One God

The bumper sticker read, "God has no religion"—Mahatma Gandhi. As a practitioner of a religion that has informed and enriched my life beyond measure, I have been wrestling with that quotation ever since. It reminds me of the Jesus who sits with a Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) or rails against the pious hypocrisy of his own elders (John 9), offering the reality of God to each in spite of religion, even his own.

Those convinced that reality is only that which can be measured and weighed struggle with the fact that all cultures since the beginning of human history have expressed beliefs in divinity or spirituality. Attempting to explain away humanity's almost universal religious expression, University of William and Mary anthropologist Barbara King suggests that the "belongingness" associated with religious behavior evolved as a human survival trait deep within our cultural and biological DNA (Evolving God, Barbara J. King, Double Day Religion, 2007). She and other social scientists suggest that humanity invented religion to form and sustain the communities that insured survival.

Maybe so, but the professor confuses religion with God.

Along with pointing out the rich history of failure and atrocity in religious institutions, which cannot be denied, our atheist and agnostic friends' criticism of monotheistic religion in particular will focus on the stories and metaphors of God as an "Old Man Up in the Sky," ignoring that only the most woodenheaded literalists actually think of God as a "Shepherd" (Psalm 23), or "roaring like a lion"(Hosea 11:10) or that God is a "rock," which we find 19 times in the Book of Psalms.

The Ten Commandments, found in all three Abrahamic faiths, state an essential conviction that there is one God and one God alone, who, by God’s nature, transcends any human concept or comprehension: "I am the Lord your God … you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth below" (Exodus 20:2-4).

Two very different concepts of divinity, often at tension with teach other, are found in the shared traditions by the three religions. "God [is a] being beyond the universe, another being in addition to the universe, the supreme being, almighty and all-knowing [who] created the universe, but is separate from it; and...God is not a separate being from the universe but a sacred presence all around us...a reality...present everywhere and permeates everything, not 'somewhere else'.... (Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian, HarperOne, 2012, p. 66)

On the one hand, our traditions personify God as a male supreme being who "walks through the garden of Eden" (Genesis 3:8), who is like a shepherd (Psalm 23) or who has a mighty "right hand" (Exodus 15:6,12). At the same time, God is understood as a sacred presence beyond gender (Genesis 1:27), in which "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28), not separate from the universe but permeating all of life and time (Psalm 139); "...we are in God as fish are in water." (Borg p. 69).

The three Abrahamic religions can understand this One God as the Supreme Being and/or as Being itself. This seeming contradiction passes the limitations of rational thought.

Thus our traditions use metaphors and poetry to talk about God because, either as Supreme Being or Being itself, any definition of eternal, omnipresent, omniscient divinity by its nature will transcend human understanding and words.

Joseph Campbell, the brilliant comparative religion professor, once said, "God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, including being and non-being. It's so simple."

But it’s not so simple for most of us. We can and should condemn the evil done in the name of religion. We can dismiss the mythological that is held up by some as science. But we can't negate the reality of a mystery with and against which humans have related since history began.

In the third chapter of the Hebrew book Exodus, at the burning bush, God reveals God's name to Moses as "I Am that I Am"; it is an enigmatic puzzle and is supposed to be. The Hebrew tradition is never to speak or write that name, for to do so would suggest that one understands what one is saying. No one can ever fully comprehend all of who or what God is.  Worshipping something that can be named is to worship an idol.

The Muslim tradition so abhors idolatry that most of its artists refuse to depict the face of Mohammad or other prophetic figures from their sacred book, the Koran. The amazing beautiful traditions of Islamic calligraphy come out of the insistence that recreating images of the children of God is idolatry.

At the root of the faith shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is a relationship with the source of life itself that transcends time and moment. That reality belongs to all of creation, not to any one religion or rejection of religion. If God is God, there can only be One. And these three distinct traditions share that conviction in their own unique ways, often with their own unique versions of the same stories.

Human beings invent religion as a means to grapple with a mystery never to be reduced to our understanding. The variety of expression in concept and ritual is evidence enough. Sometimes humans use their religion for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes the religious can redeem the individual or community beyond all expectations for good. Yet this very human institution can only point to the reality of spirit – at best, by its example. Religion is not to be confused with "a oneness in life that is not of our creation" (John Philipp Newell, Iona).