This post is of an article  originally submitted to “Philotheos: International Journal of Philosophy and Theology.” The published version appeared in the 19:2 edition of “Philotheos.”

Abstract
Martin Buber in his famous critique of modern philosophy and psychology, described the philosophical hour through which the world is now passing as a spiritual eclipse––a historical obscuring of “the light of heaven.” This essay explores process thought as first formulated by the mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and then expounded by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and other theologians as paradigmatic of Buber’s concern. Accordingly, it proposes, that when consciousness shifts in such a way that God becomes recognizable as immediately present, as the aura in which the person of faith lives, the eclipse is over.

Key Words
eclipse, God, philosophy, process, thought,  theodicy, theology, spirituality, impassibility, metaphysics

Process Thought
Alfred North Whitehead’s thought and writing is so complex and so dense, that one is hard put to think of anyone who has been able to convey the gist of it in only a paragraph or two; as, for example, might be done by nearly any university student with the existentialism of Jean Paul Sarte or Albert Camus. Nevertheless, here is an attempt, definitely foolhardy, to do just that for those unacquainted with Whitehead’s thought.

For Whitehead everything is in motion, everything is evolving, everything is changing, everything, including God, is in process. Molecules, algae and whales, dogs and fleas, human beings and whatever you consider as ultimate is in process. Nothing is in a static state. God is still becoming. In so far as process theology can be said to be theistic it is a naturalistic theism, not in the sense of identifying God with nature, but rather in denying the concept of a divine being who can intervene and alter the normal causal principles of the universe. God is enmeshed in time, and is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. God knows only the present with its potentialities. There is a sense in which God can inspire and persuade, but God cannot make things happen. Neither can God prevent anything from happening. Everything that exists has its own level of creativity; and, therefore, possesses the power of freedom, of self-determination and of causal influence. God, it can be said, is as affected by the world as much as the world is affected by God.

This resolves the philosophical problem of evil and suffering by arguing that while God is good, God does not intervene to end the misery of the world because God, enmeshed in temporality, is unable to do so. Indeed, it is debated whether God is a superfluous notion in process thought. “Actual entity” is the term Whitehead coined to refer to entities that actually exist, and that relate to other actual entities. The question that then arises is whether God is an actual entity. Whitehead’s method of metaphysical discovery begins with the careful observation of immediate experience, then moves to the free play of imagination, and finally engages in rational analysis. He believed that by employing this methodology he could encompass all of metaphysics in one philosophical system. This is obviously an over simplification of process thought, but hopefully will be sufficient to unfold it as illustrative of Buber’s criticism.

The Eclipse of God
What the Jewish scholar and mystic Martin Buber called the “eclipse of God” speaks to the way in which modern philosophy, theology, and psychology work to destroy the possibility for intimacy with an eternal, ever-present, Mystery, Thou, or God. This essay sees process philosophy as formulated by the mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and expounded by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and other theologians as paradigmatic of Buber’s concern. Technically there is a distinction between process philosophy and process theology; however, the two are formally joined under the rubric of process thought. Understanding, much less critiquing, process thought is a rather daunting task. To begin with, in spite of its efforts to be coherent, it is not a highly linear or systematic philosophy or theology. It is rather a complex and inventive metaphysical “system” employing a number of interlocking arcane concepts. This paper, then, explores how the general orientation and core concepts of process thought are a template of the sort of philosophy Buber felt constituted an “eclipse of the light of heaven, an eclipse of the light of God.”

Direction Determines Destination
Process philosophy has its origins in the mathematical mind; and, in this rationalistic orientation has remained constant. Alfred North Whitehead worked most of his life teaching mathematics, first as a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884 to 1910), and then at The Imperial College of Science and Technology. In 1898 his A Treatise on Universal Algebra was published. In spite of the title, this book was more about the foundations of geometry than algebra. It attempted to draw together the divergent ideas of research mathematicians in a systematic form. Although this effort established Whitehead’s reputation as a scholar, it had little impact on mathematical research. Whitehead’s early work included two other books, Axioms of Projective Geometry (1906) and Axioms of Descriptive Geometry (1907).

Before the completion of these two Axioms books, Whitehead was at work on Principia Mathematica––a ten-year collaborative project with Bertrand Russell. The intention of Principia Mathematica was to work out a set of axioms and inference rules from which all mathematical truths could be proven. However, in 1931, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proved for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, either the system must be inconsistent, or there must in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them.

Understandably, during the carnage of WW I Whitehead’s writing began to take a more philosophical turn––his papers on relational space, while anchored in geometric thought, are explicitly philosophical. In 1919 his Enquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge appeared, then in 1920 his The Concept of Nature. In 1925, facing mandatory retirement at The Imperial College of Science and Technology, Whitehead accepted a position teaching philosophy at Harvard University. A year after arriving at Harvard, he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures. These lectures formed the basis for his book Science and the Modern World (1925). Following the Lowell Lectures, he presented the 1927/28 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh resulting in his Process and Reality (1929). Later, Hartshorne, Cobb, and Griffin sought to “theologize” Process and Reality; however, Whitehead’s metaphysical system is determinative for the legitimacy of all process thought. It began and it ends, as a highly academic and esoteric enterprise.

Decoding the terminology of Whitehead’s metaphysics is a major challenge. Whitehead not only used common and philosophical language in idiosyncratic ways, but also invented a series of neologisms, including: appetition, concresence, conformal, formaliter, ingression, prehension, regnant society, and superject. While Whitehead aspired to a literal general description of reality, his obtuse style has proven frustrating for both trained philosophers, and inexperienced graduate students; and, is seen as somewhat useless by more literally minded scientists.

And so, we are left with Pascal’s passionate declaration: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob––not of the philosophers and scholars.” This saying, as Buber notes, represents Pascal’s, metanoia, his repentance, the turning of his consciousness from the God of the philosophers to the God Abraham and Sarah know and trust––to that sort of intimacy with which a couple may know one another when their making love is truly love making.

Process philosophy was spawned in the sea of mathematical reason and nurtured to adulthood in the swirling speculations of academic philosophy. Indeed, the nineteenth century’s misplaced confidence in the power of science and reason was the very matrix for process philosophy. And whatever its original “spiritual intentions,” process thought has continued to follow the highly rationalistic and naturalistic trajectory plotted at its beginning. However, it is not the intention, but the direction in which one proceeds that determines final destination. If the goal, the intention, is to explore the North Pole, then traveling east along the Prime Meridian will not lead to the desired destination. If one’s desire is to experience the beatific vision, the path of esoteric intellectual concepts, will, in the end, either stop short of that destination, or miss it entirely.
Knowledge of the Second Kind

C. Robert Mesle in Process Theology and John B. Cobb, Jr. in Jesus’ Abba, both attempt to present a more unobscured and Christian friendly version of process thought. Yet, such portrayals by process theologians are, more than anything else, like ghostly images of Christianity––they are like wispy resemblances of someone who was once greatly loved but is now only vaguely recalled. Mesle asserts:

Even if the God of process theism should turn out not to exist, or even if there is no divine being at all, even if we find it more helpful to think of the entire venture as the creation of myths and models, I am convinced that process theology deserves our most serious attention. The ethical model that process thought shows us can transform our whole way of thinking about religion, life and values.

A problem with Mesle’s argument, is that the ethical and moral values he endorses are derived from Judeo-Christian Scripture. More than that, historic and ecumenical Christianity believes that these values grow, so to speak, organically out of, and express the very nature, of Divine Reality. The question then becomes: “If severed from their roots can these values of love, compassion and justice continue to flourish, or will they wilt and wither like cut flowers in a vase?” Mesle strangely asserts that even if there is no God, or if what we thought were eternal verities and universal spiritual principles turn out merely to be helpful “models,” process thought still has the power to transform our thinking, life and values. In the end this is akin to a baker of apple pies saying: “Even if all the recipe books are wrong, or it turns out there are no apples or apple trees, my apple pie will still be delicious.”

As the Jesuit, priest, scholar and mystic, William Johnston noted, there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is the sort of discursive reasoning common to the academic enterprise. We cannot, of course, entirely escape using this sort of conceptual thinking, however, there is a supra conceptual, mystical, knowledge, a knowledge “of” rather than “about” God, which fills one who is emptied of images and concepts––a loving light that penetrates the shadow of the eclipse. It is this knowledge of the second kind that process theology tends to obscure.

Equation of Suffering
The horrors of World War I were for Whitehead and his wife Evelyn immediate and personal. Their youngest son, Eric Alfred, was killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps in 1918. Whitehead was driven by his personal pain to seek a resolution of the equation of human suffering and evil. His answer, more intellectual than spiritual, was that suffering exists because God is powerless to prevent it. This has continued as a foundational axiom for process theologians who are fond of the old cliché like syllogism:

1)  A god that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving would prevent evil and suffering.
2)  Evil and suffering happen.
3 ) Since evil and suffering happen, an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god cannot exist.

Process thought seeks to resolve the dilemma by accepting that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. It is not, however, willing to relinquish the notion that God is good. However, the syllogism is, within itself, a somewhat obscurantist statement. That is to say, the premise obscures in that it asserts more than is or can be known. Michael E. Rea, for example, challenges in his The Hiddenness of God the notion that divine love can be equated with idealized human love.

One Who Proves Too Much
It is curious that Whitehead failed to grasp the implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem for his own metaphysical work, for just as surely as it ended the quest of Principia Mathematica, so it spells the impossibility of encapsulating all of metaphysics into one philosophical system. Qui nimium probat nihil probat.

What if process thought has it wrong? What if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but indifferent? What if Stephen Crane’s poem is true?

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Or, perhaps God is pitiless. It is not unusual for psychotherapists to encounter people who believe that an all-powerful and all-knowing God exists, but that God, far from being good and kind, is heartless. They are no more likely to worship an impotent God of process theology than a loveless one.

All the great Christian philosophers, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas Aquinas, to name three of the classicists, have wrestled with the philosophical problem of God’s impassibility––the logical dilemma of how to make sense of God as both compassionate and unchanging. Hartshorne resolved the problem by arguing, in agreement with Whitehead, that God is not “impassable.” Process thought therefore argues that while the world is affected by God, God is also affected by the world. But as William Wainwright correctly notes, “The controversy of God’s impassibility is, rooted in a clash of value intuitions, a deep disagreement over what properties God must have to be unqualifiedly admirable and worthy of worship.” For the Christian contemplative such questions are fascinating brain teasers, but in the end, to paraphrase Thomas à Kempis, one must choose whether it is best to discuss theories of impassibility learnedly, or to experience the faithfulness of God. Process thought seeks to explain everything, but changes nothing; whereas, biblical and spiritual theology explains little, but changes everything.

There are, of course, multiple philosophical possibilities in accounting for the problem of suffering: (1) there is no God, (2) God is ineffectual, (3) God is cruel, (4) or the solution is less philosophical, and more spiritual. C. S. Lewis, echoing both Psalms 73 and The Book of Job, wrote in Till We Have Faces, “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face the questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” However, with its highly academic orientation, it is precisely this last answer that is no longer visible in process thought.

Freedom
Coupled with the primacy of suffering in process thought is the theme of freedom. God is not all powerful, and knows only what is, including the potentialities of the present, and not what will be; consequently, God, who is enmeshed in temporality, can actualize potentiality but has no “coercive” power. God can invite, persuade, and entice but cannot make things happen. “God,” says Mesle, “is the unique Subject, whose love is the foundation of all reality.” But Mesle leaves process theology open to the same problems he posits in his caricatures of Judeo-Christian tradition. To say to someone: “God feels really terrible that you have been brutally raped, that your three-year-old has been run over by a drunken driver, that you have terminal cancer, that there is yet another famine, lethal epidemic, or genocide in the world, but unfortunately, while God feels your pain, God is impotent and cannot help,” is not particularly consoling. Process thought seems especially vulnerable to Nietzsche’s harsh accusation: “Only a God who is imperfect, or something of a sadist could delight in (actualize) a world of such immense misery, violence, pain and suffering.” Process philosophy, as we have seen, agrees with Nietzsche. God is imperfect in that God’s knowledge and power are both limited.

The question, however, is not even whether God is all-powerful, but whether God’s power, even if limited, makes any difference at all? Couldn’t the god of process thought, if loving, use a little more influence in raising up wise, competent, and compassionate world leaders rather than so many malevolent sociopaths? Couldn’t a god who actualized quantum physics, do more persuading or revealing, or whatever, to produce some exponential breakthroughs in fighting cancer, hunger, or birth defects? Process theology not only answers “no,” but explicitly states there is no certainty that good will ultimately overcome evil.

It is not that process philosophy blocks out all light, any more than a solar eclipse blots out the entire sun. The movie O’ God, starring George Burns, is perhaps as simple and as appealing a presentation of process theology that a lay person can find––an entirely affable, but ineffectual god who wants us to do better than we are doing when it comes to treating each other with greater kindness and showing more concern for the environment. Indeed, process thought appears to be a product of modern Western culture in that it seeks a way of finding solace in a world mad with fear and suffering, but in a way that guarantees individual autonomy without accountability or personal spiritual transformation––the sort of willingness that is the essence of all spiritual progress. This then is the eclipse of which Buber wrote––the sheer “wilfulness” of philosophy and theology.

Cognitive Cloud
Whitehead himself was an agnostic and it is not easy to grasp what he meant by “God.” Many, perhaps most, process philosophers speculate that God is an actual entity, although there is disagreement as to whether God is a series of momentary actual occasions, or a single everlasting and constantly developing actual entity. God is a kind of storehouse of both “envisaged potentialities” and of every “puff” of experience at every level. God as a kind of storage mechanism for knowledge, might remind one of that illustration from quantum physics which says in explaining black holes, that if one’s wallet fell into a black hole the wallet would be lost, but the wallet and all it contained would remain as a kind of smear of mathematical information on the edge of the black hole. On the other hand, more than a few process philosophers maintain God is not a necessary element of the process metaphysical system, and may be deleted without diminishment to the model.

Donald Sherburne maintained in his 1971 article, “Whitehead without God,” that a non-theistic or “naturalistic” version of process philosophy is more useful and coherent. Whitehead believed, noted Sherburne, that God is metaphysically necessary because God (a) preserves the past; (b) is the ontological ground, or “somewhere” of the eternal objects; and (c) is the source of order, novelty, and limitation in worldly occasions. But, said Sherburne, these roles for God are inconsistent with the metaphysical principles of Whitehead’s system and are superfluous.

Whitehead himself argued that ultimate reality is best described in terms of the principle of creativity. Creativity is the universal of universals, and is sometimes compared to Aristotle’s “being qua being,” or Heidegger’s “Being itself”––that is “Becoming itself.” All actual entities, even God, are in a sense “creatures” of creativity. Zeus was subject to the principle of destiny––the thread measured and cut by the three Fates, so one may ask: “Is God subject to Creativity?” And, this raises the next obvious question: “Is God, God?” Or, “Is the principle of Creativity God?” Or, “Is the Process itself God?”

As noted, process thought uses a good deal of ink in denying God is omnipotent. Both John A. T. Robinson and Paul Tillich disliked all talk of God’s omnipotence. They thought such talk tended to make an object of God. So, whether omnipotence is affirmed or denied God is objectified either way. And, quite soon it is no longer God being discussed. Once a symbol, or a concept, is taken for the thing itself objectification has taken place––God as God has been eclipsed.

Nearly all academic philosophy and theology done in the mode of modern scientism and materialism becomes stuck in the ditch of the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”––Whitehead’s term for treating an abstraction as a concrete reality. The organization of knowledge, as Herman Daly and John Cobb note, requires a high degree of abstraction; consequently, the more successful and established an academic discipline in its development, and the more its practitioners are socialized to think in these abstractions, the more elaborate the abstractions themselves become. In time conclusions are confidently applied to the real world without realizing the degree of abstraction involved. This treatment of abstractions as if they were concrete and possessed functions they cannot have leads to both scientific and metaphysical confusion. As soon as we speak philosophically of the omniscience, omnipresence, or omnipotence of God, or employ and proceed to elaborate upon any of the concepts of process thought, we have smudged the lens through which we hope to glimpse the divine mystery.

Conclusion
What has been posited in this paper is not that one may not be both a process theologian and Christian, but that process philosophy easily leads to that objectification and fallacy of misplaced concreteness Buber believed constituted an eclipse of God. The Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood wrote, “Once large sections of the clergy were the standard examples of obscurantism, but today their places have been taken by the academic philosophers.” Charles Chestnut furnishes an appropriate conclusion:

Moses asked God what his name was, because he wanted a logical and rational theory about God. What God told him instead was simply, ‘I am what I am.’ What will save us is not a theory about God, but meeting God and recognizing that he-whom, we-confront “right in front of us” (so to speak) is the one we call God. Or, in other words, learning what the word God means, refers to learning how to recognize those events and circumstances where we can see and feel and hear God immediately present and acting in our lives.

When we grasp, with both heart and mind, what Chestnut is saying, the eclipse is over, and philosophy no longer blots out the beatific vision.

Bibliography
1) Brown, Delwin, Ralph E. James Jr., and Gene Reeves. Process Philosophy and Christian
Thought. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971.
2) Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy.
Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1996.
3) Chestnut, Glenn F. God and Spirituality: Philosophical Essays. New York and Bloomington:
iUniverse, 2010.
4) Dally, Herman and John Cobb. For the Common God: Redirecting the Economy Toward
Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press,
1994.
5) Diller, Jeannie and Ada Kasher, eds. Models of God and Alternative Realities. Dordrecht,
Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer Press, 2013.
6) Gilkey, Langdon. Maker of Heaven and Earth. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company,
1959.
7) Grassie, William. “Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Metaphysics.” April 9, 2011.
Metanexus.net/essay/resources and problems-whitehead’s-metaphysics (accessed April
16, 2019).
8) Griffith and Donald W. Sherburne, New York: Free Press, Corrected ed,1978.
9) Hart, Larry. The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants
and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf &
Stock, 2017.
10) Johnston, William. The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing. Trabuco Canyon, California and
Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Source Books, Anthony Clarke, 1992.
11) Jones, E. Stanley. The Way. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1946. 16
12) Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, Inc., 1984.
13) Mesle, C. Robert. Process Theology: A Basic Introduction. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press,
1993.
14) Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New
York: Penguin Books, 1969.
15) Rea, Michael C. The Hiddenness of God, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.
16)Sherburne, Donald W. “Whitehead Without God.” Revised from The Christian Scholar, L, 3
(Fall 1967). anthonyflood.com/sherburnewhiteheadwithoutgod.htm (accessed April 16,
2019).
17) Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Volume I: Reason and Revelation, Being and God. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951.
18) Trueblood, D. Elton. A Place to Stand. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
19) Wainwright, William. “Concepts of God.” December 21, 2006. Revised December 19, 2012.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.standford.edu. (accessed April 16, 2019).
20) Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray

Consensus Christianity
Central to what is being said here is the idea that classical Christianity is characterized by consensus –– not always a perfect consensus to be sure but a consensus nevertheless. While, for example, any two patristic writers may not agree with one another in every instance there is a common understanding of what Christianity is –– of the beliefs and practices which inform, shape, and determine the life of the believing community. Indeed, the community of faith is itself crucial in determining the parameters of this consensus. So Thomas Oden wrote:

Consent was not ecumenical if it was not found worldwide in all twenty centuries. The clergy did not create this consent; it was achieved by an act of the worshipping community confirmed by the laity in song, prayer and Scripture. If all of the clergy in Christian history had agreed on a point of Christian doctrine that had received no universal consent by the worshipping community it would not be ecumenical consent.”

The first agreement in this historical and ecumenical consensus is, of course, that “We are made for God, made to love and to be loved by God, and our hearts are always restless until they find their rest in God.”

The God Beyond Belief
The entire Judeo-Christian tradition is a common and continuous declaration that God is beyond human comprehension, thought, imagination, feelings, concepts, or ideas. Whatever notions I have of God, whatever I believe about God, no matter how true, whatever feelings of the sacred I experience, no matter how genuine, and regardless of any qualities I attribute to God, no matter how accurate or appropriate, that is not God. God is always more than what I can conceive or say. Nevertheless, learning to speak well and truly of God is a part of our spiritual progress. And so the consensus of classical Christianity is that God is:

The Uncreated One –– God is Self-sufficient, Independent, Necessary, Underived Being. God is the Source, the Beginning and the End of all things (Psalm 90; Isaiah 40:28;i Corinthians 1:30). Isaiah speaking as the voice of God declares, “Before me there was no god fashioned nor shall ever be after me. I am the Lord, I myself” (Isaiah 43:10). God’s name as Yahweh, “I Am,” suggests God “simply and incomparably” is.

The Unity of God –– there is no pantheon of gods. “I am God, there is no other” (Isaiah 45:22). “For us,” wrote Saint Paul, “there is one God, the Father from whom all being comes, toward whom we move and for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6).

Indivisibly Simple –– since God is not composed of parts the whole of God is present in all that God does. Whatever distinctions the human mind may make regarding the qualities of Divinity, God remains one. All the attributes of God are “interfused and joined together in one indivisible essence in a way that transcends partial human perception.”
Immensity, Immeasurability, and Infinity –– “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and of his greatness there is no end” (Psalm 145:3). “God’s center,” said Saint Bonaventure in the Middle Ages, “is everywhere, and God’s circumference is nowhere.” And Julian of Norwich, the Medieval English Christian mystic, wrote: “Human imagination stands in numbed silence in the Presence of the Measurement of all our measures.” The Latin root of immense means “unmeasured” (im – mensus, not to measure). To classical Christians this has always suggested what is beyond measurement, unfathomable, boundless.

Eternal –– God is without beginning or end; and, therefore, the guarantee of unending life: “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:199)”. But what is envisioned is more than life of unending duration. The Divine life, the life of God is shalom, harmony, peace. To have eternal life is not only timeless existence but is to enjoy the same quality of life, the same joy, peace, and harmony as God. Augustine said, “Join yourself to the eternal God, and you will be eternal.”

Omnipresent –– God is everywhere and always present. When Paul was invited to address the philosophers gathered on Mars Hill one of the key things he said to them was: “God is not far from each one of us, for in God we live, move, and have our very being” (Acts 17:28). And Scripture is filled with the kind of thing we find in the writing of the Prophet Jeremiah: “‘Am I a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away. . . Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:24). “No atomic particle is so small that God is not fully present to and in it, and no galaxy so vast that God does not circumscribe it. No space is without the divine presence. God cannot be excluded from any location or object in creation” (Thomas Oden in cc ). Classical Christianity believes that God is a constant presence with them on the best and worst of life’s ways as an enjoyable and comforting companion and friendly help.

Omnipotent –– God is not limited by anything external to God. There are no limitations upon God’s ability to influence the world; or, to do all that is consistent with the divine character. Nothing that God conceives or wills is beyond God’s power to accomplish. Yet, God’s power over all things is such that it empowers, encourages, and enables the freedom of all creation. Scripture points not simply to God’s limitless power, but to the way in which God’s power is employed for the good of humanity and the whole of creation. The question is not simply whether God has power, but whether God has the power to help me in my darkest and most despairing moments. To put it in evangelical terms does God have the power to save humanity? Rudolf Otto spoke of primal spiritual experience as mysterium tremendum et fascinans — that is, a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated. God’s power, when recognized, elicits feelings of overwhelming awe, simultaneously accompanied by a sense of absolute safety, graciousness, and of being loved.

Omniscient –– The omniscience of God is the recognition that God’s consciousness is all inclusive, –– that God knows completely, limitlessly, holistically, exhaustively, and knows it simultaneously. I think it is J. B. Philips, one of the first to translate the New Testament into modern English, who told in his book Your God Is Too Small, of an Oxford University Professor who liked to ask his students to shout out their spontaneous response to the following question as soon as they heard it. “Does God understand nuclear fission?” Invariably the majority of the class would shout out “No!” Everyone would then laugh since obviously if there is a God then all physical processes are known to God as the all-knowing Creator. God’s understanding says Psalm 147:5, is without limit. And Paul wrote, “O the depth and wealth of the wisdom and knowledge in God! How unsearchable God’s judgement, how untraceable God’s ways!” (Romans 11:33-34). Unfortunately, this attribute has frequently been used negatively to frighten children with the image of a God who is always watching to catch them doing something wrong, rather than as kind assurance of God’s caring. “God knows all,” said Saint Augustine, “and is greater than our self-condemning conscience.” “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Jesus in Matthew 10:29-31).

Holy –– Unlike the “force” in Star Wars God has no dark side everything about God’s character is light. ¬¬God is perfect in goodness, truth, justice, love, wisdom, and mercy. To describe God as perfect is to portray God as entire, whole, and complete in goodness. It is what many theologians mean in speaking of God as “Wholly Other;” that is, God in these moral qualities, or characterological excellence is not like anything we know or can describe. Indeed, the best way to understand the holiness, the sacred mystery, the otherness of God is through awe, wonder, gratitude, and reverence.

Just –– God gives to all things what is right. Pause briefly and read Psalm 23 slowly and carefully. It is a wonderful portrait of God’s justice. When in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus talks about God’s care for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, he is picturing God’s justice. When the Apostle Peter wrote, “God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3), he was writing of God’s justice. When workers are paid a sustainable wage that is justice. When the earth is cared for like a natural garden that is justice. When there is food for the hungry, medicine for the sick, and shelter for the homeless that is justice. Because God is holy and just it is expected that we too will be holy (different or other than the avaricious world) and just. No one can claim to be spiritual, or a Christian, who is unjust.

Loving –– The classic consensual Christian attempt at a definition of God in human terms, which unfortunately fail us in the end, can be stated concisely this way: God is the uncreated source and end of all things; one; incomparably alive; insurmountable in presence, knowledge, and power; personal, eternal, spirit, who in holy love freely creates, sustains, and governs all things. However, there is no more concise, simple, or profound statement of the character of God than 1 John 4:16, “God is love.” It is in, through, and with sacred love that God creates, sustains, and governs or guides all things. That God, as shown in Christ, is loving means that you were made in love, by love, through love, for love; and, when you die you go into love –– not as a sentimental abstraction but as the concrete reality of your ultimate destiny.

Notice that John says God is love, not that love is God. To say the latter would be to worship our idea and image of love, or a single characteristic of God rather than God. But to say that God is love is to say that God’s every intention for us is kind, that God’s every action toward us is meant to sustain and nurture our life and the creation of which we are a part. “The glory of God,” said Irenaeus, “is a man or woman fully alive.”

Living and Personal –– In biblical Greek life has three meanings:1. Bios refers to the life of the physical body. It is used in Luke 8:14: “… the anxieties and riches and pleasures of this life.” 2. Psuche refers to the psychological life of the human soul, that is, the mind, emotions, and will. It is where we get the word psychology. It is found in passages like Matt. 16:25: “For whoever wants to save his soul-life shall lose it.” 3. Zoe is the uncreated and eternal life of God, the divine life uniquely possessed by God. It is divine bliss, and light. It is the beatific peace, love, and joy that God is. Zoe is the kind of life meant in John 1:4: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of humanity.” Since God is Spirit and not a physical being (John 4:24) bios is obviously not what is meant when we speak of the Living   God. At the risk of being misunderstood we not only may, but find it necessary to describe God as living in the psychological sense –– as aware, willing, choosing, loving, communicating. The only way that classical Christianity, following ancient Judaism, knows how to describe God is relationally, as the sort of encounter of mutuality and reciprocity, and even intimacy, that exists only between persons. Father, Son, Paraclete (Helper or Comforter), shepherd, friend, forgiving, loving, kind, are, of course, only metaphors, but they are necessary metaphors and refer to something quite real. “God is not a nameless energy or abstract idea. God is not an ‘it.’ God is inadequately described by impersonal philosophical and theological terms such as, ground of being, the Unconditioned, eternal infinity, Space – Time Deity, Reality Idealized, Phenomenology of Mind, or the Center Event.”

Trinitarian–– Classic Christianity worships the “Three Personal God,” the Holy Trinity of what has traditionally been known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The New Testament itself contains no formal doctrinal statement of the Trinity. In fact, it is not until the second century that the term occurs in the works of Theophilus (trias) and Tertullian (trinitas) and it is not until the fourth century that it becomes a fully developed theological concept with technical disputes over the meaning of words like “person” and “essence.” What the earliest Christians were aware of is the paradox in their absolute belief that God is one while also believing Jesus was divine. The paradox was further heightened by their recognition of the Spirit as a “person.” So, how could God be three and one at the same time? The writers of the New Testament did not look to Greek metaphysics or esoteric philosophy for understanding the paradox. Their understanding was shaped more by how they had experienced God; that is, the approach of the writers of the New Testament was more practical than speculative, and more focused on understanding in terms of relationship and how it functions, and on the character of God than on the metaphysical complexities of the divine nature. Their concern was more about what the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit meant for them in spiritual, relational, and functional terms. If the center, the heart, of reality is personal and relational, that obviously determines and affects absolutely everything in ways that cannot be fathomed. And when we say God is love we are saying infinitely more than that God has a warm attitude of benevolence. We are saying, among other things, that God is the very rhythm, music, dance, flowing movement of love. No wonder Thomas à Kempis said he would rather experience the Trinity than to be able to discuss it learnedly.

The Names of God–– The names of God are important both because they maintain the continuity of the Christian Way with the ancient Hebrew spiritual tradition, and because they tell us something about the nature of God. In looking at the Hebrew names for God it is helpful to note in Hebrew thinking the world was seen and understood in concrete ways –– ways that can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. There are three different words in the Bible that are translated into English as God.
El is the most frequent name in the Hebrew Scriptures translated into English as “God.” El means the strong and mighty one who shows or teaches the way. In its original pictograph form what is now the “E” in English represented the head of an ox –– a symbol of strength. The “L” originally represented both a yoke and shepherd’s staff. Two oxen were normally in the yoke together when pulling a plow. An older more experienced ox was matched with a younger and inexperience one who learned the task of plowing from the older one. God (El) is the “strong leader” (the older and stronger ox) who teaches the people (the younger ox) how to plow by working along with them (Genesis 26:28). Elohim is the plural form of El. However, the plural is not quantitative but qualitative, so that it is intensifies or emphasizes the might and creative power of God. If, for example, this form were used of a tree it would mean the largest, strongest, tallest tree. Elohim suggests the wonder, the majesty, the fullness and completeness of all God’s powers. Sometimes El is combined with Shaddai. Translators usually render El Shaddai as “God Almighty.” This is because the translators of the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) thought that Shaddai came from a word meaning “to overpower” or “to destroy.” More recent scholarship indicates it may actually related to the word shadaim –– “breasts.” In this case what is pictured is sufficiency and nourishment. God is enough, completely sufficient, to nourish the life that is really life in both the individual and in the community of faith.

The name Yahweh is an intensification of the Hebrew verb to be. In Moses’s mystical encounter with God at the burning bush he asks what he shall say when the Israelites inevitably ask, “What is the name of the God that sent you?” And God answers, “Tell them I Am has sent you to them.” I Am as a name, is as awesome as it is mysterious. It may be translated as “He Who Is,” or I Will Be What I Will Be,” or “I Am the One Who Is.” Thomas Oden therefore concludes, “Yahweh incomparably IS.”

Because they regarded the very name of God with such reverence the ancient Hebrews were reluctant to write it; instead, in copying the Old Testament they often substituted Adonai meaning “Lord.” In reference to God the Hebrews used the plural form as an intensifier so that it means something like: “the Lord –– the greatest one. It is translated into Greek as Kyrios. “Christ is Lord” is generally considered to be the oldest Christian confession. When the Apostle Thomas sees the resurrected Christ in the Upper Room and is invited to touch the wounds in Jesus’s hands and feet, all his doubt is overwhelmed and he cries out, “My Lord, and my God.” It is this insistence of Christians that Jesus is Lord that brought the enmity of Caesar and the wrath of the Roman empire upon them. No dictator or totalitarian regime can tolerate the possibility of a subject having a loyalty to anyone or anything greater than themselves, and that is exactly what is means to confess Jesus Christ as Lord.

I want to offer one more observation on the names of God. The word for “name” in the Hebrew is shem and can also mean “character.” The name of someone, then, can say something about their character, as for example when Jacob’s name (meaning manipulator, deceiver, or cheat) changes to Israel (meaning one who has struggled with and seen God). So, we can therefore translate God’s response to Moses’s question (Exodus 3:15) like this:

And God said to Moses, You shall say to the children of Israel, “He That Is,” the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my character forever, and this is my memorial to all generations.”

The names for God are not merely abstract or academic labels, but affirmations of who and what God is –– attempts to say something, as limited as it is, about the essence of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Knowing and Knowing About
In Classical Christianity there is a distinction between knowing about and knowing God. One may know in the sense of having an intellectual grasp on numerous sophisticated theological and philosophical ideas about God, and even be expert at explaining complicated concepts without knowing God. When Jesus says, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3), he is talking about a knowing as deep and as mysterious and as personal and as intimate as when a couple’s love making is truly making love.