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

Egypt

Film & TV

Freedom of Belief

7 February 2025

6 min read

The 21: wrestling truth from a story of horror

Remembering the Coptic Martyrs a decade on.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An graphic image shows 21 men in orange suits kneeling in front of executioners in black.

MORE Productions.

In 2015, 21 men were kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed by ISIS. Twenty of those men were Coptic (Egyptian) and one, Matthew, was Ghanian. They were all Christians. And that is why they were killed.

Over the past decade, the story of their martyrdom has been widely told. And yet, the only piece of visual storytelling that existed was the propaganda video, filmed and released by ISIS. A film that was intended to scare the world and dehumanize the men, a film that glorified violence and hatred.

We’ve known the story of the men’s execution, but we’ve only known it as told by their executioners.

That’s no longer the case. On 15 February 2025, ten years since their death, the story of the 21 is being re-told by a team of over seventy artists from 24 countries, directed by Tod Polson, and in collaboration with the global Coptic community. The short film, The 21, will premiere on the anniversary of the men’s death and be featured at film festivals throughout 2025.

We knew a story, now we’re hearing their story.

I was able to talk through the details, how and why this short-film was made, with one of its producers – Mandi Hart of MORE Productions. After watching the film a handful of times, and needing ten minutes to recover after every viewing, I had lots to ask Mandi. Firstly, I wanted to know all about the visual aesthetic.

This film is animated, which feels like both a defiance and a kindness. It’s a defiant choice because it ensures that this film stands in contrast to the film that was released ten years ago, where pure terror was the only story-telling objective. Nothing about this film is reminiscent of that one. And that’s a kindness to us, the audience. We’re not totally spared, however, as carefully selected moments of the original footage are woven into this short film, reminding us that these men – the ones who were killed and the ones who did the killing - were as real as you and I. But, on the whole, we’re spared the worst of the horror. As Mandi noted,

‘animation allows your imagination to fill in the gaps. It’s just as powerful a form of story-telling, if not more so’.

Mandi’s right. This film will stop you in your tracks. More than anything, though, the visual aesthetic is an ode to the men who were lost and the community they belong to.

Director, Tod Polson, travelled to Egypt to meet with Coptic iconographers and learn about the intricate ways they communicate in symbolism, iconography and art. Mandi told me that even details as subtle as the width of a line used or the placement of the eyes on a human face have deep wells of meaning held within them. Polson also visited Minya, the Egyptian region that was home to many of the martyrs, and gathered inspiration from the church that was built there in their honour. The film’s aesthetic derives from all of this, it’s drawn in alignment with what Polson learnt. In other words, the story is told in the language of the martyrs. Through the work of the seventy plus artists, this story is weaved into the story – the Coptic story, the Christian story. It’s rooted and yet timeless, a decade old and yet ancient.

For the men standing on the beach, an assassin standing behind them, the veil between the seen and unseen was incredibly thin.

The film is a masterclass in learning the language of the ones to whom you’re paying tribute. The artists have honoured the martyrs on their own terms and according to their own story. It’s a special thing.

It’s also a challenging thing. It’s a harrowing event, after all. It feels as though, through this film, we’re brought closer to the torture the men endured, given details that the mainstream media left unreported. Details such as, the floor they were forced to sleep on was continuously pumped with water, the relentless taunting and manual labour, the beatings, the fact that they were actually put in orange boiler suits, taken to the beach, and filmed three times. It was on the third time that they didn’t return.

40 days, that’s how long the twenty-one were held for.

960 hours.

57,600 minutes.

3,456,000 seconds.

The longevity and intensity of the torture is nearly impossible to fathom. The fear they must have felt is mostly unimaginable. Mandi mentioned that she was probed by a continual set of questions as she studied this story, these men, and those days. The questions went along the lines of: what would she be willing to die for? Would she be brave enough to stand her ground? Would she be faithful to what she believes to be true? Would she choose a life without Jesus or a death because of him? It’s a hypothetical set of questions for Mandi, and for me too. But not for the 21 men.

Finally, I wanted to ask Mandi about the inclusion of supernatural facets of the story – the improvable, un-fact-check-able stuff. If I was to be brave, I guess I would say the truest stuff. The way the heavens seem to open, rage, and weep; the subtle appearances of Jesus’s scarred and bloody feet; the mention of a prayer-fuelled earthquake in the prison; the glimpses of a supernatural army guarding the 21 men as they walked to their death. It’s quite weep-worthy, really. The closer these men get to their execution, the brighter and more vivid the ‘unseen’ becomes.

Yet, it feels like quite a brave storytelling choice, to meld the provable with the improvable facts of the story.

‘Only to us’, Mandi reminded me. ‘we, the cultural West, struggle with the supernatural stuff. It’s an affront to the ‘rational’. But we’re the minority. The majority, who have less cultural power, they don’t struggle with this stuff at all... ’

This led us to speak about the seen and the unseen elements of reality, how – as Christians – we believe that all that we see is not all that there is. In fact, the things that cannot be seen are the realest things. And how, for the men standing on the beach, an assassin standing behind them, the veil between the seen and unseen was incredibly thin. It’s comfort that often makes the veil thicken out, Mandi reminded me, it’s the left hemisphere of our brains that tells us that all that we see is all that there is. When our safety and comfort are stripped away, what happens? For the twenty-one martyrs, it seems as though the veil became thread bare. As Mandi quite remarkably noted, ‘the human soul knows more than the mind is comfortable admitting’.

The 21 is a short film about death, the death of 21 innocent men. It’s important that we give these men our attention, look them in the eye and weep with those who weep. But I think, in a way, this short film also tells the story of life. Life after death, life that death doesn’t put an end to. Life that confounds death, even. And in that way, this film tells both a particular story and a universal one, both their story and the story – the Christian story.

Find out more about The 21

Watch the trailer

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