My beliefs... Part 1 of ?

My husband read my last post and said he got bogged down in the rather short paragraph where I outline some of my key beliefs without going into further detail. I did link some of them through to various Wikipedia pages, but even so.

Couple this with my thoughts of writing an explanation for various parts of some creeds, and you get this first out of, hopefully more than one, posts.

I'm going to start with the first line of the Apostle's Creed. All the links, btw, will go to various Wikipedia pages for you to view.

There is more than one 'version' of this. I'm going to use the one from Common Worship, which is:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

Taking this in chunks, I'm going to look at the first part only - I believe in God.

This is a good place to start any Christian apologetic, so let me see if I can explain what I mean by God.

If you ask certain theologians, they will describe God as 'the other'. By this they mean that there are things and persons we can see and touch. Thee and me for one. We can easily communicate in a common ground. I think both of us understand the concept 'yellow'. For some blind people, they don't have a concept attached to the term 'yellow', and for them they can discuss it as a philosophical idea, but have no way of attaching it to something they can grasp.

God is a bit like that. We have a name for him - "God", but we can't actually see what that is. We don't have the ability to actually experience God as God, so we can only approximate what he is.

So, how can we know God? We know him because he has revealed himself to us, firstly by the calling of the Hebrews, then by the giving of the law, then through the prophets, and 'in these last days through his Son'. Over all of human history God has been speaking to us, becoming more and more personal as he does so. And it is through his speaking that we have come to understand part of who he is.

We only know about God what he has told us about him. I'd like to use an approximation here, but it is important to realise that when talking about God, approximations are all we really can use, and also that all the approximations that we do use, fall flat in relation to the actuality of God Himself.

It's a bit like having a pen-pal. Unless your pen-pal sends you a photograph, you can only imagine what they look like. You can get letters from them, giving you information, perhaps they like to ice skate, and you can build up a mental image of someone ice skating, but the image you have in your mind is not the actually picture of your pen-pal skating. In fact there could be huge differences (you imagine in a rink, they actually do it on a glacier). So, despite having written text from your pen-pal about themselves, until you actually get a photograph of them ice skating, you don't really comprehend them.

Is God our pen-pal? I think that sitting down and writing letters to God on a regular basis, like a pen-pal, could be a rewarding experience (even if you don't believe in him). I'll not say anything about him responding, in either direction, but if I did it I would start to pour out my heart to him much more than I currently do.

God is, however, someone who we can only know by what he as written to us. If you read the scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, then you can get to know a bit of who God is. I've heard more than once the fact that the God of the Old Testament is a cruel, heartless taskmaster who punishes the least sin, compared to the God of the New Testament who is loving and forgiving.

I would point people at the story of Jonah for a look at how forgiving God can be (not in his actions towards Jonah, but in his actions towards the people of Nineveh - a nation of gentiles). There are other parts of the Old Testament which talk about his love. Almost all the prophets tell of God's love for his people, how he loves them like a bridegroom loves his bride, like a father loves his child. And in the New Testament we have Jesus making a whip, and overturning the tables in the temple, whipping the people to make them leave. That's not exactly the common view of an all-loving god.

I use these two different points to show that God is complex. That is one of the most important things to have in mind. Humans are very complex. I don't always know what my husband is thinking, and sometimes I get responses which are so far out of what I was expecting that I realise again how complicated a man I married. (In a good way here). God is every more complex than that.

God is not a turtle

Humans have invented some words to describe the attributes of God. A preacher once stated that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and eternal (at this point in a sermon a small child piped up and said to the preacher "God is not a turtle", hence the start of this section).

What do those omni-words mean. Omni- is a prefix which means all, so omnipresent means always present; there is no-where you can go to get out of the presence of God.

Omnipotent is always potent, or able to do stuff; there is nothing which is too difficult for God to do.

Omniscient is always scient? What is scient - well we get the word science from the same root. It means knowledge, so omniscient is all knowing; God knows everything (thus disproving Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and saving cats everywhere from being cruelly put in boxes and either being killed or not).

Omnibenevolent, all loving; God loves all his creation. This is the one which tends to have all the rationalists pointing their fingers and saying "what about then?". Just because God loves you, and is able to stop something bad happening to you, it doesn't mean he will stop it. Him not acting a particular situation in the way people want him to does not say he (1) doesn't exist (2) doesn't know about it (3) can't do something about it (4) doesn't care about it. He just knows a lot more than we do, and perhaps he has a reason we can't comprehend. Yes, I know that those rationalists are now pointing the finger and saying "cop-out."

Take a parent who has a young child. He loves his son, and wants the best for him. He knows that sometimes the son should do things he doesn't want to - say tidy up his room (don't come to our house and look at *any* of our rooms without giving us 1 months notice). So, he tells the child to tidy up his room. The parent now has to leave it in the hands of his son to do the actual tiding. He can come in and tidy the room up on his own, he certainly has the power. He can see the state of the room from the hallway. The fact that he leaves the actual action to the son doesn't mean he doesn't exist (he's in the hallway). That he doesn't know (he can see the room). He can't do (he can easily step into and do). He doesn't care (he does, that's why he's told the child what to do).

Eternal (not a turtle, although turtles are nice). Some people use the term self-existent. They have similar results. It means that God always has, and always will exist. We live in a universe governed by time. We get up in the morning, and go to bed in the evening having the day in between those two points. We have a birth, a life, and a death. The universe, according to some theorists, has a big bang at the start, an expanding universe at the moment, and the ultimate heat-death of the universe to come (don't worry about that, unless you are going to be around for the next ten billion or so years you'll still be able to live on the earth precluding anything serious happening that is). God doesn't have any of that. He was, he is, and he is to come. Some people say God is outside time. Others time is inside God. I think time is irrelevant to God - it doesn't apply to him. It's a bit like saying the laws of how to drive in Britain are irrelevant to people driving in America. Doesn't mean people don't drive in either country. God can do stuff in time, and he can do stuff outside of time. In fact it's all the same to him.

Conclusion

Do I have one? Well yes. God is someone which the stuff which applies to us, doesn't apply to him. We are limited in where we are, what we can do, what we know, how much we can love (people, cats, budgies, whatever), when we are (I'm writing this now, you are reading it now - however those 'now's are very different). God isn't. We are human, he isn't. We are same - he is other, which brings us back in a nice circle to the great theological conclusion that you can't understand what God is, he is other.