God is a mystery of another world. God is Spirit, another substance, another entity, a person that we can relate to, but can only understand through symbol and metaphor and the broadest of concepts. God is separate from this world, as different from this world as a cow is different from an amoeba. God is a part of Himself, which before creating this universe created the spirit world for His essence to dwell in, although nothing can hold Him.
We, however created by God and in God’s image, are creatures of this world. From the instant we are born, possibly before, we are swimming in the substance of our world, breathing in the ideas, experiencing its vision, consuming the smells and tastes around us. All that we experience is not just created by God, but created by humanity. The sea of humanity is not only the mass of people, but the crowd of human creations that we cannot escape. This force, as pervasive as gravity or air, is culture.
The culture we are raised in and live in is not just something we live in, but it lives in us. Even as our soul is united with our body, our being is infused with culture. Every thought we think is a cultural thought. Every act we perform is a cultural act. Every word we speak is a cultural word. The unique ones are never a culture of their own—at best they are a sub-culture of one, but still reacting in one way or another to the culture or cultures they know and remain a part of, even if absent.
How then can we know God, who is so apart from this world, and we are so inseparable from it? The only way to experience the greatest of all Aliens is to have the superior intelligence teach the lesser one. To understand the best of who God is, we need to have it explained to us in cultural terms. We have no reference to who God really is, but God patiently presents himself in terms we can appreciate and understand. How God wants us to live is encased in culture. And when we relate to God, whether in worship or in prayer, God kindly allows us our cultural expression, for we have no other.
The difficulty is that culture is not a rock foundation on which our ideas are based, but culture is in constant flux. It is an ocean, that as soon as you have determined a pattern of water flow or of hot and cold streams, it shifts, or there is a hurricane and everything changes. With each generation, culture makes a major shift again with minor shifts happening all along. And if a single culture is divided, then it becomes two, distinct, unique cultures within two generations, and never can they be united again without irreparable harm.
Because of this, our relation to God changes. That which one generation holds as the truest form of worship, within two is completely rejected. The worship itself has not shifted, but the mode would be unthought-of by all previous generations. The communication of how we live must change, for the good life of one culture could be evil in another and visa versa. In one context, it is good to give money to beggars, while in another it is death. And even our understanding of God himself, wrapped up in an ancient culture, becomes an enigma, uncovered only by those who have knowledge of the ancient culture, and that only in the most vague way.
God continues to display himself. He is not limited by time, by changing contexts or by unused languages. He continues to speak, and yet He does not neglect his older speech. But that speech is transformed, born again, renewed. It is both old and yet strangely new. It’s old context and life still lives and it lives again. Yet God can only be understood by communication that comes from God himself. Because He is fundamentally unknown, that which we know about Him, as vague as that is, must come from Him, not our own culture, our own thoughts. For God is beyond our thoughts, never being of our culture, as much as He uses our culture.
The difficulty we have about God, however, is trying to grasp Him only through His communication, and not through our own. Alongside the God that dwells in the Spirit world is a god, in the semblance of the former, that is a creation of culture. This god (in reality, gods) is very real in the minds of humans, more real than the true God of heaven. But this god is real because it is a part of culture, a part-and-parcel of “real” life, everyday existence. And this god can use the same ancient revelation and mode of modern communication in order to take the place of the God who existed before time.
This god promotes religious prejudice. This god limits himself, even as he makes claims that are vast. This god is everyone’s friend, and yet he creates enemies and has his people kill them at their pleasure. This god places himself in philosophical concepts of Trinity and Sovereignty, Prime Mover and Anti-Flesh. This god becomes a part of patriarchy, of empire, of rebellion and of complete independence. So a culture of human theology is created, and shifted and soon there are many theologies and many truths about god, all equally inadequate. And they can all say, “We have as much truth as the last theology,” and it is true, for none of it is based on revelation, but on speculation.
And then this god makes demands to shape and warp culture into his own image. His followers become advisors and judges and lawyers and politicians in order to control the passage of culture. He imposes his own limits and laws, his unique principles and precepts become the law of the land. Other cultures fight against this trend, and the followers of the god say, “You are opposing god! You are evil incarnate!” Yet the true God waits on the sidelines, allowing the culture war to play out.
Other cultures to whom God is revealing Himself in a unique way become the evil cultures, in opposition to god, no matter how close some in those other cultures are to the true God. The followers of god do not have understanding of God, so they cannot see Him at work. So the strong culture of god makes war with the other cultures—often destroying the communication of God there. The god of a culture is never the critic of the culture, for the culture itself becomes the god. And anyone or anything that changes the culture is trying to change god. Yet God never changes. He waits, continuing to communicate, continuing to love and critique all equally, for all need support and all need change.
To overcome god, we must restore God to His place. We must re-discover the revelation that God has given—both ancient and modern—and take such revelation seriously. We must not hear it for what we want it to say, but allow it to speak for itself. For it is the best understanding of God we have. We must allow Jesus and the prophets and apostles speak. And we must listen.
In listening, we must do two things. We must first create principles of the cultural communication to have ideas that surpass culture. And then we need to embed the concepts back into culture, otherwise they are words with no life. We must see how revelation is in agreement with culture, and when it opposes culture, remembering that God is beyond all culture, not taking sides, but is only on the side of Truth and Love. God is no respecter of persons, upholding one culture above another, one human ideal above another. So God has both a message of approval and of change for every culture, equally.
If we truly want to see God, then we must look for His communication to other cultures as well, in ways that we would not have expected. And when we find God in the other culture, in the context of that culture, we will know more of Him than we ever would have in one culture.
And we must never automatically reject another’s worship or communication with God or ethical pattern until we understand how they are trying the context of what they are doing. We fear and reject that which is unfamiliar—that is the human pattern. But to grasp God, we must go beyond the human as God does. God’s revelation, one might notice, has few items that are condemned in comparison to the limitless variety of the human experience. The variety, obviously, is pleasing to God, and so we must accept it, wherever it comes. And if a particular mode of variety is displeasing, then God will correct it, if we would but trust it.
But we must be rid of god. We must be rid of the cultural idol we have created in our own image. We can often recognize this god when he says, “We must not speak this way. We must not act this way. We must not love this way. We must not restore this way.” God rarely says these things. But god will demand destruction of the other, will limit variety at every incarnation of it. We know that god has reared his ugly head when each of our congregations look the same, worship the same, act the same and always knows what the other congregations are talking about. In God there is natural conflict—but in God there is the craving of accepting so that we all might achieve the One in many.
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