A Brief Bio of God

Our topic today tonight is not a small topic, it is a

brief

biography of God and it will have to be, considering the breadth of what that topic could be, it will be a kind of short version, but we have made one. Of these before we had a

brief

biography of the devil and that has been a pretty popular conference, so we thought, well, why don't we give God a chance to see how popular God is compared to the devil? Let's say this is a broad topic and so, out of necessity, I'm going to narrow it down today, so I'll tell you that your expectations here in terms of the things that I'm actually going to talk about, obviously there's a There's a whole host of other things. ways this could be and other things we could talk about.

This is what we're going to talk about today, so first of all I want to talk about the evolution of how God is portrayed, so the opening title card that we have. it's from the sistine chapel one of michelangelo's paintings of creator god and this is another painting in the sistine chapel uh this one is less famous but it's uh uh god separating light from darkness in the genesis story as depicted again in the ceiling of that famous chapel in the Vatican, so anyway we're going to talk about where we got this image of God and what its history is.

Then we will talk about the evolution of God in Hebrew. Bible and when we talk about these things we are not really saying how God has changed, but rather how human understanding or how humans have defined and understood God, how that has changed and how we can see even within the Hebrew. the bible christians the christian old testament the jewish bible we can see how um hints within the bible the previous perceptions and the previous conception of god and the gods that the early israelites had even though the bible was compiled and edited in later attempts to eliminate them, but nevertheless there are many traces of the previous conceptions that are in the Hebrew Bible and finally we are going to talk about how God is defined in theology and we are really going to especially look at Christian theology, although you know the related religions, the Abrahamic religions , has a similar relevance, etc., that's what we'll talk about, obviously, there are a lot more traditions than just that, but we can't cover everything in one type. of the night so that we can see the understanding or how we understand the divine in other systems, other traditions, etc., and that would be a reason for another conference that we can have as a kind of sequel to this one in the future.

I hope he's okay, so that'll be a little bit of our roadmap of what we're going to try to accomplish tonight. Okay, so we'll start here with popular representations of God, so this is God the Father represented by Raphael. Another famous Renaissance painter in popular culture, I would say that the devil tends to make more appearances than God, as I said, we did a lecture on the brief biography of the devil which was a very popular lecture, somehow I feel like I will see it. but I doubt that this conference will be as popular as the devil's.

The devil. People are more interested in the more seductive devil character, I guess, and this is depicted more often. For example, even if you go to the great classics. of literature, so Dante's Inferno that book is much more popular than Dante's Paradise, so people are much more interested in Dante's description of hell and what is happening there than in what is passing in the sky. It's actually a lot less interesting literally anyway at least. in the conception presented by Dante Lucifer also in the great English epic Paradise Loss by John Milton Lucifer is an extremely compelling character in that text.

You're really interested in what's going on with Lucifer again dramatically. He's a much more interesting role, as you understand it. or represented in some way in Christian literature that the representation that we have of god and and uh, the good side in that um in that epic there have been all kinds of representations of god, this is a famous one when I was a child, so george burns had a whole series of uh where he was playing god, an old comedian who is famous anyway, famous, a surly old god, etc., smoking his cigar, most recently, um, in the movie dogma atlantis, morissette was cast and he played god there are all kinds of examples of these so I'm just picking a couple of steve buscemi um in a new series the miracle workers have now gone into a couple of seasons um he plays god and it's again a kind of uh well anyway it turns out he's part of a whole kind of family of gods and he's kind of like our god, he's a bit of a winner and he's created a shitty planet relative to the other gods and stuff, in that particular series we have the depiction of god in the mighty python and the holy grail and of course my favorite is the depiction of god in the simpsons and homer the heretic when homer has a vision of god and decides he doesn't need to go to the church for all kinds of different reasons because God is everywhere and so on.

If we look at the history of the image of God, we have that image in the Simpsons and Monty Python, etc., there is a kind of idea and image of God when we see God, so this is again the Sistine Chapel painting, etc. . um, this is a very famous one from the creation, the creation of Adam, that we're getting all these types of white men, white beard, often, white robes, uh, kind of, not always white in terms of robes. While the paintings of God in the Sistine Chapel are very famous today and shape our popular image, the tradition of depicting God the Father was relatively recent in Michelangelo's time and remained controversial among Christians at that time. moment, certainly in the short term after this other one.

Christians, including Protestants, became much more iconoclastic and in fact opposed the representation of God the creator and in fact tried to depose, oppose a lot of religious, let's say excessive statues and works of art, etc., and they preferred to have very, very simple churches, um, anyway. Although this is not a Protestant church, a Catholic church here in Padua, these are frescoes by Giotto from the early 14th century and this is one of the first representations of God the Father here, you say again, as if enthroned with a robe and a beard white. and so on, so that's when that kind of tradition of doing that started, so like I say, the Protestants are opposed to you knowing this kind of stuff and they took all their churches, of which you know the church at all. the churches had been Protestant Catholic in their areas uh they broke with the church their church now became Protestant churches in many cases they destroyed their own historical and heritage works of art that had existed, that's why a lot of times you go to places and um, Medieval churches and things like that had their statues torn off and so on, or the frescoes were painted over and that kind of thing, at one point people thought that the representation of these images um was some kind of There's no way to go back to paganism and idolatry and so on and they needed to be purged, so here's the argument that images lead to idolatry.

The argument presented by the iconoclasts. Iconoclasts means uh, people who destroy images. People who don't believe there should be images. worship dating back to First Temple Judaism, so the oldest time period in the Bible in the early parts of the Hebrew Bible is being written before Jerusalem was destroyed the first time by the Babylonians. There's an idea there that the images. lead to idol worship, if the common people have a statue or image of God, the fear was that they would confuse the image with God and begin to worship the image and therefore one of the ten commandments given in the Exodus , one of those is you.

You shall not make for yourself any graven image and therefore the first temple Jews are, therefore, and actually especially more so in the second temple period, they are famously iconoclastic and they are against the use of um, the use of statues, especially any image to represent God or the worship of god, here is the broader commandment here, which is part of it in the exodus, you shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of something that is up in the heaven or that it is below on the earth or that it is in the water under the earth.

I will not bow down to them nor worship them because I, Yahweh, the Lord, your god, am a jealous god, so this is talking about things that are in the sky above, so that contemporaries here understand that all the stars and so on , the planets are gods and therefore don't Don't make, don't make statues of Mars and Venus where you know the Roman names of those gods uh uh and also anything that is in the water under or under the earth, so uh hades and uh uh and neptune and poseidon or whatever and those are the Roman and Greek versions, but obviously they are also the local Canaanite gods at this time you should not bow down or worship them, you worship only Yahweh, a god that should not be represented, okay, in rabbinic Judaism that iconoclasm goes even further, so god in the Hebrew Bible refers to the more generic word for god in Hebrew elohim, but it is also used by his name using the first with four letters which we do in English like y-h-w-h, so you don't really know what it should be like. pronounced because in the Jewish tradition you don't pronounce it uh and that's why we call it in Greek tetragrammaton, so there were the four letters and I normally pronounce it yahweh the traditional way that it's been said in English it was jehovah and that's It was definitely a bad translation or mispronunciation, but anyway that was the one that, as was understood when the King James translators began to work beyond leaving God without a photo there, then we became a prohibition on saying the name Yahweh allowed in the Rabbinic Judaism and, when you get down to it. dot uh in the text and you're seeing it written you're supposed to say the word adonai which means lord when you're reading the written name and that's how the mispronunciation of jehovah comes from jehovah so we have those consonants and they're written and then in the Middle Ages, um, an early modern period when when you add vowels to Hebrew they're little dots that go up and down, normally there's just the Hebrews, normally they're just written with the consonants, but there In the Middle Ages they developed this system of points that could be put and the rabbis wrote not the points for what Yahweh should be pronounced, but how Adonai should be pronounced and thus we took Jehovah out of Adonai. the vowels and the consonants of yahweh are fine and there is also uh uh anarchism in uh anticonism in Islam, in other words, a total prohibition on representing God and a downright strong representation, a strong prohibition on representing images, so the acts of the prophet Muhammad, including the destruction of the idols that had been in the Kaaba in Mecca, so if you have ever seen photos of the Hajj, the pilgrimage, there is the black temple that is said to have been built by Abraham according with the tradition of faith, not the history, but nevertheless a tradition of faith in Islam in the time of Muhammad.

It was a pagan temple and there were all kinds of idols in it and Muhammad destroyed them and the Koran and it includes the prohibition of representing God and that actually then extends to representing the prophet now, so people get into a lot of trouble. by making images or caricatures of Muhammad sometimes and then even in general and humans in general or animals in general and so at a certain point in Islamic art, instead of um, you get images of living beings and humans and so on. , you get these amazing, uh, elaborate ones. patterns um, they're even built into these kind of geometric forums and so on, they're floral patterns and so on, but you can also see it on the bands.

Here is actually the script. It should go in this direction since it's not from right to left but from left to right and that's in a way, you can see this very elaborate Arabic calligraphy, so it's interesting what happens when some things are prohibited, there can be a flourishing of what you are allowed to do and that is certainly taking place in Islam because again of this very strong prohibition against idols, on the one hand, statues, but even then, images, images of God, but then images of everyone at a certain point, just to be sure, okay, so let's talk about what God is like. represented in Christianity, so I was suggesting that I say that this, this thing in the Middle Ages, that portrait of giada is one of the oldest of god the father in a Christian tradition or in a Christian context in a church, um, and That's true, so let's go. towards the Sistine Chapel and so on, so how was God presented before that?

Here, um, is a 6th century view of heaven from the church of Saint Apanala Apollinaris in Classis, that is, in Ravenna, Italy, so this was the last capital of the Western Roman Empire. and also from the Gothic Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and then also from Byzantine Italy when the Byzantines destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom, so Ravenna was a very important Roman city, let's say early medieval, late ancient, early medieval, where they were actuallybuilding new things, including simply magnificent churches with magnificent mosaics, so where is God in this vision? God the father and the answer is right there.

You can see that hand reaching down. We will approach that to the traditional Christian representation of God the creator God. The father is the hand of God and that is the only component you see of God, so taking advantage of the same tradition against the representation of God that informed rabbinic Judaism, the early Christians avoided representing more of God than this heavenly hand. Symbolic image of the representation of God. The early Christians considered the creator to be beyond the ability of humans to see or feel directly, so in the gospel of John 1, chapter 1, verse 18 it is said that no one has seen God and with what they want say that God the creator. as opposed to the spirit or christ, which are the other components or the other persons of god in the Christian tradition, so what are we seeing when we see besides the hand, how do we understand this or how does this work fit together?

The first Christian to write survives and also such an important early Christian thinker who is so influential that he came up with a solution to imagine the impossible to imagine, so, you know, again, Paul was resurrected, he's Jewish, he's, I'm trying to say it is a Pharisee and he, uh, is a Pharisee and therefore would know about the prohibitions against representing God and even saying God's name, so he is saying God's name, Yahweh, etc., etc. , etc., what is it, but how does it feel like now we can? uh I have a new way of understanding God through the testimony of him in Christ, so Paul has an answer that he thinks and therefore the testimony of him is Christ is Lord, so what does that mean?

I'm going to explain that, so we talked about when you go, when you get to a certain place in the text and it says yahweh, it says out loud adonai, it says lord and Paul's testimony here is christ is lord, so he can be banned. imagine the creator, but when you read the name yahweh in the scriptures and replace it with lord. as i say paul saying that christ is that lord, in other words, instead of directly imagining god the creator, christians can now imagine christ as a bridge between the human and divine realms, so it is understood that christ is a person of god, a person of the trinity completely human completely divine christ had a completely human body, you can represent him, therefore, all you want and understanding that when we get to that place in the text where you can't say the name of god but You can say Lord Christ is providing that image or visualization of God for Christians it is a little complicated, let's explain it a little more so how do we know God the creator through the logos God?

So if we go back to that passage and/or go back to the gospel of John. Uh, I'm not reading here, this is John and I made the wrong quote here, but it's John 1 1 chapter 1 verse 1 to 3 8 and then 18. in the beginning was the word that means the logos and the the word was with god and the word was god he was in the beginning with god all things came into existence through him and without him nothing came into existence no one has seen god he is only god the only son who is close to the heart of the father who gave him to know and here on the right I'm showing here a um, an illuminated manuscript from the central Middle Ages, so a few hundred years before the Sistine Chapel that represents the same thing, so this is a representation of god creating the heavens and the earth, you can see the moon and the stars etc, god creating Eve, you can see how he was created from Adam's rib and then also creating all the animals etc, which are everywhere. in the illumination, this is the same type of imagery that we have in the sistine chapel, but instead of representing god the creator, this represents christ because we are allowed to represent christ and therefore this is actually, you know christ, the pre-existing christ as the logos through him, the word through which god the creator created everything according to the gospel of john, so the christian trick or substitution here, the way christians avoid this prohibition to make images or pictures or representations of god the creator is to have a much more complicated understanding of god in which you could imagine and represent christ or the logos as god and in that way we have a conception or a bridge between the unknowable and us and that is why Christians, unlike the other Abrahamic religions, have a way of representing uh God, okay, so imagining the logos the second image of the person of the trinity the author of the logos theology of John who wrote the gospel of john that theology of logos is strikingly similar to that of the hellenistic jewish philosopher philo of alexandria.

We have had a whole conference, actually, both on the authorship of the gospel of john and also on philo of alexandria, so, unlike from Michelangelo's painting of God, the creator of Adam, Christian representations of creation in the early Middle Ages are always substituting images of Christ's logos for the creator, so it won't be, you know a guy with white hair and so on, he's a guy who looks pretty much the same, but he has a brown beard, etc., because he's Christ, okay, so, um. One of the things here is that by doing this by taking this leap that Paul made, this is in a way that we add belief to religion, belief is not always part of, you know, believing in certain things is not always part of religion, so while today belief in god or gods is popularly considered essential to religion, the idea would have been quite foreign to many followers in ancient times, making them ordinary people who worship to the ancient gods, that is, what we now call Greek and Roman pagans. and so on, um, they didn't go around saying that, they just cared so much about whether they believed in God or not, that's how we frame it from our perspective, in many cases, there are some cases where people were accused. of atheism, but it usually doesn't mean what we think it means now, so Christians were accused of atheism because they didn't recognize that the Roman gods had any real reality, Christians tended to see them as demons. and so on, and so on, they accused you of atheism for denying me belief in everyone's gods, etc., instead of not believing in God in general, and as far as ancient people are concerned, as I say, planets uh uh stars the earth itself uh the winds death this is all these are all gods and obviously you believe in them because all those things exist so anyway, Paul adds the idea of ​​faith in belief to the equation so as not to tell the people that have to believe in God, almost everyone believed in God, at least depending on how we define it, you know, in many cases they are pagans, even if they technically believe in all kinds of different gods, the philosophers. underlying which generally represented that he understood or proposed that there is an underlying source from which the various gods are emanations etc. and so on, anyway, most people had that feeling in ancient times, you didn't have to tell people who believed in God, but what what.

Paul is saying that you must believe, you must believe that Christ is Lord and that is injected into him and this becomes such an important component of religion that it is difficult for us to even separate this from this idea that belief is essential to the religion. uh, it wouldn't have been that similar in the past and it wouldn't be the same for many other religions. We talked about this when we gave our conference. What is religion? Why is religion so impossible to define? Okay, so I'm I'm going to summarize this first part of the lecture, this part is about representations of God the creator, so the Abrahamic religions have always been deeply skeptical when it comes to representing God.

Jews and Muslims prohibit the depiction of God because they argue that it leads to idolatry. Christians generally avoided imagining God. creator anyway until the late Middle Ages and many have remained iconoclasts, so there are a lot of um, you know, Protestants don't like, for example, often representations of Jesus on a crucifix as a bleeding statue and things like that that are thought to be too flashy or too pagan or whatever they don't like marijuana. Protestants tend to be more iconoclastic and have more sterile works of art in their churches than, for example. uh, orthodox orthodox people like statues and instead have beautifully painted icons or mosaics etc., and Catholics have statues and paintings etc., so okay, those are representations.

Now I also want to talk about the evolution of human understanding of God or the idea of ​​God as it exists in the Hebrew Bible, so we've shown this before. This is a kind of context graph of a kind of timeline of when the Bible is essentially being composed in its early days. until uh, when it's actually being compiled in 400 BC. C. in the time of Ezra and so on, once they returned to Jerusalem and Jerusalem is a province of the Persian empire under Persian influence at that time, so this is a period of many hundreds of years. um, some people think that among the first possibly historical characters in the hebrew bible is david, so there's certainly a sense that, anyway, from this time period, when the bible is being written, The ruling dynasty of Jerusalem calls itself the House of David, so the feeling is that there was a figure who was their eponymous ancestor and who, they say, was the founder of their House, but that doesn't mean that any of the The stories we have about David actually refer to anything that has that potential.

The historical figure may have done it, rather, it's more in the time period a little after that, when we get to, say, the mid to early 800s BC. C., when characters like Omri, who is one of the kings of the most important north. The kingdom gets going and that kind of time period is when this older period of biblical writing starts to happen, especially right in the period before Assyria destroys the northern kingdom in 7 20. So 700 is They are writing those first biblical components. things of origin and some of them leave, let's say, fingerprints or traces of how the ancient Israelites understood God at that time, as opposed to the way they understood him when the Bible was compiled by Ezra and edited to have a very different conception. then there is an evolution of the conception of yahweh among the prophets and priests in ancient israel, then it begins like all the others when we call polytheism or paganism where yahweh is worshiped along with many other gods, it goes to a phase that is sometimes called monolatry or henotheism that we will explain where they understood that among the various gods that exist, Yahweh is the only god that the people of Israel should worship but in other words not deny that there are other gods but simply that they should not worship those other gods. then the development of monotheism, the understanding that Yahweh is the only god and other gods or when you talk about other gods, you really only mean idols, only statues that have no power and are created by humans, etc., is well, here is one of the fingerprints or footprints of uh this kind of polytheistic conception of uh of uh god, so the idea that there is more than one god and there are national gods.

This is a section of Deuteronomy called the Song of Moses when the Most High says that he gave the nations their inheritance when he divided the sons of man he established the boundaries of the people according to the number of the sons of but the portion of Yahweh is his people jacob israel his assigned inheritance and that is why here the great god father of heaven has different sons who are the different gods among those sons is yahweh and his people is israel, in other words, there is yahweh in this understanding he is a god national, he is literally the god of Israel, but there are other gods that are gods of other nations, so the monolatry in the ten commandments um, we have been reading, you know anyway, of the ten commandments the same type of conception so I am the lord your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery, you will have no other gods before I you will not make yourself an idol, whether in the form of something in heaven and on earth, we read that above you will not bow down to them or worship them because I, the Lord your god, am a jealous god, so you do not know this.

We read it before, but reading it again here, one of the points we should make: This is not saying that there are no other gods except me, it says that you will have no other gods before me, whether they are the gods that are in the heavens. whether on land or in the sea, you are not going to make idols of those gods and worship them, you should only worship the lord your god yahweh, so when you are provincialist, this is perfectly reasonable, so when you have uh, somehow If you believe, as I say, in monolatry or henotheism, the god of the soul to be worshiped, you can have him paired with a different chosen people chosen by a god, so it is anation with a national god and in the same way that Israel had Yahweh as their god the Philistines have a Dagon god the Ammonites have a Malcolm god the Moabites have a chamos god and we actually have from the Moabite records that the steely Moabite is essentially a very similar understanding that the Moabites have about god uh their god chamash that the Israelites have about Yahweh, so essentially the Moabites, the reason why the Moabites had been devastated by the Israelites and lost a war, etc., is because Khaimash was punishing them for not worshiping him properly, so it's the same thing that happens to the Israelites when they don't worship Yahweh or when they bring in foreign gods, the Moabites have the same understanding, they just have their own different national god, so the Monotheism develops and when we get to the last sections of the book of Isaiah, the parts that are not written by the ancient first temple of Isaiah, but rather written by post-exilic people writing in the Persian period writing in the name of Isaiah pretending to be Isaiah.

Now they have a fully developed sense of monotheism, so it says in Isaiah. 44 Thus says Yahweh the king of Israel and his redeemer the lord of hosts I am the first and I am the last besides me there is no god is there any god besides me? there is no other rock I don't know any so when you get to monotheism the only god, in other words all the other gods are idols, now your provincialism becomes problematic, so if there is only one distinct people chosen by god, then suddenly you're saying, well, the Philistines, the Ammonites, the Moabites, everyone else, they're all people who have been rejected by the only god, so we're the only people on earth with access to god, that's one way which you can follow this kind of parochialism if, however, you begin to change your conception of how you understand god. from being a god of your national nation to the universal god who has chosen only your nation, so I just want you to know, make a little graph here or whatever of how all this kind of stuff fits together, you know. god among gods or the only universal god, whether he has a limited application or a universal application, whether he is only the god of one nation or whether he is the god of the entire universe or whether god is the god, should not say that he, uh, no is a no. a gender here, so that's the wrong pronoun to use or should I use it, okay, so here we go, so if you have a limited application of a god among gods, in other words, a national god, but there are other national gods who are like me. say monolatry or henotheism if you have um, you know like a god among gods, but there's kind of a universal application.

I call it syncretic polytheism, so it's a little complicated to say. All these words are correct techniques, but anyway, polytheism in others. words, you are believing that there are many gods, you know henotheism and monality, you also believe that there are many gods, but you only worship the one in syncretic polytheism, you say well, as we look at our pantheon, we see that there are all of these. gods we have one main father god you know we call him amon but you guys call him zeus and the romans call him jupiter but we really understand that all those gods are actually the same god and we just know that we know him or you know in that case of him, you know, we know, we know the god Venus and you know her as Aphrodite, etc., Athena and Minerva, and it is understood that they are different interpretations of the same universal god, so I.

I'm saying you know polytheism, but it is syncretic in the same sense that there is syncretism between different polytheistic traditions, so it is a god among gods, but the application implies it is universal again if there is a universal god who only chooses one people. so you have a kind of chauvinistic monotheism and I'm not suggesting here that even that's what Judaism has because I actually think that most Jews are certainly reformed Jews who understand that god is the god of all people, but they have their own particular and unique tradition and so on in terms of their relationship with god, but it's not that god doesn't care about other people or anything like that in the earliest period, the first temple period, um, the second temple period, when this starts.

To elaborate, some of the writers have a kind of chauvinistic monotheism, but anyway, that doesn't always last, sometimes people think they are the only chosen people and they are the only true church that has ever been. certainly part of our tradition before we got past that as a church and finally you have a universal god and you have a god for everyone, that's kind of a universal monotheism, so that's my matrix here on how you can understand God and understand the relationship. of God with people, so in the universal conception of God you know that you can still have a people with a different tradition, but all the other people have their own divine ways, in other words, the Philistines, the Ammonites, the Moabites, all the others can also be from God. people, it's just you, it doesn't mean that you, it doesn't mean that your tradition is not important or valid, it just means that other people also have their own valid past, there are multiple paths to the divine, if you, in this conception, it's okay . here is a Judeo-Christian interpretation of the early scriptures, so all Jews, although the Jews and early Christians in the first century CE had come to see their god as universal, much of the scriptures were written by authors with a much more primitive perspective, for example.

In Genesis, God walks through Eden and doesn't even know where Adam and Eve are hiding, blows with his nostrils, closes Noah's ark with his hands, in other words, this is a problem, so if God wanders around there saying where are you? Isn't God omniscient? Does God already know the answers? Why does God ask those kinds of questions? If God is incorporeal. God is God. He is all spirit and no one has seen God. How does God seem to blow with his nostrils or with his hands? to be much more primitive, uh, mythological, almost like stories about Zeus, a kind of um uh, representation of God in some of these parts of the Bible, but Philo of Alexandria, who we mentioned, is now very clear on how to read this With respect to this part of genesis, Philo warns us to quote now the expression insufflated, which is equivalent to inspiring or giving life to inanimate things, so he warns us to be careful that we never fill ourselves with such absurdity as thinking that God uses the organs of the mouth or the nose for the purposes of breathing into anything because god is not only devoid of qualities but also does not have the form of a man and the use of these words shows some more secret mystery of nature, so in other words, he does not You're, you shouldn't take these kinds of things literally and this is already like, as I say, a Jewish theologian making this very strong argument in the first century CE, so this is just a little bit later, contemporary of Jesus.

Okay, early Christian writers expressed a similar caution, so the origin of Alexandria in the second and third centuries and Augustine in the third and fourth sorry, in the fourth and fifth centuries they interpreted uh um the scriptures in a similar way. to how philo did it, so augustine, since we have talked about precautions against limited readings and affirms that beyond the literal, which is the lowest way of reading the Scriptures, the Scriptures must be read allegorically, topologically, that is, morally and anagogically, etc., we've talked about how, um, precisely this kind of when we talk about the kind of history of Scripture a couple of times in our lectures what kind of modern um you know, reading it is like a history book or something like that is just a completely new and strange way of doing this uh because in the past people didn't have a developed sense of history like we do now that academic history has developed well, so the modern focus on the Bible and literal reading, in a Protestant way, focus on the Bible as the only source of authority along with its translation into vernacular languages ​​and its dissemination. with the invention of the printing press, biblical interpretation moved from the hands of experts into the hands of uninformed laymen and created a new focus essentially on literalism, so I just want to summarize the second part of the lecture on understanding God.

From the Scriptures, you know, while Catholics created modern representations of God the Father that later inspired us, Protestants destroyed religious works of art to prevent astral idolatry; However, from my perspective, Protestants were creating a new literary idol of their own by reading. the bible as if it were literal and historical, which it is not, um, let's talk about the third thing, how god has been defined theologically, so I don't have a picture of this god, you can't represent god, I don't know. can represent god, um, so, Keep this blank for that purpose, so there's a modern dead end that I say has been fully explored.

This is the search for God in spaces, so in ancient times people did not know the difference between how and causality, so we do. I don't have any great explanations for why you know that various natural processes occur and so on, and there was no effective distinction made between, as I was saying, death or rivers or lightning or any kind of thing like that between that and the actions of the gods. , that is why, as I say, ancient people, it is absurd not to believe in the god, since all those things are interconnected as natural and divine, but in modern times, more and more natural processes have been adequately explained, it is a possibility.

What people have is that God is still doing some kind of something, let's say, something supernatural that can't be explained yet, and so, as more and more of the natural world is explained, the part that recedes, the part that It is not explained. understandable it is called the spaces and that is why people look for god in the spaces, that is what this strategy is when the natural philosopher benjamin franklin demonstrated the effectiveness of the lightning rod in 1749 before this lightning struck the buildings and burned them very badly. frequency now, suddenly With this invention that attracts lightning and removes the load from the building, some contemporary Christians complained that this was frustrating the will of God, in other words, God wants to destroy your building and now you are stopping him with this invention, so the complaint is. the beginning of this long intellectual dead end, in my opinion, the path of reserving God as an explanation for inexplicable natural phenomena, so this modern distinction between natural and supernatural, when much less was understood about the natural world, as I say , modern people began to believe that some things happened supernaturally supernatural is a modern word it didn't really exist in ancient times um people continue to love the supernatural they love magic that's why you know baby baby yoda people love that baby yoda can do magic well and wonder superheroes can do magic and everyone You know, anyway, magic is very popular and remains very popular.

However, as more and more natural processes are understood, the modern proposition that certain things occur supernaturally seems to have less and less merit, hence the supernatural intervention of God and the problem of evil. The idea that a lightning rod could thwart the will of an omnipotent god you know makes no sense theologically. That's not when you thank God for saving your home from a hurricane, if you mean that God is directing the phenomenon, what is the implication for everyone then? the people whose homes were destroyed in that same hurricane or whose lives were lost so this is a question for theology this is a question for the problem of evil rather than one for the natural sciences so historically um the god like when you say there are A word has not been a fixed idea whose existence was in doubt, but rather the word God was always a variable that needed definition, that's only when you look at it and see the different ways people understand it, each individual person.

They probably don't think of God as a variable, they think they have a definition and that's the right definition, but if you take it as a combination you realize now that they're using the same word but they mean different things, so we. We've talked about several of these, we had a whole lecture on Anselm of Canterbury, one of the most important thinkers of the early Middle Ages. Over time, many thinkers have proposed many definitions of God, so Boethius in Augustine followed the Neoplatonists and argued that God was transcendent goodness for goodness' sake. for itself transcendent love for love itself let's talk about that we will have a full lecture next week on plato plato and christianity and platonism anselm of canterbury uh defines god like this then nothing greater can be conceived uh we definitely had all a lecture on that too, so, following Aristotle, Aquinas argued that god is the unmoved mover and ultimate cause of existence, Descartes said that God is notnecessarily the existing supreme perfection.

Spinoza defined God as a singular, self-sufficient substance that he ultimately took. as a synonym for nature, in other words, there is not a single idea here about what the word god means and how we understand what is god and fair for everyone in terms of personal contemplation on these kinds of things, I think in some ways even this The whole kind of modern idea of ​​Do you believe in God or not? You do not believe in God. I think it's a question that's kind of missing um, it's meant to be a more important question than I think because I think once we're taught, when we talk about that question, we're missing bigger questions that underlie that or and that are more universal to us, so everyone has beliefs, our conscious beliefs may differ from our own. deeply held beliefs, so we can profess to believe in all sorts of different things, do we really believe those things? a person says: I think your deeply held beliefs can sometimes be observed in terms of what a person actually does, so a person can believe that they are a very, very charitable person and they can believe that about themselves and say that about themselves, but they might actually be quite self-centered and their actions may illustrate that they are actually quite self-centered and not particularly charitable.

A person may also believe that he is a nihilist. He may profess that nothing has meaning eh that there is no inherent truth. or anything like that, everything is um, everything is coincidence, etc., their actions, however, are often shown and some and some people who are professed nihilists actually show that they act out of love, say for their children, their friends or their family, and what that might imply is that there is something inside, a deeply held belief, maybe that deserves a little introspection, so I think we can all do well. give ourselves permission to do some open exploration, some introspection to discover our deeply held beliefs, what we do, why we do the things we do, why we understand, how we understand the meaning, etc., of our lives, as well as learning about and experiencing philosophical ideas and traditions and other spiritual practices, etc., rather than just automatically saying well what I've made, this decision, the thinking is done, I don't believe in all that or any openness to thinking about things in different ways.

I think that's always a useful thing, so in some I'm going to suggest anyway that the word god has historically been a variable and ultimately not definable because god is going to be beyond human conception as part of the correct definition or perhaps part of a potential definition, although we have modern images of god, modern literalist literary representations of god, and modern ideas about the supernatural, none of these encompass the idea of ​​god over time, you know, just during the time period I just dove into here. To the extent that we insist on any of these, we are becoming idols, making for ourselves the idols that iconoclasts have warned against for millennia.

The word God is a variable whose definition is approached by humans through continuous theological exploration, open-minded and all. of my images here have only distracted us from that as instead we are imagining atlantis morissette or george burns or essentially jupiter's zoo or zeus and a white guy with a white beard etc. so that will end the story for us formal presentation like me. Bring me a glass of water here, as always, Leandro will start writing down your questions and sending them to me, and we also have some discussion questions that you might think about and I'll ask you, so the first one is What makes the devil Be a compelling character in literature and media?

Did you like the lecture on the biography of the devil better than this lecture on the biography of God? Well, that's number one and two if the word God is a variable like I'm saying that. describes competing and evolving definitions, how can you say instead of um? So instead of just inheriting a preconceived idea, let's say you have this image of God that you got in Sunday school from reading the Bible literally, literally, and you went to college and you thought I don't believe in that or whatever, like this that instead of that, um, instead of that inherited conception, if instead you step back and just say, okay, let's take that word as a variable, how would you define that term if you were open?

To all these different things, I listed a bunch of different people, from Descartes to Spinoza to Anselm Aquinas, etc., and then number three, how do your professed beliefs about the meaning of life compare to your actions? That other thing I was talking about. It may not take a little introspection to do that, so I'll let you think about that and then we'll watch Ethel Andrew take some of the questions for me. Winston Barkes asked if God exists, is it reasonable for God? to stagger towards the true god god I um well maybe maybe not uh so there would be different ways that we would understand what I can say and let's say that a traditional Christian context is uh it would be that god and we We're talking here then about god the creator in contrast to god the spirit or god the logos christ god the creator is unknowable and unsealable but god does reveal the self of god in the christian understanding uh through you know, let's say sometimes through the glory of god through the logos of god, that is, through the true spirit of god, in other words, god is revealed through the persons of uh the spirit and of Christ in the Christian conception and so how is that revealed? let's say through creation correctly and so on, as we look around the universe as we perceive the universe as we look at ourselves as we reason as we think and experience as we have existence um those are in a traditional sense revelation of the creator um anyway in how Christians understand God revealing himself, um, it wouldn't be like God going pop and appearing like George Burns or something, because God is not like George Burns in that, in that conception, um, uh, Nadev , Nadev Kravitz says, um, why is the pre-incarnate Christ depicted? in adult form, yes, well, people have a lot of trouble representing, um, yes, pre-existence and, in fact, post-existence, so the reality, I mean the theological, not the reality, the theological conception of another life, such as the afterlife or the preexistence, is an is. meant to be totally foreign and inconceivable to what this life would be like, so in reality it's not really imaginable, so why is it like that?

Why is Christ represented preincarnate in adult form? I mean the inability of artists to and and we have to be imaginative, so it's hard to know what you want, to know what you want as an artist, what you want Christ to look like and then you make Christ that way, actually for a long time. and until the middle ages. They are actually very bad at portraying um child victims and they just choose when they have Madonna and Baby Jesus. It's often like a little adult Christ, so it's even like the Baby Christ is like a little adult Christ and so on. in um, then I would say that there is simply an inability of the artist to try to show something that would be something impossible to represent, so um and such and that is therefore, it is an artistic tradition, says Wanda Mercer in one of my courses graduate of religion in the burned region in response to the question of the gender of god I was of the opinion that god was a pretender and that god the father was the description of man and for me there is one who was created before all and I chose to identify this supreme like god so yeah, we have a tradition in English um in the past where the neutral pronoun and the masculine pronoun are both he and so it's been a problem, it's been part of the reason why um um society has been so sexist. over time uh but um Christian theologians uh and they actually also like to go back to Philo of Alexandria um and make it very, very clear that god uh god is not limited to being male god uh transcends gender in exactly the same way that God transcends everything and, therefore, it is not like that, even in the Genesis story when it says that in the image of God he created, then, man and woman, the idea of ​​that in the traditional interpretation is that both man and woman are are. in the image of God, who is, which therefore includes man and woman and everything else, in other words, gender is God's gender, transcends, you know, as binary and also let's say individual male gender for sure , uh and so I try to never do it, I mean, I think we could also if we're going to use pronouns um because god is such a short word that we can try to say the word god every time and not use a pronoun, but you could also say They, certainly, even the word for god in Hebrew elohim is uh uh plural.

You could also say god, they and there, since they and them are becoming our usual neutral uh singular pronoun in English now uh and I try to avoid saying he if I can and it better not be better. It actually helps if you don't imagine God as the father, if you imagine God as the father or even sometimes imagine God as the heavenly mother, which is totally within the Christian conception, um, uh. So you're not going to obsess over the genre, so Mike says that the depiction of the heavenly hand is somehow related to the hand and the story of the writing on the wall in the book of Daniel, I think so, um, and so, um, I'm trying to think if, you know, there's also, like I say, there's the um, there's the god using the hand to close the ark, you know, etc., so there's an expression, you know, by the hand of God, you know and So, um, uh, and then it was a way of imagining that you know the creator through creation, the work of God, and then, um, so, I think that's where that tradition comes from, uh, and As I say, that had been kind.

You know, it's the same way that initially in Buddhism the idea of ​​the Buddha was that the Buddha had transcended and was gone, so the original depictions of the Buddha are not like the ones we see now, where you got this. guy sitting in his lotus position, where you know, and so on, the initial depictions were just traces because he left, you know, and only later, um, did they start making sort of Greek-influenced statues, etc., which We know, know and love the Buddha today, so the same kind of evolution has occurred. So Dionysus Infinitum says that belief in God, theism, deism, is born from upbringing or is innately connected to our human nature and the native Kratovitz asks why we have found it so important. belief in god, what that has meant over time, so I think this focus on belief in god is actually a modern thing, as opposed to where in the past we had, you know, kind of an open framework of how we understand the universe to function how we understand that there is purpose and order and meaning and how we have reason, reason, etc., and theologically, people will make arguments like these when Aquinas is making his difference, we're going to talk about this, in a future lecture, when Aquinas is doing his different kinds of proofs of God, he'll say something like proofs of causality, every single thing that happened happens, you know for a cause and then something caused that cause and something. caused that and so on and so on and that goes back to some point or rather he argues about something that must be the first cause and then and then he just says after he gets to that first cause and he says and everyone calls that god, you know, and In other words, but as I say, if that's the case, if he says that the first cause in all causality is what everyone calls god, that's a different definition of god than some guy walking through the Garden of Eden. with hands and so on, what is the mythological portrait that exists in Judeo-Christian mythology, you know, theology is very different, when the main theologians like Thomas Aquinas define it in the same way, Anselm's definition, that which nothing. something bigger can be conceived, like this, like this, I think this modern idea that has happened when people made, let's say, an image of God, it's painted in the Sistine Chapel, etc., they have this idea as a kind of warm-up.

Image that had existed of Zeus, a white guy with a white beard, now he has more clothes and stuff, but anyway, and then they make that image, that's when we become obsessed. You have to believe in God, since you have made this limited image. Slash Idol. of what god is defined to mean, so I don't necessarily think it has to be connected to everyone, or that the believing part is as important over time, I think we do it as a um, as people want. so you know we want to find meaning and we search for meaning and we want to believe in meaning and I think our deeply held opinions, as I say, show that we have values ​​and we act on the beliefs that we have. maybe we're not even aware that they're not our professed beliefs and so on uh and so yeah uh you know in terms of um uh in terms of psychology and so on there's uh in evolutionary psychology, you know particularly what's sometimes called areligious brain um that may be a byproduct of evolution, I don't know, you know, I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, but we can investigate that, you know, at a future conference and think about it a little more, so Mike says, where there's the image of the holy spirit as a dove comes from other versions, so yeah, we have pretty easy representations of Christ, you know, um, we've talked about that in the historical Jesus lectures and so on where those images come from. of the image of god, you know, it's more recent as we've seen god the father in terms of the holy spirit as a dove that comes from the synoptic gospel, so this comes from mark uh as the source of that story.

That is, during the baptism of Jesus, this is like for Christians the primary Trinitarian moments, because you have Christ who is there being baptized, you have the creator, the father, in heaven, you know when I hear the voice from heaven saying this is uh um my beloved son uh uh in whom I am very pleased and so from time to time you have the uh spirit descending in the form of a dove and so on because the holy spirit as a spirit is very It is difficult to represent the fact that there is an image there, in other words, a form of dove, that's where the idea of ​​the holy spirit as a dove comes from.

I'm not sure if there are other ways to represent the spirit besides a dove, he really understands the dove, it's depicted a lot, so I'll have to look into any other type of depictions, okay, so rona is answering, Wagner is answering some of our questions and the first was why the devil is so much more. comparable in character and Rome says that the devil satan lucifer to me is the enemy of God or perhaps the enemy of Christ, but I think he has been given much more credit than he deserves due to the fact that things happen in the life, okay, so that may be the reason, so the second question was if the word god is a variable that describes competing evolving definitions, how would you define the term?

Then Roane says that God to me is a spirit, not in human form, but when it is said that we are made in the image of God. He thinks that it is our spirit and not our body, okay, very good and then in the third The question I asked was how you profess beliefs about the meaning of life compared to your actions, kind of an introspective question, the answer to that question escapes me, he says. I'm still trying to figure that out, yeah, that's a tough question because we really have to do some, I think, deep thinking and introspection, um, to really start to access that.

Stephanie ceraci says, oh, she's answering the same questions, so she says who the devil is. compelling because the devil is a good container for our fears and one that we can overcome in literature and media, so yeah, um, yeah, the idea is that they had in 30 rock uh characters like where God, um, was really The bad thing was that they were a pretend NBC TV show that NBC was making while the network was failing, where God becomes like a cop's partner and everything he does doesn't make any sense because God doesn't make sense anymore. You know, how do you know why God isn't learning?

So God, you know that you are omnipotent and already know everything, etc., etc., it's just not good literature, it's impossible, it's like trying to write, um, not me. I don't know that he's a very difficult character to write, while the devil is a fallen angel, the devil has motives that are apparently understandable and then, as you say, fear sells, just the way we are, the way we are, you. I know it's good literature to do that, um, so in your definition of how you define the term God, you say that you try not to define the term, which is always a good strategy and therefore a way to avoid the idolatry. but then she says I lean towards the definition of the first cause we were talking about in Aquinas and then three in terms of his professed beliefs. "I'm sorry for her deeply held beliefs that maybe she can see based on her actions," she says.

I wonder that constantly and sometimes the first and the former inform the second and sometimes the latter informs the first, so sometimes you know this kind of understanding between, as you say, your professed beliefs, your deeply held beliefs, your actions, etc sometimes they inform each other thanks stephanie um brando says the devil has always been more scheming since milton um i agree with you some in milton the devil says uh you know what's better uh it's better to reign and howl than to serve in heaven and you know which for a lot of people, you know that's a compelling argument for freedom, etc., if you're going to be, you know, Milton's conception of heaven is not as exciting or as grand as that and the devil again is a compelling character in that literature, yeah, nadev kravitz says why atheism has been so rare in the past and why it's more common now, so I think it's more common now because, like I say, in modern times. people, Christians, especially atheism, atheism has evolved in the West from Protestantism, it is functionally an elaboration of Protestantism and, in fact, although atheists do not believe it historically, it is effectively a sect of Protestantism, Protestants already They were eliminating things, atheism is just eliminating.

More things, atheism begins as an anticlerical movement and that's why people are upset because the clerics in early modern times had all kinds of control over ideas and so on, they are creating more and more hardened and fixed images of God or definitions and understandings of God that are frankly false and then by making those images and making those statements and so on uh the clerics and controlling the universities and controlling um having control of it, there is a group of intellectuals who say look, so we are not going to play that game I'm no longer going to, I'm no longer going to be part of a conversation in which each of us redefines this term so that we understand it based on our new understanding, you're insisting that it's this dead definition, uh, the one that I seeing is wrong and does not exist, so now we are going to reject this open research to redefine the term in the future, so I think it is a modern product of the West that is of social origin. uh uh and in terms of being weird in the past, I mean again it didn't have any meaning in the past, so in the present there's a uh like I say, an increasingly fixed and um idolatrous idea of ​​what the word is.

God. means uh, which is false, a false conception, um, and instead of rejecting that false conception, um, uh, what happened is people just said we're not even, we're rejecting the concept, so Matt Metcoff says, um, in response to that question. about how your deeply held beliefs and actions, he says that my beliefs are not static and seem to evolve over time and this is also true for my understanding of the meaning of life, therefore my motivations and active actions also seem be changing over time and I think it's a good idea and I think it should be true for all of us.

I think you know when we think. So I think there's a big difference between, say, a set of professed beliefs, whether that we might have if we're members of a formal religion that has a creed and our actual understanding or we're learning and feelings about the meaning of life and its motivations, etc., he's alive and stuff. they are changing because life is change and therefore in many cases your actual beliefs are perhaps deviating even further from any professed creed you may have and you might or might think you have something, says Daryl Scott in my head I keep answering the same question in my head I can't help but be some kind of neolist so nothing has meaning but my heart won't let me live like that so I probably don't act in a particularly consistent way very well, that's why we do the right thing. introspection and that's what, and then, you know, I mean, coherence is also something that one has to value or not, and then, uh, and that's why you have to do it again, it's its coherence and important value for you uh you have to do some kind of introspection to decide that um ruth Goldstrom says for her um the same question this is a popular question I'm glad I asked it she says I'm dating people who profess to be Christians and would have values ​​to be considered and concerned about others, but that they refused to wear a mask and that they would be considered the way to get through the pandemic, yes, so, yes, so in theory, Christianity is a very outward-looking thing that I'm trying to make you to others, I mean, actually, that's in many religions it's the golden rule, but there have been a lot of people who are focusing on themselves in this, instead of, you know, thinking about their Companions, you know. , and this pandemic is sad because it's a time where you can grow together and you can come together as people and feel stronger as a result of it or it's a time where you can fracture and divide and, unfortunately, um. uh in many of our communities, the latter seemed to have happened in this particular crisis. um stephanie says stephanie serracy says one of my favorite sayings is an old Franciscan saying that your only impediment to God is your concept of God, yeah, great, I like that.

I was thinking of another saying, but I like you to say it better anyway, so we'll leave it at that and that's the last word. So, uh, okay, Andrew, thank you very much. I want to thank everyone who joined us tonight for another great discussion. I really appreciate it. We are going to talk next week about Plato in Christianity and it will be exciting. We'll get back to it. It's going to be based on some of the things we've talked about tonight, oh, you've got to change.