What kind of God?
The great fear of those who think elements of Gnostic thinking form part of my theology is that I am denying the utter otherness of God and the divinity of Christ. Jesus, today’s conservative evangelicals say, did not fully share our humanity and we are most certainly not equal in our nature to his divinity.
The early church spent three or more centuries developing stories, myths and theological memes to prove that or ensure that we are distinct from God, even though we are the species that alone in the universe, so far as we know, has developed a consciousness of God as an entity. Revelation is said to account for our consciousness of God. God reveals Himself and his essence to our conscious minds. Birth and resurrection narratives, angelic beings, miracles and miraculous experiences and encounters, were all developed and codified in creeds to empower the magisterium with the ability to determine, dogmatically, what were true and untrue, authorised and heretical, revelations, ideas about God and God’s divinity and about human beings and our inferior status that are true or false.
God apparently maintains a controlling interest in His ultimate authority. In the Global South this God is more successful than the Western Church in persuading adherents to give themselves, heart and mind, body and soul, time and money, to worship and serve this God. Adherence is in free-fall in the UK. In the USA, this Omni-God is still frighteningly dominant, providing Trump Republicanism with a perversion of Christian truth and teaching, justifying lies and abuse and enacting laws to protect inequality and prejudice.
Unknowing God
In Unknowing God (2022) Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead write about their experience of how bad ideas about God can destroy creative faith. Nicholas is a Catholic, Linda an Anglican. They describe how they had to fight against false ideas of “orthodoxy” put forward by their churches in order to find the divine in life. Both Nicholas and Linda felt they were unable to accept unreservedly the versions of Christianity that their churches supplied. They had to “un-know” the God they inherited having become aware that “The language, imagery, and teachings of Christianity are not as unequivocally benign as some would think.” They are among the many kindred spirits who reassure me that my vision of God is not so easily dismissed as ‘Gnostic’ or ‘revisionist’.
Unknowing God prefigures Adrian Thatcher’s devastating critique of unhealthy versions of Christianity in Vile Bodies. Linda sets out to re-wild the God of the philosophy of religion, the God to which much time and energy was expended in arriving at an agreed definition, a “being who is singular (monotheist, universal, sufficient); personal but spiritual (not embodied); and overwhelming (omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent).” Nicholas says that we have to unlearn bad images of God, not least God the all-powerful, all-knowing one whose infinite resources are always available.
Unhealthy Omni-God
The bigger and more transcendent God became - the “traditional, orthodox, Biblical, canonically approved and believed by the true church throughout history” God - the harder it is to make believable sense of Jesus as the incarnation of God in a human being. This God, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God believed in by millions and ridiculed by nonbelievers, Linda names an Omni-God. The trouble is, the Omni-God is lurking around all the time in our fears and superstitions and need for an emotional comfort blanket. To recover the healthy God of Jesus in the Gospels, we have to learn to identify the unhealthy Omni-God. We have to become more conscious that it’s very unlikely and maybe very unhealthy that the God of traditional hymns and language isn’t really like this.
The God of the conservative networks who claim to be the majority in the Provinces of the Anglican Communion and all who accuse the liberal West of having abandoned the orthodox God is Linda Woodhead’s Omni-God, the God responsible for unhealthy, prejudiced, abusive, sub-Christian theology and teaching. This sub-standard version of Christianity impacts on our consciousness – they are more successful than us, far more numerous, growing exponentially – so they must be right.
The contemporary Church of England
There is a disjunction between the Church of England and the majority of English people, a disjunction in the awareness of sexuality, gender, justice, equality and the sacred. It is the disjunction I experience acutely between Christianity as I have experienced it and been inspired by in the past and the depressing, abusive, conspiratorial, Omni-God religion of today. The Church of England is being taken over by adherents of those tribes in the Church for whom an unhealthy Omni-God is an essential characteristic of the supposedly Biblical God constructed by conservative evangelicals.
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Archbishops’ Council, the House and College of Bishops, conservative evangelicals and Catholics, are all infected in some way by this malignant Omni-God. The infection weakens backbones and saps courage. The infection accounts for the failure of leaders in the Church of England to articulate a theology of a God who is unconditionally, infinitely and intimately loving. Infection by the Omni-God syndrome accounts for their failure to stand up for the radical new inclusion announced by the Archbishops, not only of LGBTQIA+ people but of women, people of colour, those failed by the safeguarding scandal. Bishops fail to use every opportunity to articulate the fundamental vision of radical new Christian inclusion, betraying their own vision and faith. They capitulate repeatedly to the relentless, Omni-God bullying by conservatives.
We are all infected to some degree by what is, in Trump language, a fake God, and as with Trump’s followers who are totally seduced by his manipulative oratory, many millions elsewhere have great difficulty telling the difference between the fake Omni-God and the true unconditionally loving God.
Many people are rejecting the commonplace construction of an abusive, unhealthy Omni-God, giving up on church. Others continue, if not to believe in this God, then at least to adhere to worship and prayer and Christian ideals in their local church, with or without the help of the Holy Spirit and the living presence of Jesus. Most of them are ignorant of the abusive culture of the General Synod and the failure of the bishops to counter the abusive Omni-God. And those of us still involved one way or another with the Church, with LLF, those convicted by Healthy-God of unconditional love, find ourselves trapped, defensive, trying to function and create change in an unpleasant, unhealthy, corrupted Church.
Healthy God, healthy Church
Is it possible today, our vocation and priority in England, to found our spiritual and community life on Healthy-God, whose founding essence is unconditional love, justice, equality, full inclusion, in which our theology, practice and prayer must be rooted? How on earth do we work towards this when the people in control are either ineffective or are victims of the Omni-God movement?
In my understanding, faith, has nothing to do with the reception of a set of propositions and rules. Faith is the trust born of experience and awareness that we give to the essential goodness of creation. “Watch!” says Jesus. You may never know where and when the divine may break through, or more accurately, break out. Beware of the reality of God, dwelling within you as much as without you in the creeds and dogmatics of the church. Church can make us distrustful of our within, our intuition and feelings and innate God-presence. We can find the divine in new ways without necessarily being able to give a coherent account of our faith. It does not all have to add up, to be a personal, coherent ‘systematic theology’. There is no pure and innocent core to any religion, and no teaching or theology that issues infallibly in just and loving acts. We, each one of us, have to take responsibility for the God/s we feel sure are speaking to us in the depths of our own collective or personal experience. There is an inhibiting pious fear that such a discerning, personal spirit is idolatrous and unfaithful; that God and holy Scriptures must judge us, not the other way about.
Nicholas and Linda warn that
“our Gods come to us swirled up with a host of very human associations and blind spots. They create us and we create them. Because we exist in symbiosis with our God/s, we must take responsibility for them, as well as for the institutional arrangements of the religions of which they are a part. Today God emerges from a closed system in which it is axiomatic that allegiance to the superiority of the other world is a mark of orthodoxy. Such allegiance is a distraction from and a dishonouring of the delight and tragedy of our part in the unfolding mystery, the becoming of all things. Conversion is a movement out of unreality into taking responsibility.”
If you would like to spend a day with people seeking to enrich their spiritual lives and the life of the church then the Changing Attitude event Life in all its fullness offers you this opportunity. It’s being held in St Andrews Church, London, SE1 8LJ on Saturday 2nd March 2024 from 10:00 to 16.00, resourced by Revd Dr Tina Beardsley, Revd Colin Coward, Rev David Page, Revd Dr John Seymour, Professor Helen King and Revd Robert Thompson