Philological Concerns: Theos

Theos (Gr.θεός) is the Greek word for God. If we are going to contend with the biblical stories it is probably a good idea to get straight exactly what we mean when we say “god” — at least to the best of our abilities. To this end, and in no particular order, I intend to make a list of attributes of God as he appears in the Bible. If we are going to talk about God in a nuanced manner, we might as well start here. So who is this God of the Bible?

 

God is the highest ideal. Man has the ability to posit abstract ideals. It is one of the hallmarks of humanity. Do not get bogged down in the details, it is as simple as this. Human beings have an innate drive towards admiration. We see things in others that we admire. As we do this over and over again, generation after generation, the picture becomes more and more clear.

To better understand this we will return to the analogy of the good guy and bad guy in a movie. We watch a movie and we look at the good guy (or for some of us the bad guy) and we think how admirable he is and how we would like to be like him. But he is a character in a movie so we can’t be just like him. Then we go to another movie, and another, and another. In each of these movies we follow the good guy and extract out the admirable qualities we wish to imitate. Children in the developmental stage do this in a way that was very well documented by Jean Piaget.

After hundreds of movies and books and news stories and life experiences we continue to add to that abstraction details that are common across the set of all good guys. That abstraction is the meta-good guy. The meta-good guy is an idealized character which has all (and only) the attributes that are common in all good guys.

Now let’s say you and your tribe do this and it continues on for thousands of years. Other tribes come to you and with their meta-good guy and you merge. Sooner or later, over the course of a vast swath of time, the abstracted meta-good guy becomes the ideal person.

Then what? Well, then you start telling stories about that ideal person.

One of the attributes of God in the biblical library is that he is the absolute peak of all sets of all meta-good guys. The fact that humans have the ability to abstract in such a way, despite what soft minded environmentalists like David Suzuki might believe with his loathsome climate alarmism, suggests that our consciousness plays a constitutive role in this universe — that consciousness is as much a point of the universe as we can tell. In a few weeks we will come back to this with John Wheeler’s notion of the participatory universe, but for now we can say that the absolute cutting edge of physics at the current moment is in a general consensus that there is at least something about human consciousness that is constitutive of the universe.

This world creating consciousness of ours projecting out a more and more distilled abstraction of the perfection of all which is admirable and which should be emulated is one of the many attributes of the biblical God.

In short, God is that abstraction which stands outside of time, space and nature and is the absolute pinnacle of that which ought to be admired.

God is sovereignty. Twice in the Bible (1 Timothy 6:15 and Revelation 17:14 and 19:16) God is referred to as the king of kings. What is this notion? The image is of a room with all of the world’s kings and they are bowing before the highest of the kings. This is actually incredibly sophisticated narration if you don’t try to take the fundamentalist route. What the phrase “king of kings” means is that even kings are subordinate to the abstract concept of sovereignty as such. This stunning ancient discovery is a hallmark of civilization.

The easiest idea is that the strongest is the king and unless someone can be stronger than him sovereignty is embodied within him. But this is not so in the biblical stories. In the biblical stories there is an abstract concept of sovereignty which is eternal and to which even the mightiest kings owe their allegiance.

Neither chimpanzees nor socialists have evolved to the point of understanding this. The king himself must be subject to the idea of sovereignty as such. That idea of sovereignty, the eternal abstract concept of kingship, is God.

God is transcendental reality. Observable by man only indirectly and over vast stretches of time, God transcends the world. The belief in a reality which is transcendent of this world is the belief in God. Further, without the belief of a transcendent reality there is no true humanity. This is why the secular world will never produce great art or literature or music. Without a notion of a reality which transcends the world one cannot create beauty.

So what is God as transcendental reality? It is that force which contends with and contextualizes primordial chaotic soup in order to create a habitable world. It is the uncreated reality which exists as being itself. God says as much to Moses in the book of Exodus when he tells him his name is “I am that I am.” God is being qua being. God is the active form of the verb to be.

God is truth. This is a tough one to understand. The best way I can describe it is that, as the transcendental reality, whatever is true is God. From the other side of this we see that a lie is an attempt by man to change the nature of reality. This is why Satan is often called the Prince of lies. If God is transcendent being itself he is the culmination of truth which means he stands in opposition to lies and falsehood necessarily.

God responds to proper sacrifice. One of, if not the greatest achievement of human beings is the discovery of sacrifice and it is, writ large, across the entire biblical library from Genesis to Revelation. At some point human beings realized that they could offer something of great value in the present in order to get something in the future. This plays out, at first, as very brutal animal sacrifice and eventually, over a very long period of time, becomes psychologized.

The concept of sacrifice is something we predicate our daily lives on even today. Work is sacrifice. We sacrifice our time in the present for money. Money is a promise from society as a reward for sacrifice. You give your time up now and later you will be rewarded with a promise for financial solvency through promisary notes.

We sacrifice our time to a goal. When we decide, for instance, to play a musical instrument we sacrifice countless hours to learn that instrument so that in the future we can play it and we assume that society will reward us for this. We sacrifice when we do repairs on our homes or when we do favors for friends. And yeah yeah yeah you can say, “well beavers build dams.” Yes, they do. But they aren’t doing it thinking about all the other things they would rather be doing. Beavers have an embodied knowledge of dam building. They don’t consciously decide to build a dam — not in the way a person gets up in the morning and decides, despite every reason and even valid excuse not to, to go a a job he doesn’t want to go to. If we are going to take this seriously, we have to dispense with the teen angst objections like this.

What we do when we make sacrifices is we make a bargain with reality itself, with being, with God. We enter into this bargain willing to give up that which is most precious to us and if our sacrifices are done properly we expect that being will reward us in the future. On the other hand, if they are done improperly we can expect to be punished.

The future is a human thing. The discovery of sacrifice is the discovery of the future and the discovery of the future is the discovery that a covenant can be made with God. This covenant is a commitment to mutual responsibility and a future oriented sacrifice-reward dynamic with being itself.

God is responsibility. If you took the abstracted concept of responsibility as such and turned it into a narrative character you could tell a story about that character would be God.

To act in a responsible manner is to act in a way which emulates the pattern of action represented by God.

God creates order. The fundamental pattern of the divine and its image in human beings is that of the creation of order out of chaos.

For the human it is simple. We can think of this as moving into a new home. On day one there is this enormous mess of potential. What do you do with this chaotic mess that isn’t anything yet? You confront it. You pick a part of this mess and you turn it into a part of your home. You do this over and over again until what was a chaotic mess of potential turns into a home. The divine counterpart is God creating an ordered universe through the articulation of the word out of the primordial chaos.

Clinical Psychologist and marital expert John Gottman said something interesting that is a correlate to this. He said that a marriage is built out of arguments. While he didn’t frame this in biblical terms, I think it is perfectly applicable. In a marriage there is some argument. It isn’t something anyone wants to talk about or confront because, well, it’s really difficult. You have to tell someone how you feel knowing full well they will not be happy about it and you have to listen to and contend with someone telling you how they feel knowing full well you won’t be happy about it. That is chaos. Confronting chaos requires courage. When you courageously confront the chaos with truthful words you can, hopefully, negotiate a peace that you can live with. Then this part of the chaos is resolved into an order which can sustain both parties.

Gottman says that arguments must occur perpetualy because the pattern of actively resolving those problems is the marriage in the same way that human beings, in order to survive and flourish, must constantly confront the unknown and map it in such a way that it goes from being unknown territory to known territory. In the biblical stories which are dramatic abstractions this pattern is God.

God is that which punishes pride and presumption. Let’s start this one by putting this out there: pride and presumption will always be punished. Go ahead, go into the world prideful and full of presumption and see, long term, how that works out for you. You will be punished. The reason you are being punished for pride and presumption is that what you are doing is taking the duty of being the transcendental reality on yourself. You are, in a sense, picking a fight with reality. Guess who is going to win ten times out of ten, you or being itself.

God is conscience. There is a wonderful idea in the book of Kings (19:12-13) that for all of his awe and all of his might God is not the spectacle of wind or earthquakes, of fire or hurricanes, God is “that still small voice.” Have you ever asked someone where an idea came from and they said “it just popped into my head?” I mean, can you think of a less sophisticated answer than that? How is it that I can sit on the edge of my bed and ask myself a question and get an answer that I in no way expected? Why, when I do something I know I shouldn’t, even if I am one hundred percent sure I will not get caught, that I feel guilt and shame? Why is the cellophane on the package of cookies so incredibly loud no matter how hard you try to muffle the sound in the middle of the night? There is a still small voice. In the biblical stories, this is God.

God is the drive to act. We see this repeated over and over again across the biblical stories (Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jonah and the Apostles just to name a few). God is the call to go out into the world and do something. In the Bible there is a God who does not want you to do nothing. He does not want you to burry money instead of risking it for gain (parable of the talents Matt. 25: 14-30) and he does not want you to sit home and do be comfortable (the call of Abram Genesis 12: 1-9). The God we find in the biblical narrative abhors stasis.

God is the giver of law. The biblical stories show how the idea of law emerges in human beings. That a series of laws can be abstracted out of embodied moral behavior is God.

God is the mode of being which allows for protection from catastrophe and the ability to save the world. We see this most clearly in the story of Noah but it emerges repeatedly in the biblical library. When one finds the proper mode of being (walking with God), when the flood comes they will manage to ride out the storm and save themselves, their family and the whole world with them.

God is redemption. In the ancient world a very obvious question comes up to people everywhere. What are we to do about the tragic, mortal, limited life which has been thrust upon us and the consequent suffering which characterizes it? The answer in the east was a mode of being to escape the cycle of suffering (samsara) and obliterate the self (nirvana). However, the Bible presents a different answer. The biblical answer which lies at the foundation of western civilization is not to escape the suffering through non-being but rather to justify the suffering with heroism. The pattern of heroism which justifies the suffering of all being and the sins of the world is God.

This in no way represents an exhaustive list, but it is a good start.

You can believe in this or not, that isn’t important at the moment. What is important is that this is what the Bible says God is. While this list in no way is complete — what ever God is in himself it is clearly more than what he is to man — and it isn’t a theological or philosophical claim (at this stage) it is merely a description of the main character in the narrative we are about to analyze.

The most crucial part of this, what’s most important to me, is that I have a guarantee. I need for my reader to put aside notions of God they received in their religious or secular educations, colloquially through their culture or the ideas they have and do not know where they come from.

We are attempting to read this book and, like Jung says, the precursor to the savior is the fool. At this stage, if you are not willing to be a fool — not willing to enter into this discussion with the mindset of the absolute novice — there is nothing more here for you.

For my part I hope you are willing to be a fool with me and take a look at this book with beginners eyes. For the last two thousand years, and even more intensely in the last five hundred years, there has been such a pile of burning tires which we laughingly call theological thought that it is time to wipe the board clean and take a look at this most amazing set of ideas which form the foundation for the entire civilized word.

Let’s have at it!