On Original Sin and Celtic Spirituality

 

On Original Sin and Celtic Spirituality

April 4, 2025

 

First, a disclosure. Despite my Scandinavian last name (Danish spelled as though it were Norwegian), I am actually of more Irish (actually Scotch-Irish probably) heritage than any other. My middle name is Calnan, a good Irish last name. Which does not make me an expert on Celtic spirituality. I have learned a bit about it quite recently in preparation for a trip later this year with a church choir I sing in to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. So here, for what they’re worth, are some of my reflections on Celtic Spirituality prompted by thoughts about the doctrine of original sin.

Since roughly the beginning of the fifth century CE, western Christianity has espoused a doctrine called “original sin.” “Original sin” is the  claim that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil corrupted their very human nature. That corruption, this doctrine says, has been passed on to every single human being through sexual reproduction. The Westminster Confession of Faith, a Reformed, that is, Calvinist, confession of faith drawn up in 1646 CE puts the doctrine of original sin this way: “[Adam and Eve] being the root of all mankind, the guilt of [their sin] was imputed and…death in sin and corrupted nature was conveyed to their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.” The Westminster Confession is a statement by Calvinist Protestants. It became important especially for Presbyterians, a Calvinist tradition originating in Scotland. The doctrine of original sin, however, has never been limited to Presbyterians or any other Reformed, i.e., Calvinist, Christian tradition. It spread to all of western Christianity in short order after its first formulation sixteen centuries ago, which was around four centuries after the time of Christ.

The doctrine is grounded in an exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The story has it that God created a man called Adam (which isn’t actually a name but means something like “earth creature,” but never mind) and put him in a garden called Eden. God told the man that he could eat anything in the garden except the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which he was not to touch. Then God created a woman named Eve (which isn’t actually a name either but means something like “the mother of all living,” but never mind) to be Adam’s companion. A “serpent,” which isn’t necessarily a snake, enticed Eve into eating the forbidden fruit (which almost certainly isn’t an apple) of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She gave the fruit to Adam, who ate of it too. God found out what they had done and casts them out of the garden. God casts them out because if they remained in the garden they might eat the fruit of the tree of life, something God, it seems, definitely didn’t want them to do.

Now, notice a few things about this story. It is very ancient. It is what scholars call a “J” source document, which makes it one of the oldest stories in the Bible. It is an ancient Jewish story, and it is remarkably primitive. In it God walks in a garden but doesn’t know where his two humans are or what they have done. God reacts to what the people have done out of fear of what else they might do, and God inflicts significant punishment on them. For the woman the punishment is the pain of childbirth. For the man the punishment is the need to farm unsuitable land. There is no hint of forgiveness or of divine grace in this story.

But notice what else is not in the story. The text of this story says absolutely nothing about the sin of Adam and Eve being transmitted to anyone else. Not one word. It is their sin, and it is their punishment. The notion that their sin corrupted their nature and that that corruption has been passed to every other human being through sexual reproduction as the doctrine of original sin claims just isn’t there. Notice also that Judaism, whose story this one was for a very long time before it became a Christian story as well, has never developed or proclaimed anything remotely like the doctrine of original sin. Folks, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden simply is no basis for a doctrine of original sin. That Augustine and others warped it into one does not change what is and what isn’t in the story.

So why did western Christianity develop the doctrine of original sin and ground the doctrine in a story that just doesn’t support it? The first part of the answer to that question is surely that there is no doubt that we humans are capable of behaving and do behave very badly a great deal of the time. We humans have proven ourselves to be greedy and violent in the extreme again and again. Many of us live far more in hate than we do in love. The history of humanity is, to a considerable extent, a history of wars in which people set out intentionally to kill one another. The sins of humanity are so widespread and so profound that they hardly need more enumeration. We all know what they are. The doctrine of original sin at least gives a reason for what so often seems to be corrupted human nature.

A second part of the answer to the reason for the doctrine of original sin is that it pushes people toward control by the church and thus by any state with which the church is aligned. The doctrine says we’re all corrupt. We’re all horrible sinners. We are sinners because it is just our nature to be sinners, and we are lousy at overcoming the drive of our inherent, corrupt nature. Therefore, what we need more than we need anything else is to be saved from our sin and from what we take to be sin’s consequences. In most of Christianity, the church as taught that it controls salvation. Do what the church tells you to do, don’t do what the church tells you not to do, and believe what the church tells you to believe, and don’t believe what the church tells you not to believe, and your soul will be saved from an eternity in the torment of hell, which is where you actually belong because you’re such a sinner. The doctrine of original sin facilitates the church’s drive toward replacing God with itself as the dispenser of salvation.

Folks, the doctrine of original sin is utter nonsense. It is that for several reasons. One is that it is, as we saw above, simply terrible exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That story doesn’t even hint at anything remotely like the doctrine of original sin. Yes, Adam and Eve are punished in the story, but there is no suggestion that their intrinsic nature was corrupted. All they did was exercise the free will God gave them albeit they exercised it badly. Yet even if the intrinsic nature of the first two people (as the story presents Adam and Eve as being) were corrupted by what they did, the story in no way suggests that anyone else’s intrinsic nature was corrupted by that sin.

The doctrine of original sin is also nonsense because it paints too dark a picture of human nature. Yes, we humans can be awful. Trust me on this one. I’m a professionally trained historian, and I know how ugly human history can be. And no, I’m not intending to minimize the evil people commit and the damage it imparts on other humans. But human nature isn’t just corrupt. We humans also do a great many things that a corrupted human nature would never do. We commit great acts of charity, and at least some of us work for justice. We create great expressions of the grandeur of the human spirit. We produce great art. Great architecture. Great literature. Great philosophy. We do an awful lot that is incomprehensible within the doctrine of original sin. We must reject that doctrine altogether.

So. Does the Bible give us any valid insight into human nature? Yes, it does. It comes from the other creation story in Genesis, the one with which the Bible opens. In that creation story, which is very old but not as old as the Garden of Eden story, we read that God said “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness….” Then:

 

So God created humans in his

image,

       in the image of God he created

   them;

       male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26 and 27.

 

Here we have a very different image of humanity than the one the doctrine of original sin gives us. This magnificent (though of course poetic not scientific) creation story has God make both male and female human beings as having nothing less than the image and likeness of God about them.[1] Psalm 8 makes the same point by having the psalmist say to God “you have made [human beings] a little lower than God.” Psalm 8:5a. Is it possible to have less than nothing? The Garden of Eden story has nothing in it that actually supports much less requires the doctrine of original sin. If anything, Genesis 1:26-27 has even less.

Friends, Christianity does not require us to accept the doctrine of original sin. There have, in fact, always been Christians who haven’t. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, of which Russian Orthodox Christianity is by far the biggest portion, has never accepted it. The doctrine of original sin was formulated in the western part of the late Roman Empire, and it was formulated in Latin. The Eastern Christian church of the time spoke and wrote in Greek not Latin. Linguistic and cultural differences may help explain why the west accepted the doctrine but the east did not. In any event, Eastern Orthodox Christianity has never proclaimed the doctrine of original sin.

There have also been Christians in the west who never accepted it. The best example your humble author knows of this rejection of original sin is Celtic Christianity. Just where the Celtic people first lived is a bit controversial, but for our purposes they resided, and reside, primarily in the Scottish Highlands and in Ireland. Their deep spirituality precedes Christianity, but the people adopted it to Christianity, or Christianity to it, after Scotland and Ireland became Christian. The pre-Christian origins of Celtic spirituality together with its refusal to accept things like the doctrine of original sin caused the official Christian churches of the Celts homelands to work hard to suppress it, but it is still with us today. One of Celtic spirituality’s chief centers was the island of Ione off the west coast of Scotland. People still go there to learn Celtic spirituality and experience its power in a Christian context.

As your humble author understands it, the primary premise of Celtic spirituality is that everything that exists, including all of nature and every human being, is infused with the divine. Creation is not God, but it subsists within God. It is saturated with God. Celtic spirituality says that deep in our souls we all know the truth. We all know that we and are imbued with a divine spirit and so is everything else in creation. We forget that truth. That, I think, is where evil comes from. When we forget that God is in us, and in everyone and everything else, we act selfishly and violently. We put material values ahead of spiritual ones. Celtic spirituality calls us to rediscover and reclaim our being rooted in and infused with God. To rediscover and reclaim that every other person who has ever lived, who lives now, or who ever will live is so infused with God too. To rediscover and reclaim that the same is true of all of creation. Everything comes from God, subsists in God, and is saturated with the divine.

Your humble author has a couple of reservations about Celtic spirituality. It can sound a bit too pantheistic. Celtic prayer sometimes sounds like it is praying to nature but then adds a Christian tag to avoid a charge of idolatry. The advocates of Celtic spirituality insist that it is not pantheistic. Creation and God are not identical. Rather, Celtic spirituality is panentheistic. This means that God is the Creator of all that is, and all of creation exists within God, but creation is not God. Panentheism is indeed how God and creation relate to each other. It avoids the pitfall of classical theism that it separates God and creation in an ultimately unhealthy way. It avoids the pitfall of pantheism that the material isn’t just diffused with the divine, it is the divine. Celtic spirituality gets it right as long as it avoids actual pantheism.

Your humble author’s other objection to Celtic spirituality is that it can sound horribly naïve about nature. It so emphasizes the divine goodness of nature that is seems not to see the dark side of nature. Yes, we humans often experience nature as beautiful. But nature can also be horribly ugly. Life sustains itself by consuming other life. Nature is filled with the violence of fang, talon, and claw. Some of nature’s plants will kill you if you consume them. Nature has a dark side, a fact Celtic spirituality can seem, to me at least, to overlook.

It can sound a bit naïve about us humans too. Each one of us has a shadow side to our psyches. We all have aspects of our being that we suppress, that we try to bury in the unconscious layer of our psyches. Much of the harm we people do comes from the fact that we never address our shadow side. We don’t come to terms with what we bury there. Because we don’t, what is buried there comes out in unhealthy and destructive ways. OK. We humans come from God and are diffused with God. But we are also a lot more complex than that. You humble author gets the sense that the proponents of Celtic spirituality need to spend more time with Carl Jung.

So. The doctrine of original sin is indefensible. It is grounded in really bad biblical exegesis, and it paints far too bleak a picture of human life. If Celtic spirituality can avoid pantheism, which its primary advocates say it does, it can be a spiritually healthy corrective to the doctrine of original sin. Yes, we humans commit bad acts, lots of them. But that doesn’t mean our nature is corrupt or that that corruption comes from Adam and Eve through sexual reproduction. God created us in the image and likeness of God. Celtic spirituality says that means that we are diffused with the presence of God. Rediscover that truth, and we can transform the world. May it be so.

---

[1] We know, as the ancient world from which this story comes did not, that human sexuality comes in more varieties and is substantially more complex than are simply male and female. We can’t project our knowledge back onto the priest who wrote Genesis 1, so we just have to live with the text’s calling all people male or female; which, of course, doesn’t mean we have to agree with it.

The Big Questions of the Christian Faith: Big Answers for a New Era, Conclusion

 

This is the current form of a conclusion to a book I have drafted with the title "The Big Questions of the Christian Faith: Big Answers for a New Era." I hope to self-publish it soon.

Conclusion 

I trust that the material you encountered in this book has made at least one thing clear to you. True Christianity is not what most people think Christianity is. Christianity must not be what most people think it is if it is to survive in our  post-modern world. Most Christians think Christianity is about getting their souls to heaven after they die. It isn’t. Most people think the Bible is divinely inspired. It isn’t. Most people think Christian morality is about obeying rules. It isn’t. Christianity understood the way most people understand it is, in the long run, spiritually stultifying not spiritually uplifting and liberating. Christianity understood the way most people understand it demands that the faithful take conservative and even reactionary positions on the issues of the day. It doesn’t. In fact, it does just the opposite. Popular Christianity gets most of the faith tragically wrong.

Yet Christianity can be a great liberating, life-altering, life-enhancing, and ultimately salvific faith for anyone who approaches it appropriately. To approach it appropriately is to approach it having set aside essentially everything popular culture thinks Christianity is. It is to understand that the language of faith is unavoidably symbolic and mythic not literal and to understand that that is a very, very good thing. It is to understand that the Bible is a human product not a divine one but that it nonetheless contains divine truth when it turns the ways of the world upside down.

It is to understand that love is the standard by which to judge everything. It is the standard by which to decide all the issues in our lives. To decide political issues. To decide economic issues. To decide moral issues including even sexual moral issues. It is to apply the standard of agape love to every decision we must make in life.

It is to live by Micah’s great question: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? It is to live according to Jesus’ Great Commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

To approach Christianity appropriately it is necessary always to remember a few foundational truths. God is real. To remember that God is, in Brian Wren’s great words, “Joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing.” It is truly to grasp that God is both ultimately utterly unknowable but that we nonetheless know truths about God. It is enter into the paradoxes of God’s transcendent immanence, God as Trinity, and Jesus as God the Son Incarnate. None of those paradoxes makes a lick of sense, and that is their great virtue. God is and always must be ultimate mystery, and the paradoxical nature of religious truth preserves that mystery. Therefore, we cannot do without it.

To approach Christianity appropriately is always to remember that everything we say or think about God may be wrong. God is mystery, but not a mystery to be solved. God is a mystery to live into with full awareness that we cannot ultimately know God and that therefore everything we think we know about God may be wrong. It is, however, also to live in trust that what we think we know about God does not lead us badly astray. And to trust that even if we get everything else about God wrong, God’s grace is God’s limitless, unconditional love for every one of us. We can therefore trust that our mistakes do not separate us from God. That indeed, absolutely nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God.

It is to remember that we see God revealed as fully as we are capable of understanding God in Jesus Christ. It is to answer the question of God: Look to Jesus. As Christians we must understand that the world-upending truths that Jesus taught us are as close to divine truth as we’ll ever get. We must strive as best as we fallible mortals are able to live according to those truths.

To be Christian is to put spiritual values above material ones. It is to put God above everything else on earth that demands our loyalty and our service. It is to lead a live of spiritual practice. It is to lead a life most particularly of prayer. Not prayer as an attempt to get God to do something God might not otherwise do but prayer as our primary means of feeling the presence of God in our lives and living into that presence.

To be authentically Christian is to understand that Jesus Christ was not a price paid to God to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. As we see in the Old Testament, God has always forgiven sin. The notion that Jesus had to suffer and die to procure God’s forgiveness of humanmis what most people think Christianity is. It isn’t. To be authentically Christian is to see Jesus suffering and dying on the cross as the ultimate revelation of a universal divine truth, namely, that nothing in all creation an separate us from the love of God.

To be truly Christian is to understand that a truly Christian life isn’t easy. After all, his truly Christian life cost Jesus his life. Christianity calls us to build the realm of God on earth, and the realms that already exist on earth will resist our efforts with all the power they can muster—and that’s an enormous lot of power. To be Christian is to take up our crosses and follow Jesus wherever he may lead us. Being Christian cost Jesus his life. It has cost countless other faithful Christians their lives over the millennia. Perhaps it isn’t likely to, but it could cost us our lives too.

A Christian knows that Jesus will never lead us into violence but calls us always to live nonviolence. That Jesus will never lead us into hatred, not hatred of anyone whatsoever, for God is love, and love is the standard by which to judge all things. Jesus will never lead us to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or any other kind of hatred. Jesus will never lead us to Christian nationalism and certainly won’t lead us to white supremacy. As Christians, we must strongly reject all of those bastardizations of what Christian values really are.

Christianity is in peril among us today. The number of people who belong to and attend Christian churches has been in decline for decades. The number of people who self-identify as Christian whether they belong to and attend a Christian church or not is also steadily declining. Can we save our great, ancient, sacred faith, a faith through which we and countless other people today and over the millennia have found their connection with God along with all of the blessings and challenges that come from that connection?

I don’t know. I do know that the answers to most of Christianity’s big questions have changed. The answers many of us beyond a certain age, or maybe even short of that age, learned in Sunday school no longer work if indeed they ever did. I know that the answer to Christianity’s big questions that people take from television preachers and the preachers of most large, evangelical, community churches are just flat wrong. Those answers will kill our faith if we can’t overcome them. They won’t kill it tomorrow. They may not kill it for decades. But Christianity is alive today, to the extent that it actually is, because it has been able to present its divine truths to people in different cultures and different socio-economic systems, for nearly two thousand years. I live in trust that it can do it again. May it be so. Amen

Reflections on Isaiah 55:2a

 

Reflections on Isaiah 55:2a

March 18, 2025

The readings from the Revised Common Lectionary for next Sunday, March 23, 2025 include one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible. It is Isaiah 55:2a. It reads: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?” That question was and is of existential importance to me. Its original context is probably that of Second Isaiah, that is, roughly, and only roughly, Isaiah chapters 40-55. The setting for Second Isaiah is the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people in the mid-sixth century BCE. It sounds like Isaiah is calling his people back to attention on their Jewish spiritual heritage. Holding onto that heritage couldn’t have been easy during the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian Empire had conquered Judah and destroyed Solomon’s temple there. They had hauled essentially everyone who mattered in Jewish political and religious life off to Babylon, located hundreds of miles to the east of Jerusalem. The Jewish faith had been centered on the Jerusalem temple. It would have been rather easy for the Jewish exiles to lost the faith that they could not longer practice as they had for centuries. I hear Second Isaiah here calling his people back to what really matters, to what really satisfies, namely, a spiritual life in connection with the people’s God.

Those are probably the specifics of the context in which Second Isaiah wrote this verse, but the verse has a far broader significance than that. Bible verses matter mostly when they are not only about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away but are about us too. Isaiah 55:2a is very much about us as much as it is about the Jewish exiles in the verse’s original context. It is very much about me and my life’s journey toward wholeness and satisfaction.

To understand this verse, I suppose, we have to start by asking: What do the metaphor “bread” and the word “satisfy” mean here? What is truly bread for us? What truly satisfies us? I take both of these words to be referring to that in life which truly makes us whole. That makes us the people God has created us to be. That leads us to know and to become our true selves, the selves God made and intends us to be. I’ll use myself as a good example of what I mean here.

For over half of my life, I spent my time in my professional life pursuing that which did not satisfy. I first intended to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a university history professor. I spent seven years obtaining a PhD in Russian history. When I got that degree in 1977, there were essentially no decent job openings for university Russian history professors. Today, so many years later, as I look back on my life, it sense that trying to be a professional historian would not have satisfied my spirit the way I thought back then that it would. In any event, I never became a university Russian history professor.

I went to law school. At first I found the law fascinating and fun. I did really well in law school, and I got a first law job with a significant law firm in downtown Seattle, Washington. At first I was thrilled. I can remember walking down the street in downtown Seattle hardly able to believe that I was actually there and doing what I had been hired to do, namely, practice law. I was nowhere nearly as successful as a lawyer as I had been as a law student. I was a good lawyer but not a great one. I worked for three different downtown law firms between 1981 and 1992. I made partner at none of them.

So I opened my own law office. At first I did OK in that office. I was fine until 1994, when I started to find it more and more difficult actually to do any legal work, not that I had all that much to do. Two things happened in 1994 that bear on my point here. One was that my wife and my daughter, who was in high school at the time, sat me down in our living room. My daughter said to me: “Dad, you’re depressed.” She, and I assume my wife, saw my clinical depression before I did. Not long thereafter I was on anti-depressant medication. It helped, but not all that much.

I’ve written about the other thing that happened before, but I’m going to do it again here. One day, as I sat in my law office feeling pretty miserable and finding it very hard to make myself do the little bit of legal work I had to do, I did a Jungian psychological exercise called active imagination.[1] I sat down, cleared my mind as much as I could, and asked myself this question: “Why am I having so much trouble practicing law?” Instantaneously, with my having had no time whatsoever to think about an answer to my question, an answer came booming up from somewhere deep inside (or perhaps from completely outside me): “You’re not a lawyer!”  Well, I knew that was ridiculous, so I argued with the answer, wherever it was coming from. I said: “Of course I’m a lawyer. I’m sitting here in my law office. It says “Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney at Law,” on the front door. I have a little bit of legal work to do. My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. Of course I’m a lawyer!” Again whatever it was that was answering my question said forcefully: “You’re not a lawyer!”

So I thought OK, I’ll stop arguing with the answer and ask: “If I’m not a lawyer, what am I?” Again, instantaneously, with my having given the answer no thought whatsoever, the voice within me said: “You’re a preacher!” Well, I knew that was perfectly ridiculous too. “Preacher” wasn’t even a word I ever used. I’d say minister or pastor but never preacher when referring to the man at the church I attended who did the preaching. So I ended the exercise and went on as I had before, struggling to do legal work and making no money at all.

Nothing else happened until 1997 except that I continued to be miserable. Early in that year I began seeing a Jungian counselor. One day I told him of a dream I’d had. In the dream I was walking across a beach wearing wingtip shoes, the dress shoes I wore when I was being a lawyer. I walked across the beach until I came to the water. Ahead of me was only the vast expanse of the sea. My counselor knew immediately what the dream meant, though I didn’t at first. It meant that I had gone as far as I could as lawyer. That I was in fact done with law. It was time for me to do something else, to be someone else.

But do what? Be who? I had no answer to those questions that made any sense. I sort of wanted to go back to school, get a PhD in systematic theology, and become a seminary professor; but I knew that was impossible. I was too old. I couldn’t afford, I’d probably have to so some place like Yale to do it, there being no way to do it in the Seattle area. So I did nothing. I just kept going to my law office and being perfectly miserable.

Then Providence stepped in, or so it now seems to me. Seattle University, a Jesuit university in central Seattle, had been granting fully accredited Master of Divinity degrees for years; but, seeing as it is a Roman Catholic university that did not train Roman Catholic priests, it granted them mainly to Catholic laypeople who wanted to do ministry, most of them women whom the Church would not let become priests. It turned out that for quite some time leaders of a dozen or more Protestant denominations in the Seattle area had been working with Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry, the part of the university that granted MDiv degrees, to find a way that that Roman Catholic university could train Protestants for ministry. So on July 1, 1997, the School of Theology and Ministry created what it called the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies. Overnight, half of the students at that Catholic seminary, were Protestants. I knew I had to be one too. I just knew I had to go to SU and get an MDiv degree. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how I could afford it, and I knew I was too old. Still, I just knew I had to do it.

So I did. I closed my law office and took a job with a legal services firm called the Legal Action Center that was part of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. We provided free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction. We said we were a homelessness prevention agency. That job was as much of a Godsend for me as the School of Theology and Ministry was. It was a half-time job. It got me a 25% tuition reduction at Seattle University. I never thought on the day when I went looking for some job, any job, in the classified ads of the Seattle Times that I would ever find anything like it. I’m sure the two lawyers who made up the agency at the time never thought they’d get to hire a lawyer who had been a senior litigation associate at the fourth largest law firm in the country, which I was from early 1986 to the end of 1989. It was law that felt like ministry. It was indeed a Godsend. I was finally doing law that was bread, that satisfied my soul in a way law never had before.

I received my MDiv in December, 2000. During my time at STM I finally figured out what I was supposed to be doing with my life. As part of my studies there I did a year of internship work at a local UCC church. After I had been there a short time I said to God: “You’re kidding, right? This is what I’m supposed to be doing?” Sure surprised the hell out of me and later would surprise the hell out of everyone who knew me, but that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. In March, 2002, I was called as the parttime pastor of a local UCC church. I was ordained in the UCC in June, 2002. I knew the first day I walked into that church’s building as the church’s pastor that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer. And I was at last a preacher. I was fifty-five years old. Becoming who I really am gave me satisfaction and fullness life that nothing else I had ever done ever had.

All of that was my journey to finally, at long last, spending my money for that which was bread and my earnings for that which did indeed satisfy. To put the same point another way, it’s my journey to finding out who I really am. Finding out who God created and called me to be. And I am convinced that being who you really are is about the only thing there is that is bread and that truly satisfies. So many people spend their lives being someone other than who they really are. So many people work at jobs that are just jobs and have no other way to be who they really are. So many people live denying their sexual orientation or gender identity, that is, living as someone other than who they really are. So many people stay in personal relationships that stifle them rather than make them whole. So many people spend their lives chasing material goods, wealth, prestige, and power, none of which is really bread for them, nor does it really satisfy them. It doesn’t make them who God made them to be.

So, my friends, I pray that you have discovered who you really are. I pray that you spend your money for spiritual bread and your earnings for that which truly satisfies. If you have, I imagine you know full well what I’m talking about here. If you haven’t, it seems to me that you have work to do. You might start by doing that psychological exercise I talked about.[2] You may need professional help to do it just like I did. You may do it alone, or you may do it with others. It doesn’t much matter how you do it. It matters a lot that you do it. I pray that you either have or you will.

---

[1] The book from which I took this exercise said don’t do it alone. You may get lot in your inner mind and not be able to get yourself back out. I did it alone anyway and got away with it, not that I recommend that anyone else disregard this warning.

[2] You’ll find it in Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986).

My Criterion

 

My Criterion

March 15, 2025

I have written several times in various books, some self-published and some yet to be self-published, about the nearly universal belief among Christians that the Bible is somehow divinely inspired. I have said, and I believe, that that belief comes in two forms. With Marcus Borg, from whom I take the terms, I have written of a hard form and a soft form of that belief. The hard form of that belief says that God dictated the Bible to human scribes, who wrote God’s dictation down without error. That notion is simply absurd because it is to easy to disprove. The Bible is full of factual impossibilities and significant contradictions that God would ever have made if God had written the Bible. The hard form of belief in a divine inspiration of the Bible is easy to demolish, and I’ll spend no more time on it here.

The soft form of belief in a divine inspiration of the Bible doesn’t say that God dictated the words of the Bible exactly. Instead, it says that the men (sadly, they were all men) who wrote the different biblical books wrote under the divine inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. The Bible’s numerous authors were divinely inspired, but they were also fallible humans. Therefore, they made mistakes. They put both divinely inspired truth and human falsehood into their writings. Christians who accept this version of divine inspiration must, therefore, distinguish between what in the Bible is divine truth and what is human error. I have often critiqued and discarded the soft version of divine biblical inspiration by saying that both a person’s choices of what is divine truth and what is human falsehood, and any criteria a person might formulate for making that distinction, are purely individualistic. The person’s choices may feel good and sound right to the individual making the distinction, but they will have no persuasive power for anyone who makes different choices or who makes no choice at all.

Recently, as I was proofing what I had written quite some time ago in an as yet unpublished book of mine, it occurred to me: Sorenson, you make those distinctions too. You say that the Bible is a purely human product, which, frankly, it quite obviously is. However, you find both divine truth and human falsehood in it the same way adherents of the soft version of divine inspiration of the Bible do. I asked myself: Have I ever admitted that truth to myself before? Have I ever admitted it in writing before? I think the answer to those two questions is no, you  haven’t. Not directly. Not in so many words. As I thought about the issue, however, I began to see that I have in fact written of how I make that distinction several times. I want here to consider just how I do in fact make that distinction and express it more directly than I have before.

I get to my criterion for making the distinction between what is divine truth in the Bible and what is not by beginning with a question: What do we need to learn from or of God? Do we need to learn the world’s ways of being and of doing things? To we need to learn violence, injustice, oppression, radical individualism, consumerism, social hierarchy, the dominance of the rich over the poor, authoritative governmental or religious structures, hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, life lived under the criteria of earning and reward, living by judgment and condemnation, or any of the other ways the world has of living? No, we don’t. We learn and live by all of those things quite on our own. Many of us may, and in fact do, project many of these things onto God, but they are all human ways of being not divine ways of being. Projecting human ways onto God and seeing God as just humanity writ large are classic, nearly universal mistakes Christians have always made and still make today. God is just way too big to operate the way we humans so often do.

So what do we need God for? We need to learn that most of the ways of the world in which we live and which we have to a considerable extent internalized are false. We need to learn that God’s ways are radically different from the world’s ways. We need to learn how destructive the world’s ways so often are. We need to learn ways that make life better for everyone especially for the poor, marginalized, and disregarded among us to be sure but actually better for everyone. We know instinctively that violence is bad. We need to learn that ultimate reality, that is, God, is radically nonviolent and calls us to be nonviolent too. We need to learn that political, social, and economic oppression of some by others actually degrades life not only for those who are oppressed but for those who do the oppressing. We need to learn that we all need God in our lives if we are to make it through this life with a minimum of psychological and spiritual trauma. We need to see, in short, that there are better ways to live than the ways by which most people live today and most people have always lived. We need to learn that fullness of life comes from living God’s ways as best we can.

The Bible is a purely human document, but it contains both mere echoes of the world’s ways of being and at least hints at much better ways of being, at God’s ways of being. The great Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan explains this dynamic this way. He says that in the Bible we see expressions of God’s ways that turn the ways of the world upside down and then see the Bible falling back into endorsement of the destructive ways of the world. I’ll use violence as a good example. Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. He didn’t want us to accept evil, Matthew 5:39 apparently to the contrary notwithstanding; but he wanted us to resist it creatively, assertively, but always nonviolently. Then we go from Matthew’s Jesus to the Jesus of Revelation. There Jesus is about nothing but violence. He unleashed massive violence on the world. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus of Revelation are essentially polar opposites. We all know that violence is the world’s way. I mean, just look at the world today, and just look at human history. It is a history of war after war after war. It is a history condemned by the violence of some people against other people throughout time. In the Bible we see passages that ascribe violence to God. We also see passages that have God reject violence in radical terms.

Which of those views of violence to we need to learn? Certainly not the ways of violence. We’ve got those down cold. We need to learn nonviolence. We need to learn nonviolence precisely because violence to ends and degrades the lives of people all over the world. The Bible, with all of its violence, also gives us the command of nonviolence. Which is divine, violence or nonviolence? The answer is nonviolence. Nonviolence is the answer precisely because it turns the way of the world on its head. Precisely because it calls us to a different and very much better way of living.

We see the same thing in what the New Testament says about women. In Galatians Paul says that in Christ there is no longer male and female. Galatians 3:27-28. Obviously Paul didn’t mean that the biological forms and reproductive roles of women and men have disappeared. He meant that in Christ women and men are radically equal. He spoke that truth in a culture that was androcentric, paternalistic, and misogynistic. He expressed a truth that turned his world on its head. Then, in a significantly later New Testament text, we read: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” 1 Timothy 2:12, a text that says it is by Paul but that clearly is not by Paul. We have here the expression of a truth that we know is merely worldly because it just echoes the way of the world. Real truth is divine because it turns the ways of the world upside down for the purpose of equating equality, for the purpose of improving the lives of real people. We see in 1 Timothy the expression of a supposed truth that we know is worldly and false because it merely echoes the ways of the world in which it was written, ways that harm the lives of real people.  

So what is my criterion for deciding what is divine truth and what is worldly falsehood in the Bible? It is to ask: Does something in the Bible merely echo the ways of the world that we don’t need to learn and that harm real people, or does it express a counter-worldly truth that we need to learn because it makes human life better? If the former, it is worldly falsehood. If the latter, it is divine truth. Put another way, my criterion for what is true in the Bible is: Does something the Bible says improve human life, or does it just express human life and harm human life? Human life is my standard. Real, lived human life as real flesh and blood people live it. You, dear reader, can accept that standard or reject it, but I challenge you to find a better one. This is the best I can do, and I don’t think it’s bad at all.

Donald Trump Proves He Is a Fascist Once Again

 

Donald Trump Proves He Is a Fascist Once Again

March 14, 2024

 

It is clear that Donald Trump thinks that any criticism of him or his actions (which are so erratic that we can hardly call them policies) is illegal and should be criminally prosecuted. He has said in so many words that his critics should be in jail. He obviously knows next to nothing about the First Amendment to the US Constitution and cares even less than he knows. In a constitutional democracy with constitutional guarantees of certain freedoms for the populace, which our country used to be and which some of us believe it can be again, expressing opposition to the president or the president's administration is not a crime. It is constitutionally protected free speech. The regimes, and sometimes many if not most of the people, of authoritarian or totalitarian nations do not believe in free speech. Let me tell you a story of how I once encountered that distinction between people who believe in the citizen's right and duty to criticism their government and people who do not.

In the summer of 1968, I participated in a Russian language study program of Indiana University. We spent five weeks studying, and speaking only, Russian on the IU campus. Then, we went to the USSR for five weeks. The group of participants I was in went first to what was then Leningrad, now once again St Petersburg. One evening one person in our group brought a Soviet citizen with him back to a hotel room where we had gathered. I don't know who that Russian man was. Maybe he was a KGB plant, maybe he wasn't. Whatever. He said to us: "You Americans say only bad things about my country and our government. How would you like it if people were always saying bad things about your country and its government?" Now, understand. This was the height of the Vietnam War era. Bobby Kennedy, the nation's best hope for ending that illegal and immoral war, had recently been assassinated. We said bad things about our government and our president Lyndon Johnson every single day. Many of the members of our group had "Clean for Gene" stickers on their luggage, expressing their support for the anti-Vietnam War candidate for the Democrats' presidential nomination Gene McCarthy. It never occurred to any of us that we were doing anything wrong when we criticized or even damned our government and the people in it who had gotten us into and kept us in that unconscionable war. We were all Americans. We had all grown up in a constitutional republic with constitutional guarantees of our right to free speech. If anything, we thought it was our duty as American citizens to speak out against something that our country was doing that was horrifically wrong. The same was true when we supported the Civil Rights Movement and condemned American racism. The Russian man we had encountered had grown up in a totalitarian state with no meaningful guarantees of citizens' rights whatsoever.[1] We felt perfectly free to criticize our government. He thought any criticism of his government was just wrong. In fact, it was, in effect at least, illegal for a Soviet citizen to criticize their government.

Donald Trump wants to turn the United States into the Soviet Union at least in this regard. He calls opponents enemies and terrible people. He says they should be in jail. He would be perfectly happy to write the First Amendment out of the US Constitution if he could.

Folks, what more proof do we need that Trump is an American fascist? Fascists, and Communists, who for our purposes here are indistinguishable from them, eliminate free speech and the free press. They throw people into jail who criticize them. That's not the American way! That's' the fascist way. The Soviet Communists did it. The German Nazis did it. The Chinese Communists do it. Vladimir Putin does it. There is no avoiding the truth that Donald Trump is an American fascist. We must all do everything we legally and nonviolently can to rein him in, stop him from doing more damage to our country, and work to repair the damage we haven't been able to stop. My criticizing Trump here does not make me a criminal. It makes me an American. If only Donald Trump knew and respected that truth.

---

[1] The Soviet constitution actually did have a clause in it guaranteeing the citizens’ right to free speech. That clause was meaningless, and everyone in the USSR knew it. No citizen could raise it as a defense when charged with the crime of criticizing the government.

My Personal Faith: God

 A couple of years ago I wrote a book with the title How Can I Be a Christian: A Personal Confession of Faith. I had pretty much forgotten about it until I found a hard copy of it my home office the other day. It has a chapter in it about God. As I reread it, I thought it was actually quite good. So I'm posting it here, with a copyright claim because I'll probably self-publish the book some day. For what it's worth, here it is:

This is most of a chapter cut from the book How Can I Be A Christian. When I reread it after having forgotten all about it, I thought it was rather good. I’ve edited it a bit with an eye toward perhaps posting it on my blog.

 

My Personal Faith: God

© Thomas C. Sorenson 2025. All Rights Reserved

 

When we set out to discuss God we immediately run into a couple of significant problems. One has to do with the language we use. The other has to do with the paradoxical nature of the truth about God. We’ve already discussed the nature of faith language as mythical and symbolic. I won’t say much about that issue here. I’ll just remind you, and myself, that, because our language is unavoidably limited and human, it is incommensurate with the task of speaking any truth about transcendent, ultimate mystery. I’ll also remind myself, and you, that because our language is incommensurate with the transcendent reality of which we speak, and because that of which we speak so transcends our ability to speak about it, that anything we say about that reality is potentially partly true but necessarily partly false as well. Calling God Father is a good example. God may be a father to us in some sense, but God is nothing like any earthly, human father. So calling God Father is both potentially true and necessarily false. I freely admit that claiming to say anything about God is an act of immeasurable chutzpah. It is claiming to do that which can’t be done. It can’t be done, that is, with any certainty that anything we say is even partly correct.[1] It is an attempt to say something meaningful about that which so transcends our creaturely being that it remains always mystery. I confess that God remains always the ultimate unknowable reality.

Why then do I, and why does anyone else, set out to do something that we admit can’t actually be done? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do it because I can’t not do it. I do it because I’m human, and part of what it is to be human is to long and grasp for connection with ultimate transcendent reality. I do it because both the universal experience of humanity and my own personal experience tell me that that about which I speak is real and really important. I do it because living life in the awareness of the reality and the presence of God is deeper, richer, and more satisfying than living without that awareness can possibly be. It’s also more challenging, which can be less comfortable but is equally important. I do it because I believe that by recognizing the universal human experience of the reality of a spiritual dimension of being, and by applying our minds and our spirits to the task of understanding at least something about that spiritual reality, we can gain knowledge that, while it will never pin down or define God, nonetheless facilitates our life task of living in intimate relationship with God. I do it  because my experience tells me that I have discovered something about God that is at least true enough to sustain me and enrich my life. I do it because I am so convinced that what I think I have discovered about God is supremely good news for all people. I want to put that good news out there where, perhaps, a few people will discover it and find it beneficial in their own lives.

There is one unavoidable fact about all of the profound concepts of the Christian faith that most people don’t understand and reject when they’re told about it. It is that all of the profound truths of the faith are paradoxes. A paradox is something that can’t be true but is true. A paradox is self-contradictory, but that it is does not obviate the truth of the paradox. One quick example is the truth that God is both utterly transcendent and intimately present in creation at the same time. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is also a paradox. It says that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human at the same time. That, of course, is simply impossible, or so the rational mind thinks. Once again, it isn’t possible, it’s just true. Another prime example is the Christian notion of God as Trinity. That notion says God is one and three at the same time. That, of course, is impossible, it’s just true.

To be Christian is to accept, indeed, even to cherish, living with impossible paradoxes as the most profound truths we will ever know. Most people avoid the Christian paradoxes in one of two ways. They may ignore them. They may think of God as transcendent, or as imminent, but not as both. They are likely to think of God as one and forget the three part of the Trinity. They may deny Christ’s divinity, making him just another human being and thereby not having to deal with the paradox of the Incarnation. Or they may see Jesus Christ as so divine that he is hardly human at all. Yet for me, the most profound truths must be paradoxical. That’s because it is beyond the ability of our human language to express the most profound truths in any other way. Paradox preserves the mystery of God, and nothing that is not mystery can possibly be God.

I am thoroughly convinced that all human truth arises from human experience. Experience is all we have or possibly can have. That’s because of how we are structured as centered selves who perceive a world that appears to exist apart from us but that we can’t prove actually does. No one in the so-called western cultures, except perhaps for a few mystics, has a problem with the notion that we experience the reality (the assumed reality actually) of physical objects.[2] Things physical are not hard to experience. We all do it all the time.

The same cannot be said about the spiritual dimension of reality. Human experience points to the reality of the spiritual dimension of existence. Not every human being experiences spiritual reality, but that doesn’t establish that the spiritual isn’t real. A great many humans who are open to experiencing the spiritual, myself included, have experienced the reality of the spiritual. Only willful blindness to the experience of humanity as a whole can lead to a denial of the reality of the spiritual.

Because we can speak of the spiritual only in the language of symbol and myth, we need a symbol for the spiritual that will make it possible for us to talk about it and relate to it.[3] The phrase “the spiritual” is such a symbol. It is finite human words that point me toward a reality I can approach in no other way. There are other words for it. We can call it the numinous or the divine. I mostly use “the spiritual.” Calling that reality the spiritual works for me. That’s why I do it.

There is, however, a much more common symbol for transcendent spiritual reality. That symbol is the word “God.” “God” is not someone’s name. It is a symbol that I and an untold multitude of other people use that points us toward the transcendent aspect of reality. I too use the symbol “God” as a powerful way of relating to ultimate reality. It is of course also Christianity’s (and Islam’s and Judaism’s) primary symbol for that reality even if most of the people who use it don’t realize that it is a symbol. The word “God” and the words “the spiritual” mean the same thing to me.[4]

God is not a person, not even a person writ cosmically large. But of course God is not less than a person. God infinitely transcends personhood. That means, however, that God includes personhood within God’s pure being. The symbol “God” makes it possible for me (and everyone else) to relate to God personally though I know that God is infinitely more than a person.

Because God is so utterly transcendent of material being like ours, and though we can relate to God personally through symbols and myths, God remains always mystery. A verse from Brian Wren’s great hymn “Bring Many Names” expresses the paradoxical mystery of God better than I ever could. It calls God “joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing.” Talk about a beautiful paradoxical mystery! Yet people are forever trying to overcome the mystery and the paradox of God. They want to make God something they fully comprehend and even control. Yet any entity that we can fully comprehend and control simply cannot be God. God is a symbol for ultimate reality. We are creatures of contingent reality. Tillich said God is “pure being” while we have only created being.[5] However we express it, there is, and there must be, a cosmic gap between the ultimate reality of God and the contingent, or conditional, reality of our created being.

I have said here that our human language is incommensurate with the transcendent reality of God. It is equally true that our minds are incommensurate with the transcendent reality of God. Our human minds are limited. They are finite. There is only so much that they can comprehend, though they can comprehend a lot more than most of us do. We can comprehend a great many things. All of those things are, however, created things not ultimate things. If God is truly God, and God is, God must be beyond the grasp of our creaturely minds. Anything that was not beyond the grasp of our minds would necessarily be a contingent being not pure being. If we can fully comprehend it, it is not God.

Because God always remains ultimate mystery, a significant part of the life of faith is learning to live with mystery. It is learning to live with questions that not only aren’t answered but that are unanswerable. Nearly all of us creatures of western civilization find doing that essentially impossible. We hate unanswered questions, and we won’t even admit that there are unanswerable questions. So some Christians say that the Bible fully comprehends God and transmits a complete comprehension of God to us. Others say that their church fully comprehends God and that to know God fully all we have to do is accept what the church tells us about God. Western people will often grasp at anything to avoid living with paradox and mystery.

Yet I find knowing that God is ultimate paradoxical mystery to be a great blessing. I can stand in awe of ultimate mystery in a way I could never stand in awe of anything I could fully comprehend. I am in awe, for example, of people who really understand complex mathematics. I hardly comprehend even the simplest arithmetic. Yet the gap between God and me is infinitely greater than the gap between me and the mathematics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I gaze with awe and wonder at the enormity of God, at God’s transcendence of everything I am and everything I know or can possibly ever know.

Because God is always mystery, my quest for a proper relationship with God is a lifelong effort. I will never know God fully, not in this life anyway. I can however keep seeking to deepen my understanding of God. As Brian Wren also says in “Bring Many Names,” God is “never fully known.” That means there is always more to know about God. I can never sit pat and say now I know everything about God. I must always say, and mean, that the fullness of God will always remain beyond my grasp. That’s not a bad thing. I can think of the way God is always so far above me as God’s invitation to me to keep discerning God’s presence in my life and what that presence means.

But here’s another one of those paradoxes of faith. God remains ultimately unknown, and yet we do know God. We know God as God appears to us in our lives. We know God as we feel God’s presence with us in everything that happens to us or for us in this life. All through this book, and all through my ministerial career, I have claimed to know things about God. The paradox here is that God is the Known Unknown. No, it doesn’t make any rational sense to say that anything is the known unknown. Known and unknown are antonyms. Nothing  can be both. And once again, this aspect of God is not possible, it’s just true. I can live in trust that it is indeed true.

Here’s one thing I trust is true about God of which I am quite confident. God is totally different from us. God is nothing like us. God transcends us absolutely. We are finite, God is infinite. We are temporal, God is beyond time. We are mortal, God is immortal. We are so small relative to God’s universe that it is hard to conceive of God even knowing that we exist. God is bigger than the universe, and the size of the universe is immense beyond our ability to visualize it or even really to conceive of it. When I say that God transcends us, that is what I mean. We are limited in so many ways. God is unlimited in every possible way. God is totaliter aliter, totally other.

The most important thing about God’s transcendent otherness for our human purposes is brilliantly stated in these verses from Isaiah:

 

For my thoughts are not your

               thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says

               the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the

               earth,

     so are my ways higher than

               your ways

     and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9.

 

People have so much trouble understanding Isaiah’s insight here. They keep trying to make God be like us. They make God judgmental. They make God angry. They make God vengeful. In all of that they just get God wrong. They make God too small. They make God entirely too human. Making God too small is perhaps the most common and most significant mistake we humans make about God.

People get God wrong, I am convinced, because they don’t understand God’s very nature as love. It simply isn’t possible to stress God’s nature as love too much. Scripture says God is love. 1 John 4:8. That, of course, doesn’t prove anything; but in this case scripture gets it absolutely right. God is indeed love.

Yet we must understand how radically different God’s love is from any love we mortal humans can possibly know. We love particular people. God loves everyone. Love for us is often mostly an emotion. For God it is the essence of God’s being. We expect a relationship of love to be mutual. When we love someone, we want that person to love us in return; and that doesn’t always happen. God’s love is completely one-sided. God loves all of creation whether all of creation or even any part of it loves God in return or not. I confess a God whose love truly is universal and unconditional.

God expresses God’s love for us through God’s grace. I confess God’s grace to be God’s unconditional love in action. I confess that God’s grace applies to every single person who has ever lived or who ever will. In grace God saves every single person who has ever lived or who ever will. God’s grace must be universal because if it isn’t universal, it isn’t grace. God’s universal grace is something so many people deny. For them, God has to make distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys, then extend grace and salvation to the good guys and damn the bad guys. Of course there is a scriptural foundation for that belief, but that there is doesn’t make the belief right. Making God judgmental denies that God is grace, and it makes God entirely too human, entirely too small. God’s grace and salvation are for everyone. Period. Any other understanding of God denies that God is God.

Another profound way in which God is different from us is the way God wants the world to be. The world the way God wants it to be is pretty much totaliter aliter from what it is. The world is violent, God wants it to be nonviolent. The world is economically and politically unjust. God demands that it do justice for those it now impoverishes and oppresses. The world values material riches. God wants us to place spiritual values above material ones. This really is true: To know God’s ways, turn the violent and unjust ways of the world upside down and inside out.

It is simply true that God utterly transcends this world. Yet for all God’s transcendence, my experience and the experience of humanity as a whole tell me  that God, who transcends all creation absolutely, nonetheless inheres in everything God has created. God must inhere in all that God has created because, if God did not, God could not put God’s universal, unconditional grace into action.

Panentheism is a way of conceptualizing God’s physical relationship to creation. It says that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. All of creation subsists in God though God infinitely transcends creation. But God doesn’t just bump up against the creation that God surrounds. God permeates everything that is. Once again I have to say that no, that isn’t possible, it’s just true. Physical reality is not God. God is present as the depth dimension of everything that is. God is the more in everything that is. God is the love behind everything that is. God saturates everything that is. We can see God in everything that is if we’ll just open our eyes and see what is really there.

This truth about God means that we can find God and God’s love anywhere because God is always everywhere. It is common for people to think that they have to go someplace special in order to commune with God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. I believe, with Celtic spirituality, that there are “thin places” where the perceived barrier between people and God is thinner, more permeable, than it is in other places. Nonetheless, I don’t have to find a thin place to commune with God. Or perhaps better, any place where I commune with God is a thin place. The important point is that, wherever I am, I can find God because God is there. Whenever you need God you can find God, because God is there. To me that truth is tremendous good news. I hope it is to you too.

Just how God is present and active in creation is another thing that people almost always get wrong. Much of the ancient world, including the ancient Hebrews, thought that God controlled everything that happens on earth. To them, if something happened, God did it. I guess a few people today still cling to that untenable belief. It is untenable because it makes God responsible for things like the Holocaust and the other manmade tragedies of cosmic proportion that we humans are so damnably good at creating. The ancient Hebrew prophets could place the disasters of the conquest of both Hebrew kingdoms by foreign empires at God’s feet and say you did it. Today we simply can’t blame God for every horrible thing people do, or at least I sure won’t blame God for them. God is not present in creation primarily as cause. It may be that God is there gently, quietly, nudging the world in a better direction. It may be that God quietly bends the arc of the universe toward justice. Still, God does not directly cause anything that happens on earth. It is simply untenable to insist that God does.

So is God simply passive in God’s presence in creation? By no means! God is present in creation for one primary reason, to be here for us. To be here so that we can know that God is here. To be here so we can actually experience God’s love in our lives. God knows that human life isn’t easy. God knows that we all suffer pain, grief, and other loss. Of course God knows that we’re all mortal, for that is how God created us.[6] God inheres in all that is so God can be here for us in all aspects of our lives, including the really hard ones.

For centuries the Christian churches have spread a great lie among the people. That lie is that if our faith is strong enough, and if we pray hard enough, bad things won’t happen to us or our loved ones. Folks, it just ain’t so. That is not how God works. No amount of faith and prayer will make us immortal in this life. No amount of faith and prayer will stop accidents, illnesses, and other bad things from happening to us or our loved ones. God does not intervene to stop the natural order of life no matter how strong our faith or how fervent our prayers. God doesn’t even intervene to stop horrific distortions of life like the Holocaust or the Holodomor. Many people seem to like to convince themselves that God does intervene to prevent bad things in their lives. Well, I’m sorry. It just isn’t so.

So what does God do with God’s presence in creation? I’ll say it once again. Mostly, God is there. God is there to offer us the things that God chooses to offer us. God is there with each and every one of God’s people when the bad things happen. Early in my time as a pastor there was a horrific earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia. Thousands of people lost their lives. When things like that happen people want to know: Where was God? In a sermon I preached at that time I answered that question: “On the beaches, in the water, with the victims.” God was in the trenches, in the barracks of the concentration camps, in the gas chambers with the victims of the Holocaust. As I write there has been a terrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria in which tens of thousands of people have lost their lives. God is there, in the rubble, with the victims, with those who mourn tragic losses. That’s how it is with God.

How do we know that that is true? We know that it is true because God was on the cross with Jesus suffering and dying with him. That’s mostly what God is doing in creation. God is there holding us in whatever happens in our lives, even in the most horrific things. God will get us through even those most horrific things. That doesn’t mean God prevents them from happening. God doesn’t. It means that we can know that, in some mysterious way, we are existentially safe even in those horrible things. Even when we suffer. Even when we die. That’s mostly what God is doing in creation.

There’s another way I know this truth too, the way of personal experience. I’ve told this story in print before, but I want to tell it again here. It is the most powerful experience in my life of how God relates to human suffering. On July 31, 2002, my wife Francie died of breast cancer. We had been together for thirty years. She was the mother of our two children. We had known for some months that her death was coming. I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. I fell into a grief more painful than anything I had even suspected was humanly possible. Three days after Francie’s death, on August 3, 2002, I stood in the shower weeping and hurting as badly emotionally as I think it is possible for a human being to hurt. In despair, I started to sink to me knees in grief. As I did I said, “Lift me up, Lord!” And the Lord did. Immediately I felt myself lifted back up onto my feet by a power that could not possibly have come from inside me. When I was back on my feet I thought, Oh, all that stuff I’m always talking about as a church pastor really is real. That’s how I know the truth of my contention that God doesn’t prevent tragedy and pain, God is present with us in them. God didn’t kill my wife, but God didn’t prevent her death either. Rather, God was with her and with me as she suffered and died.

Another story to prove the point. Francie died at home, but she did have a final hospitalization less than a month before she passed away. While she was in the hospital she was having a particularly difficult day. That’s when it happened. Francie had a vision. She saw both of us held in God’s hands, and she knew that we were both safe there. On her grave marker we put the words, “Safe in God’s Hands.” Safe here means existentially safe. That’s how Francie and I both were safe with God. It’s how we both still are.

God knows that we need more than comfort, more than reassurance, more than existential safety. God has a dream for how this world should be. Jesus called God’s dream the kingdom of God, but God’s not going to intervene in power and glory to create that new world. God hasn’t done it yet. There’s no reason to believe that God’s ever going to do it. No, God leaves the transformation of the world up to us, but God does not abandon us in our efforts to bring transformation about. God is there with us giving us a gentle kick in the backside when we need it to get us going with the effort to make the kingdom of God a reality on earth. God is there to support us as we do God’s work in the world. God is there to forgive us when our work falls short of what is needed, as it inevitably will.

God showed in Jesus Christ what God wants the world to look like. God showed us in Jesus Christ how God wants our lives to be. We so rarely get it. We’re so good at coming up with excuses for not doing what God calls us to do. Yet God is there with us, hearing our excuses, and saying, if we’ll just listen, “Nope. That’s not it. Get up off your duff and start transforming the world.” Most of us don’t hear God doing that most of the time. But sometimes some of us do. Sometimes some of us actually do something, even something very small, to make something in God’s world better. God’s there in creation to prod us to do it, to help us when we try, and to forgive us when we fail.

All of these words are my feeble attempt to say who God is for me. To put the matter much more succinctly, God for me is the power of love that brought the universe into being and sustains it in being. God is the power of love that embraces and accepts every single person, even those we can only hate. That God is universal love who extends universal grace to every living being means that all the human thought about God as judgmental, angry, and vengeful is just wrong. No, no matter what we may have done wrong in our lives, God is there as a refuge to which we can turn everywhere at any time. God wants nothing but good for every one of us. There is no damnation with God. There is no hell, because a God who is love would never create such a place or send anyone to it.

I do not mean to suggest that God’s universal grace means that anything goes or that God doesn’t care about human sin. I addressed the issue of moral behavior above. In my faith system we don’t behave ourselves out of fear of eternal punishment after death. There is no eternal punishment after death. Rather, we behave ourselves because we want to respond to God’s love with love. Of course God cares about human sin. I believe that human sin actually hurts God. That doesn’t mean, however, that God responds with anger and judgment. We humans respond to many things with anger and judgment. God responds to human sin with a still, small voice calling to us to do better. We know the behavior God wants from us. It’s up to us whether or not we behave that way. God cares. God doesn’t punish.

In love God calls and prods us to work to make the world be more like God wants it to be. In faith we must respond to that call and that prodding as best we can. The truth is, however, that even if we never hear God’s call or feel God’s prodding, and even if we do hear or feel it but do nothing in response, God still loves us. God still saves us. Friends, the God I know and confess is simply the most unimaginable, profound, all-encompassing love there could possibly be, and even more than that. I don’t understand God’s love. I can’t really understand God’s love. Neither can you or anyone else. We don’t understand it, we stand under it. We stand in awe of it. We live always in its protective shelter. In it we know that we are indeed, always, safe in God’s hands. Thanks be to God!

---

[1] I’ve seen a Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy, who’s a dog but ever mind, tells Charlie Brown that he’s writing a book on theology. Charlie Brown asks him if he has a title for the book. Snoopy says yes. His title is “Has It Occurred to You That You May Be Wrong?” That’s a perfect title for most any theology book including this one. And yes, it has occurred to me that I might be wrong.

[2] That’s not so true in some Asian cultures. Some spiritual traditions in India and elsewhere actually consider what appears to be physical reality not to be real at all. They consider it all to be an illusion. We needn’t go into the issue of the reality of the material world any further here. We all assume that it is real not that it isn’t.

[3] By “myth” I do not mean something someone thinks is true that isn’t true. I mean a story that acts like a symbol to connect us to God and God to us.

[4] A symbol is an object or a word that points beyond itself to a reality it cannot contain or control but with which it can act to connect us. A symbol can work as a symbol even for people who do not think of it as a symbol.

[5] Tillich says that the difference between contingent being and pure being is that contingent being isn’t pure, which I take to mean that contingent being is somehow less than pure being. It is, however, the only being we have or ever can have.

[6] Paul says that the wages of sin is death. Romans 6:23. I take Paul to have meant that if we didn’t sin we wouldn’t die. I do not believe that to be true. We are mortal because we are creatures not gods. To be a creature not a god is necessarily to be less than perfect. Mortality makes life imperfect, or so it seems. We are mortal because God created us that way. That really is all there is to it.