God

Question 1

The emergence of monotheism in the OT

Answer 1

• In the OT, it is evident that beluef in God was not monotheistic to begin with
• Other God’s were acknowledged, with Yaweh being the head of the pantheon of gods of other nations, demanding sole alleigance from his people
• Theologians point to one of the early names used for God in Genesis which is ‘Elohim’- the plural word meaning ‘gods’ as well as countless references such as: ‘Who among the God’s is like you Lord?’
• Note the first of the Ten Commandments, ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ which demands worship of this God but is not a forthright denial that there are others
• It is thought that monotheism developed out of monolatry or henotheism (the worship of one god, without the denial of the existence of other gods) during the Babylonian exile

Question 2

Ethical Monotheism

Answer 2

• The OT reflects the Jewish belief in their election- that is, God choosing them from among the nations to establish a special relationship woth them. This relationship is known as the covenant relationship- an unbreakable agreement of commitment between God and his people
• This began with the election of Abraham in which God made an unconditional covenant that he will be his God and will give him descendants and a promised land
• With Moses, the covenant becomes conditional with the introduction of God’s Laws
• In the NT, Jesus presents a reinterpretation of those laws, emphasising love and mercy and embracing the spirit rather than the letter of the law found in the OT (The Shema- ‘Love your Lord with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your strength’)
• This is a clear link between monotheism and the moral responsibility that springs from that belief. For Jews and Christians, then, moral obedience is at the heart of having a right relationship with this one God

Question 3

God as omnipotent creator

Answer 3

• As creator of all things, God must be omnipotent. There are different interpretations as to what this actually means:
  1. God can do everything- even the logically impossible e.g. God could make a square circle
  2. God can do everything that is logically possible
• Most Christians accept the second definition to explain that God is not logically able to deal with suffering and evil whilst allowing free will
• The concept of God as an omnipotent creator is also differently understood- some believe that the universe was created ‘ex Deo’ (out of God’s own being) which breaks down any difference between God and the universe and denies Gods transcendence (leading to pantheism)
• Most Christians refer to God creating ex nihilo (out of nothing) reflecting the word of Genesis 1 where God speaks everything into existence as opposed to using pre-existent material

Question 4

God as sustainer and controller of all things

Answer 4

• This concept is linked to the titles of ‘King’, ‘Lord’ and ‘Sovereign’
• God’s control over the universe and preservation of it are recurring themes in both the Old and New Testaments
• The concept of ethical monotheism also reflects God’s sustaining human morality with the giving of the 10 commandments and the teaching of Jesus
• As with God’s omnipotence, Christian’s interpret the idea of God as controller of all things differently
• God’s control is linked to his omniscience, meaning that God knows past, present and future in their entirety
• This creayes theological determinism- the idea that God’s knowledge of everything means that humans cannot truly have free will. If this is so, it calls into question God’s right to judge, reward and punish
• The alternative to this is one expounded by Aquinas who argues that God knows past, present and future as one due to being outside of time. He argued that God merely sees the results of our free choices. This nevertheless suggests that God does not have complete control as he can merely observe human action that it outside his control

Question 5

God as transcendent and unknowable

Answer 5

• By definition, this means that God is unlike anything within his creation and must be eternal (uncaused, outside the system of causation)
• God’s otherness is regularly referred to by biblical writers- call of Isaiah
• Earlier, Moses at the burning bush is told to remove his shoes as he is standing on holy ground, and when he asks to know Gods name it is revealed as YHWH and interpreted as meaning ‘I am who I am’- denoting that otherness, timelessness, mysteriousness- even numinosity
• Ezekiel has a vision of God that defies all understanding and ends with him distancing himself three times from saying that this was God: ‘This was the appearance, of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it I fell face down’
• Despite this, the Bible is full of examples of God intervening, suggesting immanence e.g. the parting of the Red Sea to save the Israelites and the incarnation

Question 6

Origins of the Trinity

Answer 6

• Christians experienced God as Father (creator), Son (redeemer) and Holy Spirit (sustainer and empowering presence of God)
• The doctrine of the Trinity was needed to explain the relationship between these three persons. It asserts:
  1. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three distinct persons
  2. Each person is fully God and the three are coesistent, coeternal and coequal
  3. There is only one God- God is not split into three parts
• The technical term for the relationship between the persons of the Godhead is the Greek word for ‘rotation’ perichoresis- ‘mutual indwelling’ i.e. the Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father etc
• The Church has never been able to explain adequately how God can be one and three. This concept is regarded as a mystery reflecting the idea that no human words could ever express the reality of God and holding central the notion that God exists as a community
• Whilst the term ‘Trinity’ is not used in the NT, biblical testimony points to the doctrine

Question 7

Biblical foundations of the doctrine

Answer 7

• The doctrine of the Trinity is not clearly developed in the NT but two examples from the Gospels are particularly cited as significant
• At Jesus’ baptism all three persons are noted- God (the Father) speaks from heaven saying ‘This is my beloved son’ and the Spirit descends on him like a dove
• Natthew 28 has the Great Commission in which Jesus sends his disciples into the world to baptise all nations ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
• Othe passages speak clearly of Jesus being God: ‘Before Abraham was born I am’ (John 8)
• The role of the Holy Spirit emerges particularly from Pentecost onwards as the empowering presence of God after Christ’s ascension

Question 8

The importance of the doctrine of the Trinity

Answer 8

1. It brings together the central doctrinal truths of sin, atonement and redemption. God’s response to the Fall of Adam and Eve is explained in all three persons of the Trinity:
   * God the Father sent his son to die in order to atone for the sins of humanity and so redeem them
   * The Son, who was fully human and fully God was able to be the perfect sacrifice to achieve this
   * The Holy Spirit enabled his followers to live in relationship with God by bringing about a new birth and the ability to be raised to new and eternal life
2. It makes it possible for humans to have a personal relationship with God. This is seen to be an answer to the seeming contradiciton between God being transcendent and yet being immanently involved in creation. The Godhead is transcendent and unknowable but the three persons can be known:
   * God the Father, as Creator, can be known through creation
   * God the Son can be known through the incarnation and the person of Jesus
   * God the Holy Spirit can be known as the indwelling, empowering presence of God in Christian experience
3. The Trinity is seen as a model for personhood. The relationship between the members of the Trinity is one of love
   * Augustine described the Trinity as Lover, Loved and Love, none of which can exist without the others. As the HS acted within the Trinity as a bond of love with the Father and Son, he acted within humans to unite them in a bond of love with Father, Son and one another. Thus, he claimed that Christians could experience the true Trinitarian nature of God for themselves
   * Jurgen Moltmann emphasises the Trinity as a community of self giving and self receiving love, modelling humanity’s call to community and love.

Question 9

The anthropomorphic tradition

Answer 9

• Anthropomorphism- the practice of attributing human characteristics to non human entities. In this case to speak of God in human terms
• The Bible uses anthropomorphic language of God throughout. In Genesis 2, God is heard to be walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day
• Many other passages speak of God’s hand guiding, God seeing, God hearing the cries of his people, God feeling sorry and changing his mind, God loving
• The doctrine of the incarnation feeds into these notions of God being human like

Question 10

Problems with anthropomorphising God

Answer 10

• Such language surely reduces God who is also believed to be immaterial, omnipotent and transcendent
• To give God emotions is problematic as these thibgs are triggered in humans’ brains. If God is not physical in what way does God feel regret etc?
• Anthropomorphism comes out of human made language which is based on things within our experience of the universe. Any language attributed to God must therefore be inadequate
• This creates God in our image rather than the claim that we are in God’s image and begs the question as to whether such a God is worthy of worship
• This has been used to support the claims of the likes of Freud who sees the notion of a heavenyl Father-figure an invention of wish fulfilment for an emotional prop and of Feuerbach’s idea of projection- wishful thinking.
• It opens faith to the accusation of being childis- a desire for a superhero with supersized human attributed. Dawkins speaks derisively of a ‘sky Daddy’

Question 11

Anthropomorphic language regarding God as personal

Answer 11

• God as personal does not mean God is a person- to speak of God as personal needs to be understood as analogical language rather than a claim that God is a literal person
• It is a claim that God is relational rather than a thing
• This allows God to be immanent (experienced and responsive) which is certainly supported by the doctrine of the Trinity as interpreted by Augustine and Moltmann in which God is relational: a community of self giving and receiving love
• It is also a concept foundational to Christian ethics, particularly NL and DCT- morality is objective, given to us by a personal God

Question 12

Anthropomorphic language regarding God as Father

Answer 12

• This metaphor denotes attributes such as strength, guidance, protection, discipline, authority, love and in ancient patriarchal cultures, power
• The term is used of God in both Old and New Testaments, linked to God as Creator and often referring to Israel as God’s son
• This takes on an even greater significance when Jesus is described as God’s son and Jesus calls God ‘Abba’- an intimate familial term rather than the traditional Jewish concept of an Almighty Father
• This is the term Jesus used when asked how his disciples should pray and is found in the Lords Prayer
• It suggests that Christians too can have a close father-child relationship with God
• The Apostles Creed outlines faith in God ‘the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth’ and goes on to speak of ‘Jesus Christ, his only son our Lord’. This combines God’s role as Father of Creation (an image that includes power and transcendence) and Father of Jesus (which is more intimate)

Question 13

Anthropomorphic language regarding God as Love

Answer 13

• Gods omnibenevolence is critical to Christian belief about God along with Gods omnipotence and omniscience
• This refers to God being all loving and perfectly good. This is a belief attacked with the use of the Epicurean paradox, inconsistent triad and other arguments concerning the existence of evil and suffering
• Trust in God’s benevolence is based on biblical teaching:
  1. God’s love is the basis for the convenant relationship between God and Israel. This explains election and redemption fromEgypt and later from the Exile
  2. God’s love is understood in the giving of his Son for all salvation- ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16)
  3. Paul writes that all the gifts of the spirit, ‘the greatest of these is love’
  4. Because God loves us, we should love others
• This is exemplified by Jesus stating that the Greatest Commandment is to ‘love God’ and to ‘love your neighbour as yourseld’. The word for love used by Jesus and then Paul is agape- selfless love for others
• It is further supported by the teaching in Genesis 1 that we are made in God’s image- which could reinforce the idea that we are made by love with the capacity to love

Question 14

Anthropomorphic language regarding God as King

Answer 14

• Titles such as Majesty, Lord, King of the whole earth are often used in biblical writings
• To refer to God as King is clearly a metaphor- in the ancient world the power of a king was absolute (Call of Isaiah)
• This notion of a ruling, all powerful King fed into Jewish expectation that the Messiah would be sent by God to introduce God’s kingdom through saving the Jews from foreign powers as their warrior king
• Jesus, of course, reinterpreted the role of the Messiah as well as the notion of the kingdom of God
• Christians are to pray and to work for God’s kingdom to come ‘on earth as it is in heaven’

Question 15

Anthropomorphic and gender specific language about God

Answer 15

• Anthropomorphic language used of God has been overwhelmingly masculine- Father, Son, King, Lord and whilst a minority of Christians see the Holy Spirit in feminine terms (on the basis that spirit in Hebrew is feminine) the likes of Daphne Hampson points out that this third person of the Trinity is an abstract entity that is rarely given the prominence of the other two persons who are unequivocally male
• Hampson: ‘I have concluded that fundamental to the Abrahamic religions is the will to subvert women and establish men as the norm’
• Such thinking can be said to explain Christian traditions excluding women from the priesthood and from Church leadership
• Feminist theologians point to the paradox within Christianity in which it is asserted: that God is spirit (not embodied and therefore without sexual organs) and that Genesis 1:26 states that male and female are equally made in the image of God whilst insistence on patriarchal terms for God and rejection of feminine or inclusive terms is fiercely held by the majority

Question 16

The debate about gender specific language

Answer 16

• All anthropomorphic language must be seen as metaphorical. Thus God is not actually male, not actually a father nor a mother. These are meant to be helpful images to allow us to relate to a personal God. Certain modern translations of the Bible have opted for gender neutral terms such as ‘parent’ rather than ‘father’
• Feminist theolgian, Sallie McFague argues strongly that when metaphors become unhelpful and outdated, new ones must be found that lead people to similar concepts of a personal and loving God. Thus, she renames the Trinity as Mother, Lover and Friend and rejects militaristic, authoritarian terms for God as unhelpful in this period of history. To hold onto an insistence that God is literally male or Fther is othing more than idolatry
• Feminist theolgians also point to Jesus’ radical treatment of women that defied accepted norms, teaching them and entering theological debate with them and choosing to appear to women as the first witnesses to his resurrection
• Others have rejected such arguments, arguing that Jesus did little to elevate the role of women and unarguably chose 12 male disciples

Question 17

The debate about gender specific language

Answer 17

• All anthropomorphic language must be seen as metaphorical. Thus God is not actually male, not actually a father nor a mother. These are meant to be helpful images to allow us to relate to a personal God. Certain modern translations of the Bible have opted for gender neutral terms such as ‘parent’ rather than ‘father’
• Feminist theolgian, Sallie McFague argues strongly that when metaphors become unhelpful and outdated, new ones must be found that lead people to similar concepts of a personal and loving God. Thus, she renames the Trinity as Mother, Lover and Friend and rejects militaristic, authoritarian terms for God as unhelpful in this period of history. To hold onto an insistence that God is literally male or Fther is othing more than idolatry
• Feminist theolgians also point to Jesus’ radical treatment of women that defied accepted norms, teaching them and entering theological debate with them and choosing to appear to women as the first witnesses to his resurrection
• Others have rejected such arguments, arguing that Jesus did little to elevate the role of women and unarguably chose 12 male disciples

Question 18

The concept of God in process theology

Answer 18

1. God is not the creator: Griffin rejected the traditional view of God creating ex nihilo. He argued that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ was a mistranslation and the more likely translation of Hebrew was ‘In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth’
   * In other words, the second translation suggests that God created order out of pre-existing chaos- not that God created everything from nothing
   * He concluded that: the universe is eternal and not created by God, the universe began as chaotic matter, God was also there- existing panentheistically-the universe and God exist as the mind and body coexist, God’s role was to persuade matter from chaos to order and increasing complexity
2. **God is not omnipotent: **If God did not create ex nihilo this immediately challenges the idea of God’s omnipotence and one of the key beliefs behind that assumption
   * If matter is not created by God, it also implies that God does not have ultimate control over it. Griffin argues that God has persuaded the universe to change and adapt for good, but that evidentially God has taken billions of years to encourage it to get to this point
   * Quantum physics suggests that flux and change is at the root of the universe which may give some support to Griffins ideas about God
   * Similarly, his views can be supported by comparison between Genesis 1-3 and the Babylonian creation myths of Enuma Elish which speak of the gods creating out of existing material. The clear influence of those upon the biblical text might well suggest that the opening words reflected the belief that God created out of pre-existent matter