‘All in God and God in All’
A talk given by the Revd Canon Hugh Wybrew
to Churches Together in Headington, Tuesday 27 February 2007
The title of this
Lenten series of talks is “Contact with God”.
That takes us to the heart of Christianity, which is our relationship
with God. But who is the God with whom we relate? How should we conceive God?
In one sense we can’t conceive God at all: God is mystery beyond comprehension,
as a well-known hymn puts it: ‘Immortal, invisible God only wise, in light
inaccessible hid from our eyes’.
Yet the unknowable God
has made himself known, and has done so in a human person, Jesus. One of the
favourites sayings of my tutor at The Queen’s College, David Jenkins, is, ‘God
is as he is in Jesus’. That conviction is central to Christianity, and central
to our relationship with God. We are daughters and sons of God in Jesus Christ,
the Son of God.
In Jesus God makes
known his character; and what he reveals of his character is succinctly summed
up in1 John 4.7 ‘God is love’. That too is central to our Christian image of God.
The fact that God
makes himself known in a human person also demonstrates another basic Christian
conviction, that God is personal. That too is fundamental to the biblical and
Christian tradition. We as persons, created in image and likeness of God,
relate to God who is personal.
But it’s no less
fundamental that God is not a person,
even a superhuman one.
That needs stressing
because most of us, I suspect, do usually and instinctively think of God as a
person, even if as a superhuman person. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of God
is, ‘A superhuman person regarded as having power over nature and human
fortunes; a deity.’ With regard to Jewish and Christian theology, it goes on to
say that this supreme being is regarded as the creator and ruler of the universe.
Is that how most Christians think of God? Is that how we instinctively think of
God? It’s certainly the image the bible generally paints of God: a superhuman
person, outside the world he has created, infinitely greater than the world. That’s
the image, too, depicted by the language we use in liturgical worship. So do we
relate to God simply as one person to another, even if the other is a supremely
holy and superhuman person?
The Christian
tradition has a rather different understanding of God. It seems to me supremely
important that we measure the image of God we instinctively operate with
against the Christian tradition, to see if we, like most people, are operating
with a misleading image of God. It’s important because our image of God shapes
the way we envisage our relationship with God.
This evening I want to
concentrate on two aspects of the Christian understanding of God.
1. All things in God
When he was in Athens,
Paul found in the Areopagus an altar with the inscription ‘To an unknown god’ (Acts
17.27). He used it as an opportunity to proclaim the one true God. This God, he
said, had allotted to the nations their times of existence and boundaries, ‘so
that they would search for God, and perhaps grope for him, and find him –
though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘in him we live and move
and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are
his offspring’.
We and all creation
exist in God. Paul calls God creator. But we shouldn’t think of creation here, and
God there, as though in different parts of space, as I suspect most Christians
do. God doesn’t exist in space: space exists in God. All creation has its being
in God.
That means it’s
misleading to imagine God as a person, standing over against all created
persons and things. God is personal, but not a person – just like other
persons, only greater.
That basic truth has
to shape the way we think of our relationship with God. We often compare that
relationship with our relationship with other people, particularly with our
friends. There’s a good biblical basis for that: in John’s gospel Jesus calls
his disciples friends. When we’re trying to help people to understand their
relationship with God, it can be helpful to use the analogy of friendship. We
talk to our friends, we listen to them, we spend time with them: that’s what we
do with God in prayer. Our friendship with others grows as we pursue common
interests: that’s what happens with us and God when we do when we try to do God’s
will and put into practice the commandments of love.
But we do that within
an existing relationship without which we shouldn’t be at all: we live, move
and have our being in God. We are ‘en theo’; all things are ‘en theo’. Panentheism
is not a word we normally use, or are used to. But Arthur Peacocke once asked
me if it was an Orthodox concept. I didn’t know. So he asked Bishop Kallistos
Ware, who said he thought it expressed what Orthodoxy does believe about the
relationship of creation to God. I came across the word again in a recent book
about Orthodox spirituality. It’s called ‘Light through Darkness’, by a Greek
American theologian, John Chryssavgis. He wrote, ‘God is – and is within – the
very constitution of our world. This is the distinctive teaching of
panentheism, which neither classic theism or pantheism are able to appreciate.’
I think it’s a concept
we need to assimilate if we are to work with a less misleading image of God,
and if we are to put across to others a fuller Christian understanding of God.
It’s not without roots in the New Testament. Colossians 1.17 describes Christ
as the image of the invisible God, and says ‘He himself is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.’ If all things hold together in Christ,
then they do so in God: for Christ is one with the Father, one of the Trinity.
At the same time, all things are destined to grow into God. Ephesians 1.10 speaks about God’s plan for
the fullness of time, revealed in Christ, ‘to gather up all things in him,
things in heaven and things on earth.’
So we are to come to
know, and grow into, the God in whom we already exist, in whom we live and move
and have our being.
B. God in all things.
If it’s true that all
things are in God, there’s an equal and complementary truth. John Chryssavgis’ statement has a
parenthesis: ‘God is – and is within – the very constitution of our world.’
He’s concerned to emphasise the concept of panentheism. But that needs to be
complemented by the fact that in the Christian perspective God is also in all
things.
There’s a biblical
basis for this affirmation too. The Book of Wisdom says: ‘Because the spirit of the Lord has
filled the world, and that which hold all things together knows what is said’
(Wisdom 1.7). The spirit, like the figure of Wisdom, is a personification
standing for the presence of God himself.
The presence of God in all things and in all human beings is what
enables them to exist. John Chryssavgis goes on to say, ‘If God were withdrawn
from the world, the world would collapse.’
All things exist in God, and God is present in all things.
This perhaps goes
rather further than the New Testament and Christian tradition are generally
understood to go. They’re clear about the presence of the Spirit in those who
believe. In 1 Corinthians Paul asks the rhetorical question, ‘Do you not know
that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?’ (3.16).
They’re also clear about the presence of Christ in believers. Colossians 1.27
speaks of the mystery of God revealed now to his people, which is ‘Christ in
you, the hope of glory’. But the New
Testament, and a good deal of traditional Christian language, distinguishes
both the Spirit and Christ from God. Western liturgical language does it
constantly: we pray to God through Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. Even when
we add the doxology, ‘who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever’, the
impression is left that the Spirit and Christ are not quite the same as God –
by whom we ought to mean God the Father.
So there’s another
question we need to ask about our image of God. How seriously do we take and
apply the doctrine of God as Trinity? Fully developed Trinitarian theology is
clear that whenever we speak of the Spirit’s presence and activity, we must
think the Son and the Father to be present and active too. Whenever we speak of
the Son’s presence and activity, we must think the Father and the Spirit to be
present and active too. And whenever we speak of the Father’s presence and
activity, we must think the Son and the Spirit to be present and active too.
The recent revival of Trinitarian theology in the West notwithstanding, this
basic Christian understanding of God is more deeply rooted in the consciousness
of the Orthodox East and its liturgical prayer than in the Christian West. But
it’s fundamental to our image of God, and to our relationship with God. It lies
behind something Metropolitan Anthony Bloom said in one of his books on prayer:
The Gospel tells us that the Kingdom of God is within us first of all.
If we cannot find the Kingdom of God within us, if we cannot meet God within,
in the depth of ourselves, our chances of meeting him outside ourselves are
very remote. When Gagarin [the first Soviet cosmonaut] came back from space and
made his remarkable statement that he never saw God in heaven, one of our
priests in Moscow remarked, “If you have not seen him on earth, you will never
see him in heaven.”
This is also true of
what I am speaking about. If we cannot find a contact with God under our own
skin, as it were, then the chances are very slight that even if I meet him face
to face, I will recognise him.
St John Chrysostom
said, ‘Find the door of your heart, you will discover it is the door of the
Kingdom of God.’ So it is inward that we must turn, and not outward – but
inward in a very special way. I am not saying that we must become
introspective. I don’t mean that we must go inward in the way one does in
psychoanalysis or psychology. It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is
a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of
self into the place where he is, the point at which God and I meet.”
The God with whom we
are to grow in friendship, as adopted daughters and sons, sharing in the divine
nature, is the God who lives in us. This fundamental truth should shape the way
we understand our relationship with God.
So when we pray, we
should be clear that our prayer is the prayer of the Spirit within us, and so
the prayer of the Son and of the Father within us too. It’s the prayer of the
holy and undivided Trinity. When we try to obey the commandments of love, we
should be clear that our attempts to co-operation with God the God who is love
is co-operation with the God who is working within us. We don’t have to reach
out to a distant God, whom we might or might not find: we relate to a God who
is in the depth of our being – to use biblical terminology, in our heart. God,
in whom we live and move and have our being, lives and moves and has his being
in us.
All in God and God in all. One possible title I suggested for this
evening’s talk was ‘Three in One and All in Three’. Ian quite rightly thought that
would be too skittish – though he didn’t use that word. But it does point to
another fundamental aspect of our relationship with God. God is personal, but
not a person. Strictly speaking, the Christian tradition believes that God is
three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Three are a single communion of
Persons united by love in mutual self-giving. That divine life and love is what
the Christian community, the Church, is meant to mirror. The Church is called
to become and to be a communion of persons united by love in mutual
self-giving, and so to be what the whole human race is meant to become in God.
We can’t grow in our relationship with God without growing in a relationship of
love with others. That’s implicit in the Christian belief that God is Trinity;
and to believe that God is Trinity is to believe that God is Love.
This talk was given to
Churches Together in Headington in Lent 2007.
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