A New Name for God?

A New Name for God?

I share this article with you because I have great interest in expressing the

experiences I have when I feel one with God.  As the questioner in the article

admits he feels the word God has a lot of baggage, I agree.

So is there another name?  Read on:

Karen

John Gamlin from Old Hall, East Bergholt, Colchester, UK, writes:

If we are now beyond theism then I suggest we are also beyond the word “God”

— beyond it because: of the baggage it carries.

to continue to use it is to be constantly misunderstood.

we will continue to drift back into the old language and old images.

So what new name?

Life?

Energy?

Love?

None will do, but we need to look somewhere for a new way to describe the bearer of eternity.

Dear John,

Thank you for your perceptive question, which has forced me to think

about this issue in a new way to answer it — or at least to keep the conversation

going. I need to make some distinctions or clarifications.

There is a difference between the experience of God and the explanation

of the experience. Religion tends to assume they are the same. Theism is a human

explanation of the experience of God; it is not God. The experience can be real or delusional.

The explanation will never be eternal.  No explanation ever is.

Personhood is the deepest experience of our lives as human beings

and we cannot escape its boundaries. We describe everything in terms of

that reality. That is why we think of God after the analogy of a person. We can also never

get into the being of God, or of a fellow mammal, a reptile, a fish or an insect.

We define each out of the reference of our own personhood. The same is true for every other creature.

Xenophanes said it in the third century before the Common Era, “If horses had Gods,

they would look like horses.”

The concept of God has been evolving as long as there have been human

beings. In animism, which appears to have been the earliest human religion, God was defined

as multiple spirits in a spirit-filled world. These spirits caused everything to do the things

that we human beings observed happening. The sun moved, the moon turned,

the flowers bloomed and the trees bore fruit. Animism sought to help us relate to and

win the favor of these animating spirits. When we human beings moved into

agricultural communities, God was defined in terms of the processes of fertility.

When we grew into tribes on our way toward nation states, God became a tribal deity.

In the Gods of Olympus, animism and tribal deities were merged into a hierarchy of

Gods ruled by the head (chief) of the Gods (Jupiter, Zeus) but with animistic functions

still being defined by spirits (Neptune and Cupid, for example). Finally, we moved

into a concept of God’s oneness and God began to grow vaguer and more mysterious.

During our history, definitions of God have been born, changed and died

and that is the process that is going on today. Our knowledge is expanding and our

definition of God will expand with it. The God who was thought to ride across the sky as the sun,

changed as our knowledge of the sun grew.

So what do we do?

Allow the name to evolve. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is identified

with wind and breath, concepts that eventually evolved into the word Spirit.

God was identified with love, as the expander of life, and evolved into the

understanding of the Christ figure as “love incarnate.” God is also identified with the idea

of “rock” and evolved into the Ground of Being that we identify with the old patriarchal word Father.

I do not believe that in the last analysis any human being can actually define or redefine

God, whether we call God the Holy, the Sense of Transcendence or anything else, but I do

believe we can experience this presence and I do believe it is real. When we experience this

presence I know of no other way to describe it except as “God.” History teaches us that

the word God is never static; it is always in flux and ever changing.

I suggest that we not be frightened and allow that process to continue.

I will continue to think about it because of you. So I thank you for your question.

– John Shelby Spong