4 Views of God

Our community group this year is going to listen to various podcasts and focus on the meditation and reflection sparked by those podcasts.  If you’d like to follow along with us, you can check out my notes here on the blog each week.

October 11th

For discussion…

4 ways of viewing God

As discussed by Peter Rollins & Rob Bell

1. God as Super-Being
   This is understanding God as a bigger version of ourselves.  If I am finite, God is infinite.  If my knowledge is limited, God’s knowledge is limitless.
2. God as Hyper-Being
   This is the most orthodox view of God.  It is grounded in the understanding that God cannot be conceptualized.  God is bigger than anything we can say about God.   A sunken ship contains a fragment of the ocean.  But the ocean contains the entirety of the ship.  We contain but a fragment of God.  God contains us in our entirety.  We are entirely saturated by God.
3. God as Ground of Being
   You encounter God through giving yourself to the world in love.  God is that which you discover in the act of love itself.  At the very moment that you think you have lost God because you have been busy loving the world and the people in it is the precise moment you find God.  The question is not where is God? but rather where are we?
4. God as Event
   God is the name we give to that which calls us to greater love, freedom, hospitality, kindness.  It might be summed up in the words gravity & grace, as described by Simone Weil.  The world is ruled by gravity.  That is to say that the world has what appears to be a natural way of being, where we meet violence with violence and hatred with hatred.  Yet there is also grace.  Grace is peppered throughout gravity and is that which keeps us from returning an eye for an eye and allows us to offer peace when met with violence, love when met with hate.

For Meditation & Reflection…

• Faith is not merely the arranging of intellectual furniture in one’s head.  If you want to find God, care for one another.
• The truth is not in what I think, the truth is in what I do.  Faith, at its best, is about attempting to orient yourself differently in the world, not having a certain belief about the world.

I hate, I despise your festivals,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
    I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos 5:21-24

Last week…

October 4th was our first gathering.  We worked our way through this liturgy together.  You know, cause we wanted to kick things off with something that’s not at all controversial.

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