Theology and Monotheism
I thus moved from physics to theology. The time has come to explain why theology did captivate me.
First, a definition. The word theology is a compound word of Greek origin: Theos meaning God and logia meaning "study." In fact, the word logia has many related meanings and an august pedigree. But in our context logia means study. Thus, theology is the study of God and of only one God, to be precise.
"Studying God" is a lofty aspiration and can only have an analogical meaning. Because God is who He is, we can't place Him under a microscope and dissect Him. In fact, we must wrestle with that very word, God before we can say something intelligible about Him. We must use analogies to speak about Him, words that fall short when approximating His reality, but words that nevertheless communicate true knowledge about Him. That’s the best we can do.
The noun “God” itself possesses a transcendent meaning for those of us who believe in only one God. Those who believe in one God are monotheists.
Before monotheism dawned upon history, most humans believed in a multitude of gods or divine beings. Polytheism or the belief in many gods preceded the belief in one God. Humans first ascribed divine qualities to natural objects around them. Then they ascribed to the human characteristics. Usually a most high god ruled over all the gods in a hierarchy. Polytheistic theorists usually left the origin of the highest god undefined or obscure.
Humans divinized the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the sea, animals, trees, and even mountains and rocks. They also divinized weather phenomena and volcanism, earthquakes, rocks and mountains. Divinity oozed from every single thing. If humans wanted to survive, they understood they had to placate all these divinities. Humans tied their very survival to the worship and propitiation of the gods.
Monotheism and Abraham
Modern monotheists hold to the tradition that a man named Abraham "discovered" monotheism. Abraham was a Semitic shepherd who lived in Mesopotamia during the middle of the second millennium before the birth of Christ. His historical era is known as the Bronze Age. According to the Jewish sage Moses Maimonides, Abraham discovered the one God on his own. Only after Abraham reached his own conclusions about the existence of only one God, did God appeared and spoke to him.
This first speech of God to Abraham inaugurated God's self-revelation. God spoke to a specific person, in a specific time and place in history. God entered into a covenant with Abraham, promising him numerous descendants.
God continued on speaking to Abraham's descendants. One day, God himself became human out from Abraham's own people . This man was Jesus of Nazareth. At least, that's what we Christians hold as true. Other monotheists disagree. Among the dissenters, the Jews are the most important to us Christians because Jesus was a Jew. Judaism is the root and tree from which Christianity emerged.
The Arguments for God's Existence and Their Limits
By using his intellect, Abraham deduced that only one God was enough to explain the whole of Creation. By reaching this conclusion, God ceased to be a god. Abraham, the archetypal monotheist, understood that a Creator God was an omnipotent, transcendent, unique God.
This is what we mean by God. God is the Supreme Being. We can’t think of nothing higher, fuller, and infinite than God. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He’s beyond time and space as we’ve come to reckon them. His transcendence “spills over” His immanence: God is present everywhere, at all times, and in all of His fullness. He’s closer to us than our own selves.
We are all beings and in this we're like God. But our existence is contingent, that is, our lives depend on a long chain of causes and effects. These had to happen before we got here. God isn't a contingent being. His existence doesn't depend on any other cause or effect. In fact, we don't need to exist. The world can go on without us. But it can't go on without God. God is the one necessary Being.
God has no cause. He is not an effect. His essence is pure existence. God’s is-ness is to be. He cannot not exist. Thus, for us the meaning of the word "God" is very narrow and circumscribed. God's attributes are exclusive to Himself. No other being shares them.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) reigns as the most important Catholic theologian. He proposed five ways, independent from revelation, that proved the existence of God. Yet, those five proofs do not yield, of necessity, the God of the Bible. At most, the proofs lead to Deism.
Deists think that the God "hypothesis" is reasonable.
Yet, such a distant God did not interfere with Creation, according to the Deists. He is self-contained and uninterested in his work. He "wound" the clock of the universe and let it be. He doesn't even need to be a person. Rational reflection leading to God only takes us so far. In practice, a Deist can become an atheist - someone who denies God's existence - without much effort.
At this point, the study of such a God would be dry and brief. "Theology" would be a very short study before getting into philosophy and the sciences. Then again, Deism represents the outer courtyard of the Temple of Monotheism. And the Temple is richer than its courtyard.
Going from the how of things to the why of things.
Abraham became God's friend after God spoke to him, not because Abraham "figured God out." Abraham's intellectual quest opened Him up to the reality of God. In this sense, Abraham became a model for believers who became such after their own quests.
Abraham, then, was my own model. Abraham moved from intellect to love. God revealed Himself to Abraham, not as a distant, disinterested deity but as a person. Abraham's intellectual quest was a river that flowed into the ocean of faith.
Here lies the true meaning of Abraham's quest: he went from explaining the how of things on to the why of things. In this movement, Abraham met God and God revealed Himself to Abraham.
Abraham's pilgrimage from the how of things to the why of things is the beginning of theology. It is my own pilgrimage as well.
I’ll deepen my reflection next.