Editor’s note: below is the revised version of CP’s article (Dianna)
Recently, I accidentally stumbled on an old podcast discussing how concepts of God are a product of one’s imagination. It claimed that people desire a higher power of some kind, and imagine all the things they would like a god to be, or are afraid a god might be, and stitch them together into an imaginary god that seems so real to them, it became real. To prove the point they looked at the teaching in a particular evangelical church where an emotionally intimate relationship with God was expected as the true mark of faith. I had something else to do so didn’t get to the end of the podcast, but I suspected a church where preaching promoted a prosperity gospel god flexibly tailored to each person’s desires. Or maybe a harshly judgmental god tailored to each person’s fears. Who knows?
I think the podcast was right in one sense. As far as I know every culture has some idea of the divine. It seems to be innate in what it is to be human. It’s true even for confirmed atheists who can’t drop talking and writing about the god they don’t believe in. It’s not that everyone is a fervent believer. Many are rather complacent about God as bequeathed to them by whatever tradition they grew up in, but complacency is not unbelief.
The podcasters were partially right in another way. In its landmark study the Robert Bellah team coined the word “Sheilaism” to identify religious beliefs imagined or borrowed to create a personal god. Perhaps we are all guilty of a little Sheilaism now and then, but it is not the way of classical Christianity.
God can be known only through God’s self revelation which is why imaginary gods must be rejected. For me as an Episcopalian a reliable understanding of God can be had only through scripture, tradition and reason. The Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament record how God has made God’s self known through two thousand years of painful, slow, incremental apprehending of who we are, who God is, what our relationship is, and what it should become. God spoke through prophets but only the test of time revealed which prophets were genuine and which were not. For Christians, God is most fully revealed in Jesus Christ who is the Word of God made flesh. The gospels tell the story of his birth, life, teaching, death and resurrection. New Testament books that follow tell how the early Christians stumbled forward as they gave up their pagan gods to learn a new way of life.
We’ve been stumbling forward ever since. That’s where tradition comes in. Only through time have we been able to discern more fully the path on which Jesus leads us. We have our own two thousand years of prophets and sages who have helped us understand a little more, generation by generation. We’ve been down blind alleys, heard from false prophets and phony sages, but the power of God to lead us has not failed.
Philosophers and scientists will speculate forever what reason is, but whatever it is, humans are endowed with it. We can think, doubt, probe for truth, test, and yes, imagine things into being. We are called to use that reason to study scripture, learn from the wisdom of tradition, and add to it for generations yet to follow.
The God of revelation is not a god of imagination.
It’s a curious thing that there can be an objection to God’s self revelation that has informed us that we have been made for life in peace, justice and abundance. How can that be objectionable? We’ve been given freedom to choose but God has told us to choose wisely and has shown us the path of justice for the poor and oppressed, and peace and reconciliation among all peoples. Christians have been shown the way of love pioneered by Jesus. We are commanded to follow him, and to invite all others to walk with us. We confess that we fail frequently and have to try again. It continues to be the slow sometimes painful process of understanding more fully and following with more confidence. How God might be leading others is another matter, but it will always be in the way of love.
As L. Ron Hubbard proved, anybody can make up a religion. Even some churches appear to make things up as they go along, mostly in whatever image the current pastor wants. It happens when scripture, tradition and reason are considered old fashioned and irrelevant. Making things up as one goes along leads down side roads going nowhere. We humans like to take them but it’s never too late to turn back to the road God has revealed through scripture, tradition and reason.
©Steven Woolley