From the Pastor’s Pen
Space, Time, and God
I had an extended conversation over dinner recently with some close personal friends who, although they are thoughtful and responsible persons and citizens, have no connection with or interest in religion. Each of them would, in fact, characterize him/herself as having no belief in “God”, understood as a Supreme Being located somewhere in or beyond the universe. When I stated that neither did I have such a belief, they were confounded and confused. How, they asked, if I agreed with them, could I possibly consider myself a Christian, let alone be a minister in a church?!!?
I share this conversation at the further risk of confounding and confusing the readers of this Newsletter! I am convinced, however, that something so significant is at state, that I am willing to take that risk, hoping that this may lead to as constructive a conversation as it did with my friends.
“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, full, oppressive, insipid… when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain…; its message becomes meaningless.”
These are words from the opening page of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s GOD IN SEARCH OF MAN.
In a more recent book, THE SABBATH, Heschel writes as follows:
“The mind’s preoccupation with things of space affects…all activities of man. Even religions are frequently dominated by the notion that the deity resides in space… (so that) the primary question is: where is the god?...that idea is taken to mean…God’s presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit…Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing”.
Heschel, for many years Professor of Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, can be dismissed as being too “far out”. Before we dismiss Heschel, however, let us look at the only place in the Hebrew Bible where an attempt is made to define the Hebrew personal name for “God”; “Yahweh”, translated from the Hebrew as “Jehovah” in the 1611 King James VersIon and, in more recent translations, as “Lord”, from the Greek “kyrios” in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that began in the third century, C.E. in Alexandria, Egypt. In Genesis 3:13-15, Moses discovers that Yahweh (Lord) means “I AM WHO I AM” …Thus you shall say to the Israelites. “I AM has sent me to you”. Further reflections on this definition sometimes translate it as “I AM WHAT I DO”. God, understood in this manner, is not a “thing” or an “object” in SPACE but an “activity” in TIME.
The defining Godly activity for the Hebrew people was the Exodus from Egypt which served as the basic metaphor characterizing all divine activity as liberation from all sorts of bondage. The first of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17) makes it quite clear that the Hebrew understanding of “God” is to be understood exclusively in terms of the experience of being “brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery”, an activity in time, not an object in space. In order to emphasize the importance of getting straight one’s understanding of “God”, the first 3 commandments are focused exclusively on clarifying ones understanding of “God”. It is even more significant that the 4th, and longest commandment, has to do with the holiness of TIME, not SPACE: a “day” is declared holy, a period of time, not a thing or an object, thus clarifying even further the intent of the first 3 commandments.
It becomes increasingly clear that the Hebrew understanding of “God” is closer to a verb than it is to a noun; Biblically speaking, it makes more sense to speak of “godding” in time than of a hypothetical supreme being located somewhere in space whose existence one may or may not acknowledge.
Toward the end of the conversation with my dinner friends, I was asked what was it, if not a Supreme Being located in space, that they would be required to believe in order to be in agreement with the Bible. I responded that they would need to have an experience in which they were freed from a form of personal bondage or slavery. After further attempts to clarify what I meant, one of them acknowledged that a significant burden which he carried, and which became heavier as he grew older, was a sense of profound regret about opportunities missed, a burden which he saw himself carrying to his death. I asked him if he ever considered the possibility that his personal burden or bondage of regret might be lifted from him that he might be “brought out of his house of bondage”? He responded by saying that the possibility had never entered his mind. I was then able to make it clear that belief in the Biblical “God” had nothing to do with affirming the existence of some Supreme Being in space. Instead, belief in God of the Bible had to do with believing that his personal burden could be removed!
The conversation ended with him NOT believing that his burden could be removed, but it was encouraging to realize that he was now more aware than at the beginning of the conversation about what it meant to “understand” God as defined in Exodus 3:14 and to “experience” God as an escape from bondage, an experience in time (Exodus 20:2), from which the book of Exodus gets its name.
Some readers of this Newsletter may be puzzled by the fact that there has been no reference to Jesus to whom the early Christians referred as “Lord”. At several places in John’s Gospel, most clearly in John 8:58, Jesus actually uses the expression “I am” (as used in Exodus 3:14) in relation to himself, and, even here, by stating “before Abraham was, I am”), locates himself in time and not in space!
Ever since the first orbiting satellite and the landing on the moon, we have characterized our age as the “space age”. I have always enjoyed reading science fiction, most of which was concerned with exploration in space. Although H.G. Wells wrote THE TIME MACHINE, made into two movies, space has always been the primary focus of science fiction literature. In the first STAR TREK television series in 1968, with William Shatner as Captain Kirk, or the more recent STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, with Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard, the spine tingling words at the beginning of each episode was: SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER. The notion that “space” is the “final frontier” is the unquestioned and taken-for-granted assumption of our time; we clearly see ourselves as living in “the space age”.
The Biblical perspective, which I have tried to outline in a very preliminary way in this Newsletter, is that TIME may very well be the “final frontier”. I was among those whose spine tingled when I heard the voices of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart say “Space, the final frontier”. My spine also tingles, however, when I hear the many voices of the Bible, and the voice of Abraham Joshua Heschel, suggest that time may be the final frontier. If this is so, then it is never “too late” for burdens to be lifted and hope to be renewed.
It is consistent with the thoughts of this essay that our NEWSLETTER is now organized in relation to the “seasons” of the Church “year”. Graham
