Conceptions of God
Metaphor, Imagination, and Doctrine
The most difficult part of writing about theology, for me, is that I really abhor the 1800-year-old church jargon. Do I believe the Nicene Creed when I repeat it? Yeah. Do I use it to talk about God in the Real World™️? Absolutely not.
Anyway, in 1995, Joan Osborne asked the same question we’ve been asking for thousands of years.
This song recurred in my head in a vile loop the entire time I read from Collins’ book this week, so I’m going to talk about Chapter 1, which lays out Wesley’s conception(s) of God, in terms of this song, because if I have to suffer, so do you.1
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make His way home?
One of the themes in Kierkegaard is the absurdity of God in his infinitude choosing to stuff itself into a sentient meatsack. This is what God chose to self-manifest in Jesus’ person? What does that say about me and my form? What does that say about my body and how I relate to it? I see the same theme at play here. God as a “slob,” slouched over, snoozing on the ride. Maybe a little drool. Or maybe he’s staring off into the middle distance not-thinking of anything. His mind is a multi-verse away, playing out a memory or a fantasy. It’s absurdly ironic.
I couldn’t help thinking of that absurdity reading about Wesley’s conception of God. He presents God from two different perspectives. The first is that God (Godhead God, if you’re trinitarian) has what Collins calls “personal and essential attributes.”2 In my mind, these are the “What’s God like?” qualities. This perspective focuses on God’s love and holiness, his eternal nature,3 and his Omnis.4 The second perspective is that God the Father does particular things. So, “What does God do?” Well, broadly speaking, God creates and preserves. As a creator, God makes stuff, and God infuses that stuff with order from the tiniest atom of dirt all the way up the “Golden chain”5 of order.
I don’t know whether Wesley would appreciate the vision of God that Osbourne presents. On the one hand, it does emphasize the absurd humility of God in human form. On the other hand, I think it trivializes that absurdity in some ways.
After I looked up the lyrics to try to chase the four lines above out of my brain, I found that like a lot of 90s songs, it relies on varied repetition of the same few lines, but they do a great job of making the point. The second verse asks a great question that I think Wesley is asking, too:
… If God had a face, what would it look like?
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like Heaven and in Jesus and the saints
And all the prophets?
In context of Wesley’s debates with Calvinists (and, it seems like most everyone else), Collins presents Wesley’s argument about pre-destination. Wesley again works with ideas in tension with one another. At one end of the tug of rope, you have humanity’s freedom to choose its own path, and at the other end, you have “free grace,” which provides the space for every person to choose to believe whether they recognize it or not.6 Holy love vs. Grace.7 I love how this question - how free are we to recognize and connect with God? - continues to show up.
Finally, the last few paragraphs of the chapter focused on advances in science and technology and what Wesley might have made of ideas like quantum theory, the (rapidly) expanding universe, and how those discoveries would have impacted his understanding of God. Collins presented this as another example of Wesley’s bent toward intellectual tension. Collins thinks Wesley would have been fascinated and excited by everything we have learned, but he would have placed science in context of God’s majesty rather than thinking of God as subject to scientific discovery.
… And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah
Actually, I really like this song. It’s catchy and snarky without being vapid, and it conveys Big Questions. But I don’t like it on a loop for an hour and a half.
Kenneth J. Collins. The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. 2007. Page 19.
I think infinite might be a better word here because Collins points out that we are talking about more than just immediate, linear concepts of time. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, Stuff.
Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. I would change omnipresence to ubiquity, but then you lose the “Om” effect.
Collins, page 35. This perspective, the Golden Chain that puts humanity on top, sits very uncomfortably with what I’ve learned about God’s character in the Hebrew Bible. In many ways, God reminds humans that we are raging narcissists, and it isn’t all about us. So this idea of God placing us at the apex of God’s golden order feels inconsistent with God’s character in the HB.
This seems to be the inverse explanation of Kierkegaard’s idea that we can be in despair, know that we are in despair, and also not understand what we are in despair about. I think he presented it as an aspect of Despair not to Will to be Oneself (from The Sickness Unto Death).
Which reminds me. Somewhere in one of my first readings last quarter, I think it was in Either/Or, Kierkegaard talks about explaining a concept by describing its outside edge. I visualized it like a map where you only know the edges of the ocean; you don’t know what’s past the shoreline in not-ocean. I’ll maybe write more about this later. I think some of the complication of reading Kierkegaard’s work is that he spends a LOT of time describing what things aren’t.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see this concept explored from both the ocean and the shoreline.
Collins, 31. Thus the subtitle of the book.