Hildegarde

Some time back, I was trying to explain something about the relationship between Puritanism, the Enlightenment, and what we now think of as “countercultural” or “progressive” social thought, and I made a mess of it and seemed to be saying that the Enlightenment bred the Puritans.

A number of people jumped in with comments that were mostly puzzled–hey! you know better than that!–and then I never got back around to straightening it out.

At the time, what I was actually trying to get at was that the Enlightenment bred one particular Puritan, Jonothan Edwards–and it did, and I want to get back to that in a post or two.

For those of you who care, if you go to my home page and click on the link to “Reading and Writing,” you’ll find a long essay (of mine) about Edwards, who has fascinated me since I was a teenager.

I’m willing to bet anything that I was the only person who ever read Freedom of the Will on the New Haven to Danbury bus.

All that said, I want to swing around now for a couple of reasons, the first of which has to do with the nature of God.

And no, I haven’t changed my mind.  I’m still an atheist.  But ideas on the nature of God have consequences for human behavior, so let me start with this and then get to God and Government later.

As some of you probably noted from the post yesterday, I’m in the middle of reading the first volume of Perry Miller’s The New England Mind.  This volume is subtitled The Seventeenth Century, which means it is concerned with Puritan thought rather than the history of ideas in New England in general.  I assume that Miller will get to the “in general” part, complete with Deists and New England Transcendentalists, in the second volume.

And I’ve learned one side fact in the process–it’s virtually impossible to read Puritan divines to a background of Baroque music.  Especially when the quotes from the Divines are in the original spelling.

That aside, however, the first chapter of this book brought up something interesting to me.

This has to do with how the Puritans defined God–how they defined what God is.

And the interesting thing about that is that they defined God in the same way Augustine did, and the Church fathers did, and most of Medieval theology did. 

And that’s fine as far as it goes, except for this.

That definition says:  God is Being.  God is Existence Itself. 

God is not a being. 

He can’t be talked about properly the way we talk about persons.  None of the categories that apply to persons actually applies to Him. 

When we talk about God’s will, or God’s law, or God’s wrath, we are using metaphors for a reality that is completely incomprehensible to the human mind. 

This definition of God is almost as old as Christianity itself.  You can find it in the second century writings of the Church Fathers.  You can find it in Augustine.  It is at the heart of Medieval theology and of most high-end intellectual Catholic theology today.

And there’s nothing particularly wrong with a definition like this, except that it’s much more like Buddhism or the Greek “God of the philosophers” than like anything you’re ever going to find in the New Testament.

Or the Old, for that matter. 

If you read the Bible, King James version or otherwise, what  you get is something very different from a definition like this. 

You get God not only as a Being, but as a Being thoroughly engaged in acting  in much the same sense as human beings act.  He gets angry.  He gets jealous.  He does things on the spur of the moment. 

And, of course, he speaks.

In a way, I’m not really surprised that the early Church Fathers came to their abstractionist definition of God. 

For one thing, Christians at this period did not take the Bible as literally true. 

With the New Testament especially, they tended to take the position that the Church wrote the thing, so you shouldn’t try telling the Church what it meant.

That is, largely, the same position taken by the Roman Catholic Church today.

And the Church Fathers were, to a significant extent, intellectually Greeks.  They were learned in Greek philosophy.  They came to the Church via attempts to find peace in secular learning.

And that was doubly true of Augustine, who was one of the greatest philosophical scholars of the end of the Empire.

I’m willing to accept Miller’s position that Puritanism, both inside and out of New England, represented the second intellectualization of Christian faith in the West–that the Puritans were, like the Church fathers before them, people who approached religion as an intellectual exercise first and foremost.

What I don’t understand is how, starting with sola scriptura–which they were definitely committed to–they got to this place.

It’s one thing to start with Plato and end up deciding that God is Being Itself.  It’s another thing to start with the Gospel of Luke and get to the same place.

Even the Gospel of John, which is the most Greek in its approach–in the beginning, there was the Word–won’t get you there in anything like a straight line. 

So the question becomes–where, exactly, did the idea of God as Being Itself, and not A being but To Be–where did this come from in one of the most rigorous strains of Protestantism, sola scriptura, sola fidei, sola gracia?

And, while we’re at it–why did it?

The God of Plato and of Buddhism is an intellectual construct meant to make belief in any God at all logically coherent for people who do pursue reason to its inevitable conclusions. 

It is a definition that is untouchable by the kind of analysis produced by people like Dawkins and Dennett.  It makes arguments about things like “how could a good God allow tsunamis” completely irrelevant, because they rely on the assumption that what we call God does things like allow and will in much the same way we do.

At the same time, it is not a definition that can survive for even a few seconds in any religion that people are expected to live day by day. 

Even the philosophers–and the Puritans–ended up talking about God just the way we do now, when they ended up talking about anything else except His “essential nature.”

Once they got to morality, or Providence, or even politics, God became again (at least in speech) the everyday willing, thinking, acting, mostly like a person as we define it that we’re used to.

That was inevitable, for the same reason there are two paths to God in Buddhism, one for the ordinary mortals who can’t quite get into the esoteric abstractions of the “higher” path.

But that leaves me with my question intact–how do you get to this place from the New Testament, or from the New and the Old?

In the book I’m reading, there is an awful lot about the definition and the ways in which New England theologians expressed it, but nothing about where in the Bible they thought they found support for it.

And I keep thinking that you can’t get there from here.