It all started as a gentle theological disputation but ended with one of the disputants in tears.
The point of departure was a discussion about the reality of God, prompted by current debates in the SBNR movement. A perusal of the material generated by this movement discloses that two central questions are often confused: First, who or what is God? Second, where or how is God revealed?
Regarding the first, many express a pantheistic (a slippery term) view in which God is the name for the totality of being. Others (Marcus Borg, for example, assert that all things indwell God – presumably a spiritual reality of some kind). Within the recent United Church controversy about the atheist minister Greta Vosper, many of her "big tent" supporters misread her by attributing some variant of pantheism or panentheism to her when she is, in reality, an old-fashioned materialist who would feel quite at home in imaginary debates of decades ago between Henri Bergson (arguing for the spiritualists) and Thomas Hardy (arguing for the scientific materialists).
Confucians have a principle that would be helpful here: “The rectification of names.” Pursue clarity of argument by calling things by their established, proper names. To view Vosper’s materialistic atheism as consistent with United Church of Canada teachings is a bridge too far. All those United Church ministers and professors who endorsed her would have shown more intellectual rigour (and perhaps integrity) had they taken up a collection to buy her an annuity allowing her to carry on her work amongst her acolytes.
But I digress.
In our disputation with which I began, I was examining the theological reality (or non-reality) claims of some of the SBNR proponents. I was referring to the question of whether there is a God and, granting the existence of a transcendent level of being, what it’s nature is.
My disputant had, however, inadvertently changed the subject: She was talking about something else, namely, the location of God’s self-disclosure. Where do you find God?
She argued that her seminary professor had allowed for the reality of a general revelation, that is, a divine disclosure outside the biblical history. Contrary to the biblical theology associated with the names of Barth and Brunner that declared a resounding “No” to the claim of a knowledge of God in sunsets and human experience.
Instead, God’s Word was in the strange new world within the Bible.
The question of who or what is God and the question of where God is to be found are connected. But it helps clarity in our debates if we distinguish them.
If you experience moral urgency through, for example, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 that may give you a particular slant on who God is. Similarly, if you experience a transcendent presence by a pyramidal mountain peak thrusting upward in a cloud-flecked blue sky, that may give you a distinctive way of thinking and talking about God. The difficulty here is that the same human and natural contexts may generate different senses of what really is out there underlying and communicating our knowledge of God.
This discussion introduces the familiar controversies of the death of theism (a providential, personal power), the various forms of atheism and the feasibility of pantheism.