Volume 7, Issue 5, March 1998

GOD IS TRANSCENDENT

Joseph Campbell in the book, "The Power of Myth." (Doubleday, New York, page 56f) says: "'God' is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name of 'God.' God is beyond names and forms.

.... The source of temporal life is eternity. Eternity pours itself into the world. It is a basic mythic idea of the god who becomes many in us. In India, the god who lies in me is called the 'inhabitant' of the body. To identify with that divine, immortal aspect of yourself is to identify yourself with divinity.

Now, eternity is beyond all categories of thought. This is an important point in all the great Oriental religions. We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent."

God as love, made known and to be made known in concerned, creative, and cooperative community is in the deepest sense the reality of God.

This can happen in many ways and under many forms. It can happen politically, for example, in a welfare system that restores to its citizens human dignity and responsibility. Or it can happen in a foreign aid policy that deals not in prejudices and stereotypes, but in terms of a world-wide human community.

It can happen ecclesiastically in a church whose work and worship reflect the spirit of a Lord who came not to be ministered to but to minister to the friendless and the needy. It can happen personally, whenever genuine forgiveness and forbearance are shown.

This is where God is; this is what God is doing. Christians have wasted an enormous amount of energy worshipping buildings and traditions instead of God. In a book on worship, John Killinger ("Leave It to the Spirit," page 153) makes this pertinent comment:

"The truth is - and in this Judaeo-Christianity differs from many primitive religions - that the sacred is only where God is, not that God is where the sacred is. When he has moved on, the place where he was is no longer sacred. Whatever is holy about unused temples or cathedrals, superseded prayer books, and hocked communionware is so only by virtue of the humanity invested in them, not by virtue of any residual divinity. There is obsolescence about everything he uses and every place he inhabits. The holy is always in process of becoming the profane.

The profane, on the other hand, is always becoming holy. When it has become most empty of God, most barren of his presence, it is most in the way of being a bearer of grace, a vessel of the divine. What was `without form and void' becomes a world. What was `uncomely and not to be desired' becomes the Messiah. What was mostly, untutored, and subject to ridicule becomes the church."

When Moses asked the name of the divine in the incident of the burning bush, God's reply was crytically, "I am who I will be."

God is to be found wherever things are happening - creating, sustaining, restoring. And where God is may we be found also.

The realm of God is not a visionary scheme. It defines for us what has always constituted the most real and the most ample factor of life. It formulates a principle that lies imbedded in the whole of the relations of domestic, social, economic, and civil life that constitute what is called civilization. It is the real goal of whatever of humanity there is in us. It is the reality of our life, and all that contradicts it has only illusory existence. There is no genuine success in life, or motive for life, or prospect of good for humanity, that is not rooted in it.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.