The Biblical God as a Human Creation David Lee proposes that much in the Bible accords with an understanding of the existence of God as the product of human imagination.
DNA double helix Those who hold that God has no metaphysical objectivity will nevertheless agree that he exists as a potent idea in human imagination, and as an active figure in the stories we tell and the language we speak.
One look at the world of today should convince us that there is no escape from the challenge of religious faith, whether we accept the reality of the divine or not. There are those who take the position that the traditional churches have outlived their usefulness and cannot be thought of as relevant in the contemporary scene. There are also those who find it possible to maintain their active support and membership of the traditional church while holding to the concept of the divine as a human creation.
A major component of the life and work of the church has been its use of the Bible as the principle source book for the Christian religion, and the main element in liturgical worship and devotional practice. The Bible is pre-eminently a book of religious realism, and the presence of God on every page appears as central and irreducible. The theme of this paper is to look more closely at the Bible and to propose that much in it accords with an understanding of the existence of God as the product of human imagination.
Images of God There is no single idea of God in the Bible.
The Book of Joshua tells us that the Israelites were a group of warring tribes in Palestine and that they believed that God was on their side:
The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid or discouraged; take the whole army with you and go and attack Ai. I am delivering the king of Ai into your hands, along with his people, the city and his territory.’ (Joshua 8:1) The Book of Deuteronomy was written long after the Book of Joshua and in it we find that the Israelites believed that God was calling them to more than survival:
When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are about to enter to occupy it, when he drives out many nations before you – Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations more powerful than you – and when the Lord your God delivers them into your power for you to defeat, you must exterminate them. (Deut. 7:1,2) So the Israelites believed that God had given them the right to destroy the nations around them and to take their land. Such a claim seems impossible to justify in today’s world until we realise that this is one of the reasons given by some for the present policies of the State of Israel.
As time passed and Israel began to feel secure in its borders we find a more exalted image of God emerging.
So in the Book of the Prophet Micah:
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established higher than all other mountains, towering above other hills. Peoples will stream towards it; many nations will go, saying, ‘Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob’s God, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.’ For instruction issues from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will be judge between many peoples and arbiter among great and distant nations. They will hammer their swords into mattocks and their spears into pruning-knives. Nation will not take up sword against nation; they will never again be trained for war. (Micah 4:1-3) By the time we come to the time of the New Testament Israel has suffered exile, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the conquest of the Greeks and found itself under the occupation of the Romans. This resulted in a new image of God. So in the First Letter of John: sof 70 March 2005 There is no single idea of God in the Bible.
Joshua burning Ai God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him. This is how love has reached its perfection among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgement; and this we have because we are in the world as he is. In love there is no room for fear; indeed perfect love banishes fear. (1 Jn 4:16,17) So God is thought of as one who is primarily involved with human emotions, a very personal God, to do with inner tranquillity and good will. From the point of view of those who believe in the objective reality of God – God as an actual person ‘out there’ looking down upon us with infinite power and love, the differences between these images of God in the Bible are explained by saying that human beings only gradually learnt to understand the true nature of God and that it took a very long time.
The non-supernaturalist approach is that in each generation the human race invents its own idea of God to suit the challenges and opportunities of the time.
The Book of Dreams The Bible is a book of dreams. Over and over again it records God speaking to his people through their dreams. In the book of Genesis the dream of Joseph reflects the idea that the Israelites have the God-given right to possess the lands they occupy:
In a dream Jacob saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up and down on it. The Lord was standing beside him saying, ‘I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. This land on which you are lying I shall give to you and your descendants.’(Gen. 28:12,13) In the Book of Judges the dream of Gideon reflects the picture of God as the champion of the Israelites in their warring adventures:
When Gideon heard the account of the dream and its interpretation, he bowed down in worship. Then going back to the Israelite camp he said, ‘Let us go! The Lord has delivered the camp of the Midianites into our hands.’ (Judges 7:15) The Book of Job is quite explicit in saying that God speaks to people in their dreams, and even that nightmares have the purpose of warning them of difficulties to come.
Indeed, once God has spoken he does not speak a second time to confirm it. In dreams, in visions of the night, when deepest slumber falls on mortals, while they lie asleep in bed God imparts his message, and as a warning strikes them with terror. (Job 33:14-16).
The Book of Daniel shows that even the dreams of nonbelievers can bring messages from God:
Daniel answered: ‘No wise man, exorcist, magician, or diviner can tell your majesty the secret about which you ask. But there is in heaven a God who reveals secrets, and he has made known to King Nebucadnezzar what is to be at the end of this age. This is the dream and these are the visions that came into your head.’ (Dan. 2:27,28) The vision of the prophet Joel shows that even when the divine spirit falls on the human race there will still be a place for dreams:
After this I shall pour out my spirit on all mankind; your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams and your young men see visions.” (Joel 2:28) Dreams appear in the New Testament in the most Jewish of the Gospels. Matthew says that Joseph had a message from God in a dream:
After Herod’s death an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said to him, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who threatened the child’s life are dead.’ (Matt.2:19,20) The wife of Pontius Pilate is regarded as a saint in the Orthodox Church, largely because she is reported as having a dream about Jesus, again from St Matthew’s Gospel.
While Pilate was sitting in court a message came to him from his wife: ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man; I was much troubled on his account in my dreams last night.’ (Matt. 27:19) While the traditionalist believer might say that God can use dreams to convey his messages to people, and that the Bible shows this to be the case, the nonsupernaturalist will argue that even the most elementary student of psychology knows that dreams are an expression of the subconscious mind ceaselessly at work sorting out the experiences of the day and relating them to archetypal images and ideas shared by the community. The idea that God speaks to people in dreams is a good example of this, and supports the view that God is a product of the human mind.
Wisdom Whereas the place of dreams as a medium for messages from God is uniformly expressed throughout the Bible the relevance of wisdom is something which develops and matures. It begins as an expression of practical advice on virtuous living:
My son, attend to my wisdom and listen with care to my counsel, so that you may preserve discretion and your lips safeguard knowledge. (Prov. 5:1) sof 70 March 2005 12 Jacob’s ladder sof 70 March 2005 It includes the cunning insight of King Solomon as shown in his judgement in the case of the two women both claiming a new born baby:
When Israel heard the judgement which the king had given, they all stood in awe of him; for they saw that he possessed wisdom from God for administering judgement. (1Kings 3:28), All these examples however, are subject to the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.
The first step in wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and knowledge of the Most Holy One is understanding; for through me your days will be increased and years added to your life. (Prov. 9:10,11) The wisdom of God is shown in creation and providence, and it soon becomes hypostasised – the personification of the Divine.
For wisdom is more moving than any motion: she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness. For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. (Wisd.7:24,25) In the New Testament Divine Wisdom is incarnate in Christ and it is also connected with the Holy Spirit whose gift it is.
Jews demand signs, Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ nailed to the cross; and though this is an offence to Jews and folly to Gentiles, yet to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, he is the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:22-24) Here is a good example of the process by which a human attribute becomes associated in thought with the figure of the divine. So if wisdom is thought of as a property of God then humans are urged to acquire this gift and to develop it in relation to how it works in the divine economy. This is, of course, admirable, but it does not require that we believe that it can exist outside human thought and experience. However we dress it up wisdom is only conceivable as a human attribute something ‘down here’ rather than ‘up there’.
Jesus Christ The idea that God’s existence is simply a part of human consciousness and culture calls in question much of what Christians have held about the nature of Jesus Christ as God and Man. Popular religious culture tends to emphasize the divinity of Jesus. In the Catholic Creeds and the Definition of Chalcedon we see that Christ’s divinity and humanity are to be understood as quite distinct and yet joined together. So if we read the Gospels and filter out all references to the divinity of Jesus, that is, voices from heaven, angelic visitations, miracles, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and Ascension, we are not left with nothing. In fact we are left with a recognizable human person. We then approach the person of Jesus, as did the original disciples; we make contact with the son of Mary, the carpenter of Nazareth.
The Gospels reveal that his contemporaries understood Jesus as a Teacher before anything else. ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no man can do these things unless God is with him.’ (Jn 3:1,2) Over and over again he is addressed as teacher, altogether 43 times in the four Gospels. Two things flow from this observation: First, we know that a teacher is one who does more than impart information; a teacher enables the pupil to grow and mature. When all that has been imparted by the teacher has been forgotten, the confidence, the intellectual strength, remains. Put simply the teacher’s legacy is something like: ‘Think for yourself, have the courage to face facts and decide and take responsibility for your life.’ For the present generation to see Jesus in this role is to require of them a sense of maturity and self-determination not much encouraged by those who hold that religion is a matter of unquestioning faith and obedience.
Secondly, the content of the teaching of Jesus was mainly in the form of the stories we call parables. With few exceptions, for example, the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the parables may be understood in a quite worldly way. To be sure many of them begin or conclude with the formula ‘The kingdom of God is like this’, but the stories are of typical worldly situations and challenges. See, for example, The Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:29-37), The Unjust Steward (Lk. 16:1-8), and The Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11-32). They enshrine moral principles and they urge the hearer to live in a certain way, they develop the command: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.
The disciples’ initial contact with Jesus was at this level.
Belief in his messiahship and divinity came much later and was written in the Gospels many years after the events they describe. By that time Christian thinkers had become preoccupied by the struggle to make the Gospel message intelligible to the surrounding Greek culture, with all that meant in terms of the classical cosmology which was to dominate the Church for the next 1500 years. I believe that one of the ways in which we can rescue the Church from the strait- jacket of naïve realism is to renew the emphasis on the humanity of Jesus. A restoration of the teaching of Jesus will focus our minds on the idea of Christianity as a way of life before it is a set of dogmatic propositions.
David Lee is a member of the Cardiff SoF Group and was the Archdeacon of Llandaff until his retirement in 1997.
However we dress it up wisdom is only conceivable as a human attribute something ‘down here’ rather than ‘up there’. sof 70 March 2005 SoF International David Boulton reports on his speaker tour to SoF groups overseas and sister organisations.