Tag: Jordan Peterson

Understanding the Hiddenness of God: Insights on the Nature of and Mystery of God

God is not a physical being like we are in this material world

kevingdrendel3 Comments

The “hiddenness of God” is a reality that causes some people to doubt the existence of God. If God is so great and so loving, why is He hidden to so many people? If God really exists, why isn’t God plainly evident to everyone? If God desires everyone to know Him, what’s the problem?

I have many thoughts about this dilemma, and I have written on the hiddenness of God many times before. Today, however, I want to highlight some thoughts that come through comments by an Australian YouTuber, Confident Faith, on a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Bishop Barron.

They discuss the nature of God – what kind of “being” God is. We naturally approach the idea of God from our human perspective. A person might wonder, “How can we even know what kind of a being God is?” Especially, if we are not even sure God exists!

But, we can know what kind of a “being” a God who could have created the Universe may be. Our reason suggests to us that a God who is capable of creating the time, space, and matter that comprises the Universe must be separate from and “other” than the reality of the Universe. Such a creating God must exist in a reality that is not contained within the Universe.

If we might think of the Universe as a box, we might say that boxes don’t simply for or create themselves. A box maker (who is not a box) creates them. Thus, we can intuit that Universes don’t form or make themselves. A Universe maker is required who is contained within a Universe.

If the box (or universe) is all we know, it’s hard to conceive of something outside the box (universe). It’s exceedingly hard for us to conceive of reality other than the basic units of time, space, and matter that comprise the physical Universe in which we live. Therefore, we have an exceedingly difficult time wrapping our minds around the idea of a Creator of those who is not contained within the reality of our Universe.

Even my attempt to describe the problem is inadequate, as the only reality we know is a physical one (comprised of that same time, space, and matter). For a God to have created those things and to have formed them into the Universe, that God would have to have been timeless, spaceless, and immaterial (not contained within that box), yet present with it.

I know that many people believe that a thing can create itself. Stephen Hawking famously said, “Because there is such a thing as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.” This is a box creating a box analogy. Hawking is essentially saying that the substance that makes up the components of the box (Universe) self formed and self organized into a box (Universe).

I, personally, find it harder to believe that the Universe created itself than to believe that God, who exists “outside” time, space, and matter, created the Universe.

This fundamental difference in approach and perspective is the Continental Divide on the issue of the existence of God. A person who is unwilling or unable to consider anything “outside” the bounds of the time, space, and matter that comprise the Universe is going to be utterly incapable of “seeing” (grasping, conceiving, or even allowing for) the possibility of God.

But, this way of thinking is not foreign to any of us. In fact, it’s most natural for us to think this way, because all we know is the box (Universe) in which we live.

In dealing with this dilemma, Bishop Barron goes back to the ancient text in Deuteronomy when Moses asked God, who should I say sent me. Barron says that Moses was basically asking, “What kind of a being are you?” In doing this, Moses is trying to put God into categorical terms.

God’s response was, “I am who I am!”  God is saying that He cannot be categorized as we categorize things in this Universe. This response points Moses to outside the box (Universe). This means, says Barron,, “God is not a being, but Being, itself.”

If we follow down the path of Moses’s questioning, we inevitably end up as an atheist. If we insist on putting God into categorical terms, like the time, space and matter we can touch, see, feel, and measure, God remains a mystery. We can’t touch, see, feel, or measure God because He is not comprised of (or limited by) physicality (time, space and matter), and, therefore, God is not a categorical object in the world.

Augustine called God the “Prius” – the thing that is prior to being, itself. God is that upon which the categorical world depends. God is not the highest being (as we often conceive Him to be), the highest being is still just a being; rather, God is the essence of being.

I like the way Confident Faith wraps up these things. He says,

“God is not a physical being like we are in this material world. For example, humans, animals and plants are all physical beings in this physical world. However, the pitch of God’s existence is infinitely higher. He is not physical like we are. He is Spirit. God does not exist somewhere in this physical universe. You won’t find him hiding behind some distance galaxy way out on the known limits of the known universe. Likewise, you won’t find Him hiding somewhere in the subatomic realm. It’s foolish to expect or demand that God be found in this way…. God is not just one being among many in this world. God is the very source of being.”

We are finite; God is infinite. We are contingent and caused; God is non-contingent and uncaused. We are physical, but God is Spirit. Therefore, Confident Faith says,

“Taking these factors into account, it’s reasonable to hold that God’s existence in nature will always, to a degree, be a mystery or hidden from us.”

The hiddenness of God, therefore, is a function of the difference between a box maker and the things in the box. We are a “thing” in the box of this Universe, and God “outside” of it. We are constrained by our physicality, and God is not constrained by physicality because God is Spirit.

Our ability to grasp and to understand such a God, therefore, requires us to let ourselves think outside the box of this Universe. We have to be willing to think outside the box to be able to begin to gain some understanding of God.

I have embedded the short YouTube video on this subject below, but I will close with a few other passages in the Bible the speak profoundly of the nature of God. These passages reveal that God’s hiddenness has purpose, that God knew what He was doing in creating the world the way He did, and His “hiddenness” from us is part of that purpose.

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth”

John 4:24

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

“‘In him we live and move and have our being’;

as even some of your own poets have said,

“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Acts 17:24-28

Paul recognized in his address to Greek philosophers in the passage quoted above the “hiddenness” of God, such that we must “seek” Him and “feel [our} way toward Him”. I believe, as some have objected, that God could have made himself plainly evident to us, but He chose not to do that.

I believe the reason He chose not to reveal Himself plainly to us is to give us space to seek Him because we want to, not because we must. If God was plainly evident, what choice would we have?

I believe that God is not looking for automatons that are programmed to obey. God wants us to know Him and to love Him authentically. He does not desire that we merely believe in Him; He desires a reciprocal relationship with us. but A clue to this lies in the words of James:

Even the demons believe—and shudder!

James 2:19

The demons have no doubt that God exists, but they hate God, and they “bristle” at the thought of God!

In the event a person might be tempted to think that the hiddenness of god is unfair, we have these promises:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Matthew 7:7-8

 Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

Revelation3:20

God may be “hidden” to us, but He desires to be “found”. He promises that He will reveal Himself. We can’t be half-hearted about it, however.

 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

Jeremish 29:13

The Wrath of God: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

My musing today is inspired by Bethel McGrew’s thoughts on Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and CS Lewis.

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Esther O’Reilly…. I mean Bethel McGrew, as she is wont to be known now, writes in her Essay Preview: Missing God of Jordan Peterson’s interview with Sam Harris in which Harris prodded Peterson to commit to conclusions on his flirtation with God. Harris teased Peterson into grappling with the idea of a personal God, but Peterson characteristically sidestepped the invitation.

Jordan Peterson is far more popular, or notorious, a subject than my extraneous musings, but Peterson isn’t the focus of my thoughts today. It isn’t Sam Harris either, though I have written about him before. Rather, the trajectory of my own past flirtations with the idea of a less personal God now prods me forward.

McGrew observes in Harris’s questions that he unwittingly, if not then crassly, “makes the same point C. S. Lewis makes in his fictional Letters to Malcolm, writing on the problem with trying to depersonalize God’s anger. Lewis’s hypothetical young correspondent suggests that we might reframe our experience of this anger as ‘what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power.’ A live wire doesn’t feel angry when it shocks us, but we know we will be shocked if we brush up against it.”

Before getting to the point, I must confess that I have played with a similar analogy out of a similar desire, I suspect, to make God seem less unpopularly angry. A God who is not wont to anger (or wrath as the Bible unabashedly puts it) seems more palatable to the modern mind, and, perhaps, safer,

Only my analogy, which I have thought to be rather clever, is of two magnets. The magnet signifying God is of immense proportion, of course, compared to the little magnet the size of humans. It doesn’t matter the size of the magnets, though; if we are orientated opposite to God, we are repelled by God.

It’s science. Like the laws of nature. It has nothing to do with God being angry.

I have toyed with the same human affinity to depersonalize an angry God. I admit the temptation to subscribe to the idea that primitive, Bronze Age people are less sophisticated than us and got it wrong to think that a loving God might get angry.   

I rather like my analogy, honestly. It neatly dodges the discomfort of “the God of the Old Testament” in our collective faces. Discounting God’s wrath as primitive imagery is, perhaps, convenient, if not a dead end as I now consider.

The temptation to gloss over biblical truths is no less compelling in our time than in Lewis’s time, and, perhaps, with the same unwitting results:

“But ‘My dear Malcolm,’ Lewis writes, ‘what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can’t.’”

Brilliant!

On my analogy, a magnet cannot do other than to repel a magnet orientated with its same pole forward. Of course, a tiny magnet opposing a larger magnet can always reorient itself! Right?

Of course, analogies always break done at some point. Have you ever tried holding two magnets with their north poles facing each other? The lesser magnet tends to want to flip and go the other direction. If the magnet were a person, the “attraction” might be described as unstoppable.

But that doesn’t seem to be the way we operate in our orientation to God. We seem to have this sticky business of free will milling about within us, and a real tendency toward sin that requires us to choose God’s way over our ways (if we want to be orientated in God’s direction). We don’t naturally align with God.

It isn’t quite like science. It’s messier than we like to think of science (not that science doesn’t have its own messiness with sticky things like quantum entanglement and such). We can no more remove God’s personhood than our own from the “equation”.

I am a bit embarrassed that I have fixated on this tangent to McGrew’s point in writing about Jordan Peterson, but it’s what caught my attention and held it. It gave my a springboard for my own thoughts. I have taken her work afield, but it’s the path I am on, so I will continue.

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CS Lewis on the “True Myth”

All myth is an attempt to shine light on truth. True Myth is the ultimate Light shining on the ultimate Truth. 

kevingdrendel9 Comments
The Areopagus in Athens

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are the translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened….”

This quotation is from CS Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greeves: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity), 18 October 1931. It captures the thought process of CS Lewis at the point in time when he was becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity.

If you have read much of what I write, you would readily notice that I quote and reference CS Lewis often. He resonated with me in my own faith journey that began in college, and he continues to resonate with me.

He is cited by more diverse groups of people, perhaps, than any person I can think of. He had a unique way of approaching things from unique points of view, often pulling fresh ideas from the dusty tomes of ancient literature. His concept of myth and True Myth is one such point (which actually comes from JRR Tolkien).

Some might consider his frequent allusions to ancient, pagan myth heretical. Some might even confuse his love of pagan myth with New Age belief., but he flatly rejected the occult. He was orthodox in unorthodox ways, but his creative approaches to orthodoxy were refreshing and thought-provoking.

We don’t have to look any further than the ultra-orthodox, Apostle Paul, to find some common ground with CS Lewis. When Paul was in Athens, some Epicureans and Stoics he met in the marketplace brought him to the Areopagus to address an erudite Greek crowd. In that address, Paul referenced an altar inscribed “To An Unknown God” and quoted pagan writers:

“in him we move and live and have our being”.

Acts 17:26 (quoting a line from Cretiga, by Epimenides of Knossos)

“For we are indeed his offspring ”

Acts 17:28 (quoting a line from Phenomena 5 by Aratus of Soloi)

Paul quoted the Cretan philosopher, Epimenides, also in Titus 1 (v. 12). Paul knew enough about pagan philosophy and poetry that he could quote from pagan works multiple times in his writings and addresses.

Paul quoted the pagan philosopher to express a spiritual truth about our lives in Christ, and Paul quoted the pantheistic poet, Aratus, to convey a theistic principle about God. (See Acts 17:22-28 – Quoting the Philosophers?) Paul connected with the people “where they were”, using language and references they understood to convey something about God.

Paul was well-read in the literature of his culture, and he used pagan philosophy and poetry to introduce people to the Gospel. This is exactly what CS Lewis does in in his own writing. Through his deep knowledge of pagan myth, he recognized strands of truth, and he recognized the difference between “man’s myth” and “God’s myth, the the “True Myth”.

In using the term, myth, Lewis is talking about story and narrative. Many stories and narratives convey a modicum of truth. CS Lewis observes that most myth from around the world contains some elements of truth, and Lewis insisted we shouldn’t be surprised by this, because truth is universal.

The difference between myth and True Myth, according to Lewis (and Tolkien), is that all other myth is a shadow of the True Myth. All myth is an attempt to shine light on truth. True Myth is the ultimate Light shining on the ultimate Truth.

All myth conveys truth through storytelling. True Myth isn’t just another story, though; it is “the” Story. It isn’t “just” myth, but reality, because “it really happened,” as CS Lewis said.

The True Myth is the Gospel. God, the Creator of the universe and everything in it, created man in His own image as His crowning creation. Then, God became a man, injecting Himself into His own creation, in order to communicate His very heart to us and to rescue us from going our own way and missing the ultimate purpose for which God created us – to have loving relationship with God, our Creator.

Continue reading “CS Lewis on the “True Myth”” →