TRANSCRIPT

NB. Okay, we’ve gone back to God. What must be true by God? I mean again if we look at our question tonight, is God truly listening, one of the other assumptions there is that actually God is something, someone, with whom we can communicate. If God were inanimate, if he were,  as some cultures would have it, a tree or a totem or a stone or a statue or whatever, the question of communicating, a two-way communication, would be would be illogical. My question to you, Rowan, is what’s God like?

RW. Any human being who tried to answer that would, I think, be risking blasphemy or nonsense, if they try to give a definitive answer, and I do mean that very seriously.

What we know of God is, of course, what God tells us. What God tells us in for Christians in the stories of the old and new testaments, in the events that underlie those stories, is at least two things and, of course, lots more but at least two. One is that what people encounter and talk about as God is a reality that is faithful, dependable. The God we meet in the bible is a God who commits himself to being there for the world, a God also doesn’t give up on us when we fail or even when we turn away and rebel. A God who can be absolutely relied on to be there for us.

The second thing, obviously following from that, is that we cannot, it seems, imagine a God whose nature is less than ours, a God who is less intelligent, less loving, less purposive. If the world God has made is a world which moves all the time towards intelligence, loving relation, purpose and so forth, we can’t really imagine that the energy that starts and sustains all this is somehow less than that.

So when I try to express this I often say, “The language of God is personal.” is the best we can do because the love and intelligence we associate with personal life, and that we value in personal life, is sort of that. The best we can do in imagining the kind of life we most value, we must. . . (I was going to say “admire” which isn’t quite the right word.), but that says we can’t think of God as being less than that. So faithfulness, intelligence, love, – these these are the things which seem to come into focus here.

NB. And that mechanism of not being able to think of of a being who is less than us is that in any way linked with the concept in Genesis that says that humankind is made in the image of god?

RW. Very much so, yes. And people have argued and reflected all through the centuries on what exactly those mysterious words mean, that were made in God’s image, but some of the best shots of this have been when people say, “Tthe very best, the freest and most generous capacity in us for relation, in love and in intelligence and so forth, that must somehow be the point at which we have what I’ve sometimes call a kind of magnetic needle sort of hovering in the direction of God.”

REFLECT

So, what seem to be the best clues of what God is like and if God is listening, are what we see in ourselves and in each other, that have to potential to become, if we choose to cooperate with the One who thought we should have them, blossom into something akin to the nature of God. What are those clues? Why did God place them in me and in you?

Do I appreciate these clues? What am I doing with them and with the clues God placed in those things that God created that I find in the plants, animals and nature that surrounds us?

Video: The Catholicism Series by Bishop Robert Barron, Episode 3, Naming God
Suggested viewing section: Naming God (minute:second 19:12)