There are generally two approaches to theology: Those who consider God’s creation and those who consider God’s creation. That you can hardly distinguish between the two is evidence of the difficulty involved in such discernment at times.
In the first case, what is being contemplated is the creation of God … that is, the creation of the concept of God … the development of the God idea. The work involved is ideation, which requires reflective thought on the worth and weight and consequence of ideas. When we are not lost in our own religious narratives and identities, it becomes clear that our religious conceptions are indeed a thing of our own collective, historic making.
In the second case, what is being contemplated is the creation of God … where whatever exists and whatever is experienced is assumed to be of God’s original making. Whatever can be known of the creator is likely to be inferred from what He/She/It has created. God here is synonymous with Source and even before entertaining any claims of special revelation from texts, intuitions or proclaimed messengers or God-spokespersons, whether contemporary or historical, that information must be subject to reason and so the framework into which that information is engrafted for processing are those essential lessons learned from our experience and knowledge of the created order or, as the scriptures so eloquently put it … ‘from that which is made manifest’ we can infer a thing or two about that which is causing (has caused) its manifestation.
It may not be obvious from the dichotomy, that the first takes its own self and circumstance as the starting point. It assumes itself and searches for a god from that ground. The second assumes God as the starting point. From that place it searches for itself and its relationship both with what is experienced as well as its Source in God.
One can almost guess the psychological profiles of the minds involved with both pursuits. On the one hand there would tend to be Fundamentalist smugness, and on the other, Universalist detachment. It is a telling irony that some of the most creative and transformative engagements with social and environmental reality have been inspired by fundamentalist commitment to religious teaching. That tunnel vision should produce vistas of enlightenment for productive relationship with the universe is as interesting as the tendency for the open minded sanguine one would expect to have heightened appreciation for diversity, to be oft more crippled than empowered by that knowledge in making progressive change and creative intervention. Obviously, there are stark exceptions to both patterns.
In light of this, I generally try to find a middle ground in my God talk. While not intending to be trapped in the hyfalutin academic postulations of the one, I want to couch my God experiences and God explanations in relatable language as it is my intuition that the search for God, however understood, expressed or even repudiated, is a universal one and not the exclusive domain of one over the other, and therefore it behooves us to be as genuinely helpful as we can in our contribution to the conversation.
So I begin a series of reflections entitled Lessons from the ‘God Zone’ which may sound as parabolic as Jesus’ expositions, but the ultimate intent is still to illuminate that field of human experience we call ‘government’ and affect that human capacity we call ‘power’. All power is ‘political’ in the sense that power starts with the ability to choose and helplessness begins when that faculty is removed.
So my ‘God Zone’ talk is but a modern iteration of what religious doctrinaires call the ‘kingdom of God’. Kingdom is a defunct term to the modern mind for whatever royal relics remain in modern life, they wield hardly any power beyond the symbolic … and it is a symbolism largely cauterized and disconnected from the structural power once wielded in another season of mankind. So talk about power realms today needs to be translated for modern affect. Religious texts are not the lingua franca of power they once were.
Nevertheless, one might have noticed, if one follows my blog that I devote a lot of energy to telling contemporary stories about how the God experiences of a few undeniable fundamentalists presently shape the politics and destinies of different nations and regions, for good and for ill; and for reasons I hope will eventually be understood by most. It is inescapable also that their influence is exponential in both directions. Religion remains, to the horror of its most intransigent detractors, a most consequential factor in the affairs of mankind.
From my observation, those for whom God (however conceived) is a given are most likely to actually effect commonly desired change. Or, to regress to ‘bible-speak’: … the ability to ‘move mountains’ called ‘faith’ is the exclusive possession of those who ‘believe that God exists’ and that He is ‘rewarder’. Or again to concede to a modern understanding: choice and consequence are woven into the fabric of existence (Being/God) ensuring that power is the exclusive possession of the informed, leveling the playing field for those contending for power from whatever historic vantage-point of apparent advantage or disadvantage.
So I have a lot of ground to cover and I wish to begin with a simple single insight from the God zone – the single source of both power and knowledge – a preposterous claim with tremendous historical credibility that requires initial parabolic exposition to reorient the common mind programming within the current culture, still very similar to the context Jesus encountered in the times of the Roman empire. Much has changed and much continues to change. But certain basic tenets have not yet collapsed to the gravity of the incoming reality of the God zone, far from some religious projection of an unattainable ideal, but rather the inescapable logic of mankind’s most visionary encounters with the illuminative capacity of consciousness. Thy kingdom come is more than wishful prayer, it is inescapable dialectic. The only uncertainty is when…not what; and that is influenced by the element of choice, over which we have some jurisdiction.
On reflection, that single insight has already expressed itself in this piece unawares … (typical of the God-zone) and if I were to give the lesson a title, it would be “The Painter“. “Potter”, the more biblical metaphor, expresses the same ideas but is less popular a contemporary art form. The lesson? In the chicken and egg quest in search of the explanation for design, and in the interest of unlocking the locus of designation, the relevant focus is not which comes first, but who (which of them) are you.
Government matters.
YeKengalé 