Essential* Christianity Part 3: A Good God
The very idea that there is a good God results in a call.
(A full table of contents for this series can be found here.)
I’m going through a phase in which, when I tell people I’m studying theology, I’m receiving an increasing number of chilly reactions. Just over Thanksgiving, for instance, I spoke with someone who quickly began to list one negative experience of Christianity after another: There are all those people who have not demonstrated a whole lot of control over their own lives who really want to control others. One time a pastor went on and on to a bunch of children, ridiculously, this person said, with something about walking on bones. They had seen very little in Christian practice that was pleasant, or life-giving, or relevant. “I’m not opposed to religion,” they said. “But it’s got to be something other than this.”
What this person was saying makes sense to me. Some people find nourishment in religion — indeed, have found a core definition for life itself. But many people have just found a lot of junk — and worse: shame, control, and increasingly traumatic forms of genuine abuse. There is quite obviously a lot of tepid, confusing religiousness out there. There is quite obviously a lot of intense, convicted, and damaging religiousness out there.
But as my conversation partner said, I’m just not sure that that makes the case that we ought to reject the whole idea of religion outright — particularly because it seems to me that there is such a compelling tendency for people to reproduce the mechanisms of religion automatically, whether they consciously like religion or not.
The fandom that grows around franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel films approaches something like religion, for instance. Devotion to powerful figures such as Donald Trump or Elon Musk has a religious aspect to it, too. It seems to me that the problem is not that we need to get away from religion — I mean, something that could be loosely called religion; exactly what religion is or should be could be the topic of another whole post — but that in the effort to try to get away from religion we end up doing badly things that for many people are important to do.
To be clear, there’s no intention here to force-feed anyone a prefabricated system of beliefs that they already know they dislike. But one might consider The School of Life, for instance, which is primarily oriented around psychotherapy these days, but which its founder Alain de Botton originally conceived as a religion for atheists. In its current iteration, The School offers curriculum in six domains: self-knowledge, relationships, work, calm, leisure and culture, and sociability. The idea is that becoming wise and proficient in these six domains leads to deepening wholeness and fulfillment. They’ve curated content from clear, compassionate thinkers and distilled it into simple accessible concepts.
It’s genuinely great stuff. Just perusing the content on the website for this post reminded me how much I like the ideas in The School of Life, and makes me want to start reading more of their material again.
Good religion can be many things, but one of the key elements of any religion, I would say, is the idea that we are called to grow in our calibration to a larger reality, because greater and greater peace, wholeness, harmony, fulfillment — what I’d easily call shalom — occurs as that calibration takes place. Therefore, then, one of the things that defines a religion is its way of talking about that larger reality.
At The School of Life, the governing principle for articulating a story of reality is a clear-minded, circumspect analysis of reality itself. Our understanding of supreme reality emerges when experience is wisely observed with reason and compassion. And it seems clear to me that good things undoubtedly come from this approach.
Meanwhile, an essential* idea about reality in Christianity is the idea that the substrate of all reality is a knowing, loving, good God. I think it’s worth considering how useful the idea is.
I’m really burying the lede here, but a few more caveats: One, this is not to make an argument that God exists, or that believing in God is better than not believing in God. I suspect a reader who doesn’t believe in God, or who tends not to believe in God, isn’t going to find much here to change their mind, and I would not presume to try. I would guess that you have at your convictions out of something more than thoughtless stupidity, and clearly your beliefs are your business.
And two, it’s worth noting that God in in the Judeo-Christian scriptures is highly anthropomorphized. God has a face, which people aren’t allowed to see; God walks around, God wrestles with people. Depending on how you read it, the God YHWH somehow contended with other gods and won. Etc. And it seems to me that the attempt to carry forward the most anthropomorphized of these ideas ends up being a big distraction for a lot of people. There is a lot of material in the Judeo-Christian scriptures which I feel no critically-thinking person should necessarily be expected to accept either as a literal account of actual events on Earth or of particularly literal versions of cosmic realities. I don’t think you can look at the earliest Hebrew scriptures and look at the way the more well-formed people think today and not say that the most compelling conceptions of God have definitely evolved.
But I’d also say that behind those mythological expressions there is an idea that can endure in a modern mind, for sure, which is the idea that there is a pervasive supreme consciousness, God. And I think it’s interesting to take on — at least in some metaphorical sense — the notion that, at any given point God has what I think you could call ideas about what’s happening throughout the temporal world. The idea that God’s conception about reality might be different from ours, and that that conception is worth seeking out because it’s better than ours.
And past that, the Christian tradition definitely offers — by no means uniquely — the idea that this God is good — in other words that the God’s intentions are good, that God’s conceptions of and will for the universe are good, and, especially, that a basic substrate of the universe is love — and therefore, that the calibration efforts we make toward God will result in the best outcomes imaginable for ourselves.
Certainly there is value in the idea that a higher understanding than our own can exist, and I’m often surprised by how much this idea gets underplayed. I live in the United States, and it feels like there’s a lot of struggle here. There’s a lot of struggle in a lot of places in the world, as far as I can tell. It can start to feel like one is really on one’s own — that we’re creating our well-being out of our own ideas, that we rise and fall by our own will — with nothing to mediate or save us beyond the gaggle of other imperfect beings with whom we share the world, who are occasionally capable of cooperating. In a world that is filling with so many half-formed and not-so-great ideologies, it’s sometimes easy to feel like there aren’t better ideas than our own.
But the simple truth is that for any of us, our conception of reality and is definitely not the same thing as reality. And so imagining anything at all to which to calibrate, beyond our own conception of reality, is valuable. It forces us to try to have our conception of reality conform increasingly to what reality is. It makes us humble. It makes us careful. It makes us more flexible, it makes us more relational, it makes us more real.
In the Christian approach, beyond the notion that we are trying to calibrate to reality, there is the idea that we are trying to calibrate to a supreme, and highly engaged consciousness. So the sincere approach to truth is not just achieved through relating to the dynamics of all observable phenomenon, it is achieved through a relationship with an actual over-arching being that relates to humanity through something that we can experience personally, that actually meets us personally.
Many people associate theology with rigidity and dogma, but I perceive that there’s actually something powerful, and a little mysterious, that results from the belief that a higher conception is actually held by a supreme consciousness. The humility that results is not just the humility that comes just from realizing that one has an imperfect consciousness of reality; it is the humility that comes from understanding that one has an imperfect consciousness — while a perfect consciousness exists. The carefulness is not the carefulness that comes from whatever occasional events remind us of our own faultiness; it is the carefulness that comes from the understanding that a supremely higher consciousness infuses all actions and events, always.
Add to it that the underlying nature of this consciousness is goodness and love, and there emerges an underlying idea that the final approach — for all who would choose it — is toward goodness and love. The way this fundamental fact might express itself in the details is complicated indeed, and hard to know in all cases. Surely the idea that “everything works out in the end” is not always the most helpful or consoling, and surely the idea that those who choose goodwill meet good ends could be thoroughly debated. But an essential* tenet here is the idea of a good, loving God above all, calling all into God’s orbit.
And while I won’t argue that a theistic conception of reality is superior to an atheistic one, I will say that although I definitely prefer critical thinkers to non-critical thinkers, for any given level of critical thinking I also overwhelmingly prefer critical thinkers who are theistic to critical thinkers who aren’t. It seems to me that there are certain states of personal consciousness that are much more easily possible from a theistic worldview, it seems to me. Certain types of self-abdication, humility, and surrender. Certain ways of looking for answers, and certain ways of doing without them, peacefully.
There is also, then, the invitation to notice the extent to which that supreme consciousness, that God, lives in the foreground or the background in one’s life. And, again, while it seems clear to me that nobody really needs to perform animal sacrifices for the sake of growing spiritually anymore, one of the things I appreciate about the Bible is the extent to which the characters in the stories of the Bible live a life that is saturated with devotion to a conscious creator.
In today’s world, devotion to a conscious creator is often associated with superstition and primitivism. If you’re too devoted to God, you’re going to live life without science, without reason. But is it really true that we can’t conceive of a supreme God that isn’t antithetical what’s verifiable by reason or science?
And if there is a conception of God that can coexist alongside reason and science, is there anything inherent to science, or to reason, that makes that a conscious God, and any “thoughts” that that God might have, particularly unimportant to our lives?
One of the core ideas of Christianity is the invitation to bring God forward. But wisely. Not to swallow whole any of the many systems that mix pure truth with accretions of human prejudice, but to engage in an inquiry, in which we make more time for God.
If there is a consciousness that surpasses and generates all of creation. If that consciousness has the quality of goodness inherent to itself, and if that consciousness is interested in us, it’s hard for me to understand why these wouldn’t be the most important facts of reality. There is definitely invitation to make enough time for God so that God is not encountered as a system of beliefs but, increasingly as a continual, living reality.
Prayer helps. Scripture helps. But the surpassing goal is the living encounter with a real Being, moment-to-moment.