The Nature of God

                    by Dr. Mark Pitstick

Human beliefs about this phenomenon vary widely, however, much collective evidence indicates that God is not a big bearded man sitting on a throne in the sky somewhere.  Humanity’s spiritual growth has suffered for too long by making God in our image instead of realizing we were made in God’s image as beings of Spirit.  In theology school, God was defined as the highest power of which we can conceive.  My greatest image of God is that of love, peace, justice, energy, beauty, wisdom, power—the Life Force behind all creation.    

In An Open Life, Joseph Campbell, that brilliant scholar, author, and interpreter of sacred traditions, states: “The divine lives within you . . . the separateness that is apparent in the phenomenal world is secondary.  Beyond, and behind, and within, and supporting that world is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all.” 

The following description of God is the most pure and beautiful I have ever heard.  In Destiny of Souls, Michael Newton, Ph.D., quotes a client who was one of the most advanced souls he ever interviewed during a spiritual regression under deep hypnosis.  She described Oneness, the Presence as: “. . . it is . . . massive, but soft . . . powerful . . . yet gentle.  There is a breath . . . a whisper . . . of sound . . . so pure . . . the sound creates all . . . including light and energy . . . the sound holds this structure . . . and makes it move . . . shifting and undulating . . . creating everything.  It is a reverberating bell . . . then a high-pitched pure humming . . . like an echo of . . . A mother . . . full of love . . . singing to her child.” (2)

These descriptions of God are, needless to say, quite different from those that many of us were taught at an early age.  Do the words ‘wrathful, judging, and fearsome’ sound familiar?  Some denominations still teach about a God of unfathomable love and then, in the next instant, warn that this same God will send us to or allow us to choose a fiery hell for eternity.  Can you say ‘schizophrenia’?    

In a U.S. News and World Report article (March 25, 1991) Clark H. Pinnock, theology professor at McMaster Divinity College, states: “How can Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and vindictiveness” as to inflict “. . . everlasting torture upon his creatures, however sinful they may have been.”  A God who would do such a thing is “. . . more nearly like Satan than like God.”  I agree. 

We need to reconsider our notions about God, to refute half-truths and mistruths that we were taught in the guise of truth.  Many people were brought up with the notion of a vengeful God who watches our every step, ready to smite us at the least transgression.  These teachings were the result of archaic patriarchal and fear-based misunderstandings, numerous changes, and political expediencies. 

Rediscovering the original import of sacred wisdom teachings conveys greatly different meanings.  Aramaic translations help us rediscover more accurate spiritual understandings from that pivotal time and place that so greatly influenced Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Regarding the primary Aramaic meanings of the word ‘God,’ Neil Douglas-Klotz, Ph.D., states: “The root words for God are ‘Eloha’ or ‘Alaha’ from the Hebrew ‘Elohim.’  All these words mean unity, sacred unity, or one Beingness.  The Jewish or Aramaic notion of the Divine is not a being sitting somewhere, someplace as in a room above us but a unity of which we are a part, of which our being is a part.  Both Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him shared this bigger picture of the Divine.  That’s quite different from our Western conception.  Our problem is that when this conception was squeezed through the Greek language and thinking into Western Christianity, only a very small part of this meaning was carried across the language bridge.”

Some people are atheists or agnostics because they understandably find the idea of no God an improvement over the strange images we have been led to believe are true about the Divine.  If you were taught bizarre notions about the nature of God, don’t let that misinformation keep you from enjoying a personal relationship with The Ground of All Being.