Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

9 min read

What does the word ‘God’ mean anyway?

After asking why belief matters, Barnabas Aspray turns to transcendence as a way of defining God. The second in a series exploring the Nicene Creed.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A cloud-dappled s blue sky is viewed through a large circular opening, from below.

The view from a modern cave.

Shelter on Unsplash.

God’ is one of those words we think we understand, but many of us really don’t. Both believers and unbelievers often fall prey to a misguided idea of what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant by the word ‘God’.

Consider this description of God as an example:

God is an immensely powerful spiritual being, more powerful than anyone else in the Universe. He is invisible; he lives in heaven, but he can also be everywhere at once. He created the world a long time ago, and sometimes intervenes in the world today to perform miracles or answer prayers. His arch-enemy is another powerful spirit called Satan, but God is more powerful than Satan and will one day defeat him.

Almost everything about the above paragraph is either misleading or false from a traditional Christian point of view, yet it is not far off from the way many people today think about God. If we want to come up with a better definition, we need to understand, first that there are different kinds of reality, and second, that God belongs to his own unique kind of reality. Let’s use analogies to make each of these points.

God is like the number 2

Let’s have a look and a laugh at this XKCD webcomic.

A cartoon strip of a maths teacher explaining a proof.

What makes this comic funny is that the maths teacher is confusing two types of reality:

Physical, contingent realities whose existence is contingent (might or might not have existed), that exist in a particular place and time, and that can be destroyed.

Non-physical, non-contingent realities whose existence is necessary (cannot not exist), that are not in space or time at all, and that cannot be destroyed.

The maths teacher is treating a number as if it had the first kind of reality when in fact it has the second. It doesn’t make sense to ‘find and destroy’ a number. If the number 2 ceased to exist, what would 1+1 then be equal to? What would it mean if you saw more than 1 but less than 3 objects together, or would that no longer happen? Numbers are not the kind of things that you can remove, leaving the rest of the Universe unchanged. They are part of the fabric of reality, and we can’t really conceive a Universe without them.

Now, when we’re talking about God, this is the crucial thing to understand: the kind of reality that God has is more like the reality of numbers than the reality of physical objects. Like numbers, God is intrinsic to the way reality works. Like numbers, God can’t be located anywhere, yet without his presence reality would not make any sense. Like numbers, God can’t be seen, only represented through signs and symbols.

Compared to God, we are like two-dimensional beings

Let me introduce you to Flatty.

A line drawing of a flat round bug with six legs and two eyes.

Flatty is an entirely two-dimensional creature, living in a two-dimensional world called Flatland. In this world, there is no up and down, only left, right, forward, and backward. There are no spheres, only circles. There are no cubes, only squares. If I draw a square around flatty, it imprisons him. He cannot go over it or under it, because there is no such thing as ‘over’ or ‘under’ in Flatland. If I draw an object in front of Flatty, it looks to him as if it appeared out of nowhere.

Now, imagine you could talk to Flatty. Your voice would seem to be coming from nowhere, since he can’t see anything in three dimensions. How could you persuade him that you exist and he’s not going crazy? Perhaps you could press your finger on the surface of flatland. The fingerprint would appear like a strange oval shape, but that would only be the tiniest hint of what you look like. You could try to explain that you’re above him, but the word ‘above’ is meaningless for him so he would not understand.

Suppose Flatty was persuaded that you existed. How could he prove to other flatties that you existed? He has no words to describe you with except the ones you’ve given him, which have no meaning in a two-dimensional Universe. He can’t point to you, and he can’t offer any evidence. All evidence he might have would be two-dimensional, which misses the kind of reality he wants to prove.

Now the point of this analogy is that we are like Flatty in relation to God. We lack the language to describe God because his reality is so much greater than ours that our minds are not equipped to conceive or describe it. God can speak to us – he can even make strange appearances in the physical world sometimes, but those appearances only convey the tiniest hint of who he is.

This is what the Christian tradition has always meant when it says that God is ‘transcendent’. The word ‘transcendence’ is an attempt to give a name to something we have no concept of and no ability to fully comprehend: the idea that there is a reality beyond the three-dimensional reality that we can see and experience, and that God inhabits that reality.

Let’s return to the misleading definition of God we quoted above and correct some of the points:

It is true to say that God is invisible, but this is not an accident, as if God could have been visible. It’s part of the very nature of God that he cannot be seen, because the only things that can be seen are things that belong to the three-dimensional world. (If you think about it, numbers can’t really be ‘seen’ either. The way we write the number 2 is just as symbol to represent something that has no visible form. Even if we see two objects together, we are not seeing the number 2 itself, merely an instance of its use in one particular place and time.)
God does not ‘live’ in heaven as if he were an object that could be located somewhere. ‘Heaven’ is itself a name for the transcendent reality that we cannot fully conceive (this is more obvious in the biblical languages, and in French, German, and Spanish, where the word for ‘heaven’ and the word for ‘sky’ are the same, yet nobody is confused and thinks you’re talking about the sky). When we say that God is in heaven, we mean that God’s reality is more tangible and present there than it is here on earth, although that will not always be the case.

The other misleading aspects of that initial quotation will be addressed in the next article on the doctrine of creation.

Why this is not apologetics

None of this counts as an argument for the existence of God, even if it makes a difference to how such arguments would go. The above should not be taken as evidence that God exists, but as providing a definition of God that we need before any productive argument can begin. The reason so many atheists and theists seem to be talking past each other is that they so often start with different definitions of God without realising it. David Bentley Hart puts it this way:

The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God … is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically.

One example of this mistake is what Richard Dawkins says in the following:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

Dawkins has cleverly turned the tables, making it look as if all the religions disagreed with each other, when in fact most of them agree against atheism on the question of God, and only disagree much further down the line. It is as if someone were to count English accents as different languages, and then propose making Flemish the international language because more people speak it than any of the varieties of English.

More specifically, Dawkins’ mistake is to confuse capital ‘G’ God and lowercase ‘g’ gods which is not the plural of ‘God’ in any major religion. Lowercase ‘gods’, whether they exist or not, still live inside the Universe and are part of it like you and me. The Bible itself, even though it is a monotheistic book, uses the term ‘gods’ in this way (see e.g., Psalm 82, 86, 98).

FAQs

Is this really a biblical conception of God? Why are there so few Bible quotes in this article?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant when they used the word ‘God’. They believed that their conception of God was derived from the Bible and accurately reflected the biblical view. Their conception of God has come to be called ‘Classical Theism’, which is the mainstream position taken by the majority of theologians and denominations throughout Christian history. In recent years, some academic theologians called ‘open theists’ have argued that Classical Theism did not come from the Bible but from ancient Greek philosophy, and is therefore not properly Christian. If they are correct, it means that they have understood the Bible better than almost every theologian in the first fifteen centuries of the Church, including the writers of the Nicene Creed. Their argument has not been accepted by most churches and denominations, and it depends on a not-universally agreed understanding of how Christians ought to interpret the Bible. To explain why I think the Bible supports Classical Theism would be to write a completely different, and much longer, article. There are many resources already out there that show how the classical conception of God is not only derived from the Bible, but rejects a lot of Greek philosophy in favour of the Bible. If you are interested in this debate, you might consider the following resources to start with: Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (Wipf & Stock, 2014); Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (CUP, 2019); Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017); Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God (OUP, 2004).

What about Jesus? Doesn’t this conception of God leave out the most central Christian tenet, that Jesus is God?

To say that ‘Jesus is God’ has no meaning unless you first have a definition of God that the word ‘Jesus’ can apply to. That is why the Bible starts by building up a conception of God in the Old Testament, before revealing in the New Testament that this same God came among us in the person of Jesus. That’s why it’s misleading to say (as some Christians do) ‘If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus’. It’s true at the level of God’s character, but not at the level of God’s nature. If you are interested in this question, I would suggest reading Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2018).

This definition of God makes him seem impersonal. Doesn’t Christianity teach that God is personal?

It’s true that God has chosen to relate to us as one person relates to another, and in that sense we can call God ‘personal’. But we must be careful of letting that idea run away with itself, until we imagine God to be like a human being, only bigger and more powerful. This is called the mistake of anthropomorphising God. If you’re interested in avoiding anthropomorphic conceptions of God, I would suggest starting with David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2014).

Review

Belief

Culture

Film & TV

20 September 2024

4 min read

Kate Winslett delivers the performance of her life, in a film that doesn’t look away

The true quality of witness shines in Lee Miller’s biopic.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Two war photographers creep along a shadowy corridor.

Kate Winslett and Andy Samberg in Lee.

Sky Cinema.

If we might indulge an absurd anachronism, I wonder what the American photojournalist Lee Miller would have done, had she been one of the women at the foot of the cross. To my mind, she would have held her nerve to record – on her German-made Rolleiflex camera held at her abdomen – not only the horror of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the criminals beside him, but also the suffering of his mother and the other women who looked on.

I’ve had these ruminations since I watched Miller’s biopic, Lee, on its UK premiere. In passing, I should record that Kate Winslet delivers the performance of her life in the title role, because it’s in the quality of her interpretation that I’m led to consider the nature of what it means to witness, which is an act at the heart of humanity as well as central to the Christian faith.

Witnessing is what reporters, at their best, do if they are to honour their vocation. Especially war reporters. But the act of witnessing isn’t confined to journalists. The case for professional witness can be made for other jobs – police officers, aid workers, medics, lawyers all come to mind.

It’s just that this movie shows witness at its sharpest end. “Even when I wanted to look away, I knew I couldn’t,” says Lee Miller. That imperative, not to look away, is central to our human story and I would argue that this is because it’s central to my faith, which has at its centre a God who doesn’t look away.

That’s why Lee Miller made me think of the historical event of the crucifixion. The Church down the ages has been inclined to turn the cross into the Christ’s great victory – rather as reportage of the Second World War has concentrated on its conclusive victory rather than the horrors that Miller recorded.

Her magazine employer, Vogue, at first declined to publish her photos of the liberation of concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald, in part because it detracted from the joy of that victory (though they were subsequently published in the US). If you will, Vogue looked away.

I’ve found that to go down this path with Miller, accompanied by faith, a kind of terrible road to Emmaus, delivers some unexpected reactions.

We’re called to refuse to look away from the grotesque horrors of the cross, to resist it becoming simply a jewellery symbol on a pendant, to acknowledge its centrality in man’s inhumanity to man and, ultimately, our God’s choice to share that experience. “Jesus Christ,” mutters Miller at the door of a room, possibly a gas chamber, stacked with skeletal corpses, before entering to take her photographs. Jesus Christ, indeed.

This is not to make a claim for Miller as a figure of faith. It is rather to make the claim that those of us of faith should be highly alert to where we might find the witness to it. Over the past week, I have to say I’ve found it in the work of Miller, not only in the hell of the camps, but in the shaven heads of collaborator women, the frightened children and even in that bath in Hitler’s Munich apartment.

In the last of those, there she is, naked, washing herself clean from the dirt of Dachau, which stains the bathmat from her boots in the foreground. Here is a witness to a spiritual defiance, the portrait of Hitler propped on the bath edge as she is cleansed. It’s not just that he hasn’t won, it’s that death itself hasn’t won.

I’ve found that to go down this path with Miller, accompanied by faith, a kind of terrible road to Emmaus, delivers some unexpected reactions. And they’re not the kind of reactions normally associated with faith.

The first is anger. It clearly accompanied Miller throughout her work: Anger at military discrimination against her womanhood; rage that Vogue censored her work. We could all do with being more angry at injustice, especially those of us of religious faith. Note that when American Vogue published her photos, they headlined them “Believe It!” True belief, arguably, is angry.

My second takeaway is the danger of real witness. Miller described her work as "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you". Discipleship can, maybe should, be like that.

The third is the cost of witness. Miller’s war left her with depression and what today would be called PTSD. Not looking away has its price. The cost of witness to disciples may not be as extreme as it was in the first century of its practice, but we should also be aware that it’s not a cosy lifestyle choice either.

For Miller, part of the price of her witness was alienation from her son, Antony. In the movie, though (spoiler alert), he discovers after her death how devoted to him she was. At a stretch I would say he was a son in whom she was well pleased.

That’s not to imbue her with something messianic. It is perhaps to say, with the poet Philip Larkin, that what will survive of us, especially those who have witnessed the worst of humanity and come through, is love.