On religion, spirituality, faith and God

Preamble

2023 was an interesting year particularly in how some people described me. I was described as dishonest, as having blood on my hands, as being misogynistic, as having dangerous beliefs, as being unfit to parent because I taught my children values consistent with my religion, that I’m so indoctrinated that I am incapable of understanding the harm I’m causing, that I should be ashamed of myself, and that I’m an embarrassment to human kind. And that was just from atheists who believe all religion is harmful. Christian fundamentalists used used even worse descriptions because apparently I practise the wrong religion.

Overall I find little difference in how many atheists and religious fundamentalists understand, religion, spirituality, faith, and dare I say, God. Except that one group believes it’s the absolute Truth™, while the other believes it’s all BS™. There’s even agreement on what Christianity is, although one group believes it’s the greatest good to have happened in two millennia, while the other believes its the greatest evil to have hit this planet in the last 2000 years. Both groups seem reluctant to accept there are alternative ways of understanding religion, spirituality, faith and God, and for both of these groups, whatever I believe the terms mean, I’m wrong. I suppose one positive way of looking at this is that even when it comes to religion, atheist and Christian fundamentalists do sometimes agree – even if only to disagree with me and those who hold similar ideas.

One group will quote Bible passages as the authority to support their perspective while the other will quote dictionary definitions as the authority to support theirs. I think both sides sell themselves short. So here, very briefly is my understanding of religion, spirituality, faith and God

On religion

I see religion as a human phenomenon that arises from the interaction of culture, language, and experience. Religion is not a fixed or static entity, but a dynamic and evolving process that reflects the changing needs and values of human societies. It is not necessarily based on supernatural beliefs or divine revelations, but on human interpretations of reality and meaning. Religion is a way of expressing and exploring the human quest for identity, purpose, and transcendence.

On spirituality

Lloyd Geering defines spirituality as “the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things”. I agree. Spirituality is more personal and individual, while religion is more communal and institutional. Spirituality is not dependent on any particular religious tradition or doctrine, but can be found in various forms of art, literature, music, nature, and human relationships. It is an essential aspect of human life, as it helps people to cope with suffering, death, and the unknown

On faith

Faith is a human attitude of trust and confidence in the face of uncertainty and mystery. I am not convinced that faith is a matter of accepting certain propositions or dogmas as true, or of having a personal relationship with a supernatural being. It is not so much a gift from God, but a human response to the challenges and opportunities of life. Faith is not incompatible with reason, but rather complements and enriches it. I am convinced that faith is not static nor absolute, but dynamic and relative, as it changes and grows with experience and reflection.

On God

More than 50 years ago I came to understand God as a symbol of the ultimate or highest values to which human beings aspire. I see no evidence of a personal or interventionist God, who created the world, revealed himself in history, and will judge the living and the dead. God is entirely a human construct, a product of human imagination, language and culture. It is a construct that expresses the human sense of awe, wonder, and reverence for reality. I do not view God as an object of worship, but as a source of inspiration and guidance. God is not a fixed or eternal concept, but a changing and evolving one, that reflects the cultural and historical context of human beings.

Conclusion

I accept my understanding of religion, spirituality, faith and God, is not widely held and likely rejected by many atheists and those who follow the world’s major religions, especially those in the Abrahamic tradition. Certainly in Christian US and other parts of the Americas, and in Christian and Muslim Africa, my perspective is generally viewed negatively and even with hostility – as a heresy. But I am not unique in how I understand these terms. In Aotearoa, all mainline Christian denominations have liberal/progressive congregations and/or “branches” that to a greater or lesser degree hold similar views. Then there are communities with historical ties to Christianity such as Ephesus, and Sea Of Faith in Aotearoa that are based on concepts similar to those I have described above. And of course, within my faith community, while not universally held, similar concepts are expressed more openly and frequently than what might be considered historically Christian concepts.

Lloyd Geering: interpretation of God, Jesus, the human self, and a global ethic

Lloyd Geering is a New Zealand theologian who has challenged the traditional views of Christianity and religion in general. He has proposed a new interpretation of God, Jesus, and the human self, based on the insights of existentialism, humanism, and postmodernism. He has also called for a new global ethic, which values the diversity and interdependence of all life forms.

Geering’s interpretation of God is that God is not a supernatural being who created and governs the world, but a humanly created concept that expresses the human quest for meaning and value. He argues that God is a symbol of the ultimate concern of humanity, and that different cultures and religions have used different names and images for God. He also suggests that God is evolving along with human culture, and that the modern concept of God is more immanent and cosmic than transcendent and personal

Geering’s interpretation of Jesus is that Jesus was a historical figure who lived in a particular time and place, and who proclaimed a radical message of God’s kingdom as an alternative to the oppressive Roman empire and the corrupt Jewish establishment. He contends that Jesus was not divine or miraculous, but a human prophet who embodied the values of love, justice, and peace. He also maintains that Jesus did not physically rise from the dead, but that the resurrection is a metaphor for the continuing presence and influence of Jesus in the community of his followers

Geering’s interpretation of the human self is that the human self is not a fixed or eternal entity, but a dynamic and relational process that emerges from the interaction of the human body, mind, and environment. He claims that the human self is constantly changing and developing, and that it is shaped by the cultural and historical context in which it lives. He also asserts that the human self is not separate or superior to other forms of life, but part of the interconnected web of life that constitutes the biosphere

Geering’s call for a new global ethic is based on his recognition of the challenges and opportunities that the modern world presents to humanity. He acknowledges that the human species has reached a critical point in its history, where it faces the threats of ecological crisis, nuclear war, and social injustice, but also the possibilities of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and cultural diversity. He urges that humanity needs to develop a new global ethic that respects the dignity and rights of all life forms, and that fosters the values of cooperation, compassion, and creativity. He envisions that humanity can create a new global community that transcends the boundaries of nation, race, and religion, and that celebrates the common humanity and the unique differences of all people

These are some of the main aspects of Lloyd Geering’s proposals, which reflect his non-realist, historical-critical, progressive, and pluralistic approach to Christianity and religion. His proposals have been influential and controversial, and have provoked both admiration and criticism from different quarters. His proposals have also invited further dialogue and debate about the role and relevance of religion in the contemporary world, which, not surprisingly, is the purpose of this essay.

Sources for this essay include:

• Lloyd Geering – Wikipedia
• Sir Lloyd Geering at 100: ‘I find a lot of things to rejoice in’
• Book review: Geering a religious athiest?
• A hundred years of heresy
• How my thinking has changed – by Sir Lloyd Geering
• Google Books – Christianity Without God
• God is not dead yet, Dr. Geering
• Lloyd Geering – Springer Link

Being on the same page as Sir Lloyd Geering

This, in part, is an article I intended to post to celebrate Sir Lloyd Geering’s 105^th birthday on 26 February this year. As the anniversary came and went the article became less relevant until I had forgotten all about it until I rediscovered it a week or two ago as I was weeding out old unpublished articles. If it hadn’t been for an an article I read the previous day it would have been deleted, but the coincidence prompted me to a complete revision, and this is the result.

Although Sir Lloyd Geering was 31 years old when I was born, his religious journey and mine run almost in parallel in time and in outcome. I was unaware of his existence until he hit the headlines in 1966 when I was 17. He gave an address where he stated that the Bible’s record of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not true. Not long after he made the claim that humans have no “immortal soul”.

I was surprised how similar our ideas about religion were, although I would never have dared been open about them, as I knew I was considered to be odd. Adding another reason to be bullied by expressing what I mistakenly thought was a unique way of understanding religion was something I wished to avoid. Hearing someone with authority openly express what I feared to share did help me to see that I wasn’t a complete oddball/nutcase. It helped to restore in me a little confidence to trust my own experiences and my interpretation of them – something that society had been very successful in destroying up to that time.

For anyone wishing to know a little more about Sir Lloyd, I recommend reading Celebrating Sir Lloyd Geering: New Zealand’s ‘prophet of modernity’ published in September last year following the establishment of a scholarship in honour of his name.

Before I summarise where Sir Lloyd and I agree (we don’t agree on everything), I feel it is necessary to point out that he is not “some obscure theologian from New Zealand” who has nothing of value to contribute because “he’s a theologian” as claimed by some contributors to the comments on my blog. In this country he’s highly respected, as a glance at the list of honours that have been bestowed on him indicate. Please note that honours are granted after wide consultation and especially with those in the same and similar field(s) of endeavour, which in the case of Sir Lloyd is with other theologians, religious bodies and organisations, and academia. His honours include:

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1988 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to theological and religious studies
• Honorary Doctor of Literature degree by Victoria University of Wellington in 1988, where he was also Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies
• New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal for his services to New Zealand
• Honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by Knox College in Dunedin in 1992
• Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (PCNZM) in the 2001 New Year Honours for services to religion and theology – redesignated as a Knight Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (GNZM) in 2009, after the restoration of titular honours by the New Zealand government
• honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Otago University in 2006
• Member of the Order of New Zealand (ONZ), New Zealand’s highest civilian honour, limited to 20 living people, in the 2007 New Year Honours for services to public and theological affairs

Where Sir Lloyd Geering and I agree:

• Religion is not a set of doctrines or beliefs, but a total mode of living that shapes one’s worldview, values, and practices. Religion is a human creation that evolves over time in response to changing historical and cultural contexts.
• Religion is not a supernatural phenomenon, but a natural and possibly necessary aspect of human existence. Religion serves various functions for human beings, such as providing meaning and purpose, expressing awe and wonder, fostering community and morality, and coping with suffering and death. Like every other aspect of human society, religion can also have negative effects, such as promoting violence, intolerance, and oppression.
• Religion needs to be reinterpreted and reformed for the contemporary world. For this age, it requires a global and ecological perspective that respects the diversity of religious traditions and the common humanity of all people. It calls for a critical and creative approach to religion that engages with the challenges and opportunities of the present age. The religious organisation to which I belong also holds this view, revising its collective insights every 10 to 20 years.
• God is not a personal or transcendent being, but the embodiment of one’s highest values. The traditional concept of God as an external agent who intervenes in human affairs or reveals divine truths serves no useful purpose today, nor does the idea of God as a metaphysical reality or a ground of being.
• God is a symbol or metaphor that expresses one’s ultimate concern or commitment. God is the name we give to what we value most in life, such as love, justice, peace, or beauty. God is not an object of worship, but a subject of aspiration. God is not something we believe in, but something we live for.
• God is not a fixed or universal concept, but a dynamic and contextual one. God changes as human values change over time and across cultures. God reflects our best hopes and ideals, as well as our worst fears and failures. God challenges us to grow and change, as well as to critique and transform our society.
• God is not a matter of faith, but a matter of experience. God is not revealed by authority or tradition, but by personal insight and conscience. God is not encountered by prayer or ritual, but by action and service. God is not found by looking up or out, but by looking within and around.

There are other theologians who share a similar perspective to Geering – that God is not a supernatural being, but a human construction or symbol. For example, Paul Tillich, a German-American theologian, argued that God is not a personal being, but the “ground of being” or the ultimate reality that transcends human categories. John Shelby Spong, an American bishop and author, proposed that God is not an external entity, but the source of life and love within us. Don Cupitt, a British philosopher and former priest, suggested that God is a human creation that expresses our ideals and values.

These theologians are considered as non-theistic or post-theistic – they do not affirm the existence of a personal God who intervenes in human affairs. They are also influenced by modern philosophy, science and biblical criticism, which challenge the traditional views of God and religion. They seek to reinterpret Christianity in a way that is relevant and meaningful for contemporary people.

Where/who/what is God?

When God is no longer a person up there in the sky, where is God? When God is no longer personified in ways which can be controlled and manipulated by the powerful, who is God? When we stop creating images of God which are mere projections of ourselves, what is God?

Rev. Dawn Hutchings, pastordawn Sunday 5 December 2021

The above paragraph is from the sermon NATIVITY – a parable born in the darkness of trauma given by Pastor Dawn. She is one of several Christian pastors/preachers I follow on WordPress. Pastor Dawn Identifies herself as a 21st Century Progressive Christian Pastor. I suspect most of the others would also identify in a similar vein, even if they haven’t identified specifically as such.

The sermon itself, places into perspective the minds of the gospel writers in light of the genocide being committed against the Jews by the Roman empire that started in the latter part of the first century AD, and continued for another fifty or so years. I agree with Pastor Dawn, that without understanding the circumstances of the writers, it’s not possible to understand their intent, nor the meaning of what they wrote.

Even though the Gospels were written nearly 2000 years ago, our modern understanding of the effects of social upheaval, and how people responded to tyranny and genocide at the end of the first century means that we should be able interpret their contents in a nonliteral way, which I suspect was the intent of the writers, and perhaps implicitly understood by the first generation Christians who were predominantly Jews facing extreme persecution by the Roman Empire – as Pastor Dawn describes it “the first Holocaust”.

Given the conditions of the time, why any thinking person today should believe that the Gospels must be read as factual history is beyond me. And while I can understand that fundamentalist indoctrination might be reason why some Christians conflate universal truths told in the form of storytelling, parables, metaphors and symbolism with historical facts, I struggle to understand why so many non Christians also hold a similar view – that the gospels are meant to be understood literally so are therefore a pack of lies. Neither perspective is accurate and both do an injustice to the works of art contained within the Bible.

Pastor Dawn offers a plausible explanation as to how early Christians came to deify Jesus. Although she doesn’t mention it in the sermon, Roman emperors of the day were deified and surprise, surprise, myths were created claiming some to be the offspring of a union between a mortal and a god. At least one of them had a star hovering in the sky to announce the birth. Under the circumstances, attaching a similar story to the birth of Jesus seems an obvious way of describing the significance of Jesus and his teachings to his early followers. The symbolism would have been very obvious to those of the day.

I’m a firm believer in what Quakers describe as “continuing revelation“. This can be understood in many ways, (old Quaker saying: Ask four Quakers, get five answers) but my take on it is that with new knowledge comes new understandings (of the world around us and of us as individuals and communities). While I vehemently disagree with Richard Dawkins’ view of religion, I can thank him for naming (but not originating) an evolutionary model to explain what Quakers have intuitively known for generations: that ideas, values, concepts of morality, or art, be they religious or otherwise do not stand still. They change over time.

Dawkins coined the term meme to describe the mechanism by which ideas and concepts are inherited from generation to generation, and in a way similar to how genes combine and mutate and subsequently succeed or die out, so do memes. An example might be the concept of slavery as it evolved in the West and culminated in the horrors associated with slavery in America. In its heyday, most people in southern USA considered slavery to be part of the natural order of the world. Today, remnants of that concept remain in the form of racism, it’s a meme that has mutated by not (yet) died out completely.

Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Christian history should be aware how much Christianity has changed (evolved) over the centuries. Let’s face it, Jesus was a Jew, in both ethnicity and religion. His desire was reform, to place an emphasis on ethics and social justice rather than rigid ceremony and law. It was not to create a new religion. I have no doubt that he would find Reform Judaism closer to his goals than most (perhaps all) forms of Christianity.

Meanwhile Christianity evolved into a multiplicity of forms – some developing characteristics that expanded on the ideals of the first followers of Jesus and some that developed traits that Jesus strongly opposed. I see that as an inevitable and natural outcome of the evolutionary process. Just as organisms evolve, so do religions. If they don’t evolve to adapt to their environment then they either become restricted to a niche environment to which they are suited or they die out.

Evolution also applies to our concept(s) of God(s). One characteristic that most fundamentalist Christians and many atheists have in common, is that they have an almost identical notion of how God is defined. Both seem to be unable to grasp the fact the Christian God has been under constant evolutionary change from the moment Christianity became a movement – even before it moved from being a heresy of judaism to a movement followed by Gentiles.

Some Christian fundamentalist movements will insist that God hasn’t evolved. He (it’s always ‘He‘) has always been the same, only no one fully understood the scriptures until the founder/leader of that particular movement/sect discovered their “True” meaning. In extreme cases theirs is the only “Truth”, and any who believe otherwise are heretics, deservedly destined to whatever fate their God has reserved for non-believers.

Atheists can find no evidence to support the existence of any god as an entity, and I have no issue with that. In fact, I concur. But then some atheists make the assumption that every form of religion must, of necessity, include a conviction that at least one deity or supernatural entity lies at its heart, even if that means shoehorning their concept of a non-existing deity into faith traditions that have evolved different notions of what God is (or is not).

I belong to a 350 year old faith tradition commonly referred to as the Quakers, and to a particular branch that in the 20th and 21st centuries is often described as liberal Quakerism, although in many ways it is the most traditional branch when it comes to practising our faith. In the short history of Quakerism, there is ample evidence of Dawkins’ memes in action. What is now viewed as the liberal branch were the conservatives in the eighteenth century, holding true to the tradition that everyone has direct access to the divine without the need for any intermediaries such as clergy or scripture, whereas the progressives/liberals of the day embraced the new evangelism and biblical authority that was sweeping through Christianity at that time and adopted articles of faith, creeds, clergy, and much else that is found within the evangelical movement.

In evolutionary terms evangelical Quakerism has been the most successful branch within the Quaker movement with about 85% of Quakers worldwide belonging to one of the evangelical branches, whereas the then conservative, and now very liberal branch account for around 12% of all Quakers, and confined to Britain and former British settler colonies (such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada), Western Europe, and some parts of the USA.

My reason for the (extremely) truncated description of Quaker branches is that on many occasions in the blogosphere, I have been “corrected” for making claims about Quaker beliefs and practices that are true for Aotearoa, but incorrect when referring to Quakerism in many other parts of the world. In fact I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by one atheist blogger that I have no right to call myself a Quaker as I don’t profess to be a Christian. Whenever I refer to Quaker beliefs and practices, my only point of reference is the religious community I am connected to (Quakers Aotearoa, Te Hāhi Tūhauwiri). Please keep this in mind whenever I refer to Quaker beliefs and practices. I accept that Quakers in many parts of the world have different beliefs and practices, but I am less familiar with those.

So, back to the question of where/who/what is God. For atheists and Christian Fundamentalists, the Answer is simple. For the former, there is no such thing, end of story. For the latter there is no doubt of “His” existence, and they can (and do frequently) quote passage after passage from the Bible to support their claim. For the rest of us it’s not so simple. God has evolved and continues to evolve.

You’ve got to be kidding!

I’ve just read that the POTUS is required by law to issue an annual proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer “on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.”

I thought there was a separation of church and state in the US. The writer has got to be kidding, right?

Christianity without God

On several occasions on this blog I have attempted to describe my religious beliefs. I describe myself as being religious and as being a non-theist. I describe myself as a Quaker but not a Christian. However I still find “God language” useful and meaningful to me. For myself, God is a metaphor, or perhaps more accurately an envelope that holds those ideals I value highly – fairness, compassion, social justice, kindness all rank highly. However, someone else may value obedience, adherence to rules, an eye for an eye, conformity. Whatever values one holds as being most important, that is what is contained within the envelope I choose to call God.

As an aside, I would argue that in fact even those who wish to believe in God as a supernatural being, also do exactly what I do, except they have come to believe that the envelope is the all important bit, worthy of worship itself – something beyond themselves. By doing so, they see the contents contained within as characteristics of the container. The outcome is that the contents are no longer open to question or revision.

What many of my readers may not be aware of is that Christianity today is less liberal than it was a century ago or even in my youth. Theological Liberalism remained the driving force of Christianity in Aotearoa New Zealand until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Since then, Liberal Christianity, along with it’s younger relative Progressive Christianity have faced a greater challenge from conservatism, Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism..

Those same forces have had a 50 year advantage in the USA, having gained momentum in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is presumably why some comments from Americans regarding my attempts at explaining a non-theistic approach to God are so antagonistic, especially from avowed atheists. Most seem to be unable to conceive of God in non-theistic terms.

Complicating matters, is that here in NZ only one in three people claim a christian affiliation, whereas in the US three out of four people claim to be Christian. So the context in which my beliefs developed are radically different from that which most Americans experience. The result is that that neither the American Christian nor American atheist has much in common with the Kiwi form of liberal religion that shaped my world view.

So rather than attempt to use my own words to explain what I believe, here is part a presentation made by Sir Lloyd Geering around 9 years ago (he’s 101 now, and he was 92 at the time of the presentation).

This particular part of the presentation was an afterthought. He was asked to explain the backgound behind his book Christianity Without God. It’s essentially “off the cuff” as he hadn’t made preparation for this part. I’ve included a Youtube clip. As often happens with the Kiwi accent, Youtube’s inbuilt transcript doesn’t do a particularly good job, so for those who find our accent a little difficult, I’ve transcribed it below keeping as close as I can to his actual words.

Well, Christianity Without God came about in a funny way, you know. I don”t know if you have heard anything of the Sea of Faith movement. It is associated with Don Cupitt, the radical theologian in Britain, and now it’s a movement in New Zealand as well. At one of the conferences, I offered a little workshop called Christianity Without God. I did it with a bit of tongue in check really, because it sounds a bit absurd – how can you have Christianity without God?

However, it aroused so much interest that somebody put it on the Internet. Then somebody in America found it on the Internet and drew attention to Polebridge Publishers about it. So Bob Funk who was at the head of Polebridge Publishers and the Westar Institute said “Couldn’t you write a book about it?” and I said “I don’t really know about it. I’ll have a go”. So I wrote Christianity without God.

Now, in the course of this it was really tracing to my own thinking about God, because when I came into the church, they all talked about God. I didn’t know quite what to make of God. I knew the image of an old man in the sky was just an image, and I was content, really, to feel I knew nothing about God – that God was the supreme mystery about life. And then I gradually came (as a result of reading a good deal of theology) to refine that.

So in this book, I have tried to show that in Christianity without God, I mean Christianity without a theistic view of God. Now, theism is the term which means you think of God as personal being – of course infinite compared with us, but nevertheless, one who thinks, and plans, and performs miracles, and answers prayers. That’s theism.

Well, all I want to say is that that view of God no longer gels for me – no longer gels for a lot of people. Now it doesn’t mean to say that I’m casting the word God away. No, If I use the word God at all, I’ve got to use it in a different way from that.

Indeed, one great Roman Catholic scholar said right back in the ’60s we have to learn to speak of God in a radically new way. So Christianity without God means Christianity without that old idea of God, but it leaves God language free.

Of course we don’t have to use God language. God language is a symbolic language, and theology has much more in common with poetry than it has with science because it has to do with that highest dimension of human experience – what sometimes we call the spiritual dimension, because we haven’t got adequate words to describe it otherwise.

That’s why it links it up with poetry and the arts – the visual arts, and the dramatic arts, the storytelling arts. There where we have mediums through which which we can use in order to reach out to that which is beyond us. So if I use the word God at all, though I’m more careful now because, you see it’s ceasing to be a word that you can use without explaining what you mean by it. Otherwise people assume you’re meaning the theistic God, so in some ways it’s better not to talk about God at all. But I do I do so in the way a theologian, Gordon Kaufman (from whom I’ve learned much), suggested.

The word God has played a very important role in the Western world. Not simply because of that image which has to go, but because of what it did. It was a central point. Now to illustrate this, let me say when our pioneering forebears came to Australia and New Zealand to what they thought was a sort of virgin land (forget about the Māori and the Aboriginies), and took it over and planned how to use it.

Their surveyors had to come in, and what did the surveyor do? He went to the nearest hill and put a trig station in, and from that trig station, he measured out the land and it was given out in plots. Now the trig station was on a chosen bit – that is, it was humans who decided where the trig station was to be. But having chosen it, it then became a central point to which they referred for the land.

Now the word God has played that role in the Western world. if you don’t know a thing, you’d say “Only God knows that”. Who made the world? “Don’t know. God made the world”. That’s how we answered all the difficult questions of our children as they were growing up. Use god as a reference point. So the use of the word God as a reference point is very good.

Now, what is my reference point? I was asked this recently when they did a television documentary about me. What was my reference point and I said “Well, they are values. The things I value most,” I said, “are Love and justice and compassion and goodwill and honesty and so it goes on,” and then I said, “and those are, for me, God.

In that sense I think God language has a very important role to play but in the traditional sense of that image, as John Robinson said in 1963, “That image of God has to go”.

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Like perhaps the majority of Quakers in the liberal tradition, I am a non-theist, yet the term God has significant meaning me. Whether or not we believe that God is a deity, we share a belief in values and a philosophy of life which we can ascribe to being attributes of God. It is what we share, rather than what each of us specifically believes that unites us, not only to those within the Religious Society of Friends, nor only those who hold similar values, but with all of humanity and beyond.

In the post linked to below, Peter Turner has selected some quotations that illustrate how Liberal Quakers understand God.

I have much been influenced by Quaker thoughts and ways. Their horizontal power structures in their church organisations, their intelligent, practical good works, the sheer good will that you can feel at any meeting of the Friends – I don’t know why I didn’t become a member years ago! (Well, actually, I do; but that’s […]

via 896: QUAKER VIEWS OF GOD by PETER TURNER — zingcreed

God is not real

In her book The history of God, Karen Armstrong, a former nun writes:

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that ‘he’ would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other Rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality ‘out there’; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary rational process. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world.

Professor Sir Lloyd Geering, noted New Zealand theologian and writer, would concur with the claim that “God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world“. To him, God is the embodiment of our highest ideals, and not some supernatural being. Of course, Sir Lloyd would say that most Christians aren’t monotheists at all, but Trinitarianists, but that’s for another post (perhaps).

Lloyd Geering: on God

For me, God referred to the mystery of life that could not be grasped by the human mind. But more recently I have come to realize that God does not name a reality in the cosmos at all. Rather it is a humanly created idea. It belongs to the human thought-world. It is a word by which we have tried to make sense of the physical world we live in.

This idea of God has a long history, which the remarkable scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong has written up as “The History of God”. God is an idea that has played an extremely important role in our evolving culture. It supplied an ultimate point of reference. It was the idea of God as creator and unifier of the universe that led to the rise of modern science, when mediaeval theologians tried to discover what they called ‘the ways of God’ by conducting experiments. It was they who laid the foundations of today’s empirical science.

But we also associated with this idea of God the values of love, compassion, honesty, and truth, because we find these make such moral demands upon us that they clearly transcend us. And though the idea of God had its beginning in our mythological past, it remains a useful word to refer to our highest values. As the New Testament asserts, “God is love”.

Lloyd Geering, 21st May 2017 sermon at the Community of Saint Luke Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand

Lloyd Geering: on meaning

Before we can enter profitably into discussion with one another on any particular subject, it is important to ensure that we are all using our words in much the same way. Words are not the fixed objects which people often imagine them to be. Many words change their meaning over a period of time. Even at one particular time a word may possess not just one meaning, but in fact hold together a whole family of meanings. One meaning may be intended in one place but at a later stage another meaning implied. Because words sometimes depend upon their context for their exact meaning, even the speaker himself may be misled, not realizing that the new verbal context has given the word a slightly different meaning from what it had in an earlier context. This ambiguity in the very nature of the verbal language with which we communicate means that the value of our discussion or debate may be greatly reduced if, unknowingly, we are using one or more of the key words in different ways. Where difference of opinion rests solely on the different uses of words, it is called a merely verbal argument.

Some verbal battles can be avoided at the outset if we simply take more care with our use of words. But they are not so easy to avoid wherever it is a question of that small number of basic words in the language, which by their very fundamental nature are either difficult or impossible to define in terms of others less basic. One such word, for example, is the basic term ‘God’ and the problem to which we have been referring often causes the modern debate between atheist and theist to be fruitless, for there is little use in discussing whether God exists until there is some agreement about the precise meaning to be given to the word.

Lloyd Geering, Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope