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).

Article

Belief

Creed

Ethics

Politics

20 October 2025

7 min read

The Danish Prime Minister is right - the West needs a spiritual rearmament

Christianity should challenge, not reflect, the cultural zeitgeist

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Mette Frederiksen gesture as she delivers a speech.

Mette Frederiksen speaking at Aalborg University.

Aalborg University.

For some time, there has been a sense of crisis in Europe. You can feel it. European nations are re-arming themselves as America turns off the financial tap. They are struggling to manage levels of migration. Young people are losing faith in democracy.

Yet this is not primarily an economic crisis, or even a political or ethnic one. It is spiritual. And when you start to look for it, you see the signs of it everywhere.

Take one example. Back in the summer, Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark announced a national military build-up involving increased defence spending, conscription and so on, all fuelled by the general north European fear of expansionist Russia. While speaking to a group of Aalborg University students soon after, she surprised everyone by saying:

“We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important (as the military one). That is the spiritual one.”

She spoke of the discernment needed to tell the difference between truth and falsehood in a world where they were hard to tell apart - and implied this required spiritual wisdom not more technology. Increasing levels of conscription is one thing, but persuading young Danes to fight and even die for anything is another. The problems are not unique to Denmark. Why would Gen Z fight for an economic system that doesn't seem to be working in their favour, doesn't offer them the prospect of owning a home or a stable job, and offers little to inspire any kind of heroism? John Lennon imagined a world with “nothing to kill or die for.” If there is nothing you would die for, there probably isn’t much to live for either.

Frederiksen’s call is just one sign of the spiritual crisis in Europe. Another is the rise of what is sometimes called ‘Christian nationalism’. Elites may sneer at the flags on lamp posts and the crosses held aloft in populist marches, but these are the visible signs of swathes of people in the UK who feel no-one listens to them, and who regret the loss of the cultural and broadly Christian framework that in the memory of past generations provided the operating system of British life for centuries. Its disappearance since the 1960s and the lack of anything to replace it is a problem. The ‘new atheism’ was an act of cultural vandalism, aiming to destroy faith but with nothing to put in its place. You don't have to believe that Tommy Robinson or even Nigel Farage is the answer to this yearning to recognise the validity of this sense of loss.

Yet another is what has been called the ‘Quiet Revival’ - signs of renewed churchgoing among (especially) young men in the UK. Revivals of religion usually happen when a community feels its identity and survival is under threat. At such times, people go back to their roots, to available sources of wisdom and reassurance. This isn't yet a wholesale turning to the Church, but it is sign of a yearning for some kind of spiritual meaning, for something sacred – something that can't be bought for money and that has a value beyond what we choose to give it.

So - back to Mette Frederiksen’s surprising call for spiritual renewal in her own country. Denmark is one of Europe’s most secular nations, Frederiksen is not known as a regular churchgoer, and her Social Democrat party has generally been lukewarm about religion in recent decades. Yet she was honest enough to recognise the problem. If we have told ourselves for decades that there is no such thing as truth, it's not surprising we find it hard to tell truth from falsehood. When we have confidently proclaimed that the most important voice to listen to is our own desires – ‘you be you’ – it is not surprising that that we don’t have any ideals left to live or die for. Young people might take to the streets over climate change or Palestine, but being willing to lay down their lives for something beautiful, sacred, something transcendent beyond all that - even when it has sustained their civilisation for generations? Probably not. And there is no reason to think that Denmark is any different from any other European country. The same is surely true in Britain, even if our politicians are not as perceptive as Mette Frederiksen in noticing the problem.

So where is an answer to be found? Mette Frederiksen called out to the Church for an answer:

“I believe that people will increasingly seek the Church, because it offers natural fellowship and national grounding… If I were the Church, I would be thinking right now: how can we be both a spiritual and physical framework for what Danes are going through?”

Yet herein lies the problem. The Church of Denmark, one of northern Europe’s Lutheran churches, is not exactly in a great state. 70 per cent of the population may be registered members of the church, but only 2.4 per centof those actually turn up in church on Sundays – which makes for an average of 30 people in any local Danish Lutheran church on Sunday.

In Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church ordained just 13 priests this year. Fifty years ago, 90 per cent of Irish people went to mass every week. Now it’s around 16 per cent. The decline was a self-inflicted disaster as scandals of abuse and cruelty recurred with depressing frequency. The Church of England’s attendance figures are not much more encouraging. And its ability to offer something to live and die for is far from clear. The philosopher John Gray is scathing about the western churches’ captivity to the spirit of the age. He thinks of them as “mirroring the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than offering a coherent alternative to it… this kind of Christianity is a symptom of the disease not a cure for it.”

That may be the problem - but it is also the opportunity. Christianity is the west’s default spiritual tradition. Nothing goes as deep into the European soul as this. Others come and go, but this faith is in our veins, our landscape, our art and our memory. Time and again, from its early centuries, it has inspired countless people to live lives of selfless devotion. It happened when the Byzantine empire emerged from the ruins of the Roman one, when a new medieval Christianised civilisation grew out of the ruins of the barbarian conquests, or in the reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the missionary movements of the nineteenth centuries. Time and time again it has proved a catalyst for wisdom to face the challenges of crisis, for individual self-sacrifice, cultural renewal and a purpose beyond personal fulfilment – something to live - and die - for.

And it still does. You only have to recall the 21 Libyan martyrs – mostly ordinary Coptic Christians from a simple Egyptian village who were captured by ISIS in 2015, and who chose a gruesome death rather than forsake their faith in the love of Christ – to show how Christian faith gives something not to kill – but to die for.

I have no doubt Christianity can provide that again. Not as a reversion to something past, but in a new form that is true to its roots, but in a way that will look new – maybe humbler, simpler, purer.

This is the challenge for such new leaders as Pope Leo and soon-to-be Archbishop Sarah Mullally. And indeed, for all of us who call ourselves Christian. Can we Christians, as John Gray put it, offer a coherent alternative to the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than be a pale reflection of it?

The future, not just of European Christianity, but also of Europe may depend on it.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge a gift now