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THE GOD OF ABRAHAM
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,éguos€ people, when asked whether they believe in God, anewer ‘yes'
With more or less conviction.
But if you go on to ask them whether
they believe in a personal God, many are inclined t6 say 'no'.
Forjl
it is fashionable nowadays to suppose that it is more "respectable",
more "scientific", to think of God as a Force rather than a Person.
Téis Force itself is variously conceived: sometimes as the energy which
sustains life and pushes along the evolutionary process, like Bergson's
élgg giggl; éometimes as the impulse which makes for goodness in human
life, so that God is really a metaphor for the moral conscience; sometimes as the power which controls the destiny of men and nations, so
that God can be equated with "Providence"; sometimes as a force which
does nothing in particular but which is assumed to exist in order to
make sense of the universe, as the existence of "ether" was at one
time postulated in order to account for what we know about Space.
This conception of God as a Force rather than a Person has one
great advantage.
It avoids all those difficulties which arise when
God is conceived in too man-like a fashion.
In Judaism and the
religions which stem from Judaism, anthropomorphic terms - that is,
tbrms which are really applicable only to human beings 7 are frequently
applied to God. He is described as Father, King, Judge, Shepherd.
That is perfectly all right, indeed it is very helpful, as long as
we remember that we are Speaking metaphorically.
But sometimes people
take it too literally, and then cruditiee creep iqto religion which
discredit it in the eyes of others and bring disillusionmentxmxk
to the believer himself.
If God pities his creatures as a father
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his children, and if he comforts them as a mother her children, why
does he not pity me in my present distress, why does he not comfort
me in my present sorrow?
If God is a righteous Judge, why does hu
allow evil to go unpuniehed and virtue unrewarded?
If he listens to.
prayer, why does he not listen to Q; prayer and do what I ask? If he
is 3 Shepherd, why does he not guide me in all my activities and
decisions?
These are the problems which give the atheist his chance
to ridicule religion, and which threaten to undermine the faith of
the believer, when the conception of God is too naive, too anthropo-
morphic.
Some religions are more exposed to this danger than others.
Christianity, for example, is more vulnerable than Judaism, since it
is essentially based on the identification of God with a historic
human person.
Judaism, on the other hand, has on the whole avomded
remarkably well the pitfalls of an over-personal conception of God.
It has never ceased to emphasise that God is other than man and
infinitely exalted above man.' "My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lgrd" (Isaiah 55:8). God
is essentially beyond man's understanding, and every attempt to
describe him in human language muét always be more or less inadequate,
for God, as the Creator of the universe, is greater than the universe,
so that nothing within the universe, nothing drawn frqm the_rest of
human experience, can be compared with him.
you liken God," asked the Second Isaiah.
"To whom, then, will
And the Rabbis, when they
attributed human qualities, human feelings or human actions to God
nearly always added the word kivxachol _ which is best translated
."
“Egg igpossibile" - to warn the reader that the expression is to be
taken metaphorically and only metaphorically.
In Rabbinic Jédaiam one
of the commonest ways of referring to God is hammakom,"£he Place",
an allusion to the teaching that the universe is nbt the place of God,
but God is the place of the universe.
That is to say, God is not an
entity within the universe bgt its Creator and, in that sense, outsflde
1t and independent of it.
In these and mther ways Judaism has always
clung to its belief in the transcendence of God and refused to compromise
with the pagan demand for a God who is man-like and therefore easy to
visualise.[:It is this refusal K! XKHHXKfi to lower its conception of God
even in order to make him more comprehensible to human beings which
entitles Judaism to be regarded as one of the greatest, one of the most
mature, and one of the most difficult, religions of mankind.
It is in.
reference to such facts as this that Leo Baeck, in a celebrated remark,
once described Judaism as a classical religion, in contradistinction to
Cpristiénity, which be characterised as a romantic religion.:fl
And yet Judaism has never fallen into the opposite error of regarding
God as a mere Force, or a philosophic hypothesis. For this impersonal
conception of God, though it has the advantage of avoiding the d1ff1cu1t§ea
which I have mentioned, creates other and even more sermons difficulties,
In the first place it is even more implausible as an attempt to define
All human language about God is bound to be metaphorical
To this rule there are no nxceptions, and the theory we are considering
is not exempt from that limitation. Tp think of God as a Force rather
the nature of God.
than a Person is only to substitute one metaphor for another, a metaphor
drawn from our knowledge of the physical behaviour of inanimate matter,
p
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such as the force of gravity, for a metaphor drawn from human psychology.
Aid the exchange is a bad pne.
The force-metaphor is less apt, not more
apt, than the person-metaphor.
If we are to compare God with a phenomenon
within the universe, as we must if we are to speak about him at all, then
surely we must choose the glggggfi phenomenon. And the highest phenomenon
within our experience of the universe 1é‘3ggggguhan himself. He is the
grown of creation - that is, in scientific language, the most advanced
stage of evolution.
He has powers of memory, reason, self-determination
and creativity which we encounter nowhere else in the universe.
He,
thenfore, must surely provide a better clue as to the real nature of
God than plants or animals, still less inanimate matter.
If God created
man, then he must be more than man, not less than man; then he must be
suprarpersonal, not sub—personal. As the Psalmist said, "He that planted
the ear, shall he not hear?
(94:9).
He that formed the eye, shall he not see?"
Or, in the words of the limerick,
The life-force, afflicted by doufit
As to what it was bringing about,
Said: Alas, I am blind,
But I'm making a mind
Which may possibly puzzle it out.
.
To speak of God as personal is indeed to speak metaphorically and,
like a11_metaphors, must not be taken 11tera11y.l
But it is the best
metaphor, the most appropriate metaphor, which we possess.
Secondly, to Speak of God as a mere Fbrce, or a mere philosophic
abstrah¢ion, is £0 cut the ground from under our feet, for it is to
deprive ourselves of the main ground we have for believing in God in
the first place.
It is true that
philosophers have occasionally tried
to prove that Goa exists, or at least that it is reasonable so to believe,
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by general abstract argumentsfi But
Rave succeeded.
it is not at all
certain that they
lg any case the strongest argument for religious belief
is the argument from religious experience.
The data of religious
eXperience are the raw material out of which any theology must be
constructed, even as the data of sight and Bound provide the raw material
for physics.[,The cogency, and especially the content, of any theology
depend on that.
If we did not experience God, if no man had ever
experienced God, we should have little reason for believing in God and
still less for forming any particular conception of his natureéj But
what sprt of a God is it that religious eXperience reveals?§ It is a
God who loves and forgives, who teeahee and inepires, who apprbves and
disapproves, who communicates with man and enters into a relationship
with man.
HEwever these experiences are to be interpreted, there is
no doubt as to their intrinsic nature.
They reveal a God who is in
some important sense personal, even though we must still add kivzachol.
They reveal a God whom it is natural to address as Thou and to refer to
as He.£1The other day an eleven-year old boy asked me why we refer to
God as He rather than She or It.
I
told him that it is a matter of
indifference whether we say He or She.
If it were customary to say She
he would probably have asked me, Why not 339?
It is simply that a choice
had to be made, and that for historical and Social reasons the masculine
pronoun was more natural.
Bu€11b refer to God as It would seriously
misrepresent all our experiences of him.
It would make him lees exalted,
less creative, less purposive, less concarned with humanity, than we
know him to be.§> To ignore these data of religious experience is to
disregard the only real source of religious knowledge which we possess.
We should be like a biologist who never used a microscope, or like an
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astranomer who never lookeithrough a telescope.
Whatever God may be
like, he must correspond to, he must answer to, the eXperiences we
have of him, and these shbw him to be, although unlike anything else
we know, yet more like a human father than a physical force.
Lastly, and most important, this impersonal conception of God holds
the great danger that we may think of him as remote and not very much
concerned with human affairs.
That is the heresy of Gnosticism,
conveniently summarised by the prnphet Zephaniah when he refers to
"those who say in their hearts, 'The Lord will not do good, neither
Téat is precisely the Efifiyfix weakness of those
today who say that they believe in God but not in a personal God. God
will he do evil" (1:12).
exists all right.
That much they are willing to concede. But he exists
as the Milky Way exists: a fact to which they give themr intellectual
assent and which may in some remote and obscure way influence the
conditions of life on this planet.
But it does not affect them in any
consciously felt way, and they do not feel called upon to do anything
very much about it.
speculation.
God is to them merely an objectlof metaphysical
But that is a far cry from the God of Judaism.
For all
its emphasis on the transcendence of God, Judaism has always insisted
that he is also immanent, that he enters the arena of human lwfe and
human history "with a mighty hand and an outatretched arm". He is
the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, but he also dwells with
him who is of a humble and contrite spirit. He is the author of the
myriads of Worlds, but he is also the God of our fathers, Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob.£;And this Jewish ewphasis has, of course, perpetuated
itself also in its daughter-religions.
It is related of the
French
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-Christ1an philosopher and theologian, Blaiae Pascal, that he always
carried in his pocket 3 piece of paper on which he had written: "The
God of Abraham - not the God of the metaphysicians.;]
According to Rabbinic legend Abraham discovered the truth of the
One God by contemplating the stars and the forces of nature and concluding
that they must be the creation of a power greater than themselves.
that was only the first stage of his religious development.
But
There came
a day when this remote, majestic and transcendent God actually spoke to
him: "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to
the land that I will show you."
These are the two supreme distinguishing
features of what
Baai4s-eaéhedratflmufldeuL4¢u$_neek,zeaaied "the religion of Abraham",
meaning by that the Hebraic outlook as presérved, perhaps with varying
degrees of faithfu1ness, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
great beyond all imagining.
But he is not remote.
God is
He speaks to us.
And above all he bids us leave behind the
He makes demands upon us.
land of our fathers — a world polluted with idolatry and superstition
and cruelty and strife - and travel alnng the road designated by him
to a new land, a land flowing with the milk and honey of righteousness
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and truth, so that through
blessed.
unll
our daxu»« anig
the families of the earth may be
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