- The history of Christianity
The view that God is not solitary
News •
The leaders of an 18th-century movement called Deism saw God as impersonal and unempathic—a principle of order and agent of responsibility not personal or addressable as the Christian God had been. Deism contributed to some intellectualizations of the idea of God, approaches that had sometimes appeared in the more sterile forms of medieval Scholasticism. God appeared to have been withdrawn from creation, which was pictured as a world machine; this God, at best, observed its running but never interfered.
According to the original Christian understanding of God of the early church, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation, God neither is solitary nor wishes to be alone. Instead, God is encircled with a boundless realm of angels, created in the divine image. They surround God in freely expressed love and devotion. They appear in a graduated, individuated hierarchy. These ranks of angels offer God their praise, and they appear active in the universe as messengers and executors of the divine will. From the beginning God appears as the ruler and centre in this divinely fashioned realm, and the first created of this realm are the angels. The church of the angels is the upper church; the earthly church joins with them in the “cherubic hymn,” the Trisagion (“Holy, Holy, Holy”), at the epiphany of the Lord and with the angelic choirs surrounding him in the Eucharist. The earthly church is thus viewed as a participant—co-liturgist—in the angelic liturgy. Because the angels are created as free spiritual beings in accordance with the image of God, the first fall takes place in their midst—the first misuse of freedom was in the rebellion of the highest prince of the angels, Lucifer (“Light-Bearer”), against God.
According to the view of Christian thinkers from the early Fathers to the reformers of the 16th century, humans are only the second-created. The creation of human beings serves to refill the kingdom of God with new spiritual creatures who are capable of offering to God the free love that the rebellious angels have refused to continue. In the realm of the first-created creatures, there already commences the problem of evil, which appears immediately in freedom or the misuse of freedom.
Modern views of God
If 18th- and 19th-century rationalism and scientific attacks on the idea of God were often called “the first Enlightenment” or “the first illumination,” in the 20th century a set of trends appeared that represented, to a broader public, a “second illumination.” This included a rescue of the idea of God, even if it was not always compatible with previous Christian interpretations. Some notable scientists of the 20th century, such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Born, and others, allowed—on occasion, and against the testimony of the majority of their colleagues—for an idea of God or religion in their concepts of life, the universe, and human beings.
An influential rethinking of the concept of God was spurred by the Anglo-American mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who developed a speculative metaphysical framework for his scientific study. For Whitehead, creativity is the first metaphysical principle. God was the first creature to emerge from it, and God’s own process of continually emerging into reality serves as the “divine lure” that guides and sustains everything else in creation. Some notable thinkers—such as the American philosopher and logician Charles Hartshorne, the American theologians Bernard M. Loomer and David Ray Griffin, and the Australian biologist Charles Birch—found such a “process philosophy” (a term coined after Whitehead’s death) amenable to their own worldviews and professional projects. Variations on what came to be called “process theism” promoted a vision according to which God was omnipresent and transcendent while also being immanent in such a way as to be intricately related to and bound up with creation.
When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied what he called “the death of God,” many Christian thinkers agreed that a certain set of culturally conditioned and dogmatic concepts of God were inaccessible, implausible, and dying out. Some of these apologists argued that such a “death of God” was salutary, because it made room for a “God beyond the gods” of argument, or a “greater God.” Thomas J.J. Altizer became one of the most outspoken proponents of the so-called “Death of God Theology” in the mid-20th century. The French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for a time attracted a large following as he set out to graft the theory of evolution onto “greater God” proclamations.
