The Revd Marcus Small: who or what is God?

‘God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment’ Psalm 82 verse 1.

If this verse does not strike you as odd it should do. It comes from the book of psalms in the Bible, a book that witnesses to the one God, the God of Israel. And yet here is this verse in which God is said to be holding a council with other gods. How is this possible if other gods do not exist? This is not the only place in which the gods, plural, are mentioned. Another instance is Psalm 86 verse 8 “Among the gods there is none like you, Lord; no deeds can compare with yours”.  This is not monotheism as we understand it today. Whilst Ps 86 v8 suggests that the existence of other gods was accepted, for to the people of Israel there was no god like the God of Israel, Ps 82 v1 suggests something more like the Gods of Olympus or Asgard, heavenly court with a king of the Gods ruling over the others. There is something similar at the beginning of the Book of Job, Ch1 v6 “One day the sons of God (or the Gods, [the Hebrew is plural]) came to present themselves before the LORD..” The word translated ‘LORD’ here is the actual name of the God of Israel, a name that is not spoken in Jewish and Christian tradition. So we have here the God of Israel meeting in council with other divine beings (or Gods).

So what are we to make of all this? Is the religion of the Bible polytheistic? Yes and no. It’s quite clear the existence of other Gods is acknowledged, but it is also quite clear that, so far as the Bible is concerned, these are lesser beings than the God of Israel. So other Gods exist, yes or no? Again the answer is not quite as simple as it might seem. The English word God comes from a proto Germanic words meaning ‘one who is invoked or offered worship’. So word covers both, the being that is believed to be the only God, and also the many Gods that people believed in. Using the same word disguises both the differences between the two, and the evolution of the idea of God in the minds of human beings. We find evidence of that evolution in the pages of scripture. So in addition to the examples above, we find an idea of God that is far more mysterious than simply a being among many other beings, even if that being is bigger, more knowing, more powerful than other beings including the other Gods.

In the book of Exodus Moses is shown being commissioned by the LORD, and Moses asks ‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ [Exodus 13:13-14]

God here is refusing to be named because the moment God is named, God can be pigeon holed, put in a conceptual box and misunderstood. The God speaking to Moses is beyond our understanding, God just is, and is, without further explanation. Again this is not the only place we find this in scripture. In the book of Judges, the Angel of the LORD appears to the mother and father of Sampson. They ask him his name, the angel replied: ‘Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.’ So we can see in the Bible that there a different ways of conceptualising the idea of God. It is concept that continues to develop. For St Thomas Aquinas God is not a being among other beings, God is not simply one of the Gods of polytheism minus the rest, for Thomas, God is ‘ipsum esse subsistens’, ‘the sheer act of to be itself’, ‘The true God is the non-contingent ground of the contingent universe’. [Robert Barron – www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/why-i-love-my-invisible-friend] The existence of everything is dependent of something else for its existence, however God’s being is dependent upon nothing because God is the Ground of Being itself. All our attempts to describe God fall down because our language has evolved to describe the finite world of time and space, but God is “the One whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God exists uncircumscribed in everything” [St Bonaventure].

This all may seem a little abstract but it is important for a number of reasons. Firstly it’s important to recognise that the Bible presents us with many descriptions of God, some ,make God look like the Gods of Olympus or Asgard, others point something deeper and more mysterious. Secondly it means that we should not seek to put God in an image of our own making. Finally if we are created in image and likeness of God it means that we should not seek to put one another in an image of our own devising