4.1 The Nature of God
Who is God? What is he like? If we want to have a relationship with God then we must first come to an understanding of who he is. Our ancestors Loved God as much as we do, yet they believed that God was the god of the forest or of the sun. God Loved them as much as he Loves us, but his relationship with them was restricted by this inaccurate understanding of his character. If we desire to have as full and open a relationship with God as we can, then we need to strive to have an accurate understanding of who he actually is.
The story of religious progress is a story of our ancestors discovering that God is not at all like they thought he was. We have been so wrong about who we’ve imagined God to be that it has been impossible for God to reveal himself to us all at once. There have had to be several successive revelations of his character across the millennia. What is important to remember though is that each of the individuals who engaged in these religions were attempting, earnestly, to connect with God; the same God you and I Love and worship.
We have been liberated to realize this by the teaching of Vatican II. At Vatican II The Church advanced religious progress further than ever before and realized that all Humanity, if they were following their conscience, and reaching out for God, could find him, regardless of what form God took in their lives. This enables us to realize that if you genuinely believe that the sun is a god and worship him as best you can, then you are in fact worshiping God. Your ignorance of Christ or The Trinity doesn’t prevent your Love from reaching your eternal Father.
It is so tempting for us to look at the profound ignorance of our ancestors and to then completely dismiss their pagan practices. That perspective cuts them off from us though. It not only leads us to think less of them, it prevents us from recognizing that there has been a universal Human journey towards a more accurate understanding of God’s character. This journey is one that we are all making together. It is a journey which is so tremendous that not even a single society could accomplish it all on their own. If we want to discover the true nature of our Father, we need the help of our entire Human Family.
God is so desperate to be in relationship with us that he meets us where we are, wherever that may be. If our ancestors could only imagine God as a tree, then he met them there. This didn’t make the tree God, but at the time, the tree was the greatest opportunity for God to connect with his children. Christ showed us how humble and gentle God actually is. It is this same humility and gentleness that lies behind God’s willingness to engage with and participate in such wildly inaccurate beliefs. He does not demand his own way or reject his children just because they are wrong. He meets us where we are and accepts our Love. He recognizes that, like all children, we are ignorant and are doing the best we can with the limited understanding we have attained.
Strangely, these pagan practices seem to have progressively moved towards imagining God more and more like a Human. From a scattered set of forces that are disconnected from one another to a pantheon of personified individuals. These pantheons then became structured in the same ways Humanity structures its societies. The gods get married, have children and fall into conflict. The emerging hierarchies eventually have a single god on top, like Zeus in Greece or Marduk in Mesopotamia. As we’ve already described, this “king god” then provided God with a vehicle to reveal to Abraham that he is in fact One God.
This tremendous revelation wiped the slate clean and the Jews began the process of religious progress almost from square one. It is this profound reboot that gives rise to the term ‘pagan’. Pagan just means a religion that was trying to connect with God without the realization that there is only One God. While this idea is so powerful that it seems to create an impassable divide, we must remember that God could not have brought this revelation into the world without the tremendous progress empowered by pagan beliefs. We are deeply connected to our pagan ancestors. We enjoy the light of Christ because they were not afraid to grope in the dark for him.
God Loves all of his children. The fact that our ancestors were lost in the darkness of their ignorance does nothing to change God’s Love. He does not Love us because of what we have to offer or our attributes. He Loves us because we are his children. He meets us where we are and then partners with us to bring us closer to himself.
The Jews had received a staggering gift from their father Abraham, but we know that they were still inaccurate in their understanding of God. Abraham could not have even imagined The Trinity. We know that while Moses Loved God and earnestly sought to please him, God is not interested in animal sacrifices. Did this mean God rejected Moses and the Jews? No, he met them where they were. It was God himself who taught them the temple worship. It was God who asked for burnt sacrifices. God is Love. He is a God of relationship. Because God is in relationship with his children he is limited in that relationship by the beliefs of his children.
God was not attempting to deceive the Jews, he was attempting to be in relationship with them. It was the beliefs of the Jews that limited the ways in which God could engage in that relationship. The Human Family had not yet made enough progress to believe in a God that did not desire a burnt offering. We could not accept that 3 could be 1. So God, in his Love, met us where we were. For thousands of years the Jews learned and grew closer to an understanding of God’s true character until their hard won progress culminated in the Incarnation. The appearance of God as a man.
All our collective progress in trying to understand what God is actually like results in us being able to receive the reality that he is just like us. Not metaphorically, like in the marriage of pagan gods, but literally, actually. He is just like us. This revelation is such an upheaval that even after 2,000 years I don’t think we have fully come to grips with it and all of its ramifications.
While the Incarnation is the culmination of a slow discovery that God is like us, it brings with it the revelation that God is unimaginable to us. He is 3 in 1. He is fully present in the Eucharist. These fundamental doctrines of our faith are completely incomprehensible. So while Christ revealed that God is just like us, he simultaneously revealed that God is beyond our wildest imagination. By definition The Trinity cannot be understood. The Eucharist stands in complete contradiction to all our senses. Yet it was Christ, who is fully man, who revealed them to us and instituted them.
In order to understand this glaring contradiction of God being just like us, but simultaneously unimaginable, we will have to look at the other form of progress our Family has been making. We’ve already described the story of societal progress, but there is one aspect of it that applies here and which is illuminating.