The Empty Throne: Reimagining God as Creative Energy

Many people are ambivalent or negative when asked if they believe in God. Part of this reaction has to do with what they assume the questioner means by the term “God.” The image many in the Jewish and Christian traditions see when God is mentioned is of an old man with a beard sitting on a throne in the sky and ruling over the world. Understandably, many doubt the existence of such a figure.

My own reimagining of the figure of God found expression in a dramatic experience many years ago, and this experience has shaped my assumptions ever since that time. This experience happened when I was in my late teens or early twenties, about fifty-five years ago. I had been cogitating for some time about whether God existed. One day I had what I would call a “waking vision.” This was not a dream, for I was awake, but it was like a dream in that I experienced myself entering into a visual drama.

In this drama I experienced myself standing in a great hall, looking at great double doors at the end of the hall. I opened the doors and found a winding staircase leading upward. I began to climb the stairs, and at the top of each landing I found a new staircase. I continued climbing and climbing, until finally I found myself on the outside of another set of doors. I knew that these were the doors to the throne room of God. I would finally know the answer to the question I had been asking myself about whether God existed. With some trepidation I threw open the doors and saw within a great throne with its back to me. I peeked about the throne to see who was in it and saw that it was empty. There was no one on the throne!

I realized immediately that my former idea of God as an old man sitting on a throne in the sky was meaningless. Such a “person” does not exist. But that does not mean that God does not exist. One has to have a different understanding of what kind of God does exist. God is not an old man outside the earth living in the sky, but rather a creative energy that is in and through the whole earth. This creative energy isn’t a human being, male or female—rather, it is within and underlying all beings (animals and plants), earth, air, and water. It is personal and transpersonal. It is the energy of renewal and transformation that was the basis of all creation. This is the divinity that I had experienced every day. This is the God to which I could relate, had been relating, and could continue to relate in my daily life.

The Empty Throne by Olivia Wise.

This experience more than half a century ago has decisively shaped my living reality and my theological reflection since that time. He/she/it (I prefer “she”) is what I feel in myself, in other people, in all things. When I hear preachers or liturgists talking about God, I translate the term into this root experience. And I marvel with delight.

This understanding of the divine as the energy of creativity and renewal also demands a reimagining of the many roles that religions have assigned to God.

What about God as the creator of the world? What about God as the giver of the teachings of the Torah or the New Testament or the Qur’an? What about God as the one who will bring the triumph of goodness in human history and environmental harmony? What needs to be given up is the idea of the divine as a personified agent who acts in history over against (and disconnected from) humans and other beings, creating and redeeming us and dictating truths in the languages of our scriptures.

Rather, it is humans, who interact with this renewing energy of the divine in all things, who are inspired to write the teachings of the scriptures in our various languages. This energy of...