… In One God …

Yesterday day we saw that the Nicene Creed is less a statement of ‘beliefs’ than it is a statement of trust. The articles within it are not just ‘correct theological opinions’ but, like the rising Sun in the East or a compass, are what we use to orient ourselves and our lives: As sure as the Sun rises in the East, we trust these things to be true. Today We’re going to talk about the first of these things, which is belief in God, and specifically one God.

If you’re wanting this to turn into a debate about the existence of God, you’re going to be disappointed. I find that whole debate to be silly and unhelpful, based entirely on straw-man arguments (on all sides), and more about entrenching people more deeply in their pre-existing beliefs than about bridging gaps between them. Over the past thirty years, I’ve held pretty much every position under the Sun about the question of God, from fervent belief to atheism and everything in between. And the world has made complete sense (or as much as it ever does) to me in any of these positions.

But, truth be told, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t worship, isn’t beholden to, or doesn’t build their life around, something. It may be God, but it could be knowledge, reason, family, power, pleasure, or money. (These last two are very common here in the West.) Any of these things can become gods for us. When we say, “We believe in one God…,” we are saying that we choose to make God — not intellectual pursuit, not fertility, not profit or power — the foundation of our life. Yet, there are many who use God as a cover for pursuing these other things, so the question then becomes, who is this God we say we trust? And it’s that question the rest of the Creed answers.

The first thing the Creed says about God is that God is one. For those of us who have grown up in a Western cultural context, where monotheism has been the norm for over fifteen hundred years, it’s easy to forget just how contentious and shocking this belief was — and how difficult it was to get to. While editorial decisions in the text of the Old Testament, and our familiarity with its language, paper over much of it, the Bible itself testifies to the gradual emergence of monotheism. Many of the epithets of God in the Hebrew Bible, most especially ‘El’ in its various guises (e.g., El-Elyon, El-Shaddai), are names of rival Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) deities. Additionally, it contains a few examples of the common ANE religious trope of the ‘council of the gods.’ The most famous of these is the story of Job, whose fate is decided in a meeting of ‘Sons of God’, including Satan (Job 1.5). Similarly, Psalm 82 imagines God “judging among the gods” and telling his audience: “You are gods, children of the Most High” (Psalm 82:6). Looking back at these texts through the lens of monotheism, they are normally reinterpreted as God presiding over a council of angels, but there is nothing in the texts themselves to suggest this and the ANE parallels are striking. At any rate, we also know from the Old Testament that even the most fervent followers of YHWH (the name of Israel’s God) still believed in the existence of other gods. The whole battle between Elijah and the priests of Ba’al (1 Kings 18) presupposes an actual contest between the two gods. Even the language of the Ten Commandments is not monotheistic; it doesn’t say there aren’t other gods but that “you shall have no other gods before me [YHWH].” But this language disappears in the later Old Testament writings and it genuinely seems that by the time of the return from Exile, Judahite religion had legitimately become monotheistic. (This is a big part of why scholarship generally distinguishes between ‘Israelite religion’ before the Exile and ‘Judaism’ only after the Exile.) So, the witness of the Old Testament itself suggests only a slow emergence of monotheism, from a general polytheism in which YHWH was the main God (cf., the role of Zeus in Greek mythology), through a long period of what is called henotheism or monolatry, in which many gods can be theoretically believed in but worship is reserved for one god alone, to an eventual monotheism encapsulated in the Shema Yitsrael (Deuteronomy 6.4), which acts in a similar way in Judaism as the Creed does in Christianity: “Hear O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one.”

By the time of the various Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire, monotheism was Judaism’s defining characteristic. More often than not, when Jews, and later, Christians, ran into trouble with the authorities it was over something to do with this belief. They were considered ‘atheists’ because they were so bold as to deny the existence of other nations’ gods. This was simply not done — in the cosmopolitan world of the ANE and Ancient Mediterranean, it was common practice either to accept and sometimes even adopt other nations’ gods (e.g., the Phrygian goddess Cybele became an important figure in Roman religion, and the Etruscans adopted the Greek Apollo), or to equate them with one’s own divinities (e.g., various ANE or Egyptian goddesses became associated with Aphrodite in Greek thought). So, for Jews and Christians to deny Greek and Roman divinies’ existence outright was simply shocking in historical context. In this way, the inclusion of the word ‘one’ in the Creed reaffirms the spirit of the Shema over and against the dominant polytheism of the Roman Empire.

At the same time, however, it is also an insistence, against Christianity’s Jewish detractors, that belief in the Trinity is not a belief in three gods. The Creed is without a doubt a wholly Trinitarian document, and it starts off with an affirmation of the oneness of God, lest anyone be confused. Yes, Christians experienced God in three Persons, but it was nonetheless an experience of one and the same God.

But what might the oneness of God mean for us spiritually? Ultimately, what it means is that there is no picking-and-choosing in the life of faith. Through a monotheistic lens, the spiritual world is not a struggle between gods with their own agendas or between opposing forces of good and evil. There is just God, no matter what happens, good or bad, whether we are chosen and blessed like Abraham or suffering like Job. In a time of division at home, for example, a monotheist doesn’t have recourse to blaming it on a squabble between Strife and the Hearth. Rather we have to accept these opposing tendencies towards contentedness in home life and wanting to get our own way as ultimately spiritually rooted in one and the same God. In the day-to-day, this should promote humility and radical acceptance (though never a passive defeatism!). But it has also led to some of the most profound mystical teaching and experience too. If God is one, there is only God at the heart of everything. And whether it’s Christian monastics experiencing the divine Uncreated Light, Jewish Kabbalists pursuing Ein Sof (’the infinite’), or Sufi Muslims practising the divine pleasure, monotheism has inspired people to plumb the depths of the Oneness. Moreover, if ultimately there is only God in the spiritual realm, then all of our divisions, limits, and definitions fall away — inifinite is, after all, infinite, and so it cannot be defined. And so these mystical schools all tend towards what is known as apophatic theology, or the via negativa, which refuses to say what God is, only what God is not.

All of this is true, and yet I would be remiss not to address the shadow side of monotheism. For while there is no doubt that the above is representative of monotheistic spirituality, monotheism has also inspired some pretty horrific abuses. Monotheism should promote humility, awe and wonder, and yet too often it has been a justification for arrogance, condescension, and violence. This is very troubling and confounding, but I think it has an obvious cause. Oneness inherently makes difference a problem. The question then becomes, when faced with difference, do we hold our own experiences and ideas loosely enough to approach it with curiosity and understand that somehow it too is part of the oneness that is God? Or, do we simply try to destroy it, erase it, eliminate it? The latter approach, while in no way representative of the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, is, sadly the easier one, and the one that is all too often taken by monotheists. (All of this is similar to the shadow side of the idea of ‘orthodoxy’, which I wrote about last year.)

But again, while this violent side of monotheism has often been its public face, it is not representative of monotheistic spiritual traditions. So, to do things a different way does not require us to abandon our traditional beliefs; in fact, the more we turn to the deep spiritual wells of our own traditions, the more clearly the other, more humble, gracious, path will appear for us.

So then, when we say in the Creed that we believe in “one God,” we are saying we have chosen to make God — not our country, not our bank accounts, not baby-making, nor our immediate gratification — the centre of our life. And, we affirm that this God is one, that at the heart of everything around us there is an underlying unity within our one, whole and infinite God. Before this God, all human divisions, opinions, and definitions become meaningless. Believing in one God is therefore a calling to unity for our own communities, a unity that is big enough to encompass difference with humility and grace.

We believe in one God…