Who made God?
Thus asked a member of the congregation and I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. Was it serious? Was it a bit flippant or tongue-in-cheek?
Let’s assume in the first instance that the person was serious. In Christian theology God is unmade. God simply is. God existed before anything was and will be there when all things draw to a close. Something like Aristotle’s unmoved mover.
The question may have been an expression of perplexity. We cannot conceive of anything like this. We cannot imagine something, a being, an essence, God which exists for all time and all eternity. Something that jut is. It goes beyond one of my favourite illustrations. The Hubble telescope has sent back pictures of dust clouds light years high. That’s enormous and mind-boggling and yet the creator God is beyond even that idea. Mind numbing.
But then again, maybe the question was a bit flippant. Perhaps underneath the question was the assumption that, really, we made God. That certainly is the opinion of some of the 19th century philosophers. It was one of them (Feuerbach?) who said, in essence, that God is the creation of humans. We projected onto this idea, image, symbol so much that is utterly and totally human and created God. Perhaps aeons ago God and the gods were attempts by humans to explain a universe that we did not understand. A universe beyond our reckoning and yet, perhaps, by serving or pleasing or sacrificing to the the gods we could in some way manipulate or alter events. We could effect changes through the gods. More recently Richard Holloway has suggested that God is really a symbol which holds within it so much that is good about humans.
So, where does that leave us? God, an objective reality, totally beyond our comprehension, virtually impossible to know (except, as some would say, through Christ). Or God as simply an extension of very human ideas and values, a subjective creation. Where does that leave us?
Sometimes as moderns (or post-moderns) we think of ourselves as soooo much more clever than our forebears and yet they had so much to say to us. And perhaps this is where the experience of Christ and the thinking about Christ and the meditation on Christ has a profundity and depth which we perhaps do not acknowledge.
In Christology Christ is sometimes seen as beyond comprehension. He is the firstborn of all creation; through this Christ all things were made; and the deeds he performed could fill volume upon volume.
But this Christ too is utterly human. The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasaar called him ‘one of the loneliest men that ever existed’. Think about the cry from the cross: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Think about the shortest verse in the Bible, when he heard that Lazarus had died: ‘and he wept’. But it was not all misery: the first public miracle in John was at a wedding, full of joy and happiness and hope.
Christ, it seems to me, helps us to understand God. God is beyond the petty rules and limitations that were so often used to pen people within a religion or faith or cultural structure. God is in the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Christ helps to acknowledge the mystery of God, the one who formed and created and yet still suffered the loss of one who was a part of God.
Most of all, Christ helps us to make God. It is almost as if God and Christ know fully well that we humans, in our weaknesses, will inevitably transfer onto God so many of our weaknesses, our peccadilloes, our hang-ups, our fears. But, in Christ, we are ensured that there is one aspect and one aspect of God that we are allowed to ascribe to God and that aspect is the essence of God and that aspect is, of course, love. Love sacrificial and giving. Love so beautifully wrought in Christ’s life and in the agape of the Christian community.
Who made God? Nobody and yet everybody. God simply is, beyond our reckoning. And yet such is our imagination that we will ascribe so much to God as we see fit, creating God. But then there is Christ. He questions every human assumption about God but one: love. Christ helps us to make God and make God real in his life and love, in our lives and love, in others’ lives and loves.
Who made God? We make God…real….through Christ…. in God’s created world.
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