When we pray to God, sing about God, think of God in passing, we think of God as a being, "the Supreme Being," the best being in every way." That is no less than necessary. In our speaking with God and listening to God, we have to do that within the constraints of human imagination. But we pay a price for that. We are apt to miss how mind-blowingly profound our faith is.
To reclaim the profundity of faith, religious philosophy, East and West, takes the question of "God" -- what do we mean by "God"? -- a step further. Theologians and philosophers start by acknowledging God as the Source of everything. Yes, that means the one who lit the fuse at the Big Bang. 18th Century Deists limited God to that fuse lighter and said he had then gone on about his business -- whatever that is -- and left the Universe and us to make it on our own. But mainstream theology going back to the earliest days of Christianity saw God as more than that supreme kid tossing the supreme fire cracker. God is the Source of each moment as it arises, the Source of all that is good and all that might be good.
Not all but some theologians and philosophers insist that God is also the Destiny of all Creation. That idea comes from Paul who used the word "for" to mean both purpose and destiny. "For him and to him and through him are all things." Romans 11:36. "All things were created through him and for him." Colossians 1:16. Not to go to far into the weeds, major theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, connected these texts to Aristotle's "final causes" which means all things exist for a purpose or destiny. We saw this most explicitly in 20th in the Process Theology of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and Peirre Teilhard de Chardin. They saw God as the Beginning, the End, and most importantly the process along the way.
Putting these ideas together, we say of God: "'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' says the Lord God, 'who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.'" Revelation 20:13. That is all important. But it is really making claims about God's significance for us creatures. It doesn't yet say who or what God is.
Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas say God is "Being" -- that is Being itself, the Being-ness of everything that exists. Paul Tillich called God "the Ground of Being" -- that out of which all beings arise. This is profound, but it makes God rather abstract and so hard to connect with. Some echo Plotinus and Hegal calleing God "the Transcendent Absolute." It's in the words of a children's song, "My God is so big." But it is a pretty cold idea to make a religion out of. So, some theologians have rejected this "Being" notion of God, insisting that God is a person.
But others have rejected "God is a person" as making God a being, not the source of all beings. So they have made the mind-blowing claim that Being is personal. They didn't just prefer to think that. They reasoned that to be personal is better than to be impersonal. So for God to be "the Highest Good," as we have said from the beginning, God has to be personal. If God is Being and Being is personal, everything that exists has its origin in personhood, in caring. The poet, Clarice Lispector, said, "The world began with yes" and Erika Jong elaborated, "one molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born." But where did we get the molecules? It goes even further back to the Primal Yes which is personal.
Eastern religion had the opposite starting point. Eastern religion sees everything arising out of the Void and destined to return to the Void. We came from nothing and are going to become nothing. Our existence is ephemeral, even illusory; what really exists -- except by definition it doesn't exist -- is Nothing. In the West, 20th Century existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre in particular, sought to experience nothingness almost in the way Christians sought communion with God.
Then a remarkable new thought got thunk. In the wake of World War II, some Japanese Buddhist philosophers in Kyoto -- Kitaro Nishida, Keiji Nishitani, Masao Abe, and others -- were aghast that their ostensibly Buddhist nation should turn so violent and aquisative as imperial Japan. This led them to study Christianity. They came up against the basic wall between East and West, the Void vs. Being. It was to them like a Koan. And they came to the conclusion, the East is right. Everything rises from and falls back into the Void, but the void is personal! That is beginning to sound rather like God, particularly as Meister Eckhart had spoke of Him.
Overarching all these notions of God is a voice of humility, and admission of what we do not know and cannot know. If God is big enough to be God, God is too big to fit inside our heads. God is ultimately Mystery -- not just mysterious as an attribute, but the quality of Mystery defines God. God is the Mystery before whom we fall silent and prostrate ourselves. Theologian Gordon Kaufman said it in his book, In the Face of Mystery. But it's an old, even Biblical notion. Isaiah equated God with Wisdom and said, "his wisdom is unsearchable." Isaiah 40:28. The Old Testament emphasizes that no one has seen the face of God. Paul said "in (Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Colossians 2:3.
To bow in the face of Mystery is necessary, but such a God -- like the Transcendent Absolute -- is infinitely remote. How can we relate to a God who is only Mystery? The God whose name cannot be spoken, the God of whom no image can be carved, the mysterious God of the Old Testament speaks to his people, sometimes out of a burning bush, sometimes in visions, often through prophets. In the same letter where Paul says all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, he claims, "the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations has now been disclosed to the Lord's people." Colossians 1:26. He means we see God in Jesus.
So as we have the divine paradox of Being and the Void, here we have the paradox of Mystery and Revelation. Perhaps -- and I believe this is true -- the Mystery reveals Itself. "The Mystery is always speaking, whispering to us. How? In nature, in art, in music, in each other's faces, and in our own hearts. Paul said that all wisdom was in Christ and now Christ is in us. He wrote of "the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you." God's very nature is Mystery and yet God's very nature is to speak intimately to us, even through us.
In Ancient days, people knew there were mysterious forces at work in the world and they thought of them as gods. But over time, Ancient peoples, beginning in Egypt, began to elevate one God above the others to be the primal god. The Egyptians' first primal God was Atun. They associated Atun with the river Nile which irrgated their land to make farming possible but also brought devastating floods. The Nile was the source of both creation and destruction, Being, and Nothingness. So they named their primal God, Atun, which means both Being and Nothingness.
When Moses asked the name of Israel's God, He answered "I Am." Biblical theologians have sometimes read this as God saying he was Being. But it is also something of a refusal to take a name. He simply is who He is and we cannot know more. So it has also been said that God's answer kept the Mystery hidden. And the Old Testament recounts many times when the Creator God destroys.
So this is what I say of God. God is both Being and the Void. But the Being and the Void are both secondary to the Mystery. It is a kind of Trinity -- Being, Void, and Mystery. Both Being and the Void are revelations of the Mystery whose paradoxical nature is to be mysterious but also revelatory. The Mystery speaks to us constantly, and most definitively in the person of Jesus. In him, we see God as much as we can see Him at all. The moral of all this is to pay attention to the Mystery we encounter in life and death, in our experiences of the cross and our hope of the Resurrection. We believe not just that God is Mystery, but we believe in, trust in, credo (give our hearts to) the Mystery, because in Jesus it has been revealed that the personal mystery loves us and longs for us to love Him back.
