Creation and Creator

I was always taught that there was a wide gap between God, as Creator, and humanity, as creation. God is holy, I was told, while humanity was essentially sinful, flawed, limited and unworthy. It was therefore the grace of God, and that alone, which bridged the gap between unworthy humanity and sacred divinity. It was God who bent to the weakness of undeserving humankind, mainly because humans are unable to ascend the heights of divine status.

That picture of the relationship between God and God's creation served as a core understanding for a very long time. It rested as a foundational assumption under much of my theological development. God was Creator and humanity was creation, and never the twain shall meet.

The time has come, however, for me to accept a different relationship between God and humankind. This new relationship is based on intimacy and involvement instead of passivity or design of some divine plan or fate. This new relationship rejects the notion that God is "above" or "other." It demands that we see God as within and through, around and among, between and across.

The God of divine status, far above human nature, suggests that we consider a God that, like humans, thinks, acts, judges and emotes. This is a God who wills. But what if God is different than we have thought? What if God is spiritual energy that inhabits neither time nor space? What if God is throughout instead of above? What if all life can be defined as the presence of this divine spiritual energy and death is simply its absence? What if every person, in fact every living thing, deserves divine status, simply by virtue of being a bearer of God's spiritual energy?

If God's spiritual energy is throughout all living things, then all living things are essentially worthy, capable, deserving and radically equal. There is no gap between divinity and humanity. There is instead a unity of all things in the divinity of all life.

Years ago, when I rejected for myself the notion of God as an old man who sat on a throne, high above, and acted capriciously in the course of human history, I discovered the need for an alternative picture of what and who God might be. I unlearned my metaphysical divinity and began looking for an existential God, one who truly impacts human history. I could imagine a God which acted within the course of human affairs instead of above and over them. I began to draw the portrait of a divinity that was in Christ the same way that the same divinity is within us.

From the standpoint of an alternative foundational assumption about God, a whole new theology takes shape. This theology is based on the divine abilities that are part and parcel of human essential nature. By virtue of being alive, after all, humans bear the divine spiritual energy. Each one is worthy of attention, integrity, respect, care and concern. All life is deserving. All life is divine spiritual energy.

So, perhaps there is a gap between divinity and humanity, but the gap rests in its application instead of its essential nature. I relate much better to this divinity. It is much closer, more intimate, more directly applicable to the human endeavor, if we see ourselves as bearers of divine spiritual energy.