Where is God? Christians tired of being "misrepresented" need to work harder to show what they believe

[Pixabay]

Where you locate God affects how you relate to social justice. One location allows you to keep your religion separate from social change and political discourse, the other insists these cannot be viewed separately.

If you have or choose to read previous essays and speculations published here, you will come to recognize that my views on religion and spirituality are nuanced and fluid. For example, I find the declaring belief or lack of belief in God to be an impediment rather than a useful clarification (at least for myself). And while I rarely use the word much in my personal life, I often use "God" when writing about religion and spirituality as a shorthand for the deeper, grander mysteries of life and existence that transcend a human capacity for (full) comprehension or control.

I eschew adjectives such as "personal" and "impersonal" when it comes to discussions of divinity, with the use of the word "God" revealing an orientation toward understanding and experiencing existence. Neither strictly as an ideal nor as a specific object, but a larger unity underlying and pervading all we are, all we know, all we can be. Again, at least when I'm writing about this stuff or pushed to ask what kind of God might make sense to me. There isn't much need to worry about such depictions or definitions of God for my daily living. In practical terms I tend to leave "God" unfettered by words and overly specific expectations.

So if you're trying to figure out which category my views belong in when figuring out what angle I'm coming from in relation to the topic at hand, it's one of those really open approaches that drives some people with more fixed notions of what God must (not) or can(not) be to distraction. Yet I bring this up for more than honest disclosure about my own take on the idea of something like the concept of God. Because how one thinks about God shapes how one thinks about the value and purpose of formal religion in state-level societies as well as the larger global community.

If I had some need to worry about it, I suppose it would make sense that "God" (used here to represent the central concern or focus of religious notions of spiritual depth and personal transcendence) would be omnipresent yet not limited to any particular place or time. One of those weird sounding ideas theologians and philosophers talk about, this is sometimes rendered as being immanent (it's here with us) and transcendent (it's far beyond us) at the same time. There are ways of discussing how this works, including a kind of split-level monism in which immanence and transcendence reflect differences in perception and thus represent different modes of awareness, but we aren't getting into anything so heavy here. Not today.

But why does it matter where God is "located"? And what does it have to do with how those who identify as Christian behave and how they are perceived?

Progressive Christianity embracing Contemplative Christianity?

Richard Rohr (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not that this hasn't happened before, although many contemplative Christians are rightly worried about being labeled into any kind of theological or political pigeon hole. After all, folks like Fr. Richard Rohr who focus on the contemplative dimensions of Christianity sure sound somewhat progressive; but he and others are concerned about the danger of labels as rough description becoming labels as ideological straightjackets.

In any case, it can only be a good thing for those who espouse post-modernist, liberal, or progressive Christianity to seriously embrace contemplative prayer, meditation, and the like. The big danger for the progressives is to try to make everything into an intellectualized symbol or metaphor in opposition to a literalized interpretation. It reduces the power of wonder and mystery to the neurological correlates and psychological effects of wonder and mystery.

In other words, it's just the progressive counter-point to the fundamentalist view but is still based primarily or entirely on "left-brain consciousness". The idea of simply being with the poetic imagery, the mythical narrative, and the like, being immediately open to it and within it and experiencing it directly, becomes unavailable. The fact that you may at one instance react to a scriptural passage or hymn or prayer on a literal level, and at another instance symbolic, or at other times seeing it with both perspectives at once, and at still other times the experience is so direct there is no discrimination or analysis at all, is only available when the intuitive, holistic, or "right-brain consciousness" is also honored and permitted.

The result is that the religious elements are cleaned up to strictly secular, modernistic standards, with nothing that sounds like superstition or supernaturalism, which is basically how left-brain consciousness mixed with cynicism sees the spiritual--as full of idiotic or ignorant woo. This is because the fundamentalists, who try to take the spiritual seriously but do so in a left-brain way, turn the spiritual into idiotic or ignorant woo. To outsiders, it's all assumed to just be the same, and progressive Christians are tempted to disavow the whole lot and make their religious heritage into harmless little stories that no one should really take too seriously.