Decentralizing God

I believe there is tension inherent to theistic traditions, with respect to the centralization of God (God is a father-like being who exists in a particular location in the heavens and never dies) and decentralization (God has no location and doesn’t exist in time; therefore, he doesn’t separately exist). And since the centralizing tendency is seen as so important to the maintenance of the tradition, the decentralizing tendency has often been not just overlooked, but marginalized or cast off as heresy. But examples of this important decentralizing tendency are found throughout the Bible, and as far as I know throughout all theistic traditions. A little bit from one example in the Bible:

Job 38-39 which begins:

Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm.

Already, the centralized and the decentralized aspects present simultaneously - order out of chaos, like insight arising out of confusion.

Following this opening, the extended insight from without continues to investigate and dig, undermining Job’s narrow internal understanding of the world and how it works. This “voice” from without interrogates Job:

_Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.

And in an extraordinary passage this voice from without, still mocking Job’s narrow understanding, even challenges this inner/outer distinction:

_What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
_Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
_Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!

And in my new favorite passage from the Bible:

_The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
_She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
_unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
_She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
_for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
_Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully! - a direct attack on the narrow idea of God as an intelligent designer, of clever devices, with clear purposes. One gets the sense this God as presented in Job is like Mock Turtle, in an adventure of Alice:

[i]"Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’ "

“Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.

“I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone.[/i]

But wait - “Yet when she spreads her feathers to run / she laughs at horse and rider”. Purpose is not dispensed with entirely - it turns out, the ostrich’s wings help the ostrich to run. But will we stop there? Are we so easily satisfied? Or can we rise above even this low plateau? Surely the meaning is this - that purpose itself is man projecting his smallness onto… onto what? Just onto, perhaps.

In Job’s relaxation, he claims:

_My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.

With this “seeing” (i.e. insight), Job casts off the conceptuality which can only consider God and man, man and nature, self and other - as fundamentally separate entities.

And in a passage from the New Testament (Matthew 6), Christ says:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Implicitly comparing the centralizing tendency to paganism, Christ here suggests that we need not and should not consider things like heaven or eternal life in our approach towards spirituality. He says we should be more like the plants and animals, who presumably (again, our pesky projections) don’t energetically try to persist into the future.

The sacred is not separate from the mundane. God is not separate from me and you and everyone we know. God does not exist as such.

From Luke 17:

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Finally, also in the words of Christ…

Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.

I appreciate your remarks anon, even if I draw different conclusions!

My suggestion would be that God’s point, in the book of Job at least, is to centralize humankind. That is, it is to confirm Job’s place at the top of the cosmic hierarchy, not to decentralize God…

I do wholeheartedly agree though that we need a conception of God that is both centralized and decentralized (same with our conception of humankind). That is, we need to confess that God is at the top of the hierarchy but also that God is not alone up there, and that nor does God want to be (“Face me like a man!” God says to Job).

The top of the hierarchy is not a tyrant or dictator but something more like a council or wrestling match. At the top of the hierarchy is God with the children of God taking joy in the wisdom of creation and striving with each other for the love of wisdom.

That is what we see in the book of Job at the beginning and throughout. That is what we see in God’s speeches to Job. The joy of the ostrich is precisely that.

anon—makes sense but it wont fly…

From where I come from, jehovah’s witnesses teach that “the kingdom of god” is going to be a literal theocracy where god kills all human religions and governments then establishes his own government and turns the earth into a paradise.

I am no where close to a JW, but if that is their stance, even though they very probably have no idea of the nature of what they said, that happen to be right.

And anon has a point. The idea of God being a centralized governance dictating morality to the masses represents “a god”, not “The God”; “Big Blue” versus “Baby Blue”, central intelligence versus distributed intelligence.

This centralizing versus decentralizing theme can be seen in the Song of Songs, which culminates with the female lover’s call to decentralize given prominence over the male lover’s fixation on grasping the ungraspable.

To his supplication:

_You who dwell in the gardens
with friends in attendance,
let me hear your voice!

She replies:

_Come away, my beloved,
and be like a gazelle
_or like a young stag
on the spice-laden mountains.

Thus ends the Song of Songs, with its skillful contrast between cultivation and wildness, between the safety provided by rules and the danger necessarily involved in living well, between the need to grasp, and the call to let go.

My thesis is that alongside the more obvious hierarchical, centralized, etc. character of biblical themes, is a powerful counter-current. Suppression of this countercurrent is antithetical to a deeper understanding of spirituality, which is to say - the sacred and the profane are not separable. Perhaps this is epitomized by the Song of Songs which in impoverished cultures is so often seen as mere allegory. But why can’t we also see the “allegory” pointing in the opposite direction, as anointment in the broadest possible sense? In the end, the objectification of God is always at most a hair’s width away from idolatry - and who can say who is doing the anointing, and who the pointing?

Anon, This book has always fascinated me. I’ve thought of it as a sort of a fable with a moral and find your reference to Alice intriguing. What usually upset me about the book was that Job is alike a pawn in a chess game bwtween God and Satan. So, since I’m not a dualist, I see the book as an argument between two aspects of a creator–good and evil. (True starts/false starts.)
It has to be a fable since Job got family and goods back in the end and this was sufficient for him to defray the emotional and pecuniary expenses of his first losses of such.
The “where were you” questions do seem to point to the theological, slippery slope of how God can be both immanent and transcendent or both personal and impersonal. Centralization or decentralization of God are terms I don’t quite understand.

As in, does God reside in a particular place or not? That kind of thing.

Thanks.
Then for the West God is everywhere;
And for the East God is nowhere.
For me, God is everywhere and nowhere.

Regarding hierarchy, I’m so struck by this passage:

_The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
_She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
_unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
_She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
_for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
_Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.

Do you think the sense here is that the ostrich is inferior to Job? After all, “God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense”. She lays her eggs, and then gives them up to the world. She is “unmindful”. On the other hand, people must have more than their share of good sense, as if good sense can be hoarded. It may seem obvious from this passage that it is God who endowed people with this good sense, yet the quest for knowledge, as portrayed in Genesis, was based on sinfulness. And Christ reminds us of this:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…”

Perhaps the ostrich is lower in the hierarchy, and therefore is the wiser, because she doesn’t hoard wisdom - she doesn’t channel the ocean into a little stream.

“Yet when she spreads her feathers to run / she laughs at horse and rider”

Hi anon,

I don’t think the ostrich is inferior to Job. I think that God is holding up the ostrich as an example for Job to live by.

If we understand the overarching point ofGod’s first speech as undermining Job’s knowledge, or making it clear to Job just how little he knows, it makes sense that God would then point out the idiot ostrich, who despite being an idiot still takes joy in its existence.

The ostrich doesn’t know what God’s plans are for it yet look at how it trusts God. It lays its eggs without care! It flaps its wings with joy even though they are nothing next to the wings of the stork!

Job similarly doesn’t know what God’s plans are for him, yet, instead of flapping his wings with joy (or exalting in the dust he is made of) Job complains and assumes the worst.

That would be my take anyways. Job needs to recognize that there is a lot he doesn’t know. Instead of assuming the worst he should trust in God and take joy in his existence. Just like the ostrich.

I agree, the ostrich is an example for Job - an example of how to live well. But what, then, is the nature of this “God”? Does God exist in that natural world? Apart from the natural world? Perhaps God IS the natural world? Does God reside in a particular place?

This is a tough one. I’m committed to the idea that God must be all in all. So this means that God must be IN the ostrich in some way or other.

I would also have to say that God exists apart from the natural world. God is not necessarily in the ostrich and even if God was, I wouldn’t call the ostrich God per se but maybe a child of God? A member of the angelic host?

There’s a scene in one of the gospels where Jesus goes into the wilderness and the “angels” take care of him there. While I’m loose on details here there is a connection to be made between this angelic host and the animals of the desert. Quite simply, the animals are the angels that minister to Jesus. They are not God but God is in them. They are doing God’s work. They are serving God.

So I’d suggest that this is the idea. For the whole of creation to image God and to form an angelic host that sings with joy and serves God as God lays the foundations of the earth and performs even greater things. In this way God is all in all even as God stands apart.

There is a communion of the will here but an ontological separation. Furthermore there is a mutual indwelling. God abides in a temple made of dust which itself abides in and by the grace of God.

I suppose if I had to call God anything then it would be spirit, or the source of a spirit (whatever the nature of that source might be), which is the source of all life even as that spirit needs to dwell within life to spread and multiply.

Anyways. Maybe that addressed your questions to some degree!

so anon are you saying-----that you like the natural world being included in the god concept…

A God that is at least also immanent. A not uncommon belief before the Abrahamists got going, though it’s on a comeback.

Panentheism (from Greek πᾶν (pân) “all”; ἐν (en) “in”; and θεός (theós) “God”; “all-in-God”) is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

How close are we getting here to Spinoza? IMHO, he was able to unite natural and supernatural into a whole. 2nd century C. E. Gnostics attempted this fusion early on.

There’s a difference, I think, between all things being in God and God being in all things. I would say that the first is true insofar as we all exist within the context of God’s grace. God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and this will never change. (God gifted us with life and in the end our life will return to God.)

However God is not in all things. Not necessarily. God will not be in all things, I don’t think, until the end times when we have given our lives over to God and are in communion with God’s will. So if we use panentheism to describe God’s being all in all, you could say I’m more of an eschatological panentheist.

To test the heart of man. Heart is a metaphor for mind.

One of the methods of testing the functionality of the human mind is through metaphor. At the foundation of language is a convention of names. This means that something has to be in a common environment to assign a word any real meaning.

One can use metaphor to test this. We can say that “God” is “Truth”. Now, since the mind functions through the artific of language, truth is the only power it can ever know. Therefore, do we realize what we are, or do we go off into delusional explanations of a meaningless word?

The only way to demonstrate that there is one and only one God, is a text that addresses what man is. It is the only such text. It tests the heart of man, from start to finish.

So you don’t think Spinoza got it right? If there is nothing in the physical that can extend into the spiritual, then all those who need schizmatic affirmations about God win. Results of that have always produced a Mulligan stew of belief and a them VS us mentality. “Anything we say about God is a lie.”–Meister Eckhart.