Relationship with God
Limentinus
Shipmate Posts: 8
in Epiphanies
Is belief in a distant, watchmaker God still viable in an Anglican sense, or must faith now centre on a personal Jesus who knows every thought I have and loves me as a man in real time? Do we lose anything when God is presented as a personal God.
Comments
I think there's more than one thing going on there.
The question over (effectively) Deism/Theism is quite a different one to the question of whether relationship with God is possible.
FWIW I think most forms of Christianity depend on a historical intervention by God - the Incarnation, or if you will, the Christ Event (sounds like a cheesy religious youth festival to me) which rules out Deism. On the other hand, I am sceptical about the degree of claimed ongoing day to day intervention that are sometimes made - for every supposed miraculous parking place there's me arriving at work after an hour's cycling to find I've not got the right key for my lock - or perhaps God's a cyclist hating petrolhead.
But I digress
In the charismatic circles in which I used to move, "personal relationship with God/Jesus" was a buzz-phrase which caused me a fair deal of worry. I'm a simple chap and a relationship implies someone you can talk to and who talks back, and not through what looks like pareidolia, vague hints, random thoughts and questionably applied half remembered Bible verses. Someone I can have a pint with. Go to a gig with. Take out to dinner. Sleep with. (not necessarily all of those every time)
So it depends what you mean by a "personal God".
And welcome to the Ship. Do make yourself known in All Saints if you haven't already.
Well and then there's me who was practising Buddhism, and wasn't looking for Jesus at all when He literally conked me on the head in a stone cold sober personal "road to Damascus" or "transfiguration" moment that I could not dismiss, though I tried, and which He repeated six nights later with the admonition "I see you are trying to dismiss Me as a figment of your imagination. Well this is really Me and this is really you, and this really happened and you had better not forget it."
So I can't fault people who claim a "personal relationship" with Him even if they never met Him like I did. Mine is the faith of Thomas, it is the lesser kind, because there are those who claim as great a faith as mine without the double-conk I so richly deserved (because I am an Ass - hence the onager reference in my old profile).
AFF
What do you mean by the distant, watchmaker God being 'viable in an Anglican sense'?
Are you saying that contemporary Anglicanism has lost that and gone all 'Me and Jesus'-y?
Or that a Deist position should be the default Anglican one?
With great respect for both @KarlLB and @mousethief, I completely understand misgivings about a 'personal relationship with God' thing - but as a believer and now in the Orthodox Tradition, I would still maintain that God is always 'personal'.
Which doesn't mean that I hear a voice in my head telling me what to eat for breakfast each morning.
I am teased on these boards at times for my 'both/and' comments and this is another area where this applies, I think. In fact, I think 'both/and' applies to pretty much everything - and it's there in the Incarnation of course - fully God / fully human.
I would argue that God has always been 'presented as a personal God' - heck, Moses is said to have spoken him as to a man 'face to face'. Whatever we make of the 'historicity' of the Pentateuch I think it's hard to find a watch-maker God in the Hebrew scriptures - even allowing for all the anthropomorphisms.
We can take an 'apophatic' approach of course but even that doesn't do away with the idea of a 'personal God.'
Contemporary evangelicalism didn't 'invent' the idea of a personal God - although I suggest that because of its prevalence we're becoming conditioned to see things through that kind of lens and with that kind of language.
Let's go back further. Before the Enlightenment and the Latitudinarians. Of course, as post-Enlightenment people - and there was much light in the Enlightenment - we can't jettison the thought-patterns of the last 300 years. But we can dig deeper wells.
The personal relationship with Jesus is something I can't live up to and I have to be true to the feelings I have. At the moment I'm left with the feeling that God may be infinitely powerful (and out there) but He's infinitely remote (not in the phone book). That's why I mentioned the watchmaker God. I'm not likely to meet the Jesus people talk about but never close the door to that.
It strikes me that there wouldn't be any room or need for faith if we woke up each morning to find Christ sat at the foot of our bed with a tea tray.
We go by faith, not by sight.
I've mentioned on these boards before how Ronald Knox the rather Spock-like RC apologist said that he'd never had a 'religious experience' in his life.
The late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware once leaned over the tea table towards some of his fellow Orthodox clergy and said, 'Would I shock you if I told you I sometimes wonder whether I've been imagining it these 60 years?'
Anyhow, the question in the OP is whether we 'lose' anything by having the concept of a 'personal' God - rather, presumably, than an impersonal one.
To which @mousethief replied that he finds both untenable.
Can we reduce these things to a utilitarian sense of 'profit and loss'?
I s'pose I'd frame the question differently.
Do we 'lose' anything if we have an overly familiar pally-wally sense of relationship with the Almighty?
Answer: Yes. We lose a sense of mystery and the numinous.
Do we lose anything if we reject the idea of God as 'personal' (something both Judaism and Islam have too, of course).
Answer: Well, yes. Although if there is a God we all benefit from that whether we believe in God or not.
It's a poetic thing to say, 'In him we live and move and have our being' but let's say it.
I mentioned Anglican tradition because I was raised as a High Church Anglican. Orthodoxy is 'easier' for me to deal with in some senses. I don't speak the language, for example, and I can get lost in the imagery. I'm sorry if that sounds uncultured or 'basic'.
One way I would describe what they are looking for is a rock on whom they can depend, an anchor in life's storms, a stable point of reference in an uncertain world. And a source of meaning, of morality.
It occurs to me that any time (in its history) that the Church has indulged in sanctions and punishment - excommunication, torture, painful death - I would argue that it has presented God as a remote ruler whose laws you need to obey without question, rather than a personal, imminent, being who you can relate to as an individual.
It also occurs to me that one thing we lose when God is presented as a personal God is that God becomes God of individuals, rather than God of community, of communities, of people, of humanity.
........The personal God of individuals chimes with me. He's the companionable older English gentleman from films of the 1940's and carries idealised traits: always loving, always near, always affirming. obscuring the harsher realities of life. ?
I (who had been brought up going to evangelical churches) asked, 'Oh, do Anglicans not see themselves as having a personal relationship with God then?'
She paused, as if to think about it, and then said, 'Oh, we do. But we don't talk about it.'
I saw this as more of a class thing, the stiff upper lip tradition of not talking about things very close to your heart.
I tend to see it as beyond what we can imagine as humans. That God sees the big picture, way, way beyond not only our individual selves, but beyond our neighbourhoods, beyond our cities, our countries, our planet. But equally, he sees and cares for the individual. The idea that not a sparrow falls without him knowing about it. The macro and the micro are in his vision - the two aren't mutually exclusive for him.
I'm so distrustful of anything that is about "voices". I would be more concerned if there were TWO sides talking.
In my experience, all I have to do is pay attention to my life. Every moment is trying to reveal the numinous in the mundane. I can choose to pay attention or not. And I can feel when I am paying too much attention, or not enough.
It's like having a radio transmitter built into my nervous system. For the most part the dial moves back and forth along the bandswidths of normal perception, but occasionally I can push the dial further along in one direction or the other and pick up signals from other higher and lower broadcasting bands.
Most of the information from these other frequencies is relayed as images, like a TV show with no sound.
God is ALWAYS broadcasting, on all frequencies and on all channels. Just depends on how you tune your receiver I guess.
AFF
I've seen a few marriages like that!!
I couldn't possibly comment.