More Sloppy God Talk

Everywhere you turn in this country, people are talking about God.

You might think that I, as a person of faith, would like this. I don't.

If God is really holy, mysterious, beyond the limits of our minds and human experience, then God is not a toy which becomes a convenient explanation for whatever, whenever.

Example: This past week evangelist Pat Robertson threatened the people of Dover, Pennsylvania with God-sent natural calamity because they voted out school board members who voted in a thinly veiled religious version of the origins of human life.

Example: An acquaintance whose family lives in Evansville, Indiana where the terrible tornadoes struck last week, reported to me that his family was relieved that God had "protected" them from the twisters. He was irritated when I asked him why, then, had God not protected the people who were victims of the tornadoes.

In both of these examples God's action is remarkably impervious to human suffering. In both examples, God's action is totally self-serving: Pat Robertson gets a validation for his crazy far-right rantings and my acquaintance reasons why his family is spared the randomness of a natural act.

At the root of much sloppy God talk is the firmly embedded notion that God is omnipotent. This means that God is all-powerful. Christians have been drenched with notions of omnipotence in prayers, hymns, sermons for so long that it is almost impossible for them to imagine God in any other way. Yet, at the same time they -- we -- talk about the cross where God made no intervention at all to save Jesus. Omnipotent?

The problem gets really complicated when you try to reconcile the idea of a loving and just God with the idea of an all-powerful God. Or when you try to explain mind-boggling evil. What was the omnipotent God doing during the Holocaust of the Jewish people or during the genocide in Rwanda or during Katrina or the tsunamis?

I think that the only way to be a person of faith and maintain intellectual integrity and compassion is to abandon the idea of omnipotence. Maybe God isn't orchestrating all events with purposes in mind. Maybe we need to try to find signs of God's presence in otherwise inexplicable situations and events. This shifts discussion to more tangible terms. So, in the case of Katrina, we find God's presence in the caring of neighbors or in the resilience of the victims or in the courage of the volunteers and others who went into New Orleans just after the floods.

In Old Testament times, people were afraid to name God. I think that this was because once we begin playing with the term, we trivialize it or use it for our own purposes.

Public discourse in this country would be served inestimably if people would hesitate to invoke God at every turn of the corner. And it would be served if people of faith would try to hammer out more intelligent God talk.