Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

9 min read

What does the word ‘God’ mean anyway?

After asking why belief matters, Barnabas Aspray turns to transcendence as a way of defining God. The second in a series exploring the Nicene Creed.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A cloud-dappled s blue sky is viewed through a large circular opening, from below.

The view from a modern cave.

Shelter on Unsplash.

God’ is one of those words we think we understand, but many of us really don’t. Both believers and unbelievers often fall prey to a misguided idea of what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant by the word ‘God’.

Consider this description of God as an example:

God is an immensely powerful spiritual being, more powerful than anyone else in the Universe. He is invisible; he lives in heaven, but he can also be everywhere at once. He created the world a long time ago, and sometimes intervenes in the world today to perform miracles or answer prayers. His arch-enemy is another powerful spirit called Satan, but God is more powerful than Satan and will one day defeat him.

Almost everything about the above paragraph is either misleading or false from a traditional Christian point of view, yet it is not far off from the way many people today think about God. If we want to come up with a better definition, we need to understand, first that there are different kinds of reality, and second, that God belongs to his own unique kind of reality. Let’s use analogies to make each of these points.

God is like the number 2

Let’s have a look and a laugh at this XKCD webcomic.

A cartoon strip of a maths teacher explaining a proof.

What makes this comic funny is that the maths teacher is confusing two types of reality:

Physical, contingent realities whose existence is contingent (might or might not have existed), that exist in a particular place and time, and that can be destroyed.

Non-physical, non-contingent realities whose existence is necessary (cannot not exist), that are not in space or time at all, and that cannot be destroyed.

The maths teacher is treating a number as if it had the first kind of reality when in fact it has the second. It doesn’t make sense to ‘find and destroy’ a number. If the number 2 ceased to exist, what would 1+1 then be equal to? What would it mean if you saw more than 1 but less than 3 objects together, or would that no longer happen? Numbers are not the kind of things that you can remove, leaving the rest of the Universe unchanged. They are part of the fabric of reality, and we can’t really conceive a Universe without them.

Now, when we’re talking about God, this is the crucial thing to understand: the kind of reality that God has is more like the reality of numbers than the reality of physical objects. Like numbers, God is intrinsic to the way reality works. Like numbers, God can’t be located anywhere, yet without his presence reality would not make any sense. Like numbers, God can’t be seen, only represented through signs and symbols.

Compared to God, we are like two-dimensional beings

Let me introduce you to Flatty.

A line drawing of a flat round bug with six legs and two eyes.

Flatty is an entirely two-dimensional creature, living in a two-dimensional world called Flatland. In this world, there is no up and down, only left, right, forward, and backward. There are no spheres, only circles. There are no cubes, only squares. If I draw a square around flatty, it imprisons him. He cannot go over it or under it, because there is no such thing as ‘over’ or ‘under’ in Flatland. If I draw an object in front of Flatty, it looks to him as if it appeared out of nowhere.

Now, imagine you could talk to Flatty. Your voice would seem to be coming from nowhere, since he can’t see anything in three dimensions. How could you persuade him that you exist and he’s not going crazy? Perhaps you could press your finger on the surface of flatland. The fingerprint would appear like a strange oval shape, but that would only be the tiniest hint of what you look like. You could try to explain that you’re above him, but the word ‘above’ is meaningless for him so he would not understand.

Suppose Flatty was persuaded that you existed. How could he prove to other flatties that you existed? He has no words to describe you with except the ones you’ve given him, which have no meaning in a two-dimensional Universe. He can’t point to you, and he can’t offer any evidence. All evidence he might have would be two-dimensional, which misses the kind of reality he wants to prove.

Now the point of this analogy is that we are like Flatty in relation to God. We lack the language to describe God because his reality is so much greater than ours that our minds are not equipped to conceive or describe it. God can speak to us – he can even make strange appearances in the physical world sometimes, but those appearances only convey the tiniest hint of who he is.

This is what the Christian tradition has always meant when it says that God is ‘transcendent’. The word ‘transcendence’ is an attempt to give a name to something we have no concept of and no ability to fully comprehend: the idea that there is a reality beyond the three-dimensional reality that we can see and experience, and that God inhabits that reality.

Let’s return to the misleading definition of God we quoted above and correct some of the points:

It is true to say that God is invisible, but this is not an accident, as if God could have been visible. It’s part of the very nature of God that he cannot be seen, because the only things that can be seen are things that belong to the three-dimensional world. (If you think about it, numbers can’t really be ‘seen’ either. The way we write the number 2 is just as symbol to represent something that has no visible form. Even if we see two objects together, we are not seeing the number 2 itself, merely an instance of its use in one particular place and time.)
God does not ‘live’ in heaven as if he were an object that could be located somewhere. ‘Heaven’ is itself a name for the transcendent reality that we cannot fully conceive (this is more obvious in the biblical languages, and in French, German, and Spanish, where the word for ‘heaven’ and the word for ‘sky’ are the same, yet nobody is confused and thinks you’re talking about the sky). When we say that God is in heaven, we mean that God’s reality is more tangible and present there than it is here on earth, although that will not always be the case.

The other misleading aspects of that initial quotation will be addressed in the next article on the doctrine of creation.

Why this is not apologetics

None of this counts as an argument for the existence of God, even if it makes a difference to how such arguments would go. The above should not be taken as evidence that God exists, but as providing a definition of God that we need before any productive argument can begin. The reason so many atheists and theists seem to be talking past each other is that they so often start with different definitions of God without realising it. David Bentley Hart puts it this way:

The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God … is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically.

One example of this mistake is what Richard Dawkins says in the following:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

Dawkins has cleverly turned the tables, making it look as if all the religions disagreed with each other, when in fact most of them agree against atheism on the question of God, and only disagree much further down the line. It is as if someone were to count English accents as different languages, and then propose making Flemish the international language because more people speak it than any of the varieties of English.

More specifically, Dawkins’ mistake is to confuse capital ‘G’ God and lowercase ‘g’ gods which is not the plural of ‘God’ in any major religion. Lowercase ‘gods’, whether they exist or not, still live inside the Universe and are part of it like you and me. The Bible itself, even though it is a monotheistic book, uses the term ‘gods’ in this way (see e.g., Psalm 82, 86, 98).

FAQs

Is this really a biblical conception of God? Why are there so few Bible quotes in this article?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant when they used the word ‘God’. They believed that their conception of God was derived from the Bible and accurately reflected the biblical view. Their conception of God has come to be called ‘Classical Theism’, which is the mainstream position taken by the majority of theologians and denominations throughout Christian history. In recent years, some academic theologians called ‘open theists’ have argued that Classical Theism did not come from the Bible but from ancient Greek philosophy, and is therefore not properly Christian. If they are correct, it means that they have understood the Bible better than almost every theologian in the first fifteen centuries of the Church, including the writers of the Nicene Creed. Their argument has not been accepted by most churches and denominations, and it depends on a not-universally agreed understanding of how Christians ought to interpret the Bible. To explain why I think the Bible supports Classical Theism would be to write a completely different, and much longer, article. There are many resources already out there that show how the classical conception of God is not only derived from the Bible, but rejects a lot of Greek philosophy in favour of the Bible. If you are interested in this debate, you might consider the following resources to start with: Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (Wipf & Stock, 2014); Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (CUP, 2019); Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017); Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God (OUP, 2004).

What about Jesus? Doesn’t this conception of God leave out the most central Christian tenet, that Jesus is God?

To say that ‘Jesus is God’ has no meaning unless you first have a definition of God that the word ‘Jesus’ can apply to. That is why the Bible starts by building up a conception of God in the Old Testament, before revealing in the New Testament that this same God came among us in the person of Jesus. That’s why it’s misleading to say (as some Christians do) ‘If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus’. It’s true at the level of God’s character, but not at the level of God’s nature. If you are interested in this question, I would suggest reading Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2018).

This definition of God makes him seem impersonal. Doesn’t Christianity teach that God is personal?

It’s true that God has chosen to relate to us as one person relates to another, and in that sense we can call God ‘personal’. But we must be careful of letting that idea run away with itself, until we imagine God to be like a human being, only bigger and more powerful. This is called the mistake of anthropomorphising God. If you’re interested in avoiding anthropomorphic conceptions of God, I would suggest starting with David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2014).

Column

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

25 December 2024

7 min read

Why the incarnation adds up for me

There’s much more to it than maths and linguistics.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

An abstract image of red and gold fluid shapes akin to stained glass, seem to depict a face and an upstretched hand.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

I’m rubbish at maths.

This hasn’t actually held me back all that much in life because I’m a theologian and biblical scholar by profession; I basically train vicars for a living. Being bad at maths means I fit in well in the Church because – I don’t know if you’ve noticed – Christianity is rubbish at maths too.

We go to school and we’re taught things like one plus one plus one equals three. We then go to Church and we’re told one Father plus one Son plus one Holy Spirit now somehow equals one God.

And the rubbish maths doesn’t stop there.

The Church also says that Jesus is God incarnate: that He is 100 per cent God and 100 per cent human. Even I know that this isn’t how percentages work.

But what does it mean to say that Jesus is 100 per cent God and 100 per cent human? More importantly: why should you care? What difference does this make to you?

What is the incarnation?

If you’ve ever had chilli con carne, you might know this literally means ‘chilli with meat’; ‘carne’ means ‘meat’. And the ‘carne’ in ‘incarnation’ is exactly the same: it means ‘meat’ or ‘flesh’.

So, we can think of ‘incarnation’ as ‘enfleshment’, or ‘taking on flesh’, or ‘becoming flesh and blood’. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘incarnation’: that someone or something has become flesh and blood.

In the Bible we read that, while Jesus “existed in the form of God … He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, assuming human likeness.”

And this is where the maths of the whole enterprise starts to get tricky.

The Bible does not claim that Jesus stops being God when He is human, or that He is somehow ‘less God’ in some way. Nor does it say that Jesus is anything less than completely human.

The word translated as ‘form’ in English – the ‘form’ of God, and the ‘form of a human servant’ – is morphē in Greek (the language the New Testament was written in). It’s where we get English words like ‘morph’. The animated character Morph is a little clay man who changes his form – his shape – at will. The Mighty, Morphing Power Rangers are people who change their form to become superheroes.

Something like this happens to Jesus in the Gospels, too, when Jesus’ face begins to shine like the sun and his clothes become unnaturally white. Most English translations say that Jesus is ‘transfigured’.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not a word I often use; things are very rarely ‘transfigured’ in my life.

The Greek word underlying this is metamorpheō, where we get English words like ‘metamorphosis’ from. Hopefully you can see that morph (the word for ‘form’) in the middle of the word metamorpheō. And whenever a Greek word has meta- at the start of it – like in metamorpheō. It’s to do with change.

Here, then, Jesus is literally trans-form-ed. Jesus, while in human form, is now revealed in His divine form.

It’s not that Jesus becomes God in this moment, or that he stops being human. Rather, Jesus is revealed in the transfiguration – in his metamorphosis – to be, and to have always been, fully God and fully human.

And so, when the Church celebrates the incarnation at Christmas, it celebrates God’s perfect eternal Son becoming embodied – taking on human flesh and a human body – in the person of Jesus.

This is not the life of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency I am so often encouraged to cultivate by the world around me. It’s a life of needing other people

Okay, at this point, you might be thinking: “That’s lovely, but who cares?”

Well, the Church’s claim that Jesus is 100 per cent God and 100 per vent human is deeply important for every one of us. Without it, we’re scuppered. In particular, the incarnation matters for at least four reasons.

First, the incarnation means we really do see God when we see Jesus. Jesus is fully God. In Jesus, “the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” to use the Bible’s language. In other words, then, there is no God hidden behind Jesus.

Jesus makes it genuinely possible to know God; if Jesus was anything less than fully God, then we would only know a diluted, watered down version of God through Him.

Second, without the incarnation there can be no rescuing of humanity, or of the world around us.

You don’t have to look very far to see the worst of humanity. All too often it feels as though those in power are exactly the last people we would want to wield it. Whether you’d call yourself a Christian or not, I think we can all agree that things need fixing.

The Church claims Jesus came to fix things.

Being fully God and fully human, Jesus acts as our representative to God, and God’s representative to us. He overcomes any difference between God and the world, and restores it to the glorious state in which God intended it to be.

But this act of fixing – of setting things right, of restoration, of transformation – is only possible for someone fully God and fully human. Only the incarnation makes it possible for us and the world around us to be put right.

Third, because Jesus is fully human, His life shows us what it means to live well.

Jesus is the most ‘human’ human who has ever human-ed. He is a human cranked up to eleven. Jesus’ life is what it looks like to live the perfect human life. He does not imitate our humanity; we imitate His. We are not the norm for what humanity looks like; He is.

But Jesus’ life does not look like my idea of perfect. Jesus’ perfect human life involved complete and utter dependency on other people.

As a baby, Jesus’ mum and dad cleaned up his poo and His sick; Mary probably breastfed Him. As a child, Jesus relied on other people to be educated. As a man, Jesus had no home: His dad probably now dead and His mum convinced he’d gone mad, He relied on other people for shelter, for clothes, and for food.

This is not the life of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency I am so often encouraged to cultivate by the world around me. It’s a life of needing other people.

The incarnation then, shows us what it does – and does not – mean to live well.

Fourth, and finally, the incarnation means that none of the awful things that we do to each other and are done to us by others define our value, our worth, or our humanity.

Jesus was a victim of sexual abuse.

Some people are very resistant to this idea. I wonder if there are misguided notions of shame at play here: as though this would somehow make Jesus less human, or less God, or less saviour.

Again, Jesus has other ideas.

All four of the Gospels tell us that Jesus was stripped naked as part of His torture and death at the hands of the Romans. And we know from historical records that this is what the Romans did to those they crucified: they stripped them and they tortured them nakedly and in public, as an act of very deliberate humiliation and degradation.

The radical claim of Jesus’ life – of the incarnation – is that this does not make Him less-than-human in any way.

No, remember: Jesus is more human than anyone who’s ever lived. He is the norm for what it means to be human, not us. Nor does it make Him less God, or less of a saviour. Jesus’ perfect life tells victims of abuse that their lives are not tarnished, or diminished, or downgraded through the actions of others.

The incarnation, then, is God’s decisive act to show the world, once and for all, that He is for us – that He is for you, and for me. So much so, that God has chosen to become entirely like us, that we might become more like Him.

In the incarnation, God decisively declares the goodness of humanity by freely choosing to become fully human. To be human, then, is not to be someone or something that God flees from. Rather, God loves humanity so much – He loves you so much – that He has decided He cannot be without you, and He cannot be Himself without becoming like you.