The Evolution of God

What is God to people? What does God mean? For some He is the King of the Universe, for others God is the One, the unified cosmos. Some may see God as being found in Jesus of Nazareth. Other people see God as an ideal or absract concept which people invent to help them deal with life. This blog I want to find the answer to an important enough question: What does God mean to me?

"Why  is this an important question?" you ask...because I have the luxury of time on my hands which affords me the necessity of asking questions I deem important, to fill the space. For one thing I believe in God, this too makes the inquiry important, for me if no one else. I am not writing to explain why I believe in God, that is best saved for another time, but what God I believe in, for the concept has changed for me through the years.

I once believed that God was a spiritual entity which resided in creation. I believed that nature was the residency of the divine presence. I had practiced Wicca and poorly exercised 'magic' of sorts. This, however, quickly became unfulfilling and I felt ridiculous in approaching divinity in this way. So I changed tactics. I began to read the Bible, mostly New Testament, and quickly found meaning in the words which enveloped my ideas and life. My thinking swiftly began to revolve around the New Testament and the God of love and forgivness that it spoke of. I was happy for a time, but only happy in my negligence and ignorance towards the questions I had refused to acknowledge. My faith had blinded me entirely to speculation and open-mindedness.

I had read much of the New Testament. I could recite many tracts and even started to gravitate towards the concept of becoming a clergyman. My faith by this point was towering so high it could almost touch the skies themselves. Then I read the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, and the beliefs I had began to shudder. I read and read until I couldn't take in much more and realised that the religion which existed in the Hebrew Scriptures had not only been undermined by the supposed natural evolution of the religion, but had been overrided and superceded. My doubts swiftly began to surface and I revolutionised my thinking. I adapted the New Testament teachings to suite the ideals I had gathered from my reading of the older texts and I left it at that for 3 years. Then I went to university where I began my real education.

Christianity, the religion I had dedicated myself to for over 4 years, was not what I had thought it to be. It was a series of psuedo-truths and farfetched ideas that had become facts. In essence, everything Christianity taught me was true was a pack of lies. The Trinity was not scriptural, nor was it always believed. Jesus' very divinity was questionable as it had only been decided by balding old men who bickered like jealous women over things which were just webs of ridiculous logic stamped with the seal of 'truth'. In any case I left Christianity to its throne of lies and moved on swiftly to reconfigure my beliefs. First of all I needed to decide what belief I had left.

God was the one thing I had been sure of even before I was infected with Christianity. I did not see him as some Gaia or earth spirit that pulsed through the world or some divine creature floating in Heaven. Neither was he some unfathomable force or humanistic spirit. God is everything that is. God is in all things. How does this differ from my first interpretation? God is independent, not a force. Through existing things God communicates uninterpretable messages to our existence which we cannot see nor hear nor touch nor smell nor feel. What is the point in his communication if we cannot know it? We can experience it in a way which is not with senses but is a movement within us. Not literal movement but movement within the self when faced with relation. We experience emotional attachment to an experience, but not with our senses, thus the emotional attachment we have when we attempt to be over against something which is before us, in relation, is an appropiately communicative experience between people and God.

The God which I follow does not interject in my life, nor listen to prayer or cries for help. My God is a God who speaks in relation, in emotive response. An all invisible God with no conceivable form. A God who is not all powerful or all knowing but the eternal totality of relation. Something which exists to give us the appreciation of existence. Not consciousness or the mind which construct existence but something to relate to so we can understand our situation as existing things.

So there you have it. My God has gone from being a force, to being a walking, talking, emotional man, to being a force who speaks through emotion. This is the evolution of God in my realm of experience, and soon the genetic make-up of my God may change again, for better or worse you will have to wait and see...

God's Usurper: Jesus and Hebrew sacrifice a helpful harmony or disasterous divergence?

This entry will outline the effectiveness and imperfections in the Hebrew institution of sacrifice and attempt to demonstrate how the use of Jesus' death to reinvent and establish an alternative version of sacrifice and atonment has further damaged the potential for relationship between God and humanity rather than repair the flaws in the previous system. Did Jesus come to repair the attitudes of humanity and reconcile them with God or replace God's work with his own and end God's parenthood?

  The process of sacrifice, described extensively in Leviticus (1-7), is believed by many to have been instituted by God, who taught Moses the torah (teaching, way or law) on Mount Sinai after the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt. These holy laws are to be kept to allow Israel the opportunity to receive the blessings of God (Deut. 28:1-14), live in God’s presence (Exodus 13:21, 22; 26; 38:8-38) and avoid curses brought about by un-reconciled disobedience (Deut. 27:11-26, 28:15-68). Sacrifice brought with it atonement (Lev. 23:26-32; Num. 29:7-11), allowing God’s holy presence to continue to dwell amongst the people (Routledge, 2008) by compensating for previous sins or disobedience committed (Pawson, 2003). God’s forgiving past grievances with the presentation of a sacrifice aided the construction of a mutual love and respect shared between humanity and God. Israel would forever be united in a holy relationship and a holy covenant as a holy people.

Hebrew/Jewish High Priest Sacrificing an animal on the altar.

                However, after knowing and repeating the sacrifices continuously, after countless generations, God’s chosen people of Israel began to lose focus leading to God’s rejection (Jeremiah 12:7). Sacrifice became mere acts and lost meaning and importance in the people’s hearts. Respect and love for God were replaced by pomp and love for oneself (Luke 20:45-47). Jesus is said to live at a time when the leaders of worship were often seen to demonstrate their worthiness to the people rather than spend time flaunting faith before God in the temple (Matt. 23:13-28). The efficacious nature of, and flippant attitude towards, sacrifice that had evolved under the supervision of the complacent priests needed to be changed (Winter, 1995). Jesus’ crucifixion was intended to create a universal and everlasting sacrifice which could atone for all people’s sins (Rom. 5:1, 6:6). Although this concept is fairly clear it is the dynamics of the salvific sacrifice Jesus had made on humanity’s behalf which are much more difficult to explain. Over the course of centuries many differing ideas and explanations for the atonement given through Jesus have been posited to Christians. The adaptations were geared towards promoting a much more distant and wrathful God than the relational and integral God known to the Ancient Hebrews. God became a master or debtor to humanity rather than a loving Father.

Jesus teaching his faithful followers.

                 

  God designed the original sacrificial institution to allow humanity the access to pardon, thanksgiving and atonement. Though Israel had forgotten the meaningfulness and power of the message carried within sacrifice they simply required correction, a re-ignition of the dwindling flame of faith within their hearts. Jesus had brought with him the idea of creating a sacrifice of the heart (Joel 2:13) by replacing Israel’s many sacrifices with his penultimate sacrificial crucifixion. The problem with this is twofold:

1.       Each person should be responsible for their own sin and therefore be the active member in repairing their personal relationship with God. To attain atonement the offender must bring their own offering for their own wrongdoing, no one can absolve their guilt on their behalf. To do so would be immoral (Rees, 2003). This very personal element is removed by Jesus taking the opportunity for meeting with God during reconciliation and demonstrating responsibility for action before God from Israel.  The intimacy of sacrifice is stolen away.

2.       God’s laws are unchanging, eternal and resolute. Jesus also upholds the incorrigible nature of the Mosaic Law. The replacement of Levitical sacrifice eliminates the possibility of that crucial section of law being performed, making it redundant and unimportant. Jesus’ intentions were good: enrich the worship of heart and spirit within Israel and enthuse Israel with newly revitalised glorification of the Heavenly Father. However, what he actually did was undermine the divine laws of God, remove personal responsibility and reconciliation, and end God’s intimacy and fragile relationship with his people by corrupting the once simple, effective and cherished atonement.