Carvajal: Who is your God?

PAUL Tillich (1886-1965), a German-American Protestant Theologian famously wrote of God as “Ultimate Reality” or “Ground of Being.” Realities and beings are hard enough for the human mind to fathom how much more “Ultimate Reality” or “Ground of Being.”

Thus, no one individual or group can plumb the depths of the “Ground of Being” we call God. Religions can only have differing incomplete concepts of this “Ultimate Reality” like Abba-Father in Judaeo-Christian tradition, Allah in Islam and Gaia among lovers of Mother Nature.

Moreover, adherents of a religion often have differing concepts of God. Like, the God I worship is no longer the same God my parents and seminary professors taught me. I have fashioned a God I can relate to and who provides meaning to my life. Subconsciously we all in fact worship the God whose image we ourselves have fashioned.

By the same token, the God that does not exist for atheists also differs in imagery and concept among different atheistic individuals or groups. God is real or unreal to different people in different ways.

In philosophy, being equals good. As ground of being, therefore, God is ultimate goodness. Thus Christianity asserts that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God.” As ground of being, as ultimate reality existentially subsuming all realities God cannot be anything but perfect.

Hence, there cannot be a stupid God. There can only be somebody’s stupid concept of God. And in fact, if you look around and bother to reflect on them, there are stupid ideas of God. But stupid only in the sense that one cannot relate to these ideas even as they are perfectly okay to their owners. Stupid also in the sense that some concepts of God do not jibe with his perfection as “ground of being or goodness.”

I would not say it the jarring way he did but like the president, I also cannot reconcile original sin with a perfect God. Manufacturers, even with their best efforts, have to deal with factory defects. A perfect God can only do a perfect job of everything he does. Original sin might explain our propensity for sin but a perfect God could not have created us with such a fatal defect.

I have the same problem with hell. If God is perfect then his job of saving us from sin was a perfect job and saved everybody and so nobody is unsaved and goes to hell. Besides what “fire” is there that burns spirits since we leave our bodies behind when we die. I can only relate to a hell on earth for me if I refuse to love others as my God tells me.

The question, therefore, is not “Who is God” but “Who is Your God.” It is the image or concept of God you fashion for yourself that determines how you live your life, in Love and Goodness or otherwise.

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