In Search of a Greater God, Part I.
Míceál Ledwith.

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Given the range of life's experiences most adults have gone through by an early age it is impossible for them to long cherish the images of God which they developed at the Sunday School level, and which usually have remained static - unless they are prepared to deny what life's experiences has taught them.

It is part of a very normal everyday process, that we should outgrow our childish ideas of God just as we evolve and outgrow every other idea we first formed in childhood. This process is regarded as perfectly normal and desirable in every area of life apparently except the area of religion, for somehow abandoning the naïve and sentimental God images of the Sunday School period has always tended to be frowned upon and regarded as dangerous. The result is that many feel the God they are "forced" to accept through religious peer pressure, is far too small to do justice to the belief we have that 'he' is the one who produced the cosmos and who lies behind the whole mystery of life and death.

The odds are that most people's image of God, in the first place, owes a lot to how they regarded their parents when they were growing up. This is all natural and well and good provided the notions mature as we grow older.

Guilt and fear are the companions generated by having an over-bearing parent or authority figure prominent in our early lives. If we are afraid of this person, or worse still guilty because we are afraid, there is no doubt that such an individual's images of God will be colored by that experience and it is something that is extremely hard to outgrow. If one can do a little reverse engineering on this issue, then the fact that so many Christian communions today seem to be centrally focused on arousing guilt and repentance would seem to imply that the great number of people who respond to this type of message are likely to have been themselves victims of some overbearing authority figure or authoritarian code of conduct during their childhood.

It follows that such people will tend to estimate the value of their Christianity by the degree to which they can feel sadness, guilt and remorse for what their sins have done to God, and more particularly to Jesus who is assumed to be more exposed to the vagaries of humanity through having come down here personally. This swing from the depths of guilt and remorse up to the heights of redemption and forgiviness, and back down again, is one of the most powerful engines of religion to day and is likely to remain so.

When Jesus advised us to become like 'little children' he was not putting a premium on human immaturity.

Closely related to the parental image of God is the picture of the old man with the beard in the cloud, watching over us all. For many centuries the Jewish and Christian Scriptures were available to European Christians only in the late fourth century, early fifty century, Latin translations of St. Jerome. One of the first major Biblical translators William Tyndall, was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. His version became the main component of the later King James version which is still in use today. But so revered did those early English translations become in their turn that it was centuries before anyone dared to produce a version in a more up to date tongue. The result is that many seemed to believe that God spoke Elizabethan English, and that he was very active in the past but is not any more. He across basically as a being who is in love with the past but has no relevance to the present.

In such a vein much has been made in the past of the idea of conscience as "the voice of God." It is one thing to ascribe some sort of moral discernment to conscience but a very different and dangerous thing is to regard it as the voice of God. In the first place it would be unwise as nobody really wants to have much to do with a being modeled on the nagging, disturbing, probing and discomforting roles that conscience can play in our lives. Secondly , it is clear that conscience is not a very reliable guide and its dictates can vary very considerably from one person to another, depending on one's personality, training and upbringing. Certain standards and ways of behaving are taught in every society and it is normal to feel a sense of guilt if these taboos and regulations are broken. There may be no such taboos in other societies or different ones. For example in certain cultures in the very recent past no guilt was felt for abandoning one's parents to die in advanced age. But this is the result of a conscience being artificially trained in the laws and mores of a particular society and what we hear is not the voice of God but the voice of that upbringing.

People who are morbidly sensitive can have their lives turned into a living hell by an over-scrupulous conscience if they regard it in some sense as indicating the voice of God to them. On the other hand a person who is wise and callous in the ways of the world will never feel any such pangs, and it would be equally absurd to dignify such a convenient conscience as the voice of God.

Generally speaking the all-over picture of God that stems from these and many similar images is a negative one which just surrounds us with commands and prohibitions. The acceptance of this kind of God is bitter, and it deprives one's life of joy, spontaneity or color. Unfortunately at times this can turn into some form of perverted masochistic sense which takes extreme gladness and delight in being broken and nothing in the sight of God. This is all too often a mainstay of their faith for a significant proportion of religious believers today.

To be continued.
Part two in January.

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