God's Nature, Will, Power, Presence, and Activity

For purposes of this blog, I almost left this in draft forever mode, because I'm not happy with it but had to finish something to turn in. But in the end, I decided to hit post because there is value in doing the best we can today.

This is the second of two week three discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What is your understanding of God’s nature, will, power, presence, and activity in the world? 

My first thought on reading this prompt was "Wow, that's asking A LOT!" On further thought, my reaction is just to say "I don't know." And while I actually am going to try to answer to the best of my current thought and ability, I think it's important to sit with that "I don't know" a bit. Out of those things, I only need to know a subset of two of them. I need to know that God's nature is fundamentally good  and I need to know God's will to the extent that it is a factor in my actions. I address the bit about God needing to be good to be relevant more in my reflection paper, but in general, if we don't believe God is good (or I guess powerful and evil), I think God is or should be irrelevant in our lives. Once we determine God is relevant, I think actions (living in accord with or doing God's will) are more important than theory. I do believe loving God (or anyone) should inspire me to want to get to know them better, but as Christians, I think sometimes we use following that desire (and plain old human curiosity) as an excuse to avoid the hard parts of doing what loving God calls us to do. Similarly, I think eschatology is often used in the same way, it's not that we shouldn't study these things, but we should study them because our love of God and love of the Bible make us want to know more, not because the study is more interesting to us than other less fun parts of our Christian walk. I also think theory can help us act or know how to act. I also think that "I don't know" is an underrated answer to a lot of these questions or any question about God.

Because I think it's the most important of these, I'm going to start with God's will. I believe Micah 6:8, "Only to do justice; And to love goodness; And to walk modestly with your God;" (JPS85), is a good start on God's will.  I think it is also God's will that we love God with everything we've got and love our neighbor as ourself.  As I talked about last week, I think forgiveness is part of God's will, both for us to forgive and for God to forgive us. I know that people often say that things like praise and worship, prayer, or Bible study is God's will. I haven't seen any arguments for that that are particularly compelling. I think those are things that (hopefully) help us do God's will, but I think they are more means than ends. I'm aware I'm leaving open a lot of questions in terms of the big picture of why God created the cosmos in the first place, but I am content to leave those as open questions, in part because as I discuss with God's nature, I think it's beyond human understanding. But also, I don't find a lot of mystery in having a desire to create. If humans are made in God's image, it's not surprising that God too would have an impulse to create. I do not think God has everything planned out in advance and we are only puppets acting on God's will, nor do I think our having free will (which I both think is overrated and a doubtful assumption) is a valid explanation for, well, really anything, but especially not any real or perceived shortcomings in any of the factors we are discussing here.

I think God's nature is beyond human understanding. I believe there will be a future time, which I refer to as the next life, where that will change, but in the meantime, my understanding is by definition going to be incomplete and approximate and I'm mostly content with that. I also think that we (different people) can hold different (incomplete) understandings of God's nature, possibly even seemingly incompatible understandings of God's nature and they can both be right. Just as we read that the Gospels are different witnesses' views of Jesus and we can learn from that, we should also be able to learn from differences in how we each see God's nature, rather than insist that we must all think the same way. (That's not to say there can't be false views, but disagreements don't necessarily imply falsehood.) I do believe that God is good and God works from a place of love (or as my grandma's favorite Bible verse puts it, God is love.) I think my friend's pastor puts it well when he says "It's not 'everything that God does is good', but 'God uses everything for good.'" When I was a child, my neighbor showed my sister and I her white carnations and told us that you will never find an all white carnation, they always have a little bit of red or another color hidden underneath (or even obvious) and that this is a message from God that nothing is or can be perfect. I've always taken a lot of comfort in that. I think perhaps, it may also be a message that applies to God. God is also not perfect (and by extension not all powerful or maybe power and perfection are unrelated.) Or maybe something about perfection breaks the universe. 

I do believe God is active in the world in some way. I'm not entirely sure how. I found the approach discussed in Brown that God is moving along with us, changed by us as we are changed by God, all living in relationship together, to be compelling. I also subscribe to the embedded theology that God does change in relationship to God's experience with us, because I fairly regularly point to the places in and around the story of Noah where God regrets or thinks better of past behavior and acts as a result. I need to think more about how this affects other beliefs. For instance, I think it conflicts with the "official" story of why it is completely acceptable for my international, multi-time zone church to do communion on Zoom (which involves the timelessness of God.) I'm not actually personally invested in that, because my personal theology of sacraments is that meaning and intention are more important than anything else and that for communion in particular we should probably either be doing more often and more casually (every time we eat - splitting the stable of the meal and sharing it with everyone around us) or only rarely and even more formally (to make it more meaningful.) However, as part of the church council I'm invested in having something that works for our congregation and doesn't make life overly difficult for our volunteer, bi-vocational minister.

I do think that when God intervenes in the world it is more likely to be small promptings than large flashy miracles. Maybe the age of miracles is over or maybe they just weren't that effective and God has learned better. I don't think prayer prompts God to act as much as it acts as a support of one another and prompts us to act as the people of God.

I'm sure I've left some things out here, because again, it's a big question.