ON GOD AND OCTOPUSES

Retrieving God

A few posts back I proposed to engage, along with you, my readers, in the work of theological retrieval. The challenge of theological retrieval is to recapture in a new time the excitement and insights of old theology. 

I tried to do a bit of that with the Reformed doctrine of election in a post I called “Begin with Belonging.” In that post, I proposed that election was not about a divine lottery in which the winners go to heaven and the losers go to hell. It’s about, well, not knowing: not knowing what we cannot know, like who’s in God’s favor and who’s out. This is the way Calvin approaches election in the first edition of his Institutes of The Christian Religion (1536). Belonging, Calvin says in that early comment on election, is not up to us. We don’t choose the family of God; we are family of God. The question before each of us is how to live in family. 

There’s more. Retrieved from the hash has been made of it, the Reformed doctrine of election proves a powerful defense against the way Christianity has lately been marketed. God is not a service provider to be chosen or not chosen. It’s not, as too much of contemporary Christianity has it, a matter of choosing God so your life will go better. Or choosing God so that you go to heaven after you die. Or choosing God so God will choose you.  The Christian faith is not about our choosing. It’s about waking up to the mystery that we unaccountably belong, that we have always belonged, that we can’t not belong, that our belonging is not for our own purposes but for purposes of the mission of God. That’s the theme that plays out in the first four chapters of Ephesians, a book to which we have paid far too little attention in contemporary Protestant Christianity. In those chapters, Paul marvels and marvels again that he belongs (along with his readers), and that he, of all people, has been given the mission of declaring God’s new work in Christ.

Retrieving this biblical idea of election is a step in retrieving God from what we have made of God. This sounds odd, I realize. God doesn’t need retrieving. But our concept of God may. It needs retrieving from what American evangelicalism and much of the rest of American Protestantism has done with it. To do so is to walk in the direction of the early church. The early church through at least the great councils of the 4^th and 5^thcenturies gave much of its theological energy to getting God right. The Nicene formula was the church’s way of articulating who God is and, just as important, who God isn’t. If we are to retrieve theology from what has become of it, we again need to be about this work.

Octopuses and Anthropomorphism

With that in mind, think octopuses (or, if you like, octopi). Okay, you may not have seen that coming. What brought octopuses to mind was a recent article in The New York Review of Books by Verlyn Klinkenborg. The article, a review of several new books on octopuses (where but in the New York Review of Books?), begins with a few insightful paragraphs about anthropomorphism: the way we project human traits on other living beings. 

Anthropomorphism is our characteristic mode of thinking in considering other animals. And not just animals. The anthropologist and student of contemporary religion, T.M. Luhrmann, citing Pascal Boyer, says that we humans are “wildly anthropomorphic.” She adds:

Humans see agents everywhere—at least when thinking quickly. Humans see faces in the clouds and eyes on cars. When two geometric shapes move sequentially around a computer screen, people ascribe intentions to them. (How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, p. 7)

We call our car, “Old Betsy” or some such, and we talk to our plants. 

But this is especially true for how we think about our fellow animals. We assume that they must think as we do, if a little more dimly. When our dog appears to be dreaming, we imagine its doggy dreams to be like ours, only with doggier pursuits in mind: chasing squirrels, say, or digging up bones. We assume that their intelligence must be much like our intelligence.

Octopuses are among the most intelligent animals. In some respects, they appear to be very much like us. Klinkenborg says, “. . . if you’ve ever met one in the wild, you know that an octopus doesn’t just look at you. Itconsiders you.” (italics in the original). Many of us thrilled to Craig Foster’s much watched documentary, My Octopus Teacher (2020). The octopus Foster encounters in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa becomes for him, and through him, for us, a friend, a mentor, a teacher of things wild.

But in fact octopuses are not much like us at all. Our intelligence is centralized in our heads in a single large brain. Octopus intelligence is distributed in “nine nerve clusters, one at the base of each arm and another in its head” (Klinkenborg, p. 6). What’s more, the octopus’s head is not actually a head but a mantle covering its internal organs. We don’t really know how octopuses think. What would it be like to have limbs—eight of them—each with its own brain, each capable of setting off in its own direction, each ready to explore the world on its own terms? Would we to an octopus with our clumsy gait and slow movement and single focus seem, well, primitive? What would it be like to approach the world octopomorphically? 

We don’t know. Can’t know. And this is true not only for octopuses. Klinkenborg says of us, “Thinking about intelligence in other species is something humans almost never do well.” Klinkenborg’s point is not that anthropomorphic thinking is always wrong but that it is never quite literally true. Animals are not less intelligent humanoids. They think differently. They encounter life differently. 

God and Anthropomorphism

By now you can see where I am going with this. Anthropomorphism is the characteristic way that we do theology, at least for the purposes of worship and prayer. We come by this honestly. The Bible is replete with anthropomorphic language. God sits, enthroned on the firmament (Exodus 24). God rides on the storm clouds (Psalm 19). God speaks (passim). God stoops (Genesis 11). God even takes on human shape (Genesis 18). Our worship songs and hymns are filled with this sort of language. It makes God approachable for us. It’s the language of intimacy. But, as in the case of anthropomorphic language for our fellow creatures but in ways that are vastly more complex, our language for God is not quite literally true. It’s thinking of God anthropologically—in human terms—rather than theologically.

This does not mean that we should stop using anthropomorphic language for God, but it does mean that in thinking about God we need to build in a sort of hesitation, a theological stutter step, to remind us that we are speaking analogically. This is an essential part of doing theology. Theology is thinking about how God transcends our language about God. How God is not much like us at all.

Unlike patristic and medieval theology, post-Reformation Protestantism seems too often not to have grasped this. There is a literalness about Protestant theology that insists that it knows exactly how God thinks. A few years ago in my then role as a reporter for the denominational magazine, I attended a debate on penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). Most of us are familiar with PSA, but for those who are not, PSA is, in brief, the idea that God’s righteous anger about human sin must be “satisfied.” Someone must pay the penalty. For this purpose, the Father sends his only Son, who dies as our substitute. It’s one way among others of understanding the meaning of the cross. I’ll not debate its merits here. I have done so elsewhere. What distressed me about the synodical debate was not just the theology itself but the literalness with which it was taken. For many—perhaps most—of the delegates PSA was not an anthropomorphic way of understanding God, but a straightforward description of who God is. God is terrifyingly angry at the human race. God, like an offended feudal noble, requires satisfaction. It’s not that God is like that; in the minds of those who spoke God is that.

Theological Hesitation

This way of doing theology fails the hesitation test. When, for example, we speak of the wrath of God, as does the Bible, we need to hesitate on what “wrath” might mean for the Trinity whose very definition, whose very life, is love. The Bible itself often seems to use “wrath of God” as the natural consequences of human actions, as if it were not really God but karma. Again, the point is not the biblical interpretation but the hesitation, the pause to consider what “wrath” or “love” or any number of other theological words might mean when used to describe a God who does not exist on the same plane or in the same way as we do. 

Theological literalism infects not only theology but too often preaching. I recently attended a funeral at which the preacher went on at some length about the great advantages that death had brought to the person who had just died. He would now be healed of all his ailments. He would be able to run and play and enjoy life as he had never enjoyed it before. On and on, the preacher went. For me and, I suspect, for others in the audience this sort of theological pleading did not bring comfort; it brought doubt. Our theology of death and new life can be and should be better than that.

The anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann in the book I cited above argues that humans have a built-in BS meter for too literal claims about these sorts of things. Invoking her fieldwork, she says:

People may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don’t act that way—not in the Bible Belt, not in medieval England, not in Fiji, and not among the Nuer.  . . . They seem to treat gods and spirits with different ontological attitudes than they do things of the everyday world (12-3).

These supernatural presences are taken as real, but differently real. As Luhrmann says, people, even children, approach the reality of the spirit world differently than the world we can touch and feel. 

I love a little story Luhrmann takes from the Islamic tradition, a hadith (an interpretative story in the voice of Muhammad):

“Anas ibn Malik reported: A man said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?’ The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings upon him, said, ‘Tie her and trust in Allah” (Jami‘ at-Tirmidhi, hadith 2517). Focus on God, the hadith says, but do not forget to tie up your camel. (How God Becomes Real, page 12)

Thinking God

It’s this sort of difference to which good theology pays attention. The story of Christian theology is the story of how the church (the same is true for the synagogue) discovered hidden in the language of the Bible hints that God is not as we naively think God is. God is triune, to take the obvious example, which is not exactly taught in the Bible but makes sense of it. And then, what is Trinity? 

Perhaps the best way to get at the sort of theology that needs to be retrieved is through an observation by the brilliant 15^th century theologian, Nicholas of Cusa. Nicholas says that God is non aliud, Latin for “not another thing.” What he means is that God cannot be counted as among the things of the universe. Finite beings like ourselves can be counted but not so God. God is non aliud.

Our anthropomorphic language is misleading in this regard. It leads us to think of God as somewhere countable: in heaven, for example, seated on a celestial throne. In the picture we are given in passages like Exodus 24, God is seated on the top of the celestial dome that covers the earth, all part of the same reality. But if God is another thing in the universe, then the universe is greater than God. And if God is inside the universe, then God is just another power in the universe, alongside the power we exercise and the other powers in our world. Then God is only one more actor competing for power and attention, which is how many people seem to think of God.

It’s against this picture of God as (just) another power in the universe that atheists contend. They maintain that there is no room in our best descriptions of the universe for God, and in this regard, Nicholas of Cusa would say they are right. God is non aliud, “not another thing.” To think of God in properly theological terms is to think of God not in terms of substance, as if God were a thing, but in terms of relationships. 

Consider Trinity. Trinity is best understood, as the Nicene Creed has it, in terms of relationships. The Father and Son are eternally begetter and begotten, or perhaps speaker and spoken (Word, Logos), or again lover and loved. And the Spirit who goes forth, is the breath that carries the Word, the love that goes forth from the beloved. It’s in the dynamism of these relationships that God exists, not somewhere but someone.

And if we begin to think down these lines we will soon conclude, as did classical Christian theology, that God’s power in the world and our power in the world are not competing powers. God’s power is not in competition with the laws of nature, as we know them. God’s power in the world is different, on a different plane, operating in a different way than our powers or the powers of nature. 

And if this is true, there is no competition between God as we rightly understand God and our scientific descriptions of the universe. The universe operates on its own rules, as God the Creator called it into being, but God is also present precisely the way described in Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relationships of love. 

“Learned Ignorance”

We could press on with this, but soon our heads will spin. The best theology is never simple. We need not become theologians. (For a good introduction to this sort of theology, check out Rowan Williams 2018 book, Christ the Center of Creation.) What we need is what Nicholas of Cusa called “learned ignorance.” “Learned ignorance” is an informed humility, the knowledge of what we do not know and cannot know. 

Learned ignorance is the hesitation, the pause, the humility as we contemplate God, remembering that the words we speak in praise and prayer are words given to us for those purposes, words that point us to the proper relationship to God but fail adequately to describe who God is. Our descriptions of God are in the end our descriptions, anthropomorphic, which knowledge ought to make us diffident in our theological declarations, always willing to admit that there is infinitely much we do not know.

Were the church willing to admit this, it would open conversations with others who see differently from the way we see, and in those conversations we may discover our own views of God and life deepened and enriched. It requires stepping back, hesitating, to realize that we don’t entirely understand, if not octopuses, then certainly not God.

Clay