(Originally posted on Facebook on 14 November 2016)
We had an extra 4-hour class session this Saturday. I thought this might be a special class bonding activity or something, but as it turns out it’s just a mechanism to fit a 10-week class into an 8-week term.
As usual it left me with many things to think about. (Will I ever manage to straighten this all out in my head? Even a little?) We did an exercise in which we got a list of about 30 words that could be used to describe God, and were told to pick three that aligned well with our image of God, and three that didn’t, and then discuss this in pairs. It seemed like this was going to be pretty easy – like out of a list of 30 I might pick a certain three and you might pick a different three, but we’re generally going to agree on which ones describe God (loving, merciful, omnipotent) and which ones don’t (jealous, vengeful, cruel), right? I mean ok, maybe not YOU specifically because maybe you don’t believe in a God or have very different ideas from me – but another person taking a theology class from the Catholic church… In any case, spoiler alert, nope, not at all as straightforward as it looked.
For example, I had marked “beeinflussbar” (I can’t find a good English word for this, it means “changeable,” as in susceptible to influence) as something God is NOT, and there was this terribly awkward moment in which my conversation partner looked at me with eyes wide in disbelief and said, “but don’t you believe that prayers can be answered? Haven’t you seen sickness healed by prayer?” and I was sort of like a deer in the headlights and stammered something about this not being exactly what I meant (remind me to tell you the story of how Jesus taught my daughter to swim), but couldn’t explain to her satisfaction what it was I DID mean, though another woman in the class later expressed this beautifully as, “If God is perfect love, what is it we’d want to change?”
Similarly I had “unfassbar” (inconceivable / intangible) as one of the things I think God definitely IS and my conversation partner had it as one of the things she thinks God definitely ISN’T, though we can at least partly blame German in this case, because the word can be used in both senses and what I meant is that God is inconceivable, in the sense of bigger than my mind can grasp, and what my partner meant was that God ISN’T intangible, as in we can experience God in our lives in tangible ways. Or in the words of one of my favorite poems, “Not where the wheeling systems darken / And our benumbed conceiving soars! / The drift of pinions, would we hearken / Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.” Though to be honest I have not the first clue what pinions are or how they drift.
The next topic was modern criticisms of religion. First up, Ludwig Feuerbach, who said that each person creates their own image of God, and this image is in fact just a projection of our individual imperfections and insecurities. I cannot know everything, but I want to, so I imagine a God who is all-knowing, and so on. The trouble being that there are as many different images of God as there are different people, and for Feuerbach, although this is a very human impulse, the constructs we’ve built up around God in Christianity (and religion in general) end up impeding the important discussions we should be having with each other, human-to-human. And if that all seems a bit abstract, see the exercise above where we pretty much proved his point.
So as I said, a lot to think about – and that’s not even getting to Marx and Freud...
Homework for Wednesday, write down our personal answer to the question of why God allows suffering. This class is pretty intense.
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