to jump to culture, even Christian subculture, to define and flesh out our lives, instead of walking in a relationship with Christ and through community, worship, service, and reflection learn how to live like Christ. We all seem to want a set of rules – sometimes it seems like those in ‘the church’ even expect a secret decoder ring that let’s them in on the hidden answers to know how all aspects of life should go (mine must still be in the mail). But there are many, many issues that the Bible isn’t that clear on and that culture and politics and whatever else seem to just want to use God’s name (in vain), to propagate. Reminds me of a commandment… Anyway – here’s the article:

All God, All the Time
October 17, 2005
by James Carroll

When they told us in Sunday School that God is everywhere, they could have been talking about the recent news cycle. With Harriet Miers, we see that God lives in the politics of the US Supreme Court nomination process. In a culture defined by the separation of church and state, President Bush and his allies have mastered the use of religious affirmation as a deflection not only of criticism, but of critical thought. God is thus a trump card, a free pass. If the president, senators, and members of Congress can justify their decisions by appeals to God, why not judges?

”Acts of God” is the phrase applied to staggering natural disasters, from Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake to the coming avian flu. At the same time, survivors of such catastrophes credit God for having saved them, as if God callously let all those others die. Humans are perplexed when wanton suffering occurs, especially among children, and assumptions about God are overturned. The question becomes, How could God let this happen? Today, in Pakistan, where fatal disease, hunger, and thirst go unabated, the very ones who praised God last week for sparing them are pleading with God now, to no avail.

In the argument between creationists and scientists, those aiming to defend God make absolute claims about mysteries of the deep past as if they themselves were there. Air Force flyers have thought of God as their co-pilot in the past, but in today’s Air Force, God sits atop the chain-of-command. At the US Air Force Academy, which was rocked by sex scandals not long ago, God is now the designated dean of discipline, but this jeopardizes infidel careers. Unit cohesion requires conversion. Indeed, displays of faith can be a prerequisite for promotion throughout a government where the White House itself is a House of God. In Iraq, meanwhile, someone will turn his body into a bomb today, killing others by blowing himself up while saying, ”God is great!”

Who is this ”God” in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one’s faith in such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most striking about so much talk of ”God,” both to affirm and to deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things.

But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then? The glib God-talk that infuses public discourse in contemporary America descends from an anthropomorphic habit of mind, dating to the Bible and beyond, that treats God like an intimate friend or well-known enemy, depending on the weather and the outcome of battles. But there is another strain in the Biblical tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness so complete that even the use of the word ”God” as a name for this Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism — all the same.

But here is where it gets tricky. What if God’s unknowability is the most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based, would open into true modesty. The closed creation, in which every question has an answer, would be replaced by an infinite cosmos where every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ”God” is the living pulse of such open-endedness, then God is of no use in systems of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere. And that, too, shows in America, especially in its fake religiosity.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War.”

Copyright 2005 Boston Globe