A God With No Name; The Problem With Personification

On Boxing Day, we had friends over and the conversation turned to politics and religion (we have those kind of friends).  One of the topics was our incredulity at the discrepancy between some Christian politicians' and religious leaders' fervent devotion to the figure of Jesus and a practice of hate mongering and violence that would make Jesus question why he ever left the tomb: GOP candidate, Gov. Chris Christie's, boast that he wouldn't be afraid to start World War III, Donald Trump's rhetoric about limiting the travel of Muslims and building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, the GOP candidates' rabid assertions during the debates that the U.S. should carpet bomb the Middle East and purposely commit other war crimes without regard to the lives of innocent civilians including children, the Christian leader who recently prayed from the pulpit of his megachurch for God to kill all the gays, the enactment of laws to restrict women's health services and aide to the poor...the list just keeps going on.

Our conclusion was that they have somehow divorced the figure of Jesus from his teaching and actions.  They have created an idol of Jesus in their own image totally at odds with the attributes portrayed in the Gospels. That's the danger of personifying God; literalism can detach the figure from the very qualities it was created to represent.

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The image of God is an anthropomorphizing of how we believe the, “world works”, what is valuable and laudable, what should be defended and what should be discouraged. God is a personification of what we believe is truly legitimate, noble, powerful and worthy; what we see as reality and the fundamental nature of, “the Universe”, and our place and role in it. It is the representation of these abstract qualities in a human like form.


When the chemical manufacturing process at the plant where I work was not behaving as expected, a Chemical Engineer friend of mine would like to quote George Box, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful". The anthropomorphizing of God is a good model. But, when overly literalized it can become detached from the very abstract qualities and concepts it was meant to embody and becomes no longer useful.


I believe the ancient Hebrews, surrounded by cultures with multiple gods and idols, were aware of this danger and that this may have somewhat inspired their concept of God, the God with no name. In the Exodus story, the writer has Moses ask God who it is that has sent him and God replies, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”. It is from this phrase that YHVH, or Yahweh, became the personal name of God in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures. Later, in the Priestly Era, even this was replaced with the title, Jehovah, meaning, "The Lord", with the personal name seen as too holy for anything but very special use.


A similar reluctance to anthropomorphize God is seen in the prohibition against idols. The Hebrews are told, "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth". As a result, I believe that the Jewish people gained a much less restrictive and more encompassing concept of God.


All models are wrong, but if we need to put a face to God, for me the person of Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed by the Gospels is the best possible and one the world could sorely use. A brown skinned Middle Eastern man who spent the first years of his life as a refugee and lived in a conquered nation occupied by the world superpower of the day. This man, who characterized God as primarily loving, generous and forgiving, taught that we should love our enemies and do good to those who want to harm us. He often extolled the virtues of those outside his own religion, tribe, and nationality. When arrested for the trial where he was later executed he did not resist and even healed one of the soldiers struck by one of his followers. This to me is the true face of Jesus and the true face of God. To me, the representations of Jesus by right-wing hate and fear mongers are false idols made in the image of their makers.