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

Creed

Migration

14 March 2025

7 min read

I wrote Jesus was a child refugee, I got called crazy

Digging into history uncovers uncomfortable truths.

Joan Taylor

Joan is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, King’s College London.

A red sandstone statue of Jesus as a child.

A Victorian statue of Jesus as a child.

As a historian of Jesus, I have sometimes been asked to comment on the question 'what would Jesus do today?'. I have sometimes responded. In September 2015 I wrote a guest post for the Jesus Blog, titled Jesus was a Refugee. It was on the story of baby Jesus’ escape to Egypt with his parents, as written in the Gospel of Matthew, which I conclude is historically true. It is interesting to me, because I want to understand what informed Jesus’ teaching as an adult.

I am not a theologian, a priest or a pastor. I have spent my academic career carefully working out what is true or false in terms of the many stories of the ancient past. So, when I discuss anything, it is after years of study, collegial discussion and discernment. Historians like me know that our ancient accounts come from particular people at different times, telling things with particular points of view. They don’t seek to tell the whole truth, but they shine a light on what is important to them. They can tweak, spin, modify or drop what is not essential to them, and we see this process unfold in retellings. In what I do, I am as analytical about biblical stories as I am about anything else, recognising that I too am located in a particular time and place, with my own capacity to see or not see. With biblical stories this is both rewarding and challenging because to me they are also Scripture, in that they inform my faith, spirituality and practice.

But this is a world in which sharing of expertise can go up in a puff of public pushback.

I wrote at the height of scaremongering about Syrian refugees who were fleeing to Europe to escape the dangers and devastation in their country and, given its relevance, the post was picked up on other sites. On Bible History Daily, there was a furious reaction in comments. People asked whether – even if Jesus was a refugee – his experience could be mapped on to issues of the contemporary world, which are so very different. Some commenters insisted that Jesus and his family could not be aligned with economic refugees like Mexicans or bogus refugees who were actually Muslim terrorists. More stingingly, I was told I was crazy, a professor of b******t and I was blaspheming for even suggesting that Jesus was a refugee.

That Jesus was a refugee has actually been recognised as part of his life from the very beginning of Christian tradition, and contemporary theologians like Barnabas Asprey can well explore what this means for faith. But it seems that some people were alarmed that I was diminishing Jesus by associating him with people they considered reprehensible.

My job is to understand Jesus in his own world. If I do it properly, people may well find resonances with today. But I do also understand that it is a tricky thing to map Jesus onto contemporary circumstances, especially contentious ones. Over a hundred years ago the philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer critiqued the 'quest of the historical Jesus' as a whole as covertly creating a liberal model of Jesus. He commented that the 'historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma'. If we met Jesus today, he would seem completely alien to us. So, we do have to be careful when we look to him in our arguments concerning current issues. Yet, Schweitzer also put a lot of trust in the words of Jesus, because his 'spirit, which lies hidden in his words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its own way the whole Jesus.'

So where do we go with this? What did Jesus say? Frankly, Jesus’ ethos was utterly uncompromising. "Woe to you who are rich … woe to you who are well-fed now" (Luke 6:24-25), he said. There are a decent number of Jesus’ statements that suggest people who were economically struggling should be fed and welcomed, and those with wealth should share what they have with the have-nots. Jesus said to a rich man that he should "go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me" (Mark 10:21). Following Jesus was not about becoming destitute, but about joining a community of disciples who saw each other as one big family of siblings. In this group resources were shared (Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37). This is beyond philanthropy. And Jesus didn’t talk about the worthiness of the poor; the problem was not with the poor, it was with the rich.

There’s a big question then in how to use Jesus as a model for ethics. To use Jesus as a model, you have to see the bigger picture of the whole movement he created, within an ancient context, a movement that does not exist any longer in its original form. Was Jesus a refugee? By calling anyone a refugee, in antiquity, I mean someone who flees their home to a place of refuge, to escape danger or disaster. As for my particular 'blasphemy', I reiterate it. Jesus was a child refugee: Jesus’ family fled from the danger of the Roman client king in Judaea, Herod, and escaped to Egypt. In classical Christian doctrine, this is not at all thought of as diminishing Jesus. It made Jesus one of us, in all our human hardships.

I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action.

Curiously, the fears expressed by the commenters on my post mirror ancient attitudes to poor, foreign people. Later apocryphal stories of the holy family in Egypt present them facing continual hostility from Egyptian townsfolk and attacks by robbers. These tales reflect an actual situation in which incoming foreigners, for whatever reason, were not welcome. For refugees, it could be a life of vulnerability. In the second century, the anti-Christian writer Celsus scoffs that child Jesus in Egypt worked for hire because of his poverty (Origen, Contra Celsum 1:28).

Egypt itself was not a totally safe place to be Jewish. Under the Roman prefect Flaccus (38-39 CE), soon after Jesus, there were riots and pogroms against the Jewish population of Alexandria, as the historian Josephus records (War 2:487-98; Ant. 18:257-60). In 41 CE the Roman emperor Claudius cautioned the long-settled Jewish population of Alexandria that they lived in 'a city not their own', and they were 'not to bring in or invite Jews who sail down to Alexandria from Syria[-Palestine]' (CPJ I:151). Later in the first century (70-73 CE), there were many Jewish refugees fleeing dangers in Judaea by going to Egypt (War 7: 407–419). Hundreds of these men, identified as troublemakers by the Romans, were killed, along with their families. I explore this and much more in my new book, Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. The life of a refugee was hard, and Jesus would have been told his parents’ stories about what they endured.

This is what is so interesting to me, because we know from contemporary studies of trauma that this would have had an impact on Jesus. There is received trauma resulting from the suffering, persecutions, hardships and distresses of parents and grandparents.

So how are these experiences reflected in Jesus’ sayings? I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action. Jesus, in his mission as a teacher and healer, identified himself as a displaced person: "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20), he said. Jesus was itinerant, and he entered villages with nothing, offering healing and looking for kindness (food, shelter). He asked those who acted in his stead to go out without money or extra clothing, essentially to walk along the road like destitute refugees who had suddenly fled from home, relying on the generosity and hospitality of the ordinary people whose villages they entered (Mark 6.8-11). And it was precisely the villagers’ welcome or not to such people that showed what side they were on when it came to divine justice: "And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them" (Mark 6.11).

If the sayings of Jesus show his spirit, time and again this spirit rests with the experience of the marginalised, the displaced, the persecuted, the sick and the poor. I say this as a historian, thinking of Jesus in his own time. How that sits with contemporary issues remains a question. To what extent can people of modern times, with all our baggage of private ownership, debts and anxieties about our jobs and livelihoods, share in Jesus’ ethos? In answering it, I suspect few of us will feel comfortable, whatever side we think we are on. But taking out the logs in our own eyes, rather than the specks in someone else’s, has never been easy.

Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judaean in Turbulent Times, Joan Taylor, SPCK Publishing.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief