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.