God or Not Nothing

Certain of the Sadducees asked Jesus who would be the husband in the hereafter of a much-married woman.  After describing the afterlife of humanity as being in some ways like the existence of the angels (an assertion that is left tauntingly undeveloped by Jesus, though it precludes marriage), Jesus says that “as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?  God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Christianity has delighted in holding up Jesus’ statements here as though they were the irrefutable utterances of a philosopher unequalled in all of history.  Indeed, Jesus is the greatest philosopher in all of history, but it was not his practice to utter irrefutable things.  Jesus’ assertions about the character of God, both in this instance and in others, are not presented as though they were logical postulates such as would be liable to testing, because his assertions about the incomparable qualities of God exist by definition independently of any basis for comparison.

God is, and beside him there is no other.  The “no other” part of the assertion might be taken in its immediate sense as “no other god,” but that semblance of “logic” (to stretch the term) which would disallow any other god in comparison to God must also, if taken to its logical conclusion, result in the realization that if God exists, then nothing else as a comparable entity can exist.  Furthermore, it is inescapable that analysis of the character of God is a fool’s errand.  God’s existence does not place him logically in possession of qualities (such as a loving nature) that can be understood as the quintessence of those qualities.  God does not love perfectly while yet other creatures love imperfectly.  We are drawn (we hope) to God because we feel he loves perfectly while other creatures do not, but that is simply our human nature seeking to embrace a character of God in terms compatible with our understanding of “nature.”  Ultimately (though sterilely) we must reckon that God creates the very love that he displays perfectly.  God is, and so there is love.

When our foundational postulate is “God is,” then at least we can strain toward the clarity increasingly attainable as we return again and again to that postulate.  This is in contradistinction to the unfortunate parody of piety that characterizes much of religion.  For much of religion, the foundational postulate is not “God is,” but rather “The universe has God in it and above it,” or “My life has God in it and above it.”  Placing God thus in a context inevitably leads to his diminishment.

An example of this is seen in the Ryrie Study Bible’s comment on the episode described above.  In response to the passage declaring “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” the Study Bible says, “For believers there is life after death, a truth rooted in the character of God.”  Any reasonably earnest student of Christianity and its history of doctrines will be able to sense the ridiculously manipulatable elements of the cobbled-together phrase “For believers there is life after death.”  Is this life “for believers,” while yet unbelievers will exist in sentient form forever, or does “for believers” mean that only “believers” will interpret Jesus’ use of the phrase in a certain way?  How many doctrinally-differing definitions are there of “life,” of “death,” or of “life after death”?

Moreover, what could possibly possess someone to write of “life after death” (or indeed of anything else) as being “rooted in the character of God”?  The God of Jesus is the origin and author of anything that might be called “character” (or, perhaps more revealingly, “characteristics”.)  The slightest inclination to view God as the origin and author of everything will reveal that time means no more to God than he would choose it to mean.  The self-same logic that says that God is the God of the living will dictate that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before ever they were conceived.  This does not mean that our assessment of the “character of God” is such as would allow our conclusion that he is the sort of supernatural entity who would keep his creatures (or certain of his creatures) “alive” in some sense, for some purposes to suit him.  Rather, our prudent disinclination to opine on the “character of God” will present us with a simple yet baffling postulate: neither time nor anything else need mean anything to God.  God does not fill time and space.  God is not the lord of time and space.  Both of these statements are “true,” yet in some contexts (such as many ramblings about the Sadducee-episode above) they are entirely inadequate.

God is.  Other things “are,” but those things are not comparable to God in other than an evocative sense—this is the most crucial element of understanding about God.  Time and again Jesus confronts people with insoluble questions about God, and time and again (and still) people try to solve the insoluble.  Indeed there are many questions and many puzzles that we need to try to solve, but the last thing we need to do is entangle ourselves with conjectures about the character of God.  In a certain sense, our lives are an internal struggle in which the battle is between devotion to God, on the one hand, and devotion to things other than God, on the other hand.  Among those things that are not God there are better and worse things, and in our creaturely limitations those non-God things will be the things we can act upon.

Ultimately, however, a wholesome sense of the divine will be a sense of otherness—a sense that purposeful devotion must be devotion to a God who will frustrate all our attempts at understanding.  God is the best of anything we can understand, and yet when considering God we must admit that ultimately we understand nothing.  In a sense this is unsurprising—nothing is anything next to God.  Or anything is nothing.  When we consider anything finite we grant it the effectual title of “not nothing.”  When we consider God all else should become nothing.

This, then, should be the balance in our lives.  Not the fanatic’s notion of “God or nothing.”  What we must do continually is weigh our attentions to “God” or to “not nothing.”  God or not nothing.