One of the most pressing questions of life is “Where do you find God?”
Such a profound question begins with an immediate fork in the road with only two paths forward. If God exists, we find God either outside our world system or within our world system. It must be one or the other.
If God exists outside our reality, then we will only find God if God chooses to reveal his being to us. If God exists within our reality, we can find God on our own.
Ross Douthat, one of my favorite columnists, just yesterday published an intriguing article titled The Return of Paganism. In it he argues that in our post-Christian society where institutional religion is waning, a rebirth of paganism may be in the offing. Here is its core belief:
“that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.”
How does one seek or find God or the gods or Being embedded in nature?
The most common path is New Age spirituality, which promotes pantheism ( ‘pan’ = ‘all’; thus pan-Theos, all or everything is God). We can find god all on our own, for God is all around us and within us. Douthat continues with this cogent explanation:
This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.
Can anyone doubt how attractive this new paganism is today? I encourage you to read the article, where among other things Douthat claims there may soon be more witches in the United States than members of the United Church of Christ!
This paganism offers the comfort of orthodox Christianity with none of its challenges (e.g. “world denying moral standards”). It provides a comforting worldview in which “we can truly hope to be at home” with no need to change our lives.
This Advent season we can claim again the other option: God is outside our reality and can only be known through revelation.
In my last few posts, I’ve been working my way through Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 and his famous Bread of Life sermon which followed it.
Today we arrive at the point in the story where Jesus answers his critics by showing how he is greater than the manna God provided through their ancestor Moses on their journey through the wilderness:
Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:31-35)
No fewer than seven times in this passage, Jesus calls himself the “bread who comes down from heaven.” This is the essence of orthodox Christian faith—the Father, who is outside the world, sends his Son Jesus into the world to reveal his being and nature to the world.
God is separate from creation. Most near-eastern creation stories explained creation as the result of epic battles between different gods. But the God we meet in Genesis is NOT a part of creation. God exists outside—or independent of—creation. There is a critical difference in being (technically an “ontological difference”) between God and creation.
Think of two ducks—a real duck and duck decoy carved from wood. One is living, the other is not. This is an ontological difference. The living and wooden ducks both exist, but have different orders of being. Biological life (the duck) is a higher and different order of being that simple material existence (the wooden decoy). In the same way, God is in a completely different order of being, existing outside or and distinct from time and space. In fact, there WAS no time or space until God created it, as described in Genesis!
John Calvin describes this passage in his inimitably stark but clear way:
“…this passage teaches us that the whole world is dead to God, save inasmuch as Christ quickens it, for life will be found only in Him…The simple lesson is just this: our souls do not live by what I may call an intrinsic power, but derive life from Christ.”
The new paganism insists that, because God exists within creation, human beings have an intrinsic (i.e. within them) power to know God.
Orthodox Christianity insists we have no such power. True life is found only in Jesus, God’s divine revelation to human beings. Revelation is needed because God exists in a different order of being from us and all creation. Our universe is the wooden decoy, God is the living duck. (And yet, as we’ll see in the next week’s installment, we find God only because God because God first finds us!)
This radical ontological distinction is behind every Christmas carol we will sing, every children’s Christmas pageant we will watch, every word of the Christmas story we will hear over the coming weeks. Our Creator came from outside and entered our time and space creation to become Emmanuel, God with us.
May our easy familiarity with what we we sing, watch and hear this season never obscure or diminish this radical Advent truth!
Question: What thoughts do the contrast between God within creation or outside creation prompt for you? Please share them in a comment.
