Chapter Two
The Failure
Classical Theism
The God of classical theism is
dead. God is dead! Long live God! The God of classical theism is dead, it’s
just that a lot of “His” followers don’t know it yet. Some of us do. That so many people don’t know it doesn’t
change the truth of the contention. The
God of classical theism is dead.
Classical theism has outlived its usefulness. It already lies in the dustbin of history, or
at least it is headed there in a great hurry. Yet mustn’t we ask: If classical theism is so dead how did it ever
became “classical” in the first place? I
think we must, so before we turn to the multiple and manifest shortcomings of
classical theism let’s give it the credit that it is in fact due.
It is easy for us to deny all
validity to faith traditions that we reject.
Christians do that to non-Christian faith traditions all the time. Yet, for example, Islam, which most
Christians deny contains any truth at all, would never have spread around the
globe and become humanity’s second largest faith tradition if it did not
function as religion should function, namely, to connect people with God. I and many others today reject classical
theism and its image of God, yet we must concede that classical theism has in
fact connected a great many people with God.
It still does. It still will for
a while. Eventually its actual death
will cause it to disappear, but for now it still ticks at least a bit in our
world.
We should be careful about
taking it away from people who find their connection with God through it and
only through it. That’s why I don’t
intend people who have no questions about the view of God they have been taught
and who find the benefits of faith in that view as part of the audience for
this book. The faith of classical theism
is brittle. Chip out even a small piece
of it, and it tends to shatter completely.
I have no desire to take away any faith that gets anyone through the
night, that gets anyone through hard times, that helps anyone face death with
hope and peace. Classical theism has
done that for many, and for many it still does.
Let us not forget that truth, and let us not forget to be pastoral toward
those for whom it does.
The God of classical theism is
dead, but He wasn’t always dead. The God
image of classical theism served its purpose for a time. It never would have become “classical” if it
hadn’t. The God of classical theism can
meet some of humanity’s needs with regard to a divinity, and it did so for a
long time. It still does, despite its
recent death, for a great many people.
That God is God and not an idol after all. The classically theistic God is the Creator
of the universe. Belief in Him (always
“Him,” and whenever in this work I call God “Him” I am referring only to the
God of classical theism) explains why anything at all (except perhaps God
Himself) exists. It teaches that God
rules the world, albeit it sometimes remotely and usually judgmentally. It answers some of humanity’s most profound
questions about existence. We may not
now find those answers persuasive, but answers they are nonetheless.
Classical theism says that God
sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for our sins and make it possible for us to
spend eternity in heaven rather than in hell.
That statement of course raises the issue of the classical theory of
atonement. That theory isn’t the subject
of work. I dealt with it in Chapter 8 of
Liberating Christianity, and you
can refer to that earlier work for more
information on that theory and its manifold and manifest shortcomings. Suffice it to say here that the classical
theory of atonement is the theology that says that God sent His Son Jesus to
earth for the purpose of dying as a sinless sacrifice to pay the price of human
sin that God required to be paid, and that no mere human could pay, before God
would forgive us and let us into heaven.
It is the theology of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ and of its marketing slogan “Dying was
his reason for living.” For all of that
theory’s theological indefensibility it did provide comfort and hope for a
great many people for a very long time. It
assured them of heaven, and many people live with a constant need to be assured
of heaven. Classical atonement theory
goes hand in hand with classical theism and is one reason why classical theism
became classical.
The God of classical theism is
always seen as a “heavenly Father,” and the notion that we have a divine father
is very comforting for some people who have not had a loving human father in
their lives or whose loving human father has died and is no longer with them.[1] The God of classical theism isn’t always all
that loving, but sometimes He is seen that way.
The image of a loving heavenly Father has had great meaning for a great
many people, and it too helps explain the longevity of classical theism. So let us not go overboard here. The God of classical theism is dead, but that
God and the other theological propositions always associated with Him has
indeed served to connect generations of people with God. Thanks be to God!
All that being said (and being
truly meant), it remains true that the God of classical theism is dead. For many people today that God is utterly
unbelievable. The number of people for
whom that God is unbelievable is growing every day. Why?
What’s wrong with the God image of classical theism? Why do so many people today reject it? Why do I say that it is dead? There are lots of reasons. Here are some of the more important
ones. We will deal with some of them in
more detail later in this work, but what follows here will give you at least
some idea of the failings of the God of classical theism.
Let’s start with one of the most
basic limitations of classical theism.
As we have seen, in that understanding God is a being. Classical theism
frequently calls God “the Supreme Being,”
and that phrase betrays this basic limitation of the classically
theistic view of God. That God is in
some sense “supreme” I do not deny.
That’s not where the problem is, or it is at least where there doesn’t
need to be a problem depending on what you mean by supreme. The more fundamental problem is with the word
“Being” used with either an indefinite article—God is a being—or a definite art8ce—God is the Supreme Being. God is
not a being. God is not even the Supreme
Being, for that all too familiar phrase too makes God a being. I say God is not and cannot be a being, and
you’re probably asking how I can say that.
The problem with calling God a
being, any kind of being, even the Supreme Being, is that being a being
necessarily implies limitation. The
identity of anything that is, that is, of any being, is determined primarily by
what it is not. Let me use myself as an
example. I am a being. So are you, and what I say here applies at
least in general to you as well as to me.
I am who I am, but I am also not who I am not. I am not you.
I am not my wife. I am none of
the members of my congregation. I am not
any other person at all. That’s true
even though I have an identical twin brother.
I’m not him either. I have
certain characteristics that are part of my being and that set me off from
everyone and everything else that is. I
am 5’6” tall, down from 5’7” when I was younger. I have gray hair and a gray beard. I have lived a particular set of life
experiences and have not lived any other experiences. I have a certain educational history and a
certain work history that are mine but not anyone else’s, and I have not had
the educational nor the work history of anyone else. As the philosophers say, I am what I am
not. Specify everything that I am not,
and what you’re left with is me. It may
be impossible as a practical matter to do that, but that’s not the point. If you could, I would be everything that I am
not. I am not Black. I am not female. I am not Chinese. I am all of the things that I am not. Because I am a particular human being and not
human being in general, I am limited. I
have borders. I have boundaries. I occupy a particular space, not space in
general. I live in a particular time,
not in time in general. As a being and
not as being itself I necessarily have limits.
The same is true of God when we
make God a being—any kind of being. As a
being God has limits. Even as the
Supreme Being God occupies a particular space, not space in general. Classical theism speaks of God sitting in
heaven. That’s a particular place, it is
not creation in general. When God is in
heaven God is there and not here.
Classical theism thinks of God as living through time in the same way we
do except that for God time never ends.
That makes God time limited even if immortal. It gives us a God living only in the present
moment and not beyond and across time. In
short, the image of the classically theistic God is an image of limited
God. He (again, this God is always he)
may be a Supreme Being. He may be all
those omnis that we talked about above and will address more below. For all that, this God is still a being. Therefore, this God has limits. The classically theistic God is a limited
God.
A limited God isn’t truly
God. That’s why the notion of God as any
kind of being ultimately fails. It is of
course a thesis of this work that we can never truly and completely define God,
but one thing we know for sure. God
isn’t limited. We can’t define God, but
one classical attempt to do just that helps us understand the failure of the
notion of God as a being. Around the
turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century CE Anselm of Canterbury, better known
as the author of the classical statement of the theory of substitutionary
sacrificial atonement, defined God as “that greater than which nothing can be
imagined.” That statement ultimately
doesn’t work as a definition of God any better than any other definition does,
but it does at least point to one truth about God. Whatever or Whoever God is, God is greater
than anything we can imagine. It’s not
at all hard to imagine something greater than any particular being, even a
particular Supreme Being. As we have seen,
even a Supreme Being is limited by its character of being a particular
thing. We can easily imagine a reality
that is not a particular thing but that transcends all of the limitations of
particular being. We can imagine
ultimate transcendence, transcendence that obviates all of the limitations of
particular being; or at least we can come up with concepts that point beyond
all of the limitations of particular being to a reality that has none of those
limitations. We imagine something
limited, and we can imagine something unlimited. We imagine something finite, and we can
imagine something infinite.
We imagine beings bound by time,
and we can imagine a reality beyond time.
I admit that this is a difficult one for me, but it may be worth paying
some more attention to as a good example of how God as a being isn’t truly
God. We human beings exist in a reality
in which time is a major element. We
live a life in time. For us things
happen one after another across time.
For us the past is past, and the future hasn’t come yet. We all experience time as we age. We begin as newborns and, if we are lucky,
end as senior citizens, very different from who we were as newborns. Most of us probably can’t actually imagine an
existence that doesn’t include the element time. Yet some of us can, and some of us have
actually had experiences in which time disappears. Here’s one of mine.
Back when I used to be a lawyer
I had for a while an office high in a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. I had a view of the Cascade Mountains and
Mount Rainier. On some winter mornings,
early in the morning, the view of the changing colors in the sky as the sun
rose from behind the Cascades was simply stunning. One such morning I got to work early and
looked out my windows. I was awestruck
by the beauty of the scene. I sat down
at my desk, thinking that I’d just enjoy the view for a minute or two. The next thing I knew I looked at my watch,
and forty-five minutes had passed. I
couldn’t believe it. I had no awareness
whatsoever of that time passing. It
seemed to me that I had looked at the view for no time at all. For that brief period, time had simply ceased
to exist for me. The element time had
not been part of my reality for those forty-five minutes. Adept practitioners of the meditation arts
report the same thing. On occasion at
least time for them time simply disappears as they meditate.
“On occasion” is of course an
expression mired in time. We humans
really can’t escape time for long.
That’s a paradox of human existence.
We can on rare occasions experience the absence of time, but we can
never escape it. We certainly can’t
convey much of anything to anyone without expressing the motion of time in what
we say. We are creatures existing in
time. We are limited beings, and time is
one of our limitations. Time is a
limitation of any particular being.
Time is a limitation of God as a
particular being, even as the Supreme Being.
Yet even we time-limited creatures can on occasion experience
transcending time. We can experience
being free from the limitation of time, albeit it paradoxically only for a
limited time. We can for a time
transcend time. We, however, always come
back into the world of time. God
doesn’t. God doesn’t because if God did,
God would be limited. Of course we are
here facing another paradox. I just said
“God doesn’t,” which implies a limitation while the point I’m trying to make is
that God isn’t limited. So be it. As I will insist again and again in this
work, our language is ultimately inadequate for speaking about God, and we just
ran into another example of that truth.
It remains also true, however, that making God a being makes God
limited, and God isn’t limited.
Another failure of the God of
classical theism is necessarily implied by that truth that God isn’t a being,
not even a Supreme Being. I have already
said several times in this work that the God of classical theism is always
referred to as “He.” The God of
classical theism is male. “Male” is of
course a category of creaturely being.
Some animals are male, and some are female. The male/female distinction is one of the
primary distinctions with which we humans live.
Sometimes it’s a wonderful distinction of unity in difference. Sometimes it’s a wonderful distinction
combined with the ecstasy of sexual union.
The male/female distinction propagates species, including our human
species. Sometimes, much of the time
tragically, we humans pervert the male/female distinction into a hierarchy of
superiority and inferiority, almost always with the male seen as superior to
the female. We’re getting over that
perversion of God’s creation, although of course we still have a long way to
go. Male and female are distinctions
between basic types of sexual creatures, and as distinctions male and female
necessarily imply limitations. I am
male, which means I am not female. My
wife is female, which means she is not male.
Being one gender limits us from being the other.[2] Being one gender means we are not the
other. Gender necessarily implies
limitation.
Because gender implies
limitation, and God is not limited, God does not have gender. Note again, “God does not,” a statement of
limitation; but we’ve already acknowledged that unavoidable paradox. God does not have gender. A more sophisticated way of stating that
truth is to say that God transcends
gender. It’s not that God is less than
gendered. It is that God is more than
gendered. God subsumes gender (and all
other human distinctions) into Godself and is beyond them. The way Christians always refer to God, and
always have referred to God, as “He” ignores and denies that reality about
God. We Christians are so used to
calling God “He” that most Christians still have trouble understanding why our
doing so is so problematic. It’s problematic
for a whole host of really important reasons having to do with patriarchy,
androcentrism, and misogyny. As
important as those reasons for not calling God “He” are, they are not the
subject of our present inquiry. The
important point for us is that calling God “He,” as classical theism always
does, limits God. It makes God too much
like us limited, gendered creatures. It
applies a biological category from created being to a reality, i.e., God, Who
is infinitely beyond created being and all of its distinctions and
limitations. Perhaps some classical
theists would reply here that God can be the Supreme Being and not be bound by
gender. Maybe so, but classical theism
always calls God He and resists calling God anything else. Some classical theists have fits whenever
anyone calls God She. The God of classical
theism is a gendered being and is therefore a limited being. That characteristic of its God image is a profound failing of classical theism.
Another profound failing of
classical theism has to do with the location of God. The God of classical theism is always located
somewhere particular, and that somewhere particular is always “up.” There are a couple of problems with this
aspect of classical theism. The first
problem is that being in a particular location necessarily implies a
limitation. Right now I am sitting at my
desk in my home office typing these words on my computer. I am here, at my desk. I am not anywhere else. You won’t find me anywhere else. If you wanted to see me in person right now
you’d have to come into my home office.
I’m at home, I’m not at my church.
I’m at in Washington state, I’m not in Moscow or Beijing or Berlin or
Caracas or Chicago. I’m not anywhere
except where I am. My physical location
is limited. It is a particular place,
and it is not any other place.
Classical theism says that God
is “omnipresent,” that is, present everywhere; but classical theism also says
that God is in heaven, and that statement about God seems much more central to
classical theism’s conception of God than is the abstract notion that God is
omnipresent. Classical theism of course
understands heaven as a particular place.
For classical theism, heaven is heaven and is not anyplace else in much
the same way that New York City is New York City and not anyplace else. If God as a particular being is located in a
particular place called heaven, then God is not anyplace else but heaven. The notion of God in heaven, so central to
classical theism, falls with the understanding that God is not limited.
The other problem with the idea
that God is in heaven is that classical theism always understands heaven as
being “up.” I have already mentioned the
story of Jesus’ Ascension in Acts for example.
In that story the risen Christ goes back to heaven, and he does it by
going up. The disciples see him going
up. Many of our traditional Christian
hymns, most of which reflect the God of classical theism, refer to heaven as
up. In addition to the fact that God
can’t be limited to being in heaven wherever we may think heaven is, heaven
can’t be up. The notion of heaven as up
comes from an ancient cosmology, an ancient understanding of the structure of
the universe, that we know simply isn’t true.
I have already given you a
couple of examples of the Bible’s notion of heaven as up in the last
chapter. The cosmology of the Bible, and
of most of the ancient world, was that the earth existed in a physical space
between heaven which was up and hell (or something like hell) that was
down. As I noted in the last chapter,
people thought they could build a tower to heaven and that a ladder could
stretch between earth and heaven because heaven was up, and not very far up at
that. We know that that simply isn’t
true. When we go up from earth we enter
that vastness of space, which in some sense I’ve never really understood the
scientists say doesn’t end. We never
come to any physical heaven. We know
that the universe is billions of light years large, which means that we know
that heaven isn’t just up above us beyond the clouds. Yet classical theism continues to speak of
God up in heaven and of heaven not very far away. Those are concepts that we simply can no
longer maintain given our scientific knowledge of the nature of the universe,
knowledge the ancients simply didn’t have.
Moreover, consider this. At Christ’s Ascension in Acts the disciples
see the risen Christ ascending up, as we have already noted. They see him, which means that the body of
the risen Christ, whatever it may actually have been, consisted at least of
photons. Photons travel at the speed of
light. If the risen Christ had started
rising at the speed of light slightly less than two thousand years ago, we know
that he would still be in the Milky Way!
He’s still be in our galaxy, billions of light years from the edge of
the created universe, if that universe has any edge at all. He can’t have risen up. It makes no sense to say that he rose up, if
we understand that statement literally. Heaven
isn’t up. Heaven can’t be up. We know that as
undeniable truth. So why does classical
theism still say God is in heaven and heaven is up? Beats me, but it does.
Then there’s the question of
those “omnis” that characterize the God of classical theism. In that view God is in particular omnipresent
(at least in theory), omniscient, and omnipotent. God is, in other words, present everywhere,
all knowing, and all powerful. The omnis
raise more complex problems than do the other characteristics of the God of
classical theism that we have considered so far and rejected. The problem here isn’t that these statements
about God are flat wrong. They
aren’t. The problem is in how classical
theism understands them. The particular
problem with the omnis arises in connection with the third of them, omnipotent
or all powerful. I’ll comment on the
other two briefly, then turn to that one.
I’ll have a lot more to say about it in this work when we get to the
question of God’s relationship to creation, but I’ll say just a bit about it
here.
First omnipresent. Is God omnipresent? Yes.
In Chapter One I quoted Psalm 139 on the omnipresence of God. Psalm 139, except for verses 19 through 22,
which I wish weren’t there (you can look them up if you want to know why I say
that) is my favorite Psalm. I carried a
copy of it, minus verses 19 through 22, in the front of my class notebook all
the way through seminary. Classical
theism isn’t wrong when it says God is omnipresent. There are major problems concerning the
question of how God is in God’s
omnipresent, and we’ll discuss that question at length in the course of this
study. For now I’ll just accept
classical theism’s contention that God is omnipresent and move on.
Next omniscient. Is God omniscient? Does God know everything? Yes, I guess I believe that God does. That’s not always a very comforting thought
frankly. I’m sure we all have things
about ourselves that we wish God didn’t know.
That’s why confession is such an important part of the life of faith. I may not always like the idea much, but I
find it hard to imagine a true God to whom anything is unknown. After all, if God is omnipresent as I just
conceded God is, God is going to be omniscient.
God could hardly be present and not know what’s going on. The problem with classical theism here isn’t
that it says God is omniscient. It is
rather what classical theism tends to say about what God does with God’s
universal knowledge. The God of
classical theism tends to be very judgmental.
We haven’t talked about the issues of judgment and grace yet, but we will. For now I will just say that while I believe
that God judges us, I don’t believe that God’s judgment supersedes God’s grace
or leads to any kind of punishment for us.
Omniscient is fine, but we have to be careful about the conclusions we
draw from God’s omniscience.
Finally omnipotent. Is God omnipotent? Is God all powerful? Classical theism certainly thinks so. Recall what I said about the term “the
Almighty” in Chapter One. In classical
theism the adjective Almighty operates as a functional noun and becomes the
proper name of God. In classical theism
“the Almighty” and “God” are synonyms.
Again I think the problem here isn’t with the idea of God’s omnipotence
itself but with classical theism’s usual understanding of the consequences of
God’s omnipotence. The God of classical
theism controls events on earth.
Certainly in the Old Testament God controls what happens on earth. The assumption behind most of the Old
Testament’s writings is that whatever happens on earth happens because God
caused it to happen. Yes, the
Babylonians conquered and destroyed Judah and its capital city Jerusalem; but
the Babylonians did that only because God brought them to do it or at least
allowed them to. Yes, the Persians
allowed the Jews to return to Judah and to Jerusalem, but they only did that
because they were acting as God’s agents.
Second Isaiah even calls Cyrus the Great of Persia Yahweh’s Messiah even
though Cyrus had never heard of Yahweh and certainly never worshipped him. God was in control of geopolitical
events. About that the ancient Hebrews
had no doubt. They believed that God
controlled events in the lives of individual people as well. For example, the Psalms are full of prayers
to Yahweh to do or not to do various things in the life of the one offering the
psalm.
Those beliefs about God being in
control are hardly unique to the ancient Hebrews. They are very much alive in the Christianity
of classical theism today. Pat Robertson
says God brings the destructive force of hurricanes upon Florida because the
United States tolerates homosexuality, not that most of the United States
really does. For classical theism God
controls events in individual lives too.
Once years ago I was interviewing for a job on the east coast, and the
prospective employer put a bunch of applicants up for the night in a hotel in
Baltimore.[3] We didn’t get rooms to ourselves, and I had a
roommate who was a Mormon. We were
watching the late night local news on a Baltimore TV channel. Somewhere in the Baltimore area a child had
been murdered. The TV news showed
someone in clerical garb proclaiming that the child had died because “God
wanted another little angel in heaven.”
My Mormon roommate almost exploded.
He said No! No! God didn’t kill that child! God wants a full and complete life for every
one of God’s children!” All I can say to
that is Amen, but notice some of the assumptions here. Something had happened. Something horrible and tragic; but, assuming
that the clergyman on TV was being authentic and was expressing his sincere
beliefs, he assumed that it had happened because God had done it. For him, God is in control. Everything that happens on earth, even the
unspeakably sad things, happen because God does them, because God wants them to
happen. The God Who this clergyman
thought killed this child is the God of classical theism. That God is The Almighty. That God is omnipotent, and that God uses His
omnipotence to control events on earth.
I will have a lot more to say
about the issue of God’s omnipotence and about how God relates to creation
later in this work. For now suffice it
to say that making God omnipotent in this way creates unsolvable problems for
our understanding of God. It makes God a
monster. It makes God a child
killer. It convicts God of
genocide. It makes God favor some people
over other people. It leads us to thank
God when good things happen and ignore all the people for whom good things
don’t happen. God may in some abstract
sense have unlimited power, but concluding that God uses that power directly to
control events on earth is theologically untenable. It is a notion from which God needs to be
liberated.
There’s one more issue that I
want to address. It is the issue of
God’s “existence.” Classical theism asserts
that God “exists.” Believers in the God
of classical theism ask people if they believe in the existence of God. They insist that God does exist. That they do makes perfect sense. The God of classical theism is a distinct
being as we have seen, and distinct beings exist. They have existence. I, however, do not believe that God
“exists.” Whenever I say that people are
shocked to find a Christian pastor who is an atheist, so let me explain. I’m not an atheist. I believe in the reality of God. I believe that God in some mystic, unknowable
sense is. My quarrel isn’t with the
reality of God, it is with the word exist; and that quarrel comes from the
greatest theologian of the late, unlamented twentieth century Paul
Tillich. Tillich insisted that God does
not “exist.” God does not exist, Tillich
said, because existence is a category of created being not of pure being. Created things exist. They exist because God causes them to
exist. God is not created. Therefore God does not exist. God is, but God does not exist.
Maybe what I’m saying here
sounds to you like a meaningless playing with words, but I don’t think that it
is. When we say that God exists we are
putting God on the same level of being as we’re on. We exist.
When we say that God exists we bring God down to our level of
being. We make God too much like
us. Reserving the term existence for
created beings as and refusing to apply that term to God as Tillich does helps
to preserve God’s infinite otherness. It
preserves God’s utter transcendence. God
doesn’t exist, but God is not less than existence. God is more than existence. That God doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that God
is nothingness. Saying that God doesn’t
exist doesn’t make God disappear.
Rather, it helps us to remember that God is God and just another being
in some way like us even if vastly bigger and more powerful than we are. God transcends us utterly. That that contention doesn’t entirely remove
God from our lives we will explore and explain later in this work. Religions always tend to run to one extreme
or another in their conception of God, and for many Christians God is so
familiar, so close, so much like a father and a friend, that they forget who
they’re really talking about. They’re
talking about God. They’re talking about
God, and God is utterly beyond us.
Utterly different from us.
Understanding that we exist but God is helps to remind us of those
undeniable truths. Its insistence and
God “exists” is an obscure but definite failure of classical theism
[1] It is also very damaging
for some who have had abusive, destructive human fathers in their lives. For them the image “father” doesn’t convey
love and care. It conveys physical,
sexual, and/or emotional abuse. For some
who never had a human father in their lives it conveys not loving presence but
indifferent absence. Those reactions to
the image father are part of the reason, although only a part of it, why I
almost never call God Father. For all of
the problems with male exclusive language with God see Johnson, She Who Is, op.cit., passim, and the
discussion of that issue that follows herein.
[2] I am of course aware that
human gender categories are in reality not quite this simple. Gender does not necessarily determine sexual
or affectional orientation. I have known
transgender people, and some people are born with physical characteristics of
both genders. We must acknowledge these
truths of human gender as we recognize the primary distinction of male and
female. I intend in no way to disparage
or minimize people born with the many variations of human gender by what I say
here.
[3] We were told to refer to
this prospective employer as “the Department of Defense at Fort Mead.” Some of you will be able to tell from that
information who this prospective employer actually was. It offered me a job based on my knowledge of
Russian. I turned it down.
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