trying to define a non-theist God

11 June 2024 - 7 minutes read - 1281 words - kudos:

As I write this, I’m almost done with a reread of Gérard Siegwalt’s La réinvention du nom de Dieu (Reinventing God’s Name), which is not an easy read (my French is pretty good but not accustomed to theological treatises) but has a lot to offer for thinking about what Christianity might look like today. Of the many things that I’m getting from this reread, one of the things I appreciated most is that Siegwalt has helped me understand a concept that I’ve been trying to get my head around for a year or more: the idea of a non-theist God.

In short, a non-theist (at least as I understand and use the term) is not an atheist but conceives of God not as a white-bearded supernatural dude but rather as something still divine but more impersonal and existential. Paul Tillich, for example, has described God as “the ground of all being.” I like that idea, but I also found Tillich’s The Courage to Be to be even harder to get through than Siegwalt’s book, despite Tillich’s writing in my native language. In contrast, I appreciated John Shelby Spong’s riffing off of Tillich’s (and others’) ideas to lay out a vision for a non-theist future for Christianity. However, if Tillich was too hard to understand, Spong’s argument felt like it was mostly assertions without enough depth to them to get on board with.

That said, I do appreciate Spong’s treatment of theist conceptions of God as humanity’s way of trying to ward off existential dread. Faced with a vast, complicated, possibly uncaring universe (or at least their tiny corner of it), our earliest ancestors tried to make some sense of things and ward off horror at the randomness of it all by imagining the workings of the world and the cosmos as the actions of supernatural beings. Believing that you could get on a deity’s good side helped provide a sense of calm and control in life—even during those moments when deity seemed to have an agenda of its own. Like much of Spong’s writing, I think it could be fleshed out better, but I think there’s something to it. I also appreciate the way it echoes a quote from Thomas Merton that’s stuck with me since I first read it two summers ago:

Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.”

I don’t know what connection there is between Merton and Tillich, Spong, or other thinkers (and I’m not entirely sure that I’ve understood Merton), but I’ve been haunted (in a productive way!) by the idea of tearing away conceptions of God and leaving behind an “existential altar which simply ‘is.’” If I’ve remembered him correctly, Spong also advocates for worshipping a non-theist God in a way that faces the existential difficulties of life rather than try to dismiss them with theist theology. By equating the daunting landscape of existence with the majesty of God, we can have a relationship with deity that is sincere and holy but that doesn’t try to gin up any cosmic cop outs by turning away from reality or giving an all-powerful (but ultimately arbitrary) figure undue credit. Here’s Spong himself on the subject:

The death of theism calls us into responsibility. It provides us with the opportunity to step boldly into the fullness of life. It is an invitation to give up the pitiful human quest for security, which we all at some level know does not exist except in our pretense, and to experience the power found in the acceptance of the fact that radical insecurity is the very mark of our humanity. It enables us to grasp this humanity without denial and to enter the fullness of life with a mature new confidence. This enhanced humanity in turn opens us to a new awareness that we are not alone. It is not that our loneliness is overcome by a parental God in the sky waiting to come to our aid. Rather, it is that we experience ourselves as part of that which is eternal. There is a reality we call God that is the source of the life we live, the power of the love we share, the Ground of Being that calls us to be all that we can be. I live today in the conviction that I am not separate from this God. I participate in that which is eternal, infinite, and beyond all boundaries. My being is expanded by this experience. Otherness confronts me. Transcendence calls me. God embraces me.

It’s not the main point of Siegwalt’s book, but he has some things to say along these lines, too. In fact, for a week or two, I’ve been meaning to blog about an earlier passage in his book that touches on all of these ideas. This afternoon, though, I came across a passage I ultimately like even more:

On le voit : le spirituel est la dimension de profondeur du temporel, la conscience de la transcendance inhérente à l’immanence du réel. Les religions alors ? Elles sont la mémoire du passé - un passé spécifique pour chacune d’elles -, la narration de la genèse et du devenir d’une illumination qui s’est faite au contact du réel et dans la découverte de son caractère signifiant et qui a conduit - à travers le balbutiement - à la nomination du mystère s’y attestant et perçu comme effectif, et ainsi à la nomination des noms ou attributs comme autant de « visages» de ce mystère appelé - dans les religions monothéistes - d’un terme non exclusif mais qui s’est imposé comme cumulatif, à savoir « Dieu».

Here it is in my best attempt at translation:

We can see it: The spiritual is the “depth” dimension of the temporal, the awareness of the inherent transcendence of the immanence of reality. Religions, then? They are the memory of the past—a specific past for each one of them—the telling of the beginning and the becoming of an illumination that happened when it came into contact with reality and in the discovery of its meaningful character and that led—through its babblings—to the naming of the mystery witnessed therein and perceived as effective, and thereby to the naming of names or attributes as so many “faces” of this mystery called—in monotheist religions—by a term that is non-exclusive but that has emerged as cumulative, that is “God.”

Trying to render Siegwalt in English makes me even less sure that I understand him—there’s a lot of technical theological language in here, and the dude could stand to break up his sentences more. Assuming that I’m not too far off, though, I appreciate this idea that religion is ultimately the passing on of memories of encounters with the illuminating and transcendent in the reality that surrounds us. It is these meaningful encounters with reality that we have named God, and religion is a way of passing these encounters from generation to generation and inviting new generations to have similar encounters.

I still have more to read and understand about non-theist conceptions of God, but Siegwalt’s writing (so long as I’m following it more or less correctly) puts words to why religion remains meaningful and important to me—and the way that I want to understand God in my continued worship and practice.

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