This week for Theology II, we have been asked to summarize our notion of God in one page. Hardly fair, since one page is so limited and it only gives the briefest sketch of what our understanding is. However, it is something I want to chew on, so I've placed my statement below:
Many people have written tomes on the nature of God. Before attending BU, my favorite notion of God was Whiteheadian Process. Creativity bounded by conception as a persuasive force pulling the past into the future where possibility could be played out was much cleaner for me then notions of a three in one, imminent and transcendent at once nonsuffering, unchanging, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God.
I am Unitarian. The oneness of God prevents God existing as a discernable three. This ends up touching on many doctrines. To the best of my understanding, the trinity is doctrine because the death on the cross has to atone for the sins of humanity. Something about the atonement seems so false to me. How can my sins be paid with the blood of another? How can any sins be atoned for? No amount of remorse undoes the damage done by wrong doing. Our best is healing the wounds instead of pretending they don’t exist. Again, we come upon another doctrine, that of Christology. If I view Jesus as a healer and a prophet, his work to heal the wounds of those around him makes much more sense than serving as a paschal scape goat for the wrongdoings of humanity. He was killed not to show revelation that humanity killed God and God suffered, he was killed because he spoke truth to power and revealed a better way of living and a new faith for all.
Since I have touched on atonement and Christology, to complete this view of God I need to reflect on pneumatology and theodicy. When folks deify the holy spirit, I wonder why they forgot about the Hebrew Scriptures. God moves through the lives of people with the Ruach Elohim. This breath/spirit was not a separate person but an agency of the one divine. Why have they exalted the agency of God up to Godhood itself? I do not know the answer to that question. For the justice of God, I return to process. When I think of metaphors to use for God I end up with a blues guitarist. Improving on the guitar knows some boundaries, but not hard and fast rules. Sometimes a wrong note gets played or a note is bent in a way that sounds off. Ultimately the music controls itself as much as the musician. In many ways, that is how I see God. The metaphor of a divine musician playing along at creation, drawing it into a tight composition that is a real expression of the outpouring of the joy and love of creation sounds more tangible to me than the consequent and primordial natures of divine reality but both speak to the same meaning. God, the fellow sufferer who understands, God, the musician who feels the pain of the wrong notes but moves on with the composition anyway because ultimately the blues will out.