The Nature of God


Sermon preached in Christ Church URC Church and an abridged version later published in ‘The Friend’

This morning, friends, I would like to share with you my ideas of the nature of God. This may seem an ambitious, even a presumptuous proposal from someone who has had no specialist theological training. Yet surely our God is the God of ordinary people like me – not just the God of the intellectual and the learned.

I heard recently a story, which I am assured is true, of a primary school teacher who noticed a little girl in her class working particularly assiduously over a drawing on her desk in front of her.

‘What are you drawing dear?’ she asked.
‘I’m drawing God’, came the reply.
‘But’, said the teacher, ‘No-one knows what God looks like’.
‘Well’, replied the little girl, ‘They will when I’ve finished my picture!’

I haven’t either the confidence or the optimism of that little girl. It may be though that my hesitant and faltering conjectures about the nature of God may help you to clarify your own.

No-one knows what God looks like. No-one can know. As St John declares in the first chapter of his Gospel. ‘No man hath seen God at any time’. The human mind cannot envisage infinite power, infinite wisdom and infinite love any more than it can envisage infinite time or infinite space – yet no-one, I think, doubts that both time and space are infinite.

Our ignorance of God’s appearance hasn’t deterred artists through the ages who have portrayed God as a wise and all-powerful old man reaching down out of Heaven into his earthly creation. But, of course, neither Heaven nor God are like that at all. Even less is God like the haloed old gentleman of the national newspaper cartoonists, usually depicted as wearing a nightgown and standing on a cloud. It is rather sad to realize that in our country today there are probably tens of thousands of young people, growing up ignorant of the Christian or any other faith, who imagine that Christianity teaches that God is some kind of elderly superman who lives in a Heaven ‘above the clouds’.

We can’t hope to know what God – or what Heaven - is like. Yet it is part of human nature that we should strive to do so. It is at the root of such questions – unanswerable by human reason alone – as what is the purpose of the creation, what is the nature of Life, why were we born and why will we eventually die to this world. The pages of the Old and New Testaments record the evolution of humankind’s ideas of the deity from a capricious and sometimes cruel tribal god to the loving Father of all humankind of whom Jesus told us.

Here is a definition of God that has stood the test of time. ‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity; The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’.

This is, in fact the first of the 39 Articles of Religion to which all Anglican Clergy are required to give general assent. I think that it is a definition that would be accepted by most Christians though some might have difficulty with the affirmation of the Holy Trinity in the final sentence.

The idea of One God in three Persons certainly worried me when, some seventy years ago, I was an Anglican choirboy. It continued to do so for many years after. How could one God be, at the same time, three persons? It was beyond my understanding. My confusion was compounded by what seemed to me to be the contradictory affirmations of the Athanasian Creed, which I discovered in explorations of the Book of Common Prayer during long and boring sermons. ‘The Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy Ghost is God. Yet there are not three Gods: but one God’ – and so on.

There was a glimmer of understanding when I learned that our word ‘person’ derives from the Greek ‘persona’ meaning the mask worn by actors in classical Greek dramas. The Father is God in his persona as creator and Lord of the Universe, the Son is God in his persona of Emmanuel ‘God with us’. This is the true light that lightens everyone born into the world and who, as St John says, ‘was made flesh and dwelt among us’.

The Holy Spirit, as the Nicene Creed affirms is God in his persona as ‘the Lord and giver of Life’ (all life, not just human life) who inspired the prophets of old and has inspired the leaders of the Universal Christian Church throughout the ages.

I personally find it more helpful to think of ‘the Creator’ rather than the ‘Father’ and of Jesus Christ as John does, as The Word, or the True Light rather than as ‘The Son’. Father and Son are words that, in today’s world, have biological and perhaps sexist implications that, I believe, are by no means an essential part of the Christian Gospel.

Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is ‘God with us’; God’s human face. We have to remember that, unlike us, God is not bound by time and space. God is simultaneously able to rule the Universe, listen to and answer our individual prayers, weep at human folly and cruelty - and note the fall of the sparrow.

Other religions than Christianity have acknowledged a Creator God
and have suggested that there may be a divine spark in every human being. What is unique about the Christian faith is our conviction that Christ, who was with God and was God from the very beginning, and without whom was nothing made that was made, was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

That conviction is the rock on which my Christian faith, my Quaker faith is built. Jesus was the human face of God, the incarnation of the Christ who was one with the Father and of the Inward Light that, even as he walked the earth in Palestine, was available in the heart of every individual man, woman and child in the world, always had been and always would be.

Jesus tells us all that we need to know about the nature of God. ‘I and my Father are one’, he said. ‘He who has seen me has seen my Father’.

We Quakers have an anthology called ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’. It is a selection, regularly updated, of accumulated Quaker wisdom and experience over the three and a half centuries of our Society’s existence. Part of a contribution from Ruth Fawell, a contemporary Friend, says ‘We may make our guesses at the nature of God and we are often like my small daughter who said, “My mind goes round and round when I want to think about God, but I can think about Jesus”. To me Jesus is a window through to God, a person who in terms of personality, in a way that can be grasped by our finite minds, shows what mercy, pity and peace are like in human life. I turn to the Jesus of the New Testament – to his healing word, his freedom from anxiety, his outreaching insight, to him as a whole person to let him live and grow in my life’.

I certainly empathise with Ruth Fawell’s small daughter. I find the idea of God the Creator, ‘ruler of the earth and sky’, ‘pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise’ whose ‘chariots of wrath the dark thunderclouds form’ a distant and awesome figure. He is the figure of whom the psalmist wrote ‘The fear (or awe) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’. My prayers are addressed to and through Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus Christ our Lord – Jesus, son of the carpenter of Nazareth, whom the Christian Church has always taught was both fully human and fully divine.

The Gospels suggest that Jesus was fully aware of his divine, as well as of his human nature. He would not have been fully human though if he had always appreciated that others couldn’t understand this. We are all familiar with the story, recorded in St Luke’s Gospel of the occasion on which Mary and Joseph, returning from the Temple in Jerusalem to their home in Nazareth, suddenly realized that their twelve year old son Jesus was missing.

Every modern parent will understand the desperate anxiety that must have gripped Mary and Joseph. The perils that an unaccompanied twelve year old faced in first century Palestine were certainly no less than those faced by a similar child in England today. And in those days there was no news media to publicise his disappearance, or government agencies and charitable organisations to help find him.

When, after three days of intense worry and sleepless nights, they found him deep in discussion with the doctors of the law in the Temple, he appears to have been puzzled by their anxiety and their relief at finding him. ‘Didn’t you realize that I had to be engaged in my Father’s business’, he asked. I suspect that rather more words were exchanged between parents and child on that occasion than are recorded in Holy Scripture!

The clearest indication in the Gospels of Jesus’ knowledge of his divine identity, as an adult, is surely the occasion on which he was mocked for his claim to be acquainted with Abraham despite the fact that ‘he was not yet fifty’ and that Abraham was long dead. He replied ‘Before Abraham was I am’.

My own Quaker conviction that Jesus was the incarnation of the ‘True Light that lighteth everyone who comes into the world’ helps me to accept some of his recorded sayings that I would otherwise find difficult and invests other of his well-loved words with new significance.

I have little doubt, for instance, that when he said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes unto the Father save through me’, he was speaking not as the carpenter’s son from Nazareth but as the true light. All who faithfully follow that inward light can hope to come in the end to the Father. Similarly, it is I think generally assumed that when he said, both of acts of kindness and acts of cruelty and neglect, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ he just meant that it was as good, or as bad, as if it had been done to him. I believe that his meaning was more literal than that; that whatever – good or bad – we do to another human being we are doing to the divine spark, the light of Christ, that was made flesh in Jesus and is the inheritance of each one of us.

It was this belief that inspired the nineteenth century Quaker Elizabeth Fry, whose picture we now see on the back of every £5 note, to visit the cells of Newgate prison, bringing comfort and practical help to the women prisoners there, who were regarded by ‘respectable’ society as the very lowest of the low. ‘I was in prison and you visited me. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me’, said Jesus.

It was the same conviction that persuaded the seventeenth century Quaker William Penn to meet the native American Indians of Pennsylvania as friends and to make a lasting peace treaty with them that was described by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire as ‘The only treaty that was never sworn to and never broken’.

It inspires too the Peace Testimony to which Quakers have witnessed for three and a half centuries. How could we, for any cause whatsoever, kill or injure a fellow man or woman endowed with the divine spirit of Christ?

From time to time I am asked to address groups in this area on the subject of Quaker faith and practice. I try to explain that Quakers believe that the ultimate guide to human conduct is neither the Church, nor the Holy Scriptures but the true light of Christ working within each one of us. Early Quakers therefore proclaimed themselves to be followers of Christ but neither Catholic nor Protestant. This reliance on being guided by the inward light of Christ applies both in our private lives and in the corporate decisions that we reach at our business meetings.

I have often been asked ‘How do we know that the inspiration that we may receive when we seek guidance is, in fact, from the indwelling spirit of Christ and does not spring – as it says in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer – from “the devices and desires of our own hearts”.

The only answer that I can give is that if we find ourselves urged to an attitude or a course of action that we can imagine would be blessed by Jesus of Nazareth, as we know him from the four Gospels, then we have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. If it is an attitude or course of action that we realize couldn’t possibly receive Jesus’ blessing, then we can be quite certain that we haven’t been.

I believe that, difficult as it may be to follow, this applies to public and international affairs as much as it does to our personal concerns. We can all surely imagine Jesus giving his blessing to aid to the hungry, the thirsty and the homeless. Can you though imagine him blessing cluster bombs, anti-personnel land mines, cruise or similar missiles or even the conventional guns with which, as a young man serving as a gunner in the Royal Artillery I was involved in World War II – long before I became a Quaker?

The demands of the Christian Faith may seem minimal compared with those of some other world-religions. There are no rigid dietary rules for instance, and no rigid standards of dress. Men and women can sit and stand together in worship. Nowadays, no dire penalties are faced by those who are foolish enough to desert the Christian Faith for another – or for no faith at all.

To live in the imitation of Christ though, which is what we Christians are called to do, is no easy task. We shall, since we are flawed human beings, inevitably stumble and fall. We must then pick ourselves up, ask for the forgiveness that will be freely given – and try again.