Sunday, October 23, 2011

Spong'ed – The Attributes of God, Or, You Can Spin, but You Cannot Hide

John Shelby Spong (Why Christianity Must Change or Die) continues his man created god in man's own image argument (mentioned in my previous blog post on this topic) by saying (page 49; chapter 3, “In Search of God”):

'... we can see ever more clearly the process of “God creation” that we human beings have always pursued. The attributes we have claimed for God are nothing but human qualities expanded beyond human limits. Human life is mortal. God, we said, was not mortal. Stating it positively, we claimed that God was immortal. Human life is finite. God, we said, is not finite. When we state it positively, God became infinite. Human life is limited in power. God is not limited. Omnipotent then became our positive word. Human life does not know all things. God is not bound by that limitation. Omniscient then became our positive word. Human life is bound to a particular space or by immutable natural laws. God is conceived of as being not so bound. Omnipresent and supernatural then became our God words.

When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. …

The sentence I have particular problem with is: “The attributes we have claimed for God are nothing but human qualities expanded beyond human limits.” I have just two problems with Spong's illustrations “proving” his argument: the attributes he chose; the attributes he did not choose. If the attributes he chose are considered fully, they actually illustrate how utterly different God is from humans. In the order Spong cites them:

Immortal – this understates Christian teaching, but shows how God and human beings differ totally: humans are mortal, God is not. But it's more than that! God does not merely not die, God is the source of life, as the Creator and sustainer of life. As Jesus pointed out, no human can add so little of an hour to his or her life.

Infinite – if “without human limitations” includes an opposite such as finite-infinite, I'd have to concede this attribute. But I think calling opposites similar is oxymoronic.

Omnipotent – man's power is limited, as individuals, as communities, as nations, as a race, and is bounded by time and space. God's power is not, and God created the time-space continuum we call the universe. God's power is not merely greater, without limits – quantitatively different. God's power is qualitatively different.

Omniscient – as individuals, collectively and across all time, man's knowledge is limited and imperfect (we “know” things that are wrong). God's knowledge is complete and perfect. God's knowledge encompasses what we call the past, present and future. Again, God's knowledge is qualitatively different, not merely without quantitative limits. Also, a man can choose to limit his knowledge by refusing to learn. God cannot: being omniscient is part of God's nature.

Omnipresent and Supernatural – In citing this, Spong unintentionally demonstrates another way in which God truly is utterly unlike humans. Every human being is located at and limited to a particular place in space and time. Not only is God not thus limited (another opposite Spong tries to call a similarity), but, again, God created the time-space continuum by and in which we humans are bound.

God's attributes are not merely human qualities writ large, “human qualities expanded beyond human limits”. These attributes are qualities in which God is utterly different from humans, expressed in human language (i.e., for some reason, not in Vulcan or Klingon). And then there are some Divine attributes Spong did not cite, qualities that further underscore the fact that God is not merely a really big human being. A couple of examples would be:

Goodness – this is expressed in all God does, and is not some static perfection (which becomes imperfect when anything is changed). Being “good” is what God is. How we got this way is another story, but human beings are not fully, totally, always good. At our best, everything we do is limited and flawed; human history is replete with examples of humans' worst, especially the most recent and current centuries. In this attribute, God is not man without limits. God is unlike man, utterly.

Creator – humans have done and do impressive (to human perception) things, using natural materials. But natural materials are always needed for humans to make the useful things. God (in Judaism and Christianity, at least) used no raw materials when He created: God spoke and the universe came into existence.

Examined fully, each individual aspect of God's nature Spong cited shows that the God of Judaism and Christianity is utterly other than human, not a sort of enlarged human-without-limits. But it's when the attributes are considered collectively that the otherness of God becomes awesomely clear, and Spong's idea that God is man writ large is overwhelmingly shown to be worse than laughable.

Considering – and rejecting as false – Spong's idea that man created God in man's own image leads naturally to a question. How did Judaism and Christianity come to have such a God? The Judeo-Christian God is utterly unlike the pantheons of the civilizations that surrounded Judaism and Christianity. Whether Egypt, the Canaanite, the Philistines, Babylon, Persia, Greece or Rome, all were polytheistic, mixed with animism. Except for the god and demigods of Persia, all their gods exhibited various limitations, faults and foibles. The pantheon of Persia (Zoroastrianism) had a supreme god, and was more dualistic, with aspects of animism, but Jewish contact with Persia came well after almost all the books of the Jewish scriptures were written. Even the one seeming exception to the general polytheism, the Aten worship of Akhenaten of Egypt, was not a clean break with polytheism and animism. Akhenaten's semi-pseudo monotheism still was very different from Judaism and Christianity.

The Judeo-Christian God did not evolve from the pantheons of contemporary religions, but utterly different. Just as there is no evolutionary path from contemporary paganisms to the Judeo-Christian God, neither is there an evolutionary path “there” from eastern pantheism or the animism of various cultures (both of which contradict Spong's, “Man created God in man's image,” theory). Pantheism is likewise utterly different from the God of Judaism and Christianity. Contemporary religions show what kind of gods are produced by human imagination. The Judeo-Christian God being utterly different, from where did He come? Though Spong would reject and ridicule such a notion out of hand, believing Jews and Christians would answer that God revealed Himself to man in the scriptures.

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