Talking about God

This post is about some of the different ways in which people talk about God.   

If talking about God isn’t something that you do, then you may well not be interested in any of this.  I’m mainly writing about how Christians talk about God - because that’s the religious tradition I know best.  Also, I’m engaging with some concepts from theology, and even religious people aren’t always keen on theology.  All things considered, this post may have limited appeal.

  

My starting-point is that there is something called natural theology, and a lot of people don’t like it.  And I don’t just mean atheists and agnostics; a lot of religious people can’t stomach it either.

 “Natural theology” is often thought of in terms of trying prove the existence of God (or to show that God’s existence is probable), on the basis of matters that are common ground between believers and unbelievers.  I agree that this is part of natural theology:  but I would understand the term more widely, as encompassing all the varieties of God-talk that don’t take as their point of departure the assertion that God has been revealed in sacred scriptures or in a community’s tradition.

 As far as the traditional arguments for the existence of God are concerned, I don’t want to debate their merits here: what I am interested in, rather, is how various Christians have responded to this way of talking about God.

One common response is to say that this type of reasoning has some value, and takes you part of the way; but grace, and faith, can take you further.  You can find this approach in Aquinas.  You can also find it illustrated more poetically in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Virgil (who represents natural human reason) leads the poet through hell and purgatory, but Beatrice (representing grace) takes over as Dante’s guide to heaven.

There is however another strand within Christian thought that wants to rule out argumentative natural theology from the outset, as being irrelevant, if not positively impious.  Asked if they think that any of the traditional God arguments work, these Christians are likely to say that they don’t really care.  What is the basis for this devout hostility?

Some people say, perhaps inspired by Pascal, that the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are two entirely different things.  It’s not that these are different pictures of the same reality, viewed from different perspectives; they do not meet at all.  And some would say that Christianity tells a specific story, and that the believer ought to speak from within that story, rather than engaging in philosophical argument.  For instance, if a Christian who accepts this story-based (or “narrative”) approach to theology is asked about the problem of evil, they are unlikely to reply with any of the classical argumentative moves (such as the “free will defence”).  They are more likely to say that they don’t know why there is evil in the world, but that they know that God - through the life and death of Jesus - has stood in solidarity with the human victims of evil.  If their interlocutor says that this argument goes nowhere - because it rests on a narrative that the interlocutor doesn’t accept - then the Christian will retort that they are not talking about some generic God, but the very specific God of the Christian story.  So of course they speak from within that story:  where else would they speak from?  This conversation rapidly ends in deadlock.

I like stories; and there’s something very appealing about seeing the Bible as primarily a book of stories, rather than a rulebook.  But nevertheless I’m troubled by the appeal to “narrative theology”, if what it means is that the religious believer must always and only speak from within their community’s sacred story.  This seems to risk leaving religion as a closed system, internally coherent perhaps, but wholly self-referential, and able to deal with the external world only by preaching at it.  A hermetic religious worldview of this kind may well be shielded from outside attack, but only at the price of not being able to have any kind of constructive external conversation.  

My concern becomes still more acute if you take into account approaches to God that are based, not on argument, but experience:  given my wide definition of the term, I would see these approaches as also being part of “natural theology”.

The Religious Experience Research Centre, founded 40 years ago by the biologist Alister Hardy, collects accounts from members of the public who believe that they have had a “spiritual or religious experience or felt a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday life”.  

There are many accounts of this kind of experience, some of them very striking and moving.  Here is an example from Quaker Faith and Practice (section 26.05).  Emelia Fogelklou, writing of herself in the third person, describes an experience she had at the age of 23, at a time when she felt that she was just “a shell empty of life”.

But then one bright spring day - it was the 29^th of May 1902 - while she sat preparing for her class under the trees … quietly, invisibly, there occurred the central event of her whole life.  Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder.  It was as if the “empty shell” burst.  All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away.  She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear irradiating irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.

The first words which came to her – although they took a long time to come – were, ‘This is the great Mercifulness. This is God. Nothing else is so real as this.’ The child who had cried out in anguish and been silenced had now come inside the gates of Light. She had been delivered by a love that is greater than any human love. Struck dumb, amazed, she went quietly to her class, wondering that no one noticed that something had happened to her.

Accounts of this nature come from adherents of many different religious traditions, and from those who are not located in any specific tradition.  And very often - as in Emelia Fogelklou’s account - there is nothing in the content of the experience that ties it to any particular community’s faith story.  

Experiences of this nature are reported only by a minority, many of whom will say that such an event occurred only once in their lifetime.  But there are also other kinds of experience that are much less spectacular, but that can nevertheless have a great deal to do with whether and how people think or talk about God.

Here is a very well-known poem by the American poet Mary Oliver, called “The Summer Day”.

   

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

The final two lines are very often quoted.  Taken out of context, they sound like a challenge, a sort of existential shock therapy.  But read in context, they are more like a defensive manoeuvre.  She is saying something like this:  here is how I have been spending my day, and if you think I have been wasting my time, then what are you doing that you think is more important?

At the heart of the poem is a grasshopper - the focus of the poet’s delighted attention.  The response conveyed is one of awe, gratitude, astonishment, a sense of having been blessed, and also something that is understood as being analogous to prayer:  kneeling down in the grass, while at the same time admitting to not quite knowing what prayer is.

What is all of this about?  It’s to do with paying attention to the world, and also to your own act of paying attention:  noticing yourself noticing the world, and experiencing a sense of surprise at finding yourself as an awake, alive, breathing being on a the surface of a planet.  The Jewish writer Abraham Heschel calls this “radical amazement”:

Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.

This mode of experience doesn’t prove anything, show you any new facts, or put you inside some special story in relation to which other people are outsiders.  But it re-enchants the world:  the shift is rather like what you might experience on hearing a familiar piece of music played by a really exceptional musician.  The kind of attention that Mary Oliver is describing is a form of love.  This love encompasses, but goes beyond, the particular aspects of the natural world that she is describing; ultimately, it is directed towards the unknown source and ground by virtue of which she is able to experience what she experiences and perceive what she perceives.  Put more simply, Mary Oliver is not explaining, but exemplifying, what it might mean to love God.  

  And so my question about the narrative (or story-based) approach to belief is this.  How does it respond to the sorts of experience I have been trying to describe - both the spectacular sort, and the more everyday sort?  Are all of these types of experience of no interest, because - like the classical arguments for the existence of God - they are not “storied”, or not part of the right story?  If that is so, then there are at least two kinds of conversation that are blocked.

One sort of conversation is between those inside and outside formal religious communities.  Religious people are often contemptuous of those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.  But I think such people (or some of them, at any rate) are doing natural theology - of the experiential rather than the argumentative kind.  If the only response from within religious communities is, “None of this is anything to do with our story, so we’re not interested”, then what could otherwise be an interesting and fruitful and mutually enriching exchange never has a chance to take place. 

And the second kind of conversation is within religious communities themselves. The truth is that by no means everyone who takes part in public worship, or in the community life within which that worship is situated, does so because they see themselves as located within a shared sacred story.  Engagement with organised religion can be much more provisional and tentative. There is something in a person’s experience or perception of the world that seems to “fit” with what they see of the community’s life (and in particular its way of worship).  So they keep turning up; and in due course they might make their affiliation into something permanent.  Tell these people that they  are now incorporated into the community’s story, and that this is the sole perspective from which they should now speak about God, and they may be very perplexed indeed.  An approach that - in the name of narrative - rejects both rational argument and personal experience as ways of talking about God, runs the risk that there will be blocked and obstructed dialogues within religious communities, not just between the community and outsiders.

Arguments, experience, and stories, are all ways in which people engage with something (“God”) that can’t be fully captured by any of these means. These different forms of engagement will co-exist, not just within the same community, but within the same person.  I don’t want to talk about a synthesis between these approaches, because that sounds too static.  Instead, let’s think in terms of keeping open a space for conversation between them.

(An afterword: this post was prompted by some online exchanges with Ben Wood, who is a Quaker and a theologian.  His blog is well worth reading.  Please don’t assume that Ben agrees with any of the above!  And if you are interested in how people within the same religious community with very different conceptions of God can nevertheless carry on talking to one another, then I recommend Rhiannon Grant’s book “Telling the Truth about God”.)