Relationship with God
Limentinus
Shipmate Posts: 9
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.
Not at all.
I've only been Orthodox for 4 years but was on the fringes of it for a lot longer since I first encountered it in 1997.
I don't 'speak the language' either- and our Liturgy is in English - but I am learning ... 😉
I also get lost in the imagery but that's not a problem. The imagery is a good place to get lost.
There are, of course, resonances with High Church Anglicanism - and my American Orthodox friends tell me with traditional forms of Lutheranism too.
They are also some echoes and parallels with evangelicalism, which may sound strange but there we go. There are plenty of former evangelical Christians within Orthodoxy.
There's an Orthodox trope that we are 'Orthodox but not Jewish, Catholic but not Roman Catholic, evangelical but not Protestant.'
That sounds like a rather apophatic way of putting it and like any 'sound-bite' it only takes us so far.
Whatever the case, I've heard Anglican and RC monastics talk in a disarmingly simple way about their relationship with Christ in a way that out evangelicals the evangelicals.
I agree with @fineline that there are often- or inevitably - cultural and social factors at play that condition how we talk about these things.
Long ago, I came to the conclusion that how many charismatics talk is simply an 'over-egged' (another common Gamaliel expression) version of what other Christians might say in a less demonstrative fashion.
As for the 'two way conversation' thing with only one side doing the talking... well yes, I can see that but 'the heavens declare the glory of God, day after day pours forth speech, night after night displays knowledge.'
Besides, isn't God 'speaking' when we hear or read the scriptures, or a sermon, or in conversations with friends and family, or in the wind among the leaves and the chuckle of the babbling brook?
I make no apologies for getting all Romantic with you there.
Wordsworth and Coleridge were onto something.
So was Blake.
That sounds pretty 'personal' to me ...
The "discernible way" doesn't have to be an audible voice (even if audible only to that one person).
Not really. "Us" implies many, not one to one.
What I can say, and have said when filling in that section of the form with some extensive discussion with my tutor, is that my experience of the presence of God is something I see in retrospect, sometimes from great distance. When I look back over time and see that what I have learnt and experienced has resulted in a change in my life then I can see God's presence through that change, especially when those changes are not what I was expecting.
I'm also convinced that the personal relationship with God is with the whole people of God, not with individuals. The modern obsession with individuals is a peculiar position, the vast majority of the experience of humanity is of communities being more important than individuals, and the whole Biblical narrative is in a milieu where God is concerned with communities - even when communicating to individuals there's always that communal element of the nation, the household, the church etc. And, that relationship is not only with communities but through communities, if we want to see God in action then we need to look towards the church and what the church is doing, if we want to hear what God is saying then we need to listen to the church and what the church is saying (including the traditions of the church which retains what has been said before, with the Bible at forefront of that).
* The exception was on my first day at university. My parents had driven me up early on a Saturday, we'd taken my stuff up to my room, had a walk around the area and had some lunch, and then they left. I spent a couple of hours unpacking, putting posters on the wall and books on the shelf, and come dinner time went to eat. A few other lads had moved in on my corridor, but they'd gone out to eat with their parents, so I was on my own. Not being outgoing, I sat on a table on my own to eat starting to wonder if I'd done the right thing moving away from home, when two older students came in and asked if they could sit at the same table. They were finishing their "what did you do over the summer?" conversation when one of them (Mark or John, I can't remember which) saw my id card sitting on the tray and exclaimed "You're Alan Cresswell!", turns out they'd just come from a Methodist Society meeting organising who was visiting which of the new students who they knew about, and my name came up because the chaplain had never had so many letters about a single student before - from my minister at home and the youth worker, from one of the leaders of the youth club I was a member of (that one passed via UCCF, who do sometimes cooperate with chaplaincy groups), the response form I'd filled in myself, copies of forms I'd filled in for the CU saying I was a member of the Methodist Church. Half an hour later I'd made two friends, arranged to go to church with them in the morning, and any doubt that God was looking out for me were well and truly dispelled. An hour after that and Alison, the MethSoc President who had been assigned to visit me, was at my door and my collection of coffee mugs and the packs of biscuits my parents had left me were in use. That very clear demonstration of God's care hasn't been repeated, but I don't suppose it was needed.
The 'personal' refers to Christ ie. God is personal, not, as @mousethief says, some kind of impersonal force.
The 'us' refers to ... well 'us' ...
It's not 'Me and Jesus' but 'We and Jesus,' if we can put it that way.
The more 'Catholic' traditions tend to emphasise the corporate rather than the individualistic - which is often the emphasis within certain forms of Protestantism.
'Have you invited Christ to be your personal Saviour?'
Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't any sense of the corporate within Protestantism or that people in more 'Catholic' settings don't necessarily have a 'personal faith' - however that's defined.
We can have a personal faith without having particular experiences. It's not about how we feel.
I've got all on trying to keep my mind from wandering during the eucharist and don't often have exalted and holy thoughts. I'm often wishing it would over with so I can get a cup of tea or coffee and something to eat. My tummy's rumbling by that point but so what? Let it rumble a bit longer.
When Mother Maria Skobtsova was canonised, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom quipped that she never looked particularly Saintly when he saw her - and judged her - sitting in a Parisian cafe with a coffee (or something stronger) and a Gitane.
Yet she rescued Jewish children from Nazi deportation and died in a concentration camp.
I expect that didn't feel particularly yippee-dippee-doo either.
Thanks fineline. I don't think we can easily get away from our learned socio-cultural traditions (including as they relate to God). A friend of mine describes this mindset as being founded on an overriding sense of duty.
It sounds like you're describing someone who belongs to an intentional christian community. I don't think it's unusual for such communities to promote the idea that community comes before self. In that context, talking openly about one's personal relationship with God could seem presumptuous.
That isn't to say that evangelicals who emphasise the 'personal' don't have a sense of the corporate and communal. Evangelical and charismatic churches are often known for their close-knit sense of community, of course.
We all 'anthropomorphise' to a certain extent whether we envisage God the Father as a kind of 1940s English gentleman or some kind of celestial Tsar or God the Son as some kind of hippy transported back to the 1st century.
While we're at it, God the Holy Spirit often seems relegated to some kind of impersonal 'faith-force' or else a big, cuddly cosmic buddy who is at our beck and call like a genie and who 'tells' us and guides us what to do in a way that often seems to justify what we want to do anyway...
There are of course exceptions to that caricature.
FWIW many of the Fathers and later mystics seem to discourage us from imagining what God is like or entertaining mental pictures or impressions of him.
That may sound counter-intuitive within Orthodoxy where we put great store on iconography and physicality - 'matter matters' - but I think it's consistent.
God is 'unknowable' and 'beyond' in his essence - but the Incarnate Eternal Word has made him known.
'That they might know Thee, the one True God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.'
How this looks and is 'worked out' in practice is going to vary considerably through a whole range of factors - cultural, social, economic, education, age, experience, church tradition, personality and so on and so on and so on.
With my both/and stylus stuck I don't see why we can't have both the corporate and communal and the individual and personal going on at one and the same time.
Those of us who might be in committed relationships don't lose our individual personalities because we are part of a unit and not living alone.
I don't have a personal relationship with Jesus who you call Christ. I hoped for the one to one to open up for me and years ago I prayed for it. There was nothing. As I'm now an older man, I have the idea there never will be a personal relationship with Jesus and that's now OK for me. Hence, the attraction to the watchmaker God.
I'm not convinced those are the only two options, myself.
The Anglican church is a broad church, so anything is potentially Anglican. That said, the official liturgy does say that to God all hearts are open and all desires known. It doesn't say anything about God speaking overtly in return. (I have only once had a religious experience in church that went beyond what one might expect from communal singing, and I suspect it was something like mild self-hypnosis.)
I think there are three ways of seeing God, as distant (which in its extreme form is a nihilistic form of atheism), as personal (which in its extreme form is power worship, sucking up to the big guy), and as immanent (which in its extreme form is just an impersonal feel good force). For most of us, some mixture of perspectives will resonates more than other mixtures, but all except the extremes are valid.
What I might consider 'extreme' you mightn't and vice-versa.
But I broadly agree that it's a mixed-model.
The various contributions here make me wonder exactly what it is we 'expect' when we might pray for a 'personal relationship with God.'
Visions? Miraculous signs?
A sense of peace and of certainty or conviction?
Colly-wobbles or some kind of emotional high?
Martyrdom is what many of the first disciples received if Holy Tradition is to be believed.
Not 'feeling anything' doesn't negate the idea of a relationship with God any more than some kind of euphoria is an indication of spiritual standing or prowess.
As a former charismatic evangelical I can relate to the 'self-hypnosis' thing but wouldn't dismiss every 'experience' out of hand. We are creaturely creatures. Things 'move' us.
I find the Orthodox Holy Week services quite moving, for instance and I'm a sucker for Welsh hymns in the minor key.
I know what the 'ingredients' are and how these things 'work" but that doesn't stop me finding them moving or uplifting.
Feelings can be fickle and we go by faith not feelings but if 'feelings' come along, fine - provided we don't go overboard emotionally.
But again, how do we assess when we cross that line?
It'll vary according to each community and tradition.
I can attend a Divine Liturgy and be bored out of my skull. I can attend a Divine Liturgy and feel moved and uplifted. It's not about my feelings.
The same would apply if I attended an Anglo-Catholic service or a Pentecostal meeting or whatever else.
Me neither.
Incidentally, when you say 'Jesus who you call Christ', @Limentinus are you saying that you don't accept the traditional teaching on the Incarnation, that Jesus of Nazareth was none other than the 'Christ of God', the 'Word made flesh'?
I could be glib and suggest that if we don't accept the traditional Creeds then it's hard to envisage a 'personal relationship' with the Triune God to which they bear witness.
But I'm not so reductionist as to limit any engagement with the Divine to those who assent to the historic Creeds - although I am fully wedded to historic Creedal Christianity.
If we say we have a 'personal relationship with Jesus' then surely that must mean that if we do then we also have such a relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit- One God in three Persons.
It isn't for me to say whether this, that or the other person does or doesn't have such a 'relationship.'
What I can do, by God's grace, is say, 'I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and in ...' and try to the best of my limited ability - again by God's grace - to live a life commensurate with that belief.
I fail of course.
'But he gives more grace.'
Whether I 'feel' anything emotionally or in a numinous sense isn't the issue. The issue is that we remain faithful to the high calling we have received.
I need help with that. People here can help. So can family or friends and people in church. So can books and songs and icons and architecture and nature and ...
Maybe it's just my culture, but isn't talking about intimate personal relationships always awkward?
I think God cares about us, and me included. I don't think God is limited by time, but I do believe God loves us now as well as at any other time.
I would lose comfort if we had to talk about God personally, but I'd also would lose precision because I know a lot less for sure about God-with-me.
Could you explain your last sentence for me? I'm missing something, but that might be because I didn't sleep much last night.
On the other hand, if I'm asked about the parable of the mustard seed, I can tell the story precisely and with confidence. I know exactly what is supposed to have happened.* I even have scholarly accounts and historical details available to help my analyze the story, and so forth.
*Not getting into how we interpret the bible here. I am rather trying to express that I have a solid point of reference for the story that isn't about my human perceptions or understandings.
I'm told that in Kenya it's quite normal for someone to approach a complete stranger and ask, 'Are you born again?' Or 'Are you saved?' and so on, in a way that would frowned upon in Britain and seen as the province of wierdoes and fanatics.
One of the things I notice about the Eastern Europeans in our parish is that they are far less self-conscious than we British people are when it comes to venerating icons or weeping in church and so on.
As I've said upthread, I've come across monastics and indeed, some older evangelicals who talk disarmingly about God as if they are referring to an old friend.
That seems to be of a very different order to the 'God told me this ... God told me that ...' stuff I used to hear from some - but by no means all - charismatics.
In fairness, we held little truck with super-spirituality and there were checks and balances. Every Christian tradition draws the lime somewhere.
'We know in part ...' so anything we say in this regard is going to reflect our 'muddy impressions.'
We see 'as in a glass darkly' but we still see.
So yes, I think what @Gwai says makes perfect sense.
And we do have 'helps' - in the form of commentaries and scholarship as in Gwai's example of the Parable of the Mustard Seed and in what our Reformed brothers and sisters would call the 'means of grace'.
Those of us who have sacraments or Saints and iconography and so on, have all those too - as well as the scriptures, other people and whatever else.
None of us work in a vacuum, not even hermits.
It seems axiomatic to me that some things are going to appear clearer than others, that at times we feel the heavens 'are as brass' at others we may feel 'surely God is in this place' like Jacob or indeed feel nothing at all.
Plenty of people don't 'feel' anything and plenty of others psyche themselves up to do so because their particular tradition favours religious emotion.
I suspect most of us find ourselves somewhere or other along that spectrum.
But it does almost always seem easier to “talk” about relationship with God in music.
Hence, We plough the fields...
Ok, 'Tell out my soul...' is more 'personal' of course ... and I quite like it, but it's intended for congregational singing and not a personal performance piece as a Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash or Jellyroll song might be.
Which isn't to disparage those artists, far from it. But we aren't comparing like with like.
A Bach cantata or a choral piece by Allegri or Palestrina can move us, but they are different genres to a Wesleyan hymn, say or a contemporary worship song or an Orthodox troparion commemorating a particular Saint.
It's all about context, purpose and intention.
Okay, this helps me a lot. The muddy impressions thing is what I'm trying to wrestle with.
I think God's muddiness is the bit that bothers me the most when I have to talk (want to talk?) to people about him and how he relates to me. (Well, after the plain embarrassment about talking about what is for me a love relationship, and me a deep introvert.)
Because he doesn't seem to want to be undeniable, if you know what I mean. He could have gone for a less muddy way of communicating with people--maybe a notebook or something, and everybody wakes up to find a written entry every morning. Heck, maybe email. Something that would be harder for people to ignore or to blow off, saying "That's not communication at all."
But he seems to be doing it deliberately. He chooses methods that are only clear to those who love him and follow him--and not always then, either. He uses a book, and sacraments, and things like prayer and teaching and other people's words and even dreams and impressions. All things that those who love him are likely to notice and ponder over, but nobody else is going to want to be bothered. And even those who love him are going to wonder if they're getting it right a lot of the time--was that actually God speaking to me, or was it just my own mind?
The reason I think it's a deliberate choice is because of what he said at the Last Supper when he was preparing the disciples for his death, resurrection, and return to the Father. These events are going to cause a major change in the way his disciples relate to him and communicate with him. They are going to have to learn to cope with an invisible Lord who speaks through what he's already said (that ends up remembered in the New Testament), and through his Spirit living in us (which covers all sorts of things, from muddy impressions all the way to major visions etc.). And for some reason, while he's explaining all this, he keeps banging on about love and obedience. It's as if he thinks they are the same subject. I mean, look how he answers Judas!
19 "Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me." (John 14)
His answer bugs me, because it doesn't seem to be an answer. But if I was forced to paraphrase it, I think he's saying, "That's right, I'm not going to make myself undeniably clear to the world. For those who love and obey me, I'll make myself known, and I and the Father will live with you in love and closeness. But for those who don't, they'll have to make do with what they already have--the witness of the Old Testament and nature." (This last bit I'm pulling out of his parable in Luke 16:29-31).
It's maybe not surprising, given the way Jesus usually behaves. Somebody said once that if you ask Jesus a question, you'll get an answer, but most of the time he won't be answering what you asked him. Or at least not clearly.
But I think maybe that's what he wants. It's so easy for me to waffle on and on about the right translation of a Bible passage or something. But if you ask me about God in my life this week, I can't hide myself behind academic stuff. I have to invite you into a rather intimate place, and tell you things I don't say to people unless I care about them. So it's not just my relationship with God that's affected, it's my relationship with you. If I tell you, I'm making myself vulnerable and inviting you closer to me.
The reason I think God planned it that way is because if I do that, our relationship is going to get deeper--maybe for a passing conversation, maybe permanently if we see each other all the time. And faith in Jesus is contagious. The closer you get to a believer, the more likely it is that you (general you) will catch it. Which of course is what Jesus wants...
I just wish he didn't seem to positively want to be deniable.
I've been musing on this comment in one of your posts upthread;
"I'm told that in Kenya it's quite normal for someone to approach a complete stranger and ask, 'Are you born again?' Or 'Are you saved?' and so on, in a way that would frowned upon in Britain and seen as the province of wierdoes and fanatics."
When I was living in Kenya (2012-2016) and in the area where I was working (North Rift) this was not normal practice for people from more mainstream church backgrounds.
In fact, my Kenyan friends, all devout Christians would not have dreamt of doing this. My clergy friends might offer a prayer for someone after a pastoral conversation (the clerical collar invites such things!) but would not approach a complete stranger for such a conversation.
However I can see that the massive spread of various Pentecostal groups and the differing characteristics of different people groups (lots of my friends were Nandi and their culture is far more reserved) might lead to this happening.