The difficulty with words seems to me to be that their meaning cannot be divorced from their user’s/hearer’s context and personal baggage - and the bigger and more abstract and complex the notion behind the word the more context and personal baggage seem to become a place of refuge for those struggling to comprehend…
An obvious example is “love”. There is no universal understanding of the notion behind love - whether at micro level between two individuals who are seeking to understand what it means to love each other, or at a more complex level - for instance within a community seeking to adopt and express a loving nature. And so expactations remain unmet, perceived hurts emerge between parties, and all too frequently relationships breakdown.
And then there is “god”. An interesting word which, whatever it is, almost certainly isn’t what the architect of all being calls him/herself when engaging in some early morning thinking! And there is probably no word in any language that is so defined by context and personal baggage. For instance in Ireland where I live those in the protestant heartlands of the north on hearing the word “god” experience totally different responses to say a devout southern catholic. The matrix is compounded by those with Magdelane Laundrey experiences, Christian Brothers education, Loyalist paramilitary history…and so the options increase - and we haven’t even looked yet at the Islamic fundamentalist, the nuclear physicist, the social scientist, and the secularised housing estate teenager whose only context is as providing an alternative to 3 other expletives..
Maybe we need to be brave enough to rebrand the creator.
I was talking to two social scientists the other day - one is an avowed atheist and the other an agnostic. I discivered that if we were to discuss the possibility of the existence of “photon 43” - a hyothetical sentient entity who/which may or may not be one of a kind or one of a number, and who/which may or may not have been responsible all those billions of years ago for initiating the evolutionary process, all of a sudden we had a conversation. Whereas when I’d been talking about “god” in exactly the same way, their internal contexts and personal baggage had in effect rendered the conversation totally meaningless because even I agreed that “what they understood as god” was inaccessible notion.
It is not enough, I don’t think, to just say “ah well, your understanding of god is all wrong” - in this conspiracy driven age, that smacks of doublespeak. And in any event I don’t imagine that photon 43 is too hung up anyway on what the translation of a rough articulation of his/her namelessness sounds like in one of a million languages of his or her inspiration.
Naming God
Ian, I can see the point of trying to dump the baggage associated with the word ‘god’, particularly when it comes to conversations with atheists and agnostics. In fact, I guess we all need to do this sort of mental spring-cleaning from time to time – clear out all the conceptual junk.
I’m not sure, however, we can really escape from the naming problem. On the one, isn’t ‘photon 43’ just as loaded as any other expression for the ineffable? On the other, we cannot talk about God only in abstract terms – eg. as a ‘hypothetical sentient entity’. The biblical God is an actor in history and in many respects a strongly partisan actor, which is why naming is so important: he/she is different from other gods, he/she is YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Jesus Christ, and so on. It is important that the actions and commitments of this God are identified because this provides the basis for relationship (covenant) and mission.
So I suppose what I would want to say is that in dumping the baggage we somehow have to ensure that we do not reduce this God to the level of a philosophical abstraction. If we ‘rebrand’ God, we risk losing sight of the role that he plays in the narrative of history. It would be like saying: Let’s take Hamlet out of a revenge drama set in Denmark and give him a different name. What would that leave us with? I would suggest that the real challenge we face is to make sure that we have understood the narrative properly.
C.S. Lewis’ poem is often cited in this context, but it is important to note that the poem is entitled ‘A footnote to all prayers’. It qualifies, rather than disqualifies, our attempts to name God:
Naming God
yes - i can see the issues here….. actually the “photon 43” thing was in retrospect a moment in a conversation & probably not worth including in the thread!…. really i was more exploring the whole yhwh notion….the concept of namelessness….
one of leonard cohen’s “10 new songs” explores the relationship between “the nameless and the name”….. “the nameless gave a name to one like like me”….. and i think that’s a very interesting way to approach the play….. to develop the hamlet metaphor.
maybe in fact the central character is less defined than in the shakesperian model… perhpaps (like, as a crude example, “waiting for godot”) he/she is only ever seen in metaphor…. or through a glass darkly….
i do know, however, that if 4 people were asked to view hamlet for the first time armed only with 4 widely divergent previews as to the prince of denmark’s psycological makeup, then 4 widely different plays would be seen…. and it would be extremely difficult to the present a “truthful standpoint”…..
anyway, as you say, this can all get too philosophically abstract…. the place i was trying to reach is possibly best approached by cs lewis in “the last battle” (last of the narnia sequence) - being at work I can’t quote - but it’s the part where the tash serving soldier in death meets aslan and is accepted into aslan’s fellowship on the basis of his love for the god whom he in reality did not know…… if anyone has the precise text to hand it would merit inclusion….
i suppose the thrust of this highly abstract ramble is to say that the god of abraham, isaac & jacob no matter how accessibly we feel we are presenting him/her will present a barrier to those who know the god of mohommad, ulster or institutionalised religious abuse that the nameless might never have to have hurdled….
in any event… perhaps as leonard cohen seems to have discovered…. it is more important that the nameless names us, than that we name the nameless….