This is the first of a few essays that will be broadly linked. In this one, I explore the idea that we need to align ourselves with God instead of trying to make Him into what we want Him to be.
Have you ever met anyone who said, "I could never believe in a God who _____________," and then filled in the blank with the thing they could not tolerate.
This attitude strikes me as odd.
Perhaps it's my father's voice in my head that causes my discomfort. My family joined the church in the late 1960's; I was the youngest of my parents' four children and we were all baptized together. My parents had been very active in their protestant church prior to our joining the Mormons, but my father had expressed his concern about our church's changing because of social changes at the time.
My father's view was that if God is God, and if He does not change, then the church should not vote about what was true this year or not. For my father, God was a fixed point, a given. And it was up to us to discover who He was, not to create Him in or change Him to the image we liked.
So when someone tells me he prefers the God of the New Testament to the God of the Old Testament, I'm confused. (Now I've written before about the fact that the Old Testament also teaches the need for love of God and love of fellowman, just as the New Testament does.) Or if he wants to select a la carte the characteristics of a God he can believe in.
It seems to me what our job is in this regard is to discover God, not to create Him. We can discover Him through study of the scriptures, through revelation through the prophets (including modern prophets), and have those truths ratified through our own personal spiritual experience.
Personally I'm guided by some counsel I received from Elder Theodore Burton of the Seventy while I was on my mission. He taught in a zone conference that those things the Lord felt most strongly about He tended to say more than once in the scriptures. He suggested that teachings that appear only in one obscure verse might not be as significant as those broad themes that get repeated play.
Perhaps you've had a similar experience to mine that in General Conferences I sometimes hear themes emerge from a particular session. It may be I hear those themes because I come to the conference with questions, but I don't think that's always the case.
In any event, I am reluctant to couch my faith and testimony in terms of what I want God to be like; instead I try to understand how He has revealed Himself to be. My understanding continues to grow and develop, even 43 years since my baptism. But it's not God that's changing. It's me. And hopefully, I'm changing for the better.
our job is in this regard is to discover God, not to create Him
ReplyDeleteThat's the takeaway line. Thanks. The way I usually hear it in Mormon history discussions is "God would never have allowed X, so that shows Joseph Smith/Brigham Young/whoever was a false prophet." I always wonder what makes them such experts on what God would or wouldn't have allowed -- but you've phrased it all so much kinder, so much less snarky than I do. Thanks.
Thanks for reading, Ardis. I agree the other view seems to smack of creating God in our image instead of the inverse.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate your posts and your comments on other blogs, too.
From the OP: "my father had expressed his concern about our church's changing because of social changes at the time"
ReplyDeleteI'm actually glad that our Church changes from social pressures.
I'm glad we got rid of polygamy when the US forced our hand because my faith is far too weak to have to live that principle now.
I'm glad we finally let the blacks have the priesthood during the time that the civil rights movement put a lot of pressure on the Church. I'm also glad that they changed "white and delightsome" to "pure..."
I'm glad that we let women pray in sacrament meeting during the time of ERA, etc.
My prediction is that at some point we will have gay marriage in the United States. It will be interesting to see the compromise that the Church makes to the social reality in that case.
Mike S you say that the church changes from social pressure. In fact, if that were true, I suspect that the issue resolving the priesthood would have come 10-15 years earlier. Surely President McKay wanted to announce it (as his biography makes clear).
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not certain that it's only social pressure that drives change.
In my father's church (before he converted) it was a vote of the membership, and not any sense of divine involvement that authorized changes, and that's what made him uncomfortable at the time.
As badly as I hate it when people quote ridiculously lengthy passages of scripture/books at me, I'm going to do so here, because I think that the following from C.S. Lewis' book 'Miracles' is on point for this post, and because it speaks to me:
ReplyDelete"The popular 'religion' excludes miracles because it excludes the 'living God' of Christianity and believes in stead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else. This popular 'religion' may roughly be called Pantheism, and we must now examine its credentials.
Man starts by inventing 'spirits' to explain natural phenomena; and at first he imagines these spirts to be exactly like himself. As he gets more enlightened they become less man-like, less 'anthropomorphic' as the scholars call it. Their anthropomorphic attributes drop off one by one--first the human shape, the human passions, the personality, will, activity--in the end every concrete or positive attribute whatever. There is left in the end a pure abstraction--mind as such, spirituality as such. God, instead of being a particular entity with a real character of its own, becomes simply 'the whole show' looked at in a particular way or the theoretical point at which all the lines of human aspiration would meet if produced to infinity. And since, on the modern view, the final stage of anything is the most refined civilised stage, this 'religion' is held to be a more profound, more spiritual, and more enlightened belief than Christianity.
Now this imagined history of religion is not true. Pantheism certainly is (as its advocates would say) congenial to the modern mind...because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are...
...So far from being the final religious refinement, Pantheism is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind; the permanent ordinary level below which man sometimes sinks, under the influence of priestcraft and superstition, but above which his own unaided efforts can never raise him for very long...It is the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself. No wonder we find it congenial. If 'religion' means simply what man says about God, and not what God does about man, then Pantheism almost is religion. And 'religion' in that sense has, in the long run, only one really formiddable opponent--namely Christianity.
Gotta love CS Lewis! Thanks, Scott.
ReplyDeleteI liked the OP and the CS Lewis quote both -- wish Scott had cited it.
ReplyDeleteMy father's view was that if God is God, and if He does not change, then the church should not vote about what was true this year or not. For my father, God was a fixed point, a given. And it was up to us to discover who He was, not to create Him in or change Him to the image we liked.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great observation. Otherwise we only use God as a mirror -- and need nothing else ...