God and other famous liberals: reclaiming the politics of America Read online

  Today, two widely contrasting images of God compete for our religious affections. One, most clearly drawn by fundamentalists, whether Christian, Moslem, or Jewish, is a transcendent, all-powerful, and yet tightly controlling and judgmental God. The other, a liberal God, is both transcendent and immanent. This God is neither all-powerful nor particularly judgmental but rather co-creator with us, in intimate relationship, as we struggle together and suffer together in our common quest for growing love and justice. Those who have the former God in mind may find the very word God to be a fishbone in their throat. Others will struggle with a God more inclusive and yet, in a way, less powerful. The liberal God is not omnipotent. Children are hit by cars and die of cancer without divine sanction. The liberal God suffers with us when we suffer and fails with us when we fail, even as the life force or creative spirit works within us and others to make us better people and the world a better place.

  The resulting image is that of a loving God, present in all, suffering and struggling with us in our attempts to be "kinder and gentler" people. Such a God is not an autocrat but a democrat; not judgmental but forgiving; not ideological but flexible. Such a God values cooperation over competition; relationship over hierarchy; peace over war; neighborliness over tribalism. Such a God doesn't divide people but helps to bring them together. And we come together by slowly recognizing that it is God's will to beat swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.

  Religious liberals advocate respect for others not because we don't hold beliefs of our own but because we recognize limits to our knowledge. This has practical consequences. Mahatma Gandhi didn't advocate nonviolence to ensure the success of his cause. Nor was he seeking purity, though this too contributed to his motivation. The basis of his pacifism was far more humble. Fully willing to sacrifice for what he believed to be right, Gandhi could not justify harming another regardless of the cause, because he knew he might be wrong. Unwilling to impose suffering on behalf of error, he acted with vigor but not with violence, and the world was changed. His was not a wishy-washy position. It stemmed from a deep conviction, drawn from history and scripture, rising from deep belief in a liberal God.

  Among Gandhi's mentors were Jesus and Henry David Thoreau. One of his followers was Martin Luther King, Jr. Each changed the world, not by imposing his truth on us but by demonstrating the intimate relationship of love and truth in his own life.

  Liberals don't reject the old scriptural evidence; they reinterpret it according to new sightings, knowing from experience that both are rich with possibility. Religion has been a transformational force in this country precisely because at critical moments the "new world" spirit challenged the complacency and revitalized the prophetic vigor of our faith. Several of our most influential founding fathers—Washington, Jefferson, and Adams—were religious liberals. Respectful of the creator and creation, they freely used the minds that God had given them to interpret the nature of both.

  None of them drew a more direct correlation between God's law and our own mandate to imitate that law in building an equitable society than Thomas Jefferson. In his preamble to the Declaration of Independence, it is God's will that requires the establishment of liberal values in any society drawn up according to a divine blueprint. Invoking "the laws of nature and nature's God" to confirm every people's entitlement to "a separate and equal station," Jefferson expands this notion of equality from a people, or nation, to all persons: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." America's egalitarian mandate reflects the liberality of the creator, and thus countermands, by divine witness, all feudal and aristocratic structures. It also parallels the Jewish concept of "repair the world," or Tikkun ha'olam, which holds that the human spirit is in partnership with God to help finish the work of creation.

  This ethical impulse lies at the heart of liberal religion. It also taps into the marrow of the Bible. Jesus rejected the pieties of the local religious establishment. He followed a higher law, the law of God, which was expressed by the spirit of the scriptures rather than in their letter. The earliest followers of Jesus responded to the biblical literalists of their own day in like manner. The spirit of the scriptures gives life, Paul said; the letter kills. And James pointed out that works without faith may be dead, but faith without works is equally dangerous. It emperils our own life and the lives of our neighbors, whom Jesus calls us to love as we do ourselves. As Thomas Jefferson said, "It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read."

  Being human and therefore limited, we cannot define God's nature, not finally, but the Bible helps. Created in God's image we are called upon to manifest the same spirit of love, generosity, and selflessness that inspired the patriarchs, prophets, and Jesus, whose stories fill the Bible's most telling pages. Judging from the spirit of the scriptures, wonderfully captured in legend and parable, God is not merely a liberal, but liberal with a capital L.

  Given our penchant for literalism, to understand how and why these stories work, think of your own grandparents. For many of us, the stories we tell about them are a mixture of fact and truth, the latter an exaggerated or legendary version of the former. Stories drawn from their lives contain lessons that are more clear than the details themselves might suggest. From our grandparents' stories, we winnow lessons to help us become better people. They did the same, inspired by their grandparents' stories. Sometimes the facts get lost, yet truth is served.

  I could tell you how my grandfather Clark lost his bid for reelection as governor because he let two hundred nonviolent prisoners free from the Idaho penitentiary, which in 1942 was rife with overcrowding; or how he sacrificed everything to move to Salt Lake City for six months when my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, to ensure that she would have good hospital care; or how, as a young Idaho lawyer, he bought new shoes for all his clients, so that they wouldn't catch cold in jail. Each of these stories is based on fact, but their truth has more to do with a combination of selective detail and distillation, which together make them memorable and moving.

  If true of the stories we tell about people we know, what does this suggest about stories passed down from generation to generation, stories of distant ancestors, the heroes of our nation or our faith? They too are purified over time, unencumbered of incidental fact, focused for impact, distilled into truth.

  Cynics dispute this. They argue that varnish must be stripped away so that we can see the cold, hard facts and be undeceived concerning our ancestors' and forebears' nobility. I don't completely disagree. It makes me feel a little less inadequate to know that my parents found a bottle of whiskey in my teetotaling grandfather's desk after he died. But I still pass on other stories of his life to my children, stories that over time have begun to develop legendary features. I do this because such stories inspire both my children and me to be better people and to lead more loving lives.

  The same is true of the Bible. It too is a kind of family history, a treasure trove of stories passed down from generation to generation, distilled, revised, and improved over centuries until the stories finally were fixed into scripture. In presenting God's word and inviting us to divine and then imitate God's will, the biblical authors drew analogies from human experience that suggested the nature of divine reality.

  For instance, the story of Abraham and Sarah attests directly to God's spirit, by providing a liberal mandate always to be generous and neighborly, especially to strangers. When Abraham and Sarah provided hospitality to three strangers, though they had little to offer, they opened their door, shared their bread, and provided shelter from the elements. As a result, despite Sarah's doubts and against all logic, this old man and his old wife parented a child, Isaac, the seed of Israel.

  Interpreting this story, fundamentalists of the right insist that Sarah had a child when she was ioo years old. Fundamentalists of the left cite the scr
iptures of science to offer conclusive proof that this is laughable, impossible, an insult to the intelligence in defiance of nature's laws. Both miss the point. As many good people from Abraham's grandchildren's time until now have understood, the lesson spoken here—"Be kind to strangers"—has little to do with either fact or dogma. The story is about opening our hearts and homes to the other, the stranger, the homeless. It doesn't say, "Be kind to strangers because they may in fact be angels who give babies away as presents." It says, "Be kind to strangers because that is the right thing to do."

  Put yourself in Abraham's or Sarah's shoes. Someone you have never seen before in your entire life, dressed in ragged clothes and ravaged by exposure to the elements, knocks on your door, asking for food and shelter. What would you do? Would you ask him in, add a plate to your table, and lay a bed for him?

  I probably would not. Not that I'd slam the door in his face. Most likely I'd either send him to my church or some other nearby institution that offers meals for the homeless. Maybe I'd even offer him a ride. Not great, but I do know this. Doing whatever we can to make the world a little more hospitable is the most ancient of religious injunctions. Mindful of the story of Abraham and Sarah, my response is therefore bound to be far more liberal and generous-hearted than it otherwise might be. Perhaps the little I did offer in the way of hospitality might even invoke a "Praise God" from the man I tried to help. God is not God's name, but when we respond to the best that is in us, drawing from values passed down from ancient witnesses as well as kindly grandparents, God's image is present, and God should be praised.

  In Jewish and Christian communities, the story of Abraham and Sarah, great-great-grandparents of us all, inspires us to be more generous people. Is this story factual? Perhaps not. Is it true? Absolutely, for it leads us to honor God's liberal spirit by being true to the best in ourselves.

  I don't mean to suggest that the Bible is merely a moral playbook. Neither is God simply a human invention, designed to reflect our values or meet our need for an imaginary coach who will help us win the game of life. We don't only invent God; we also discover God. Looking at the creation, we strive to deduce the nature of the creator. We take familiar images of power and expand them until they become big enough to encompass the divine.

  This is the stuff of legend, the raw material of myth. Fundamentalists, on both right and left, reject myth. One side embraces the Bible because its records are factual, not mythic. The other rejects it for being riddled with myth. In their quest for pat or rational answers to ultimate and finally unanswerable questions, they confuse truth with fact. Myth and parable are not restricted to the world of fact. They point toward greater truths than fact can begin to approximate. Even scientists, pressing the envelope of knowledge, speak of quarks and strings and big bangs; they too speak in metaphors.

  The Bible is a library of sacred books which chronicle one people's search for and encounter with God. In addition to history, poetry, prophesy, and wisdom, it also tells the mythic story of life's beginning and consummation, as interpreted and reinterpreted by this people over time. By casting on heavenly waters their experience of the the greatest and most powerful things they knew, they caught a glimpse of the divine.

  This has been true since the beginning of history. When we were cave dwellers, masters of fire, and hunters, God thundered from the heavens, electrified the landscape in lightning bursts of anger, and shook the earth. God also flushed game from the rocks into traps we set in the valleys below. When we were at the mercy of the elements, nature's vagaries, powers that threatened destruction or rewarded us by presenting food for our survival, God was there, a manifestation of the greatest forces we knew.

  When we moved from a hunting and gathering to a farming economy, nature continued to reign, but the powers shifted to seasonal metaphors of planting and reaping. The female metaphor of fecundity supplanted that of the male hunter and spear-thrower. Sun and rain, sowing and gathering, birth and death: The rotation of seasons and the cultivation of crops were crucial to survival, and God became Goddess, whose womb was far more emblematic of creation and destruction than either lightning bolt or spear.

  With growing centers of population and the transformation of villages into towns and then cities, a new model for power emerged. The king or lord who dispensed favors gathered a portion of each person's bounty, and led townspeople into battle against other kings and lords. Since our notion of God is a projection of human experience on a cosmic screen, each tribe began to view its own success and failure according to the divine strength and favor of its heavenly protector. For a time, each tribe had its champion, and human combat was resolved on a divine stage with heavenly protagonists stripping down and fighting for the human spoils of their devotees.

  The next paradigm shift occurred when one tribe intuited that its God was everyone's God. Still Lord and warrior, with lesser enemies to conquer, the one God punished and rewarded us not according to our allegiance but according to our behavior. According to the scriptures, the God of the Hebrews even sent the Assyrian king, Cyrus, as an instrument of divine will, visiting punishment on his people when they failed to live up to his commandments. With the shift from polytheism to monotheism, destruction follows not upon the defeat of one's divine champion but as a result of his anger at his people's actions. This prompted the development of a religion based primarily on ethical foundations.

  Once religion was personalized, with God rewarding our moral actions more swiftly than he did ritual sacrifices offered for his propitiation, new images, such as that of God as a stern but loving parent, began to emerge. "You are our Father," Isaiah said (63:16). Jesus spoke of God as "Abba" or Daddy. This sense of closeness finds even more intimate expression when Jesus suggests that God is not only beyond us but also within us, participating in our love for others and our quest for justice. No longer either victims or recipients of God's vagaries, with this shift in understanding we receive blessings according to our moral deserts and dispense them as agents of the holy spirit, the spirit of love and peace that moves among us and within us.

  If myth is the projection of human experience on a divine screen, parable is the discovery of the divine within the ordinary. The former is work of the mind, the latter that of the heart. When Jesus speaks of the Realm of God, he often begins his parables, "The Realm of God is like a man [or a woman] who. ..." Perhaps a woman who kneads bread, or a man who buries treasure in a field. If made explicit by Jesus, this kind of identification can also be found in the Jewish tradition. Early in the Book of Genesis, when Abraham accepts God, God becomes part of his very name, which is changed from Abram (the people's father) to Abraham, or Sarai to Sarah (in each case, the "H" representing two of the letters of YHWH, the symbol for God).

  In our encounters with others, but also with nature and art, we sometimes experience moments of peace and wholeness that reflect more eloquently than any theology the underlying basis of our relationship to the ground of our being. What the religious liberal knows, illiberal seekers, in their obsession with orthodoxy, often overlook: We are most likely to discover God when we allow our minds to follow our hearts. If God is love, which is as good a metaphor as any, then how we love measures our knowledge of God's true nature and our closeness to God more exactly than anything we may think or believe.

  In sharp contrast, some theologians treat God as a cosmic butterfly, whom they capture, kill, and pin to a board for closer observation. Skeptics then point out that God is dead. However beautiful its wings, the concept just won't fly. Whether biblical or antibiblical, both groups are peopled by hard-bitten literalists, taxidermists of the creation, wholly lacking an eye for the poetry of God.

  Think of the creation as a masterpiece, the most highly nuanced and unfathomable masterpiece of all. As with any great work of art, interpretations concerning its meaning will differ. The greater the work, the more spirited and contentious the debate will be. This is certainly true of religion, where the task, in large measure, is to ponder
the creation and make sense of it.

  To understand religious passions, one can strike an analogy between competing schools of religious interpretation and those fierce little conventicles of literary critics who people our academies. For instance, while Moby Dick is acknowledged by many as a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest work of American literature, there are a myriad of interpretations: symbolist, Marxist, existentialist, deconstructionist, Jungian, Freudian, and structuralist, to name only a few.

  During Henry Whitney Bellows's time, Herman Melville was an occasional member of the congregation I now serve. (A far more stuffy and successful writer, William Cullen Bryant, served on the board of trustees and occupied a front pew.) Several times, Melville's wife met with Dr. Bellows to discuss her marital difficulties, but Melville himself was decidedly a reluctant back bencher.

  One day, hoping to help illuminate the theology in Moby Dick, some enterprising Melville scholar will immerse herself in Bellows's sermons. She'll probably even learn a little something. Then she'll write a highly detailed monograph. However brilliant, neither this one nor any other interpretation of Moby Dick will ever be complete. The book is far too rich and vast even for any cluster of interpretations to comprehend its meaning.

  If Moby Dick and other masterpieces continue to resist final explication, it is hardly surprising that the creation, the greatest and most impenetrable masterpiece of all, should prove a far more thorny text. Rifling through Bellows's sermons may teach us little about Melville's theology, but the same exercise would teach us even less about God. Bellows was one of the finest, most thoughtful, and profoundly Christian preachers of his day, but like every other preacher, regardless of theological stripe or mental gift, he too was outmastered by the overwhelming nature of the task.