CHAPTER FIVE: A summary of the mainstream Christian Church’s view of God
Extracting the essence of the previous four chapters, one readily can summarize the nature of God, as viewed by mainstreamWestern Christianity, as embracing the following attributes:
God is perceived to be majestic, all-seeing, all-powerful, and all-knowing. These attributes are contained in the familiar omni-descriptions: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. If other omni-attributes are found, they would apply to God as well, as the mainstream God is all about omniness.
Unlike us lesser beings inhabiting the material world, God is genderless, being above matters sexual. He is also without passion in general, including love and hatred. To be sure, He is merciful, but in a vague, largely undefined way. Passion, gender and the intimacy of possessive love are prohibited by the Western Mainstream Church from encroaching upon His omni-qualities.
Given these general characteristics, the Godhead is found to be a Trinity, consisting of a common essence and three vaguely-defined “personalities”. His Trinitarian constitution is considered to exist from forever in the past to forever in the future. The intra-Trinitarian relationship consists of a supposedly benign fellowship of three characteristically male personalities who lack the function of gender, bonded together in love restricted to an agape form; love in an eros form with its possessive and romantic qualities is considered unthinkable.
The general implication of this view of God and the Godhead is that God represents an essential alien quality, one of being inexplicably different from us: He is genderless whereas we are fully gendered; He is unattainably far above us; His relationship with us is said to consist of love, but it is the sparing love of a stern, commanding Presence, constantly kicking over those of our works that don’t meet with His stratospheric standards of behavior.
Because of God’s lack of gender, we are commanded to obey his several prohibitions of sexual deviation from His established norm of a lifetime-long single marital relationship between one male and one female without understanding why that is such an important standard. While unequivocal obedience without the necessity of knowledge is a reasonable expectation of God toward mankind, many of His other commandments are amenable to common-sense understanding. On the other hand, it is apparent that at least in our present societies worldwide, people including Christians violate the sexual commandments with indifference toward God.
If anything affirmative can be said of the various Church authorities’ treatment of the Holy Spirit as noted in the previous chapters, it is their consistency with each other in fostering the view of God as expressed above.
Our worship of this Being must consequently consist of fear tempered by love, rather than love tempered by fear. We worship Him as would tiny ants, looking up an enormous leathery sole poised to come down hard, smashing all below into pulp. We appease this harsh God, either to avoid punishment or to curry favor and to obtain subsequent gifts.
In the wake of this description of our common understanding of God I offer a question: Is this the God defined in Scripture? To that question, I respond with a resounding “no”, for the reasons explained herein.
Instead, this God is a diety of man’s own making. Usually, when referring to a false god, the conservative Christian will point to that god’s indulgences toward a fallen Church. The most recent examples of that attitude include the conservative Church’s denunciation of those Churches that attempt to accommodate the secular world’s insistence upon political correctness in the matters of homosexual marriages, homosexual participation in Church leadership, the Muslim view of God, or that worship the benevolent God who sheds health, wealth and happiness to those who, with itching ears, fervently believe in such. But the conservative view of God, while residing at the opposite end of the belief spectrum from Santa Claus, is every bit as much a god constructed by man, because that god, like the others, fails to correspond to Scripture.
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