GOD

God as Metaphor

I define God as the “ground of all being” as stated by Paul Tillich. I also like the idea that God is “being itself.” To me this means that the “sun and moon and the vast expanse of interstellar space” are all created by God but is God itself.

I have been taught that God created the creation. I believe that God is the created order itself.

I and believers through the ages need to have some personal connection to God. The definition of God I have just written about is amorphous and impersonal. It is impossible to pray to the ground of all being or being itself.

People have created God in their own image. We use a metaphor for God. A metaphor is “a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.”

The word father is the usual metaphor for God. Mother can easily be the metaphor. I will use father as it is the one I am most familiar with.

Father is the loving creator. When I give thanks to God, the father, it feels personal and close. I know, when I think about it, I am thankful to being itself and the ground of all being. But it more personal and human to thank God for the gifts I have been given

I pray for God to help me when I break my leg. I am helpless and in pain. Only the doctor, nurse of someone else can set the break and put me on the path to healing. But I still pray to God the father as he is personal and close. I don’t expect metaphor God to fix my leg. I need the help of my brothers and sisters to do that.

I pray to metaphor God when I pray that my plane does not crash. However, I do not expect any notion of God to spare my plane and not all planes. I do not expect God to halt gravity to save my plane.

If I am in a crowd and someone shoots at us, I pray to be spared. But God does not let others die while I live. God is not going to let others die and spare me.

That reminds me of the question, “Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?” The answer is that God does answer prayers. He gives us two possible answers, yes or no.

This view of God holds no moral qualities. God is not good, evil, loving, forgiving or saving. God has no morality. God just is.

We give metaphor God morality. He is good, evil, loving, forgiving and saving. We ascribe to metaphor God all the human qualities we experience as humans and ascribe them to God.

Most people are baffled by the question, how can a loving God allow evil – murder, torture, genocide, holocausts, babies born blind. God in either sense, God as being or God as metaphor allows evil. People choose to be evil. Mental and emotional illness, greed and rage, in human being cause the pain and suffering of the world. God is not responsible for evil, human beings are.