On Finitude
I get it. Death sucks. I don’t want to die. I miss, or
better I still grieve for, my first wife, both of my parents, and several dogs,
all of whom have died. Maybe I’ve been thinking about death too much lately. I
am after all 71 years old without the strongest lungs in the world, and I just
retired from my profession of pastoral ministry. Beyond that, I’ve seen two
things in recent days that have gotten me thinking death, or more philosophically,
about finitude and infinitude. Finitude is the status of being finite. Of being
limited. Of being mortal. Of being bound to come to an end. Infinitude is
finitude’s opposite. It is being infinite. Being unlimited. Being immortal. Of
having neither a beginning nor an end. And it struck me as I thought about
those two things how much we humans hate the reality that God is infinite and
we are not. Oh yes. We hate that reality. We struggle with that reality. We
hate that reality, and we hate our struggle with it. We hate them so much that
we deny both the finitude of created being and the infinitude of God. The first
thing I’ll mention that I saw was someone talking on a TV news report from the
international convocation of enormously wealthy fat cats and politicians mostly
from first world countries that takes place in Davos, Switzerland, every year.
This person was talking about economic growth and how to stimulate it. The
second thing I saw was an episode of the PBS series NOVA about black holes.
Those things seem unrelated, I suppose, but actually they aren’t. The first of
them involves a denial of finitude. The second of them speaks of the ultimate
reality of finitude for all created being. Let’s look at our denial of finitude
first.
Almost everyone’s answer to most any economic problem is
growth. Grow the economy. More money. More jobs. More production. Mostly, more
consumption. We have created an economy that is focused on consumption rather
than production. Advertising tells us Americans constantly that our purpose in
life is to consume. Buy! Buy! Buy! That’s what you need. That’s what we hear. Buy
our product and you’ll be young, well off, and beautiful. Buy this car, and
your life will be complete. Buy this cream to get those horrible wrinkles off
your face, never mind that wrinkles may be a perfectly natural development with
age. Buy this prescription medicine and you’ll live forever. And whenever
there’s a perceived economic problem, usually a perceived slowdown in the pace
of economic growth, the answer everyone gives is some form of stimulate more
growth. The supply siders say give more money to the wealthy so they’ll invest
it in the economy (which we know doesn’t work, but never mind). Liberals say
give the middle class tax cuts so they’ll have more money to spend on
consumables. Socialists say even out the distribution of money so the people
who do most of the consuming will be able to consume more. There are lots of
different ideas about how to stimulate economic growth, but economic growth is
the golden calf of the contemporary economy. Grow the economy. Consume more.
Spend more. That’s what we need, or so almost everyone who comments on the
economy says.
A demand for continual economic growth as a solution to our
problems is problematic on a number of levels, not least of all the spiritual
level. For purposes of this essay, however, the biggest problem with the demand
for continual economic growth is that it is a denial of finitude. It is a
denial of finitude because it does not recognize that it is unsustainable.
Essentially all economic activity today uses natural resources. Some of those
resources, like timber and other plant-based products, are renewable; but most
natural resources aren’t. There is only so much iron ore on earth. There is
only so much petroleum. There is only so much aluminum, copper, zinc, lithium,
titanium, and every other natural resource that we use up in our economic
activity. The more economic activity there is the faster we use up nonrenewable
resources. No economic activity that uses up natural resources is ultimately
sustainable, but the more growth there is in economic activity the faster those
resources will be exhausted. The demand for constant economic growth is a
demand to deplete the earth’s resources at a faster clip. The demand for growth
denies the finitude of those resources. Even at current rates of use modern
industrial production is ultimately not sustainable. The demand for growth is a
demand to make it unsustainable faster. But to recognize that truth is to
recognize the reality of finitude, and we can’t stand finitude. We live as
though the earth’s resources were infinite, which they aren’t. We can’t stand
being finite, so we live as though we and our earth were infinite. We aren’t,
and neither is the earth.
We do lots of other things because we can’t stand being
finite too. We can’t stand being finite, so we make ourselves gods. We make
humanity our ultimate value. We subordinate everything else to human wellbeing,
or rather, to a very shortsighted, materialistic view of human wellbeing. We
sacrifice the future so we feel better today. We sacrifice other species to
feed our hungers and satisfy our demands for pleasure. Especially in our
dominant American culture we deny the reality death, death being the ultimate
proof of human finitude. Put some cream on your face to make those wrinkles go
away, for they remind you that you are mortal. Put some lotion in your hair to
get rid of that gray, for it too reminds you that you are mortal. Believe that
medical science can cure every disease or someday will be able to do so; for
disease leads to death, and we deny the reality of death. Spend hundreds of
thousands or even millions of dollars on late life medical care to put off
death even when the life you’re preserving isn’t worth living, for we must deny
the reality of death. For heaven’s sake don’t do end of life planning,
especially not for a funeral and the disposal of you bodily remains. All of these
things are proof of our finitude. In all of these ways and in so many others we
deny the existential truth of our lives, that we are finite. We are mortal. Our
lives end. And we can’t stand it.
We so can’t stand being finite that we can’t stand it that
God is infinite. We resent God’s infinitude, for it reminds us of our finitude.
So we make the infinite God finite. We reduce God to a person. We make God the
old man with a beard sitting on a cloud in the sky, and heaven forbid we should
ever use feminine images for God. Perhaps even more perniciously we lock God up
in human creations. The Roman Catholic Church locks God up in the church. God
is who the church says God is and nothing more. The Orthodox churches lock God
up in tradition. God is who the Ecumenical Councils and the Church Fathers say
God is and nothing more. Protestantism locks God up in the Bible. God is who
the Bible says God is and nothing more. In all of these different ways
Christians deprive God of infinitude. We deprive God of transcendence. We
deprive God of mystery. Why? Because we can’t stand it that God is infinite and
we are not. We can’t stand it that God is transcendent and we are not. We can’t
stand it that God is ultimate mystery and we are not.
Our denial of our finitude and our denial of God’s
infinitude are spiritually unhealthy. They may even be physically unhealthy,
but they are definitely spiritually unhealthy. Why? Because they deny reality.
They are self-contradictory because they deny what ultimately cannot be denied.
Denial of reality cannot be healthy. Denial of reality creates unmaintainable
tensions, even conflicts, in the human spirit. Our denial of our finitude
always hits the wall of reality. We live as though we were not mortal, then we
die; and as hard as we try to deny it, we know all along that we are going to
die. We live in contradiction of what we know is true, hard as we pretend that
it is not.
Death is the existential reality of all created being, which
brings us to the program about black holes that I mentioned. That episode of
NOVA ended with speculation that perhaps the so-called super black holes, of
which there are an enormous number in the universe, will eventually swallow all
the matter in the universe. Then, some theoreticians speculate, they themselves
will dissipate, leaving a dead universe of unformed elements doing nothing. Even
if the black holes didn’t dissipate they would remain, after all, just black
holes, death holes really, that have destroyed the universe. The thought that
the universe itself is finite is unsettling, or at least it has been unsettling
for me for a very long time. Yet how can the universe itself not be finite? It
is created being. Only God is uncreated being; and the universe is not God,
pantheists to the contrary notwithstanding. If only God is infinite, then
anything that is infinite must be God and anything that is not God must be
finite. Because the universe is not God, it must be finite. Just how the
universe will end we do not know. We know, however, that it will end, that it
must end, because it is not God. As troubling as that notion may be, it is the
unavoidable conclusion from the fact that the universe is not God.
So we are presented with two undeniable realities. First, only
God is God. Only God is infinite. If we will truly understand that reality we
will stop trying to make God finite. We will stop using only masculine imagery
for God. We will stop trying to lock God up in some structure or concept of
human making, be it the church, tradition, the Bible, or anything else. We will
finally let God be God by letting God be the infinite reality that God actually
is. We will at long last understand that God is ultimately transcendent and that
God’s ultimate transcendence means not only that we cannot reduce God to the immanent
but that the categories of created being do not even apply to God. We do
sometimes say that God has no beginning and no end. What we have more trouble
recognizing is that concepts like beginning and end don’t even apply to God. Beginnings
and endings are categories of time, and the category time does not apply to
God. It can’t, for we know that time itself isn’t a fixed absolute but
something that changes due to the effects of gravity. Because time doesn’t
apply to God, it makes no sense to talk about God seeing the future. It makes
no sense to talk about God changing, for if God changes at all it must be in
some way that our finite, time-conditioned minds can’t even imagine. Only God
is God, and the fullness of what that means lies beyond human comprehension.
That doesn’t mean of course that we can’t relate to God. We
people of faith relate to God all the time. We pray to God. We address God in
human language. We wait for God to speak to us if not quite in human language
then at least in a way that we can understand. For it is one of the mysteries
of God that that which is ultimately transcendent is also intimately immanent. God
is utterly beyond and deeply within at the same time. Though God transcends our
limited human language we can speak to God in that language as long a we
understand that none of our language about God can be understood literally.[1]
We can call God Father as long as we understand that God is not less than a
human father but infinitely more. We can call God Mother as long as we do so
with the same understanding. We can understand God as consisting of three
Persons, traditionally called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as long as we
understand that our concept of the Trinity points to God but does not define
God and certainly does not limit God. God’s ultimate transcendence does not
render faith impossible. God’s transcendence is an element of any theistic
faith. So is God’s immanence. That’s why we can relate to the ultimately
transcendent God in a personal, intimate way.
So let’s stop making God finite. Let’s stop locking God up
in a church, a tradition, or a book. Let’s stop thinking that our religious
dogmas define God and how we are to relate to God. They don’t. They may offer
one way of relating to God, but that is the best they can do. They are finite
not infinite, so let’s stop thinking they give us the only true handle, or
really any absolute handle at all, on who God is. We use our human language to
talk about God. We use our human minds to think about God. We use our human
hearts to feel God and to respond to God. It’s all we can do. All of it is
possible, and when it is genuine and authentic it is very, very good. But we
must always remember: God is greater than anything we can ever imagine. Greater
than anything we can ever conceive. Greater than any human words. Greater than
any human language. Anselm of Canterbury famously said that God is that greater
than which nothing can be imagined. Although his words are not really a
definition of God, they are powerfully true. If we have imagined it, it is not
God. The best it can be is something that points us toward God. As long as we
remember that our ideas and institutions cannot be more than that we may use
them with confidence. Critically, but with confidence. When we make them more
than that we fall into idolatry, for any human image of God that claims
absolute validity is an idol. Only God is God. We would do well to remember
that truth a whole lot better than we usually do.
The other undeniable reality that we face is the reality of
our finitude. Deny it as we might, we are finite. We are limited. We are
mortal. We do not possess divine power. We do not possess absolute divine
truth. Our earth is mortal. As long as we keep using them, there will be a time
when the earth’s resources run out. There was a time when the earth was not,
and there will be a time when it is not again. It seems that the whole universe
is mortal. As far as we understand it, before the Big Bang it was not; and it
seems that there will be a time when it is not again.[2]
So let’s stop pretending that we are more than we are. Let’s embrace our
finitude, for it is our existential reality. Let’s let our mortality give our
lives meaning. After all, what would it be to live forever? Given what we know
about the finite nature of our planet and indeed of the entire universe it
doesn’t even make much sense to speak of living forever. Only God is forever,
if you will forgive my applying a time-bound category to the reality that I
just said was beyond time. (Our need to do contradictory things like that, by
the way, and the truth in things like that, are part of the paradoxical nature
of faith.) Or maybe “forever” means precisely beyond time. We humans cannot be
beyond time, for we are part of the created being of which time is a category. If
I had forever it wouldn’t matter much what I do today, but of course I don’t
have forever. Mortality gives urgency to life. Mortality gives shape to life,
so let’s stop denying mortality and start embracing it.
After all, God made us mortal. We must assume that God had
God’s reasons for creating us that way. I think that God created us mortal
because God was out to create creatures not out to create gods, and if we were
immortal we would be gods. Genesis says that God made women and men in the
image and likeness of God, not as gods. Genesis is right to limit its
description of us humans that way. Creatures, that is, created beings, must be
mortal. Otherwise they wouldn’t really be creatures. Mortality is our lot.
Finitude is our lot, so let’s build lives that accept our limitations. Let’s
not let fear of death destroy the joy of life. Let’s use the limited resources
our earth offers more responsibly than we have so far. Let’s not live as though
there were no tomorrow, for there will be a tomorrow. But let’s not live as
though tomorrow equaled forever, for it does not. Let us cherish each day that
we have, for we have only a limited number of them. Let us act to make everyone’s
limited number of days better. For far too many people their days are
diminished by poverty, violence, and social, economic, cultural, and political
oppression. No one’s days should be diminished by such preventable ills. Let us
embrace our finitude. Let us become the people God created us to be—finite,
limited people but full of spirit, full of gifts, capable of love and of
justice. If we can do that our finitude will not be a curse. It will be a
blessing.
[1] For
a discussion of the nature of human language about God see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon,
2008, Chapter 3.
[2]
Yes, I know. It makes no sense to speak of “before the Big Bang,” for “before”
is a category of time, and time is a category of what came into existence with
the Big Bang. So be it. I still think that somehow there was a “before the Big
Bang” and that in that “before” the universe did not exist. Unless of course
existence consists of an expansion, retraction, and re-expansion of the
universe without beginning and without end. But that doesn’t seem to be model
astrophysicists favor today.
