What’s a Theology For?
Part One: God Concepts for The Rest of Us
As a university lecturer and rabbi, I’m in the privileged position of talking about religion and spirituality. A lot. Both in the classroom (or, over the past year and a half, online) and in one-on-one mentoring relationships.
What I’ve learned from my students has never ceased to surprise me and make me think further — and, I hope, more deeply — about both individual and cultural perceptions of the divine. This is as true of people I’ve met who are not Jewish as it is among Jews I’ve talked with about religion.
Most importantly, as I’ve learned over the years, if you ask a group of people about their religious beliefs, no matter what they may be, you’re in for an earful.
Months ago, while reading theology and doing research for an upcoming book, I polled Jewish-identifying friends on social media, asking them to define their God-concept/s. This could have been a broader audience, and likely will be next time. Yet, somehow, I was curious about the varieties of Jewish belief, which I suspected had changed over time. And, of course, I was grateful for everyone’s comments and input.
Before I go on, I can hear the question being asked: “God-concept? What do you mean by that, specifically?” On one hand, it’s an intuitive question. On the other, it is simply not reducible to the binary of belief vs. non-belief — that is, devotion to a male-designated God who resides in heaven and hears prayer vs. atheism. Rather, what I’ve found is that when you dig deeper into the question, and present a working vocabulary with which to describe God-concepts, a more textured, nuanced picture unfolds, and we end up with a list of possible approaches to belief. (I leave the question of why one should care about such a nuanced picture for part two of this piece)
On Facebook, for example, I asked what God-concept, if anything, my friends believed in. These were the possible choices I offered at the time:
1. A personal God: God in the heavens, as described in Jewish tradition
2. God as spirit: An entity of some kind, perhaps undefinable, and whether or not you can communicate with it is uncertain to you
3. Pantheism: The entire universe is Deity
4. Panentheism: Deity contains the entire universe, but also extends well beyond it
5. The God of process theology — limited in power, and is evolving, learning, growing
6. Atheism and/or Humanism: No God/s
7. Agnosticism: Uncertain as to whether God/s exist/s
8. Polytheism: Belief in more than one God or Goddess
9. Other (please define)
I received sixteen responses, and of these, five responded with panentheism, (choice 4). Four replied with uncertain as to whether God/s exist/s /agnosticism (7). Two answered pantheist (3), and one said that they were divided between pantheism and panentheism (3 or 4), because although they believed God pervaded the universe, they weren’t certain whether the divine extended beyond it. Three responded that they were atheists (6).
One respondent wrote that all deities (both Gods and Goddesses) are ultimately one. This viewpoint is common in pagan communities, and can be bracketed as polytheist (8), subsumed under a monotheist umbrella of some kind (1–5), or both.
Notable here was the fact that not a single respondent chose a personal God (1). Then again, my Facebook wall might not be representative of the general population’s responses, and I only received sixteen. Still, I’d like to expand this poll to see what the lived (phenomenological) reality is among Jews today, as opposed to what we often find in religious studies textbooks about Jewish belief.
As for my own response, my perspective was a prismatic, panentheistic God-concept closest to 4 (with some 5 — see the next paragraph). For the past twenty years or so, I have referred to this view as “aspected monotheism,” as it recognizes one pervasive force, as well as the human element of projection of individual and collective/societal needs onto the cosmos. That is, in a given culture, at a particular time and place, we see the God-concept that we most need and, pattern-seekers that we are, we map it onto this force. Hence, cultural expressions such as gods of agriculture, chthonic deities of the underworld, gods of agriculture and the Earth’s fertility, gods of the sea, love goddesses. And, of course, the singular, all-powerful Gods of the monotheistic religions.
Around ten years ago, however, I also began to find process theology (5) useful when dealing with the problem of why evil exists in the world, and why bad things happen to good people. This is the problem of theodicy, and it’s among the diciest and most challenging in theology. Process theology has found inroads into Judaism, thanks to authors such as Rabbi Bradley Artson, but began in Christian theology, which, in turn, stemmed from the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
That some individuals and cultures have polytheistic God-concepts, some monotheistic, and still others, a more diffuse view of the flow of energy and the presence of spirit is not as important as understanding each of these worldviews through the lens of the other.
In brief, I mention some of the many God-concepts we humans hold for a reason. That is, God-concepts matter. And they vary dramatically one from the other. Regardless of the provability or disprovability of the existence of the divine, if we are to understand our world more fully, the dynamics of belief, both within cultures, and as cultures, should matter to atheists and agnostics as much they do to believers. We all need to have a rich, textured vocabulary for world religions and their theologies, to avoid the perils of painting all religion, all God-concepts, and all believers with the same stereotypical brush.
More about this in Part Two.
