Minilogue - April 2007

Theological Beliefs

By the Rev. Bruce Johnson

When asked about my theological beliefs, I sometimes define myself -- in the language developed by the theologian, H. Richard Neibuhr -- as a “radical monotheist.” I don’t believe that “God” is a being among other beings - not even the “supreme being.” That position, technically speaking, would be called “henotheism,” from the Greek word, henos, which is just one of several Greek terms that can be translated as “one.” A henotheist does not deny the existence of multiple deities, but adheres to only one of them as the highest, supreme god. Much of what passes for “monotheism” seems to me to be a form of henotheistic one-up-manship -- a sort of “my god can beat up your god” kind of thing. One center of value is elevated to a supreme position over all others in a divine contest.

Neibuhr contrasts this kind of henotheism with what he calls “radical monotheism,” where God is understood as the principle of Being itself -- what the theologian Paul Tillich called the Ground of Being. This language is not entirely adequate, either, because it is impersonal and abstract, whereas God, as I experience God, is vividly concrete and , if not exactly personal, then certainly transpersonal. While God is not a personal being in some crude and literal sense --the proverbial old man with a white beard -- it seems to me that God must be -- by definition -- more than personal, rather than less, transpersonal rather than prepersonal. To be transpersonal is to include and transcend what we understand as personal being.

I actually think a lot about what might be meant by God’s “oneness.” We are, after all (along with Jews and Muslims) supposed to be “unitarian” in our theology. What does it mean to affirm that “God is One?” One way that I imagine this is to think of God as the reality of undivided wholeness. God is the underlying wholeness which binds together the complexity and diversity of the world. “Radical” monotheism seeks to dig deeply down to the roots of things, what the Taoists call the original unity beneath the “ten thousand things.” God’s unity does not destroy or obliterate the differences in the world in order to stand as a kind of monolithic and supreme static sameness. Unity is not the same as uniformity. Strangely and paradoxically, it is the doctrine of the Trinity that tries to maintain this balance between unity and diversity within a Christian symbolic framework. I don’t particularly have a problem with Trinitarian language; I just think it shouldn’t be imposed on thought, but used as an exploratory symbol to probe and explore what in the end remains mysterious.

For me, Jesus is a symbol of God. He is “the finger pointing to the moon, but not the moon,” as the Buddhists would say. Or perhaps we could say that Jesus is a window transparent (or at least translucent) to the light of God. Jesus is a lens, focusing, concentrating (and yes, also distorting) the divine light. I find his story a compelling compass for my own religious journey, but I would not -- could not -- impose that understanding on another person.

Theological categories need to be held lightly, and they ought to remain open to growth, revision, and evolution throughout our lives. In our congregation, I hope we can continue to create an environment where people feel free to share and explore their tentative and developing thought about God without fear of being boxed and labeled into a fixed position, living out the Unitarian Universalist principles of “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth” and a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

In growing faith,
Bruce