Hello, Struggling 1,
Perhaps the greatest problem we Christians will have in our day and age is the acceptance of a divine God whose book seems to be rooted in an age of superstition and ignorance. Critics of faith like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and others point to us in ridicule for believing in that sky god who may as well be made of spaghetti. They, along with many evangelicals and Catholics both, maintain an image of what this God must be. An image, I will say, which is easily refuted.
Bishop Robert Barron, whose You Tube ministry, Word on Fire, is well worth taking a look at, makes the point I don’t hear very often; that God is entirely beyond definition, cannot be located in time or space, and cannot even be said to be ‘a being’, even a Supreme Being. Thomas Aquinas speaks of this. Rather, God is
all of being. He is everywhere, and nowhere. Any time we attempt to define God we can only use the very limited resources of our tiny intellects and will always come up short. The bible definitions of God represent attempt by those of the past who wanted desperately to connect with the divine. Anytime we refer to God we can use only metaphor.
Anytime someone claims to know the mind of God, understand Him thoroughly, or tries to tell you His will, they are mistaken. When we say we no longer believe in God, what we are rejecting is not the massive, conscious energy which drives and fuels the universe, but only the ideas of God we have been taught and have outgrown.
-CW
