The rationality of of theism no longer fills the bill. The sliding scale as I see it, runs from atheism (there is no God), to Christian deism, or deism (there is a God but He’s not involved in our life), to Christian theism, or plain ole theism (There is a God and he intervenes in our lives from time to time). Let me add two more terms. Dualism says there are two gods (good and evil). And then there is supernatural theism (when God steps in and does the miraculous). I’m being brief and simplistic and not trying to write a doctoral thesis here.
Christian theism is wonderful and I cannot walk away from what I “know“, however I am attempting to live in the “extended now”. Another way to say that is that I have one foot in theism, and one foot in beyond theism. One of the problems inherent in theism is too much liberty in taking the metaphor as literal. God is not really a Dad! The defintion of a metaphor is “to see as“, which means “it is not as“!
God is not a MAN! Sorry!
Worse yet, God is not a HE. And no, God is not a SHE! God is the Spirit; not “a” being, but “the BEING”, or as John A.T. Robinson said it, the Ground Of Being! But, what the heck does that mean? When we make God too personal, we lose track of who He is and How He operates. And we easily drift into deism without knowing it.
Think of it this way. Scientists talk about a gravitational field, but there is no “field” as we know the word. God is a Father metaphorically in that He loves and watches over us, protects us, and has birthed us spiritually, but the word father has nothing to do with biology or gender, wherein when we overly literalize the metaphor we get led doctrinally astray!
Dave Tomlinson nailed it when he said, “Opponents to women’s ordination claim that since God revealed Himself in masculine form and chose male priests in the Old Testament to represent Him, women cannot properly represent Him. But this argument leans too heavily on the “IS” side of the metaphor, and loses sight of the “Is not” side. The “otherness” of God cannot be contained in either masculine or feminine form.”
Human language is unable to describe God, so we use metaphors.
And then we pervert them into more literalness than should be! Thus Christian theism has fallen into some bogus thinking. We need to go beyond theism into I know not what. So, until I do, I will call this next paradigm- beyond theism. It is in this specific direction that I will direct my journey and pass it along to you. I invite your dialogue along the way.
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