There Can Be No Universal Talk of God

46 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 0 SPECIALSECTON:GODANDTHETWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY A s a progressive Christian, how do I talk about God in the twenty-first century? I have chosen to ground my life in the belief of God to provide me with a moral and ethical compass, but that does not solve the question of how I talk about this God. Second Isaiah (chapters 40–55 of the biblical book of Isaiah)longagodemonstrated awareness of the limits and inadequacy of the human mind to understand God. This problem is in part confined by human language. Language is the mode of our understanding, and our language controls our understanding . In the midst of such a situation, how can one appropriately talk about God? Are we not able to speak of God only insofar as our language permits us? Moreover, if God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, then even if we are able to speak of God through our human language, that does not necessarily mean that we have understood God. Thomas Aquinas notes, “it is impossible to predicate anything univocally of God.” He goes on to suggest that we can only speak of God analogically and metaphorically. God, ultimately, is a mystery. The mystery of God is far too great for us to comprehend in its entirety. All we are left are but glimpses of who this God is. As a Christian theologian, I believe that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is but a glimpse of God, a limited perspective of who God is. Humanity has been on a journey to uncover this mystery. Generations and cultures share in this journey and quest to have glimpses of the divine. Any talk about the divine, then, is a construct. Having a glimpse of the divine, we use our inherently limited language to construct a picture of who this God is. Moreover, we bring into this constructive effort of speaking of God languages, ideas, and concepts that are contextually and culturally influenced . We are only able to talk about God out of our lived experience , out of the knowledge we have acquired, and out of how our society and culture have formed us. Such a talk of God, therefore, is always particular and can never be universal. As a progressive Christian, therefore, I have found that such talk of God shapes my life of faith living in the mystery of God. This living in the mystery of God has helped me to acknowledge and accept the divine as revealed in the lives of people of other faith traditions and to relate to them with respect and appreciation. I Jeffrey Kuan is a United Methodist clergyman and associate professor who specializes in the Hebrew Bible at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. THERECANBENO UNIVERSALTALKOFGOD by Jeffrey Kuan comes to scientific research, it is the quality of the awareness in the subject that determines what is visible in the object. These biologists could help us understand why plants share water during droughts (an empirical fact that puzzles materialist science ); or how these same plants “lean toward the light” with branches, stems, and leaves stretching toward the sun in a sensual unity that inspires us to water and attend to them in a way that mere “photosynthesis” could never do; or the role of joy in bird flight and in the evolution of the wing (for the sanderling must be able to “whirl” with his community); or the role of love in the development of the kangaroo’s pouch. The point here is that these physical and morphological phenomena that normal science today describes in a largely anatomical and functional way (i.e., that such-and-such trait developed “in the service of survival”) in truth occur in a spiritual and social milieu that must be compassionately and lovingly perceived ,patientlystudied,andevocativelyilluminated.Onlyinthis way will the theory of evolution align itself with the truth that spirit and matter form an indissoluble unity, andthat we can only be the outcome of the evolutionary process that Darwin...