GODS ONE GOD NO GOD

I am going to define a god as a focussed expression (or a projection) of a given social order, or of various aspects of that order. Survival of the social order is the first commandment.

I would define the One God as the focussed expression of what is exactly not the social order, or any given aspect of it. That is, ultimate reality. That reality which we can’t escape.

The distinction between ultimate reality and the social order is the beginning of wisdom. The social order always seeks to incorporate the divine reality within it, reduce God to a god. One must read the Bible alert to the fact that often the God being portrayed is in fact a “social” God – a God who allows the Israelites to carry out their centuries long nurtured dreams of vengeance against the treacherous Amalekites by telling them it is His vengeance alone, and not their own, that they are accomplishing. But the very fact that the Israelites felt a need for distancing themselves from their own violent desires in this way tells us that something else is going on. Eventually people would take “Vengeance is mine” to mean “Vengeance is simply wrong”. This is a misreading, but a telling one.

In the present day we are no longer dealing with God as opposed to gods, but God as opposed to no god. The monotheists said, “There is only one God.” Today we can only assert, with vanishing conviction, “There is a God.” That is in no way the same thing.

Accusing the secular world of being idolatrous –worshipping money, sex, power, consumer goods, rather than statues of Baal and Astarte – has become a cliché among present-day Christians. Yet the Bible hardly ever refers to idolatry as anything other than the literal worship of wooden or stone gods.

In fact, formal or casual atheists are as “monotheistic” as believers. They believe in ultimate reality, a reality they can’t escape – it is impersonal, unconscious, uncaring. Utterly meaningless. They don’t worship this – that would be pointless. It is much easier to believe in this version of reality than of the other – a conscious, personal, caring, God. (So much whistling in the dark!) Money, sex, and power are merely distractions, an endless series of Pavlovian stimulations that temporarily stave off despair, not false idols.

We have all been gripped by the fear of this Lord – the Lord of Oblivion, the King of Nothing, whose majesty and power show us up as utterly insignificant and worthless. The fear of the Lord in the Bible is exactly this fear. It is the fear of Death. That is always our first apprehension of ultimate reality.

But it is an apprehension that begs a question. “Is that all there is?” Instead of defensively and loudly asserting one’s belief in the traditional God-against-the-gods, one may quietly assert an alternate possibility – that the “all there is” might contain some germ of hope. “All there is”, in the Peggy Lee sense, is not enough – but “all there is” in the cosmic sense is so much, so vast, so fantastic, that it becomes all but impossible to believe that it is all for nothing.