God’s Timeless Names

historicalstagesarenowvastlylonger—fifteenbillion years, not six thousand—and the universe that emergesisvastlylarger:hundredsofbillionsofgalaxies , not one solar system. This universe story finds its mostevocativetellingasamoralandaestheticdrama, not just a scientific one, in Brian Swimme and ThomasBerry’sTheUniverseStory(1992).Isitpossible to speak of God in relation to this universe story? Significantly the term “God” is never used by its authors ,whoinsteadreferto“deities.” SwimmeandBerrydefineanumberofbasicprinciples for this creation story. There is no “outside” of thisemerginguniverse.Fromtheoriginal“flaringforth”comesall theenergythatwilleverexistintheentirecourseofitsunfolding.It creates space and time as its unfolds. There is no place for a deity “outside” from which to shape it. It itself is the self-organizing energy that generates its own ongoing process: a process not of a smooth flow, but rather of dramatic self-destructions from which emerge new creative configurations. Yet the unfolding is exactly calibrated:thetiniestinstanceeitherslowerorfaster,andallwould havebeenwhollydifferentornothingatall. Three interacting processes define each emerging stage of the universe:differentiation,autopoiesis,andcommunion.Eachstage ofemergenceisshapedbyaprocessofrapiddiversificationbalancedbyself -generatingcreativityofeachofthe entities, which exist in an interconnection that relates them to each other from subatomic to universal levels. This dialectical trinitarian process has prompted one LatinAmericanecofeministtheologian,IvoneGebara, to suggest that this should be the way to make sense of theChristianconceptofGodastrinity. Yetifthisself-organizing,differentiating,andinterconnectingprocessisGod ,itisnottheGodofdominion from outside, but a deity who is wholly internal to the process of creativity through death and re-creation itself . This idea seems incompatible with patriarchal monotheism, yet it is one suggested by St. Paul’s famous evocation of the “unknown God” as the one “in whom we live, and move and have our being”(Acts17:28).ItisaGodwhobothsustainswhatisandyetis endlesslytransformative,openingupnewpossibilities;aGodthat transcendsthesplitofsubjectandobjecttoembraceallthatwas,is and may be; a God who connects us with the whole universe in its fifteen-billion-year unfolding, and yet also calls us to stand shoulder to shoulder to resist the systems of economic, social, and military violence that are threatening the very basis of planetary life. ThiscouldbeaGodwecouldbelievein.I 56 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 Imam Zaid Shakir is scholar-in-residence and lecturer at Zaytuna Institute, where he teaches courses on Arabic, Islamic law, history, and Islamic spirituality. His essays have been collected in Scattered Pictures (Zaytuna Institute, 2005). SPECIALSECTON:GODANDTHETWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY T he Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, informed us that God revealed the following simple, yet infinitelyprofoundwords:“Donotinsulttime,forverilyI amtime.”InthatGodencompassesalltime,chronology— aphenomenonthatisrelativetoourperceptionandunderstanding of the world—is irrelevant to God. That being the case, the great considerations that inform how we humans generally understand knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori, are irrelevant in relation to God. KantiscreditedwithdoingtophilosophywhatCopernicusdid to astronomy: he changed the way we look at the world and the placeoftheworldinagranderscheme—metaphysically.Perhaps if we step outside of time we can see that the question of who, what, or how God will be in the twenty-first century is a baseless one in that God’s power and ontological reality are unaffected by time.Perhapsachangeinperspectivewillallowustodiscoverthe timelessness of God. We wrestle with the idea of God, and as our intellect is shaped by realities, which vary from one time to another, that idea from ourtemporalperspectiveissubjecttochangeandvariation.However ,thereisoneconstantinourintellectualquestforknowledge of the Divine, something captured in the opening phrase of The CritiqueofPureReason: Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge itisburdenedbyquestionswhich,as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its power, it is also not able to answer. Muslims—atleastthosewhostilltakerevelationseriously(and revelation is the key to resolving the apparent conundrum Kant describes)—aresparedtheanguishthatresultsfromthepursuitof unanswerablequestions.Revelationandtheconnectionitgivesus toGodenableustofindacontentmentthatfreesusfromthedesire to ask unanswerable questions about God and instills in us the GOD’STIMELESSNAMES by Zaid Shakir TOP: “THE TREE OF LIFE” BY PAT ALLEN, BOTTOM: CREATIVE COMMONS/ENZURU, ESTEBAN.BARAHONA need to ask answerable ones about ourselves. “God will not be asked about what God does, but you will be asked about what you do,” the Qur’an reminds us. Questions of who, what, where, how, or why, as they relate to God, we are instructed, are best left to God. Rather, our task is to observe God’s timeless names and attributes as they unfold in the world and cultivate the light...