The Nature of God Date unknown
by Kenneth Barnes
The other day, in a letter from a friend, there was a curious question that set me thinking along unusual lines – and with results that were a little surprising to me. The writer of the this leter (sic) was concerned with the absurd tangles that people often get into in their personal lives and their pitiful struggles to disentangle themselves. If God is really responsible for the universe and especially for us human beings he must be responsible for putting us into such crazy situations – or [at] least for allowing us to get into them. Then what does he think of us when he sees us turning this way and that in our bewilderment? Does he laugh? How Can God laugh? Yes, said the writer of this letter, it is possible to laugh in one’s mind without one’s body, just as one can weep without tears falling. So surely even if God isn’t an old man with a beard, surely he can have a hearty chuckle now and then?
Now it was not suggested that God was a horrid teasing sort of God, like a boy who sets a cat and dog fighting each other and enjoys their suffering. No – rather that he was a loving God who, if we were willing to accept his help - or to wait for it - would help us to find a way out of our difficulties and become wiser as a result. But what I’m mainly concerned with now is the question set by this idea of God laughing when he hasn’t a body to laugh with, supported by the suggestion that we too can laugh inwardly or weep inwardly, without ;there being any outward sign of our laughter or our tears.
Now we all know that we can have feelings without expressing then outwardly. We can keep a solemn face yet bubble inwardly with amusement. But are we really to think that God is spirit without – body? I think we all prefer to be able to express our amusement in a laugh that other people can hear, and I am quite, quite sure that when we are feeling misery or grief it is better to let the tears flow and have a jolly good howl that to keep out feelings bottled up. There is something more complete about an audible laugh or a sorrow that soaks the pillow.
I am also quite sure that if there is a God he grieves with us and laughs with us. He may even laugh at us in a kindly way. But if he has to do without a voice to laugh with and without eyes to shed tears then surely he must be a more limited person than I am. That would be nonsense. If God is God he cannot be limited; he must be more complete than I am.
Yet nearly every conception of God is of a vague disembodied spirit, like an echo in the immensity of space, and he speaks so feebly to us, is so difficult to reach in any way because he himself is limited by the absence of a body.
Isn’t that one of your main difficulties 0 that a person without a body is unimaginable? That to say that God loves you when he hasn’t eyes or hands to love you with is just impossible to believe? As you know well enough, there have been people who believed in a God who had a body and a beard, and ideas about him were sufficiently definite for hundreds of artists to paint him into their pictures. If those who believed in this God were challenged no doubt they said that his body was not an earthly body, but a sort of spiritual body, an unearthly incorruptible body.
When I was young this idea of a God with a beard was sufficiently talked about – for me to react violently against it, to be very sarcastic about it and to try to discover some idea of God that was less absurd and more in accord with what I thought to be the ideas of science. About this time there was also much discussion of the ideas of Bernard Shaw and the philosopher Bergson, both of whom wanted to substitute Life Force for God. As one of you said the other night it is obvious that such a great orderly universe must have some creator or force to set it going or keep it going. Shaw and Bergson were very aware of the energy and drive of the human race, so they tried to account for this by their idea of a Life Force. At the time, to an intellectually - inclined young man this seemed convincing. But now most people realise this to be nonsense. If we did without any conception of God at all we should be no worse off. The only God that is of value is a God to whom we can appeal for help when we need it and whose presence and love we can enjoy. We cannot appeal to a force; it is just an idea, no different in its nature from the idea of gravity or magnetism.
I remember at that time I said that I could not understand that God could be personal - a person. But that was before I knew how much persons were going to matter to me. That persons – one’s friendship with them – were supremely important – the most significant experience in life – began to be obvious to me when I was 21, had got my science degree and had time to expand my experience. I came quickly to the idea that God must be personal – because he must at least include the greatest thing I knew – the deepest experience. Ideas of force etc were lessthan persons, and a God who was a force was less than me, less than anyone I knew.
So for thirty years God to me has been personal. But does that mean that he has been a person? Now in thinking out this question of whether God can laugh I have realised that I can have an idea of God as personal without his being definitely to me a person. The difficulty is this. I know what is personal – what distinguishes a person from a piece of iron or wood. But when I think of a definite person I have to imagine a body I cannot think of a person without a body. Frankly I think it is the most utter nonsense to talk about a person without a body. Think for a moment of your awareness of someone you love or enjoy or perhaps hate. Your awareness of that person is an awareness of something expressed in the body. In all the subtle changes of expression, the gestures, tension or relaxation of muscles. Even if we admit the reality of telepathy – the direct passage of thought messages from one person to another – we still need the body if we are to have any complete idea of a person. A person without a body is something less than a person – something un-realised, unfulfilled.
Among intellectual people, from Plato’s time onwards, there has been a strong tendency to think that because the body dies there must be something called spirit that carries on, and that this spirit is immortal and more important than the body. I think this idea has done a lot of harm. Because of Plato’s prestige – and that of Greek thinkers supported by the prestige of Greek thought generally, this idea of spirit set free has a tremendous hold on the world. It was quite definitely Plato’s view that the body was a nuisance, and that only when we got rid of the body should we be able to penetrate to the heart of truth.
(Footnote I ought to say too that the idea of the tremendous power and significance of spirit has its origin much further back in the most primitive savage ideas. Primitive men thought of the spirits released from bodies as having terrifying powers.)
Quote (separate page) Plato’s Phaaedo page 144 Wherefore………..over to page 145……to the pure.
As I have said, this view of the soul has had a great influence and we find great diffice (sic) in disentangling it from our thought today. Try to think for a moment what the idea of your immortal spirit, after your body has died as something vague, tenuous, drifting about like a wisp of misty vapour over marshland. Or can you imagine Plato’s immortal soul; understand everything with pure thought, going straight to the heart – of everything without ever having to look at anything, touch, feel taste or hear anything, able to understand beauty without seeing anything beautiful, able to know truth direct without doing any experiments?
Can you imagine God as pure spirit - a religious experience that is not an experience in any sense that we have ever given to that word? - or rather an experience from which everything that we normally call experience has been subtracted?
But I’m not destroying the idea of God. I’m only saying that the idea of God as spirit in the sense in which we use that word is totally inadequate and that Jesus meant something different when he said ”God is Spirit.”
Let’s start from what I believe about our experiences in this life here and now. I believe that our bodies and our senses are an essential part of out wholeness. And if we try to “unthink” our bodily experience we arrive at something less than truth. I believe that the experience of beauty, coming to us through our eyes or ears or other senses is more significant if you like, a more divine experience – than any idea of beauty we may try to find through it. When I enjoy the beauty of a tree or a person’s face, or a mountain, it is the beautiful tree or face or mountain that matters, more than any idea of beauty that may be supposed to lie behind or beneath this experience, It may be interesting and very educative to try to reflect and try to extract from the experience some ideas about beauty, but we must never forget that it is always the experience itself from which we must start and to which we must always return.
What of our experience pf people? Is the body essential? Must we have our friends with us if we are to love them? Most of you would reply: of course not. People can continue to love one another even when they are separated by great distances. Of course they can; but I think it would also be admitted that if two people who love each other do not meet this love remains in a real sense unfulfilled. People do need each other’s presence. Distance does divide hearts if it remains distance for too long. We cannot continue to love memories for ever. To think otherwise is to be sentimental and to try to escape the tragedies of loss and separation by pretending they are not real.
Yes, you can love a person at a distance, but this love is more complete if that person is present. When people are married they become in a literal sense “one flesh”, they share each other’s bodies, and when this happens they are carried to a point of wholeness and fulfilment in their love that would not otherwise be possible.
(Footnote. It cannot be denied that there are instances in which the frustration of the body – e.g. “Heloise and Abelard” – seems to bring about astonishing developments in other directions. This does not however, disprove my thesis; it only shows that humanity has astonishing resources and is incredibly adaptable.)
We need our bodies, our hands, our faces – and perhaps more than any other part. our eyes, to express our feelings for each other. When people lose part of their bodies, what is left become all more expressive because it has to take over the job of what is gone.
Now how can God express his love for us if he has no body? Because this is difficult for human beings to understand It was precisely because of this difficulty that Jesus had to be. In a sense God has your body and mine through which to express himself, but it needed more than the inadequate ordinary man in the street to make clear God’s love for us. So the Incarnation had to be. All Christians in some degree believe in the Incarnation – that in Jesus God took on an earthly body in order that we should understand what he was like and how he felt towards us Nevertheless most believers would I think say that God was not of the body at all, but just took on bodily form temporarily. St John’s statement that “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh” is usually taken to imply that God does not belong to the material world bjt only occurs uses the material world to speak through.
I would say that the nature of God includes what we call the material world. God could not help expressing his love through a human body because the human body was part of his nature. God cannot retire from matter and the body into a “spiritual realism” that is “other” than ours; because our work and our bodies are part of his nature. God if he is to know us and love us – must know life as we know it. He must experience our joys and our sorrows, and by that I don’t mean a special sort of “spiritual joys” and “spiritual sorrows”. I mean our daily pleasures and thrills, the delight we experience from moment to moment and the pains that come between the delights, or sometimes with them.
Perhaps dome of you will spot that I have got myself into a jam at this point. Where is God’s body? If we can’t see one particular body that is God’s now (since Jesus’ body no longer exists) then God must be a spirit flowing invisibly through your body and mine. This would mean that once more we are driven back to the idea of a spirit that is detachable from bodies. This is a tremendous difficulty. You can perhaps work through it by saying that God and man are utterly necessary to each other and if Man ceased to exist God would cease to exist
There is another possibility that we can arrive at through a consideration of immortality.
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