March 2, 2025

Why does God allow tragedy?

God knows that love is dangerous.

In 1991, a vibrant eleven-year-old named Rossi was rehearsing for his school play in Virginia Beach. More spirited than prudent, he decided to work his way across the support beam that hung twenty feet above the stage. He fell and landed on his head. They rushed him to the hospital, and his community prayed, and his doctors struggled, but on the third day, Rossi died.

Many members of the boy’s church believed that Rossi’s death was the will of God, and they wondered how God could let this beautiful boy die. They assumed that God is controlling, and they couldn’t imagine an uncontrolling God. Stung by their loss and heartsick for Rossi’s family, they were tempted to walk away from faith.

But their minister disagreed with them about the nature of God. He thought that Rossi’s death was a tragic accident, over which God weeps with us. He believed that that tragedy was caused by the physical laws of the universe, those laws that govern the cosmos and render it harmonious. According to this minister, the purpose of those inescapable laws is the creation of freedom, consequence, and community.

The physical laws of the universe are unbreakable to create a shared stage upon which we act.

Physical law creates freedom because, within a cosmic order, we can (partially) anticipate the outcome of our actions, so that it matters what we do. Chaos would assign a random outcome to any action we took and deny significance to our activity. But physical law creates one common backdrop against which all persons act out the cosmic drama. Without this cosmic reliability, reason could not be rational, virtue would have no virtuous outcome, and chaos would deny consequence. Without the physical laws of the universe there could be no individual freedom or functioning community.

Some philosophers propose that the universe is unreal, an illusion to be overcome. But faith trusts that physical law governs reality, not an illusion. We experience a real universe sustained by a real God to be experienced by real persons. Because all is real, all is important. We cannot dismiss the suffering and injustice in our world as inconsequential. We must take upon ourselves the concreteness of our lives, both individual and social, and work to improve them.

Our interpretation of reality may distort it, projecting our own illusions and addictions onto its willing screen. But these too can be cleansed, partially and effortfully, in community and over time. Reality gives us a truth to approach, just as careful observation, different perspectives, and reasoned analysis grant us the means to approach it.

Escapist fantasies are great—as escapist fantasies.

Yet, if physical law is so essential to our well-being, then why do we fantasize about escaping it? Why do we thirst for a magical universe in which we—the clairvoyant, time traveler, individual superhero, or powerful wizard—bear greater power than the actual universe would ever afford us?

Certainly, we love stories and the occasional escape. But such thirst can also suggest our own selfish desire to be unbound by that which binds us all. We want to break the divine law that provides for our common good. We want to rule as monarch rather than cooperate as partner.

Or maybe we want the laws to bend, just a little, just this once, to save the life of a beautiful eleven-year-old boy. Rossi’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Clement A. Sydnor III, my father, wrote:



Order is the precondition for harmonious relationality, be it of the divine cosmos or human community. It is a gift from God, even when it allows tragedy.

Although we may buck against our cosmic constraints, physical laws are not a prison of predictability. They make any activity consequential, hence meaningful, and free us from the randomness that would make true relationship impossible. The will to power may crave freedom from the equalizing rule, and compassion may even want to bend the law on occasion, but (in the end) love accepts the divine order as the blessing it is.

Moral law is breakable to allow human freedom.

In addition to unbreakable physical law, Abba (our creating and sustaining God) has also infused the universe with breakable moral law. Moral law is that manner of conduct that grants us our greatest fulfillment, both as individuals and societies.

The moral law is love. Christ came to give us abundant life (John 10:10). If we trust his words, then we realize that the purpose of the moral law is not to restrict our actions but to increase our vitality. We can only flourish together. As individuals, we come to the fullness of life through love; as communities, our joy increases as the cosmos evolves toward the divine pattern within it.

Yet, unlike natural law, the moral law is entirely breakable. Instead of loving God or neighbor, we can hate both. Indeed, we can hurt both. We can choose evil. The inviolability of physical law makes our choices consequential, while the violability of moral law makes them free. If the moral law was unbreakable, then we would be puppets, but God has no desire to be a puppeteer. The persons within the Trinity act freely and consequentially toward one another, as do we, who are made in the image of God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 89-91)

For further reading, please see:

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love After Abuse, Tragedy, and Other Evils. Grasmere, Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2019.

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.

February 17, 2025

God has made the universe more beautiful than necessary--for you

(Please note: In this blog I will refer to God the Creator as Abba, Aramaic for “father” or “dad,” per the recommendation of Jesus and St. Paul.)

Abba embeds beauty within the universe.

In previous blogs, we have discussed the relational nature of the universe, and the reliance of relationality upon time for its expression. The universe does not consist of separate objects that bounce off each other on occasion; the universe consists of interrelated synergies that derive their being from one another. This cosmic interrelatedness derives from the Trinity’s interrelated nature.

We will now explore a peak experience of relationship, the experience of beauty. In my book, The Great Open Dance, I discuss beauty while discussing the cosmos (Chapter Three), before discussing humankind (Chapter Four). This placement is an assertion. If we discuss beauty when discussing human experience, then we implicitly assert that beauty arises from our perception of the universe and does not preexist that perception. Beauty would have no being independent of us.

But if we discuss beauty before we discuss humanity, then we implicitly assert that beauty preexists us in the universe and was always there, waiting to be perceived. The Bible suggests that beauty, as an enjoyable quality of the universe, preexists us.

In the first chapter of Genesis, after each day of work but before the creation of humankind, Abba declares the result “good” (Hebrew: tov). Abba already enjoys the cosmos, even before humans join it. Yet, after Abba creates humans, Abba declares the universe “very good” (Hebrew: tov meod), because now humans can join Abba in that enjoyment. We can see the goodness that Abba sees, share that experience with one another, and praise Abba “in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 29:2b KJV).

But if the beauty of the cosmos is a gift, why is anything “achingly beautiful”? This experience is so common that writing programs identify “achingly beautiful” as a cliché. Why isn’t the experience of beauty an unalloyed pleasure?

Sin is separation—from God, one another, and the cosmos. Beauty is salt in that wound because beauty reminds us of our separation. The universe and its inhabitants are emanations of Abba, unique expressions of the divine nature. Just as the Sun produces light and heat, so Abba produces spirit and matter.

Abba created us for awareness of this primordial unity, but our capacity to perceive it has been lost, and our intuition tells us that we lost it. When we ache for beauty, we are aching for reunion. We sense the infinite within the finite and yearn for what we cannot fully receive.

Sometimes, in a state of agitation, we may want to possess beauty for ourselves. But we cannot extract anything from everything because it is all of a piece. Like clouds reflected in a stream, the object of desire cannot be extricated from its environs and placed within the sole possession of the self. We will come back empty handed and frustrated until we learn to revel in beauty, without possessiveness.

Cosmic evolution fosters the experience of beauty.

Among the three persons of the Trinity, Christ is Truth, Spirit is Wisdom, and Abba is Law. Although this may seem a restrictive designation for Abba, those who have known lawlessness best know the blessing of law. The opposite of law is chaos, and the correlate of law is cosmos.

Abba, as the Architect of cosmos, has blessed the universe with physical laws that govern the interaction of mass, energy, space, and time. Discerning these physical laws is like discerning the rules of a game that we are watching people play. We can’t see the rules themselves, but we see that the game is ordered, we infer the rules that provide that order, and we thank the Author of those rules.

In the human quest for understanding, the natural sciences seek to understand these physical laws. Over time, scientists have developed numerous symbol systems by which to analyze them—chemical notation, nuclear notation, gene nomenclature, mathematical physics, etc. Faith also calls us to study natural law, for within the cosmic order we encounter the mind of Abba. Hence, there should be no conflict between science and faith. They are twin aspects of one underlying quest for knowledge.

The physical laws of the universe foster increasing complexity through time. According to physicists, the process of cosmic evolution began with the Big Bang, when an extremely dense bundle of energy suddenly expanded, producing space, time, and the four fundamental forces of the universe with it.

After 370,000 years, the universe was homogeneous, a diffuse cloud of hydrogen with some helium and traces of lithium. This universe would have been quite boring, unless you really, really loved hydrogen. Fortunately, this pervasive simplicity possessed a disposition to complexity, an innate tendency to become more differentiated through time.

Stellar evolution began when gravity condensed the hydrogen, helium, and lithium into stars. The gravitational pressure of those stars fused the hydrogen, sequentially, into helium, carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium, etc., culminating in iron. Once iron was formed, stars of a certain mass collapsed, exploding as supernovas.

These explosions produced (most of) the periodic table of elements, which began to combine in complex ways, initiating chemical evolution.

On Earth, about 3.5 billion years ago, some of these chemicals began to adapt to their environments, utilize energy for growth, and replicate themselves. Life appeared, and the process of biological evolution began.

Living organisms developed increasingly sophisticated ways of sensing their environment, becoming responsive to hot and cold, light and dark, safety and danger, prey and predator. Eventually, the process of neurological evolution produced an expansive knowledge of the environment.

But something surprising happened when organisms became aware, not only of their environment, but of themselves. Even more mysteriously, at the height of neurological evolution, organisms became aware of their awareness of themselves. The cosmic evolution that began from a unitary seed of hyper-concentrated energy has resulted in living beings who can contemplate their own existence, discern the origins of the universe, and commemorate the processes that brought them into being. Cosmic evolution has resulted in something radically new. Cosmic evolution has resulted in us.

Through emergence, the whole is other than the sum of the parts.

Paradoxically, in a universe that tends to disorder, complexity has emerged from simplicity. The concept of emergence arose in the late nineteenth century. Emergence argues that several things can combine to produce a new thing that is qualitatively different from its constituent parts. The classic example is water. Pure hydrogen at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a flammable gas. Pure oxygen at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a flammable gas. But if you combine them into their most stable form, you get water, which at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a nonflammable liquid. We breathe oxygen, burn hydrogen, and drink water.

Water cannot be properly understood as the sum of oxygen and hydrogen because the properties of water are so different from those of oxygen and hydrogen. Combination is not addition; combination is transformation. For this reason, to understand water you must study water itself. Anyone trying to study water by studying oxygen and hydrogen separately, then predicting the properties of their union, would fail. Emergence is unpredictable because emergence is truly new. The whole is not only greater than the sum of the parts; the whole is other than the sum of the parts.
The human mind is an emergent property of matter. As such, it perceives beauty, which is an emergent property of the universe. At this dizzying height of evolutionary experience, a door opens into “ecstasy” or ex stasis: stepping “outside oneself ” into the teeming expanse of the cosmos. Swept into the rapture of this cosmic perspective, we gain a glimpse into the mind of Abba the Artist, into their overwhelming intelligence and excruciating patience. Most importantly, we gain a glimpse into their startling generosity, which has made the universe more beautiful than necessary—for us. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 87-89)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Baylis, C. A. “The Philosophic Functions of Emergence.” Philosophical Review 38 (1929) 372–84.

Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Basic, 2005.

February 7, 2025

Time is better than eternity (if we define eternity as timelessness)

God mediates all blessings through time.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity celebrates one of the most basic aspects of human existence: becoming through time. As temporal (timeful) beings, we will find fulfillment only in being as becoming. We will find fulfillment only if we celebrate time as a blessing.

Time is a blessing because time allows change. Without change nothing new could arise and nothing old could cease. We could not elicit potential, act with consequence, create with inspiration, or develop beyond our current self. We could not be moral, self-surpassing beings, nor could we be moral, self-surpassing societies. Without change, we could never increase.

We may fear time, because within time all things eventually wither and die: “The grass withers and the flower wilts when the breath of YHWH blows upon them. How the people are like grass!” (Isaiah 40 ). We find ourselves in a universe of growth and decay, birth and death, creation and destruction, in which our personal demise—and that of everyone we love—is assured.

Our tendency to fixate on decay, decline, and death tricks us into a thirst for changelessness, which we hallow as timeless eternity. We then place God there, beyond the destruction to which we are subject. But to assert that divinity lies beyond change is to reject timeful creation and, by implication, its Creator.

The solution lies in recognizing the blessedness of existence within time. Human existence is, by divine design, the unity of time with being. God made us in God’s own image, for loving self-donation expressed as speaking, listening, weeping, laughter, helpfulness, and embrace.

These divine blessings can take place only within the flow of time. Since we are love, we are time.

Love through time allows plurality to become unity. For the sake of simplicity, let us consider the example of a mechanical engine. An engine is composed of interrelated parts creating a whole. The parts unite to perform one function. None of them could perform this function on its own. Separated, they are inert chunks of metal unworthy of any common designation. Assembled, they become a motor with the potential to propel itself. But the interrelatedness of the parts, their creation of the whole, and the successful performance of their function can manifest only through changing relations—through time. Separate parts that move in coordination through time are many things operating harmoniously as one thing. They are both many and one, simultaneously.

Since things relate to one another by changing in relationship to one another, changelessness is unrelatedness. Any thing that does not change must be isolated. From the perspective of our interconnected universe, a separate thing is no thing since it rests outside the churning, relational nexus that grants reality its being.

Time grants our activity consequence.

Within time nothing is permanent and all things are changeable, so all activity is consequential. The past need not determine the future, which is free.

In a dynamic universe sustained by a timeful God, our creativity, responsibility, and promise are vast. Indeed, impermanence grants freedom because it denies any unchanging essence. If everything is related to everything else, and everything is continually changing, then nothing has a permanent nature. The potential within our timeful, ever increasing God becomes the potential within our timeful, ever increasing universe, such that Jesus declares, “With God, all things are possible” (Mark 10:27 KJV).

Our ascription of permanence to things, which Buddhists consider the main source of our suffering, is caused by the pace at which we experience time. In our own life, for example, we may live near a boulder that seems unchanging. But if we were to accelerate time, then all illusion of permanence would vanish. From the Big Bang to the end of the universe, however it might end, we would see stars arise and cease, galaxies form and collide, elements created and destroyed. We might even see a boulder turned to sand by wind and rain. In this accelerated perception of the universe, impermanence would be immediately apparent.

Someone might protest that the boulder is permanent from the perspective of one short human lifespan. In a purely physical perspective, an eighty-year life may seem quite brief relative to a ten-million-year-old boulder. But even if the boulder seems permanent, our experience of it will not be. It will be a source of self-esteem when we climb it in childhood, then a source of anxiety when our own children climb it years later. It will be a symbol of solidity on first impression; a symbol of inevitable decay when we notice the winter ice enlarging its fissures.

Wisdom doesn’t cling to permanence.

Human life is littered with these experiences, in which we assign intense value to a thing, then find that value changing. People are elated to have the winning lottery ticket, until Uncle Joe shows up at their door bemoaning his financial state and pleading for help. The aspiring actor pursues fame, until she can’t go to a restaurant without being mobbed. The young soldier seeks glory in combat, then returns home traumatized. The delicious dessert gives us indigestion.

Our evaluation of everything, even the most seemingly desirable things, changes. The Taoists tell a story about our inability to ascribe a firm value to things or events. There was a farmer whose horse, upon whom the farmer was reliant, ran away. His neighbors exclaimed, “What a pity!” But the farmer replied, “We’ll see.” The next day, the horse returned with another horse it had met in the wild, and the neighbors exclaimed, “What a blessing!” But the farmer replied, “We’ll see.” The next day, the farmer’s son was gentling the wild horse when he fell off and broke his leg. His neighbors exclaimed, “What a pity!” But the farmer replied, “We’ll see.” Then an army came through the village conscripting soldiers, but the farmer’s son was safe due to his broken leg. The neighbors exclaimed, “What a blessing!” But the farmer replied, “We’ll see.”

The farmer recognized that the churning flux prevents us from knowing for certain what is good and what is bad. Recognizing this incapacity helps us respond to events calmly. The farmer never ceases to farm, care for his family, or speak with his neighbors. He still acts and prepares for the future, but with wisdom. The impermanent nature of things doesn’t cause him anxiety; it grants him peace.

The universe is the song of God.

We can also reflect on the nature of time by slowing it down until things seem to be unchanging, even the subatomic mesons and hadrons that exist for but a fraction of a nanosecond in our current perception. Still, the astute observer would note the slight changes taking place and the almost imperceptible interrelatedness of all things, and that observer would conclude that everything will change everything else, forever.

The only way to stop this process would be to stop time. In that case, everything would be locked in place. There would be no cause, no effect, no succession of events. In that case, and only in that case, objects would have an unchanging essence, but only because they had no time through which to change each other.

Time grants relationship, while the absence of time imposes separation. For this reason, to ascribe an essence to things is to assert their separation from one another. Essentialism is atomism.

Instead, we are proposing an ultimate reality “understood entirely as activity rather than as substance,” advocates John Thatamanil. As noted in an earlier essay, God is the singer and the universe is the song. Melody needs motion, movement from tone to tone in a rhythm that generates beauty. Melody is constantly becoming, never “being,” never standing still.

Music can’t reside in an eternal timelessness, because without time there is no music. Likewise, the universe itself “becomes” continually; it is divinity singing. And the gifts that we receive within it, like music, are more events than things, more verbs than nouns, something to enjoy, but not something to possess—as is life, as is this moment, as is God. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 82-85)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Barnard, Ian. “Toward a Postmodern Understanding of Separatism.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27, no. 6 (1998) 613–39. DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1998.9979235.

Gunton, Colin E. The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity; The 1992 Bampton Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Katagiri, Dainin. Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time. Boston: Shambhala, 2008.

Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna's Middle Way. Translated by Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura. San Francisco: Wisdom, 2013.

Thatamanil, John. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.

February 2, 2025

God Sings the Universe into Being

God’s creation of the universe is continual, not a one-time event.

As noted in previous posts, God the Trinity prefers cooperation to mere operation. The three divine persons have different functions, which provide them with different experiences and different memories. They are truly unique, truly three while truly one.

One of those functions is creation. Jesus calls God the Creator “Abba,” which translates as “Father” or, more intimately, “Dad”. He claims that the Creator of the universe loves us like a most loving Parent, like a mother loves her suckling child (Isaiah 49:15).

In previous essays, I have referred to the Creator, the member of the Trinity primarily responsible for the existence of the universe, as Sustainer. I have done so because our experience of Abba as the soul of the cosmos, which is the body of Abba, implies ongoing support as well as ancient establishment. Abba doesn’t create the universe and then abandon it to run on its own. Abba’s creation of the universe is ongoing.

Theologians call the belief that Abba sustains the universe at every moment of its being continuous creation. Interpreting Abba as Creator alone runs the risk of deism. Deists believe that God created the universe, much like a clockmaker, then set it on a shelf to run on its own. From this perspective, the universe is divinely established but no longer divinely supported. God grants us our powers of reason and observation to negotiate life, but has more or less walked away. The deists’ God is remote from our concerns and indifferent to our struggles.

In contrast, we are arguing that Abba is more like a singer than a clockmaker. Abba continually sings the universe into being; if the singer stops, then the song stops.

Abba as Sustainer continually loves the universe into being. We experience that love in myriad ways: the beauty of the cosmos, the majesty of its expanse, the grandeur of its design, the intricacy of its details, the delicacy of its formulation, and the mathematical perfection of its physics.

In previous essays, I have argued that God is ever more: ever more joy, ever more peace, ever more abundance. Now, I also argue that God is ever creating: perpetually bringing the cosmos into being. Through trust of the ever-creating ever-more, the moment-by-moment progression of time becomes the grace-by-grace gift of God.

The divine interdependence sustains the cosmic interdependence.

“The universe is God’s self-portrait,” writes Octavia Butler, who interprets our kaleidoscopic cosmos as a revelation of unity-without-uniformity, or what we are calling agapic nondualism. Nothing is separate from anything else, and all differences are related to all other differences, offering them both uniqueness and contrast.

Expressing that openness, all aspects of material reality are effected and affected, originated and influenced, by the rest. In the language of contemporary physics, the universe is not made of solitary objects that bounce off each other; it is made of waves and fields that flow into one another.

Just as God is not God without any one person of the Trinity, nothing in the universe is what it is without the rest of the universe. And just as the persons of the Trinity are neither identical nor separate, but united, so the things of the universe are neither identical nor separate, but united.

This sacred unity does not eradicate difference; this union joins difference. Unifying love is the lifeblood of the universe, and love expresses itself through matter as nonduality. For this reason, we best live in the world when we most love the world. Only openness resonates with the deepest nature of the cosmos. Hence, any attempt to claim something for yourself, to separate it from the whole, is a sin. Sin is separation: vice tears, virtue mends, and apathy watches.

The elements of the cosmos are much like the pieces that make a stained glass window. Each piece contributes its own quality, while all the qualities together create the overall effect. As all the pieces influence each other, no piece is separate from the rest, and every piece finds its realization within the whole. Alone, any one piece is a shard. But with others, it is art.

The beauty of the stained glass window relies on difference. If all the glass and iron were assimilated, melted down and stirred so that it became One and only One, devoid of difference, then it would be an ugly brown blob. But if the part retains its difference within the whole, and offers that difference to the whole, and is open to the difference of others as well, then the different qualities together produce beauty.

Nothing is experienced in separation from its surroundings.

The individual pieces of glass, like the elements of the universe, are open-with-qualities. The color red, for example, feels one way when bordered by black and white. It feels another way when bordered by pink and light blue. Our experience of redness is determined by its relationship to other colors.

But what if something is just red, without any adjacent color? Then, isn’t it pure red, redness itself, its own unique expression without corruption or distortion?

But red in relation to red is different from red in relation to green. And even a pure, red field will produce different experiences in different people. Red means one thing to a communist and another to an anti-communist, one thing on Chinese New Year and another in the red-light district of Paris, one thing to a battlefield medic and another to a hemophiliac dependent on blood transfusions. In the universe of human experience—which is the only universe we occupy—red does not exist uninterpreted, and its interpretation is always determined by its relations. Nothing exists unrelatedly.

The sustained bears the imprint of the Sustainer.

Various Christian theologians have found the imprint of the divine on the cosmos. The apostle Paul writes: “Though invisible to the eye, God’s eternal power and divinity have been seen since the creation of the universe, understood and clearly visible in all of nature” (Rom 1:20a). According to Paul, creation is an icon of God. Athanasios of Alexandria (ca. 298–373) retrieved the Stoic notion of the logoi spermatikoi (seeds of divine reason) and affirmed that every aspect of reality carries an imprint of the divine.

Augustine (354–430) called this imprint the vestigia Trinitatis, or traces of the Trinity, and he scoured the world for triads that reflected their Trinitarian source. Augustine noted that love implies a lover, a beloved, and the love itself, hence a triad; and that the mind, its love for itself, and its awareness of itself also constitute a triad. The constituents of these triads are inseparable from one another, inextricably related, yet of one substance. Hence, they are analogous to the relations between the persons of the Trinity.

Today, we find the imprint of the Trinity in the interdependence of the elements of the cosmos. This diversity-in-harmony implies four truths, according to Bin Song: 1) each thing is unique, 2) each thing is related to and inseparable from other things, 3) each thing accommodates the being of other things without losing its own integrity, and finally, 4) all things change and evolve together.

Simple physics suggests the truth of this interdependence. Philosopher Sydney Shoemaker notes that physics cannot define any aspect of the universe according to its intrinsic properties. Instead, everything is defined through its relationships. For example, mass is the property of matter that measures its resistance to acceleration, while matter is anything that has mass and takes up space. An atom is the basic unit of a chemical element, while a chemical element is composed of atoms with an identical number of protons. An electron is a stable subatomic particle with a negative charge, while a negative charge characterizes an atom that has gained an electron. All definitions rely on extrinsic, dispositional properties (how x relates to y), because x doesn’t possess any intrinsic properties by which it can be defined.

Interdependence is a virtue.

We experience the nonduality of the different elements of reality as contingency. Things are either contingent or necessary. If they are contingent, then they may or may not exist. If they are necessary, then they must exist. In other words, a contingent thing can be, but a necessary thing must be.

Theologians have generally argued that only God is necessary; God must, by nature, “exist”. We have argued earlier that the persons of the Trinity are contingent on one another since they co-originate one another, and this co-origination through love is glorious. As Gregory Boyd argues, “Contingency is one of God’s eternal perfections, not a defect.”

But the Trinity itself, the communion of persons, is necessary, existing by its very nature. The universe, in contrast, is contingent on God’s sustaining grace. The universe could very well not exist.

Nondualism goes one step further and argues that, by divine design, the elements of the universe are all contingent on one another. This horizontal contingency allows our continuous co-creation of one another by the grace of God. As the persons who are God—Sustainer, Christ, Spirit—arise through their relations, so the elements of the universe arise through their relations. As do we, to the glory of all. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 79-81)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Augustine. On the Trinity. Edited by Gareth B. Matthews. Translated by Stephen McKenna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Bowman, Donna. “God for Us: A Process View of the Divine-Human Relationship.” In Handbook of Process Theology, edited by Donna Bowman and Jay McDaniel. St. Louis: Chalice, 2006.

Boyd, Gregory. “The Self-Sufficient Sociality of God: A Trinitarian Revision of Hartshorne’s Metaphysics.” In Trinity and Process: A Relational Theology of God, edited by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. 73-94. New York: Continuum, 1997.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Seven Stories, 2017.

Margalit, Natan. The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. Boulder: Albion Andalus, 2022.

Song, Bin. “A Ru Theology of Nondualism.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson, 243–60. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2023.

January 26, 2025

The infinite fullness of God is here and now: reality is mystical if we pay attention

The mind of God pervades and structures the universe, making mathematics a mystical enterprise.

We can encounter the mind of God the Creator, whom Jesus called “Abba,” in the form of mathematics. Remarkably, mathematicians have generated “pure” theories that were only later “practically” applied to astronomy, physics, and engineering. For example, the Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga analyzed conic sections—the circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola, etc. His analyses later proved useful to astronomers studying the motion of celestial objects. Kepler, for example, discovered that the planets travel in ellipses around the sun, not circles, and relied on Apollonius’s preexisting analyses to work out his mathematical physics.

Likewise, Thomas Malthus applied Leonard Euler’s preexisting geometric growth tables to demographic studies, noting that geometric reproduction rates would eventually produce an intense struggle for survival. Charles Darwin read Malthus and generated his evolutionary theory of natural selection. Einstein could not have developed his general theory of relativity, which predicated the curvature of space, without reference to Bernhard Riemann’s preexisting theories of differential geometry.

Given the outstanding power of mathematical reason to make sense of the physical universe, many mathematicians regard its practice as more than an intellectual exercise. Pythagoras legendarily endorsed mathematical endeavor as a religious practice. For Pythagoras, to understand the universe was to understand its divine source. Hence, scientific investigation was spiritual development, and vice versa. Correlating the number one to a point, the number two to a line, the number three to a plane, and the number four to a cube (the three-dimensional space in which we live), the Pythagoreans concluded that the universe is composed of numbers. When they discovered that musical intervals are based on numerical ratios, they proceeded to combine mathematics with mysticism.

The Christian tradition, which developed within the Greek thought world, absorbed the Pythagoreans’ mathematical mysticism and deemed the cosmic order an expression of the mind of Abba the Creator. According to this interpretation, the Divine Architect expresses the orderly, divine mind within the orderly, material universe. Hence, to study nature is to study God.

The Bible sees God’s wisdom in the material universe.

These insights cohere with the Bible, which finds the sustaining mind of the Creator in creation. Of course, scripture makes no specific reference to mathematical mysticism. Yet both the Hebrew and Christian writings express awe at the divine reason expressed through the cosmic order.

In the Hebrew tradition, the psalmist exclaims, “God, what variety you have created, arranging everything so wisely! The earth is filled with your creativity!” (Psalm 104:24a). Jeremiah writes, “The earth was created by God’s power. God’s wisdom fixed the earth in place and God’s knowledge unfurled the skies” (Jeremiah 10:12). And Proverbs declares, “For it was through [Wisdom] that God laid the earth’s foundation; through her that the heavens were set in place” (Proverbs 3:19–20).

Early Christians found this divine wisdom in both Jesus of Nazareth and Sophia, the Holy Spirit. They identified Jesus with the logos—the sacred reason, creative principle, or divine order—through which the universe was made:

In the beginning was the Word [logos]; and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word was present to God from the beginning. Through the Word all things came into being, and apart from the Word nothing came into being. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We saw the Word’s glory—the favor and position a parent gives an only child—filled with grace, filled with truth. (John 1:1–3, 14)

According to John, the logos permeates the universe and permeates our minds, granting us the capacity to reason, to better understand the universe and to better understand God.

Language about God is iconic.

As we have discussed the nature of God, we have ascribed certain qualities to God such as community, infinity, love, joy, increase, and omnipresence. We created these words to describe this universe and our own feelings within it. Since they are products of the cosmos for the cosmos, they can apply only metaphorically or poetically to God. God—Sustainer, Participant, and Perfecter—lies well beyond the reach of our this-worldly language. Therefore, anytime we speak of God, we should recognize that the words we use are more dissimilar to God than similar, that they are more inaccurate than accurate. They should never be taken exhaustively or literally. Instead, language about God is iconic.

An icon is a depiction of a divinity or saint appropriate for contemplation and meditation. Although the painters of icons are accomplished artists capable of three dimensional portraiture, icons have a two dimensional presentation. They look flat, but this flatness is purposeful: it reminds the viewer that they are not looking so much at the icon as through it, into the sacred space beyond. It reminds the viewer that they are not meditating on the object, but on what the object represents.

Many centuries before Christian icons came into existence, the Buddha issued a similar caution. He did not want his followers to become attached to his teachings, so he told them that, if someone points at the moon, then you should look at the moon, not the person’s finger. In other words, you should look to the goal of the Buddha’s teachings, not the teachings themselves.

Similarly, iconic language points beyond itself, to God. Optimally, God flows through the language, as God flows through the icon. But God remains always beyond.

God is infinite, and infinite restraint.

We issue these caveats here because our language for God is about to break down. We have spoken of God as a community of persons, which is a real attribute that tells us something real about God. But it is also false, and in a good way. That is because we, as persons, must be careful not to spread ourselves too thin. We have limited time and limited attention; if we pay too much attention to our work, then we neglect our relationships. If we pay too much attention to our relationships, then we neglect ourselves. We must find that ever-elusive balance.

But God becomes disanalogous to us here. God is an ever-increasing infinity who does not get spread thin. God’s omnipresence cannot be diluted in any way: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,” runs an ancient metaphor. Wherever we are, there the fullness of God dwells. Or, in the words of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “That is fullness. This is fullness. From fullness comes fullness. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness remains.”

God is an infinitely overflowing plenitude, and that plenitude is here and now. But it must hold itself in reserve or we would be constantly overwhelmed. For our relationship with God to be mutual, God must conceal some of Godself, that we might be granted the freedom to respond.

Although working with a unitarian concept of God, the Jewish tradition of Chabad Hasidism embeds mutuality within God through the doctrine of tzimtzum or “contraction.” God limits the divine being to make room for creation, so that creation is not overwhelmed by its source.

Consider an analogy: If the Sun and Earth were too close, then the Sun would burn Earth away. But the contraction of the Sun to the center of the solar system allows it to illuminate Earth without destroying it. Without the Sun, Earth would be a frozen wasteland. Without the Sun’s contraction, Earth would be a burning hell. Hence, the Sun’s self-limitation generates a relationship through which we come alive.

Similarly, God’s self-limitation—like that of any good parent—grants us the freedom to become who we are, in relation to God. God doesn’t drown us in divinity but allows us to swim in the currents of the sacred. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 75-79)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 5.1.1.

Farrugia, E. “The iconic character of Christian language: logos and icon.” Melita Theologica 45, no. 1 (1994) 1–17. https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/37182.

Guthrie, W. K. C. "Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism." In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed, edited by Donald M. Borchert, vol. 8, 181–4. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. Gale eBooks. Accessed May 30, 2020.

Hermes Trismegistus. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation. Edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1992.

Von Baravalle, Hermann. “Conic Sections in Relation to Physics and Astronomy.” The Mathematics Teacher 63, no. 2 (1970) 3–23. DOI: 10.5951/MT.63.2.0101.

January 19, 2025

God is in Nature: you can feel the sacred permeating the cosmos

God is in Nature: you can feel the sacred permeating the cosmos

God the Creator has placed beauty within nature. Most people experience awe at the beauty of nature. Whether it be a sunset over the ocean, majestic mountain view, or campfire dancing against the night, the magnificence of the natural world enchants us. This enchantment runs so deep that some people experience nature itself as holy. American naturalist John Muir writes:

Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields. . . . This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.

The beauty of nature overwhelms Muir, to the point that he deems it divine. For him, natural beauty is not merely a pleasing arrangement of objects; it is an expression of God. Serving God-in-nature, Muir campaigned to protect America’s wilderness, eventually inspiring Teddy Roosevelt to establish America’s national park system.

Tragically, although Muir’s experience of God in nature was beautiful and produced beneficial change, the weight of the Christian tradition would deem it heretical. Traditional, dualistic Christianity insists that God is above the world (transcendent), not within it (immanent). The tradition worries that, if some people experience matter as holy, they will lose their sense of a personal God.

Traditional Christian theology denies the presence of God within the universe. Scholars of religion call the limitation of God to nature pantheism. Pantheism is constructed from the Greek roots pan (all) and theos (God): all is God. According to pantheists, the material universe is sacred, but there is no transcendent Creator in heaven. Prominent atheist Daniel Dennett observes:

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

Dennett’s vision appeals to atheists because it denies deity but preserves awe. It avoids the constraints of stifling religion, while celebrating science as aesthetic pleasure. Unbound from God, we are fascinated by nature. And in that fascination, we find new meaning and purpose.

This (non)religious, pantheistic vision is so attractive that traditional monotheists feel compelled to argue against it. Fearful that recognizing the divinity of nature will result in the elimination of God, these dualistic theists, who emphasize the Creator-creation distinction, exclude God from nature. They insist that God is utterly transcendent and in no way immanent, beyond but not within. Anglican theologian N. T. Wright sounds the alarm:

Biblical theology [makes] the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming the goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. . . . Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward pantheism.

For Wright, the divine presence within matter threatens to annihilate the divine presence in heaven. This concern is legitimate, as we have seen with Dennett’s declaration that nature is sacred but impersonal. Pantheism also risks decaying into mere materialism, the firm belief in matter’s existence coupled with a denial of all religious realities.

But Wright doesn’t merely critique pantheism; he also implicitly critiques panentheism. Panentheism is constructed from the Greek roots: pan (all)—en (in)—theos (God). All is in God, even as God exceeds that all. Thus, panentheism is the belief that God emanates the universe from God’s very own being, such that the universe participates in divinity. Panentheism recognizes nature as sacred, while also preserving the personal God of theism.

God is the soul of the universe. But how can God reside in the cosmos while also exceeding it? Panentheist theologians have objected that classical, dualistic theism divides the world (matter) from God (spirit), thereby dimming the brilliance of creation. As a correction, they assert the presence of God within the world through a soul-body analogy: God is the soul of the universe, just as the universe is the body of God. The soul-body analogy allows us to sense God within the universe even as God exceeds the universe, just as the soul resides within the body even as it exceeds the body.

In the passage above, “God” refers to either God the Sustainer (Abba) or God the Trinity, or both. Since Abba’s openness to Christ and Spirit is perfect, Abba’s soul is Trinitarian—living, open, and dynamic. Abba bears primary responsibility for creating and sustaining the universe, but Abba’s support thereof is inherently Trinitarian.

The soul-body analogy articulates our experience of God as both immanent and transcendent, both within and beyond. It ascribes the holiness of the universe to a source beyond, thereby celebrating the divinity of all reality, while preserving the personhood of God.

The soul-body analogy also implies that God feels the universe, just as we feel our own bodies. God the Sustainer (Abba), God the Participant (Jesus), and God the Celebrant (The Holy Spirit Sophia) are all God the Open, affected by creation just as creation is effected by God. Therefore, the divine sustenance of the universe is a continuous process that permeates the very being of God, rendering it the becoming of God.

The Bible warrants panentheism. We find warrant for panentheism in scripture. Even as the Hebrews visualized God on a heavenly throne, they were careful not to limit God’s presence to that throne. The Chronicler proclaims: “Who can build a house for God, whom heaven itself, even the highest heavens, cannot contain?” (2 Chronicles 2:6).

Not only does God’s personality fill the universe, God’s very being fills it as well. God is within all things, even as God exceeds all things. The book of Sirach states: “It is by God’s plan that each of these fulfills its own purpose; by the word of YHWH, they are held together. No matter how much we say, our words are inadequate. In the end, God is everything” (Sirach 43:26–28).

And in the Christian Scriptures, the apostle Paul takes up this sentiment multiple times: “Who has given God anything to deserve something in return? For all things are from God and through God and for God” (Romans 11:36); “There is one God and Creator of all, who is over all, who works through all and is within all” (Ephesians 4:6); “In [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In Paul’s view, God is in all things, but not contained within them; and separate from all things, but not isolated from them.

Cosmic beauty comes from our cosmic God. From a Trinitarian perspective, the act of creation, which is continuous, includes all three persons: the Bible describes the cosmos as created through Christ, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:15–20). Likewise, the Hebrew Scriptures describe Wisdom, whom Christians would later identify with the Holy Spirit, as a manifestation of God, pervading all things, and more active than all active things (Wisdom 7:22b–25 DRA).

In this Trinitarian view, the Sustainer creates through both Christ and Spirit, so we find the imprint of the relational Trinity on our relational universe and within our relational selves. There is beauty in relatedness, especially loving relatedness. And we can see this beauty, whether it be a sunset over the ocean, majestic mountain view, or a campfire dancing against the night. When we are so enchanted, let no one deny that the experience of beauty is an experience of God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 71-75)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Ali, Mukhtar. “Islam and the Unity of Being.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson. Maryland: Lexington, 2023.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1987.

Stetson, Lee. The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures. San Francisco: Yosemite Conservancy, 2013.

Ramanuja. Vedarthasamgraha. Translated by S.S. Raghavachar. Madras: Vedanta, 1956.

Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2008.

January 12, 2025

Traditional concepts of God impede progress: we need a progressive concept of God

Why does God create and sustain the universe?

Abba, our Mother and Father, rolls the stone away from the tomb of being, freeing us to emerge from nothingness. Here, within the divinely sustained creation, we participate in the interplay of cold and warmth, darkness and light, silence and sound, and all the mutually amplifying contrasts that grant life its passion.

Abba continually overcomes nonbeing to grant us, not just being, but becoming—diversity and difference transforming one another through time. Everything that is, is of God, including us: “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me” (Psalm 3:5 NRSV). But this claim raises the question: Why does Abba, our divine Parent, create and sustain the universe at all, especially with its suffering? Why doesn’t Abba just retreat into blissful divinity?

Unlike us, God chooses God’s nature, and God the Trinity has chosen dynamic, interpersonal love as the divine core. This love is superabundant. It will overflow our concepts, overflow our language, and even overflow itself. Traditionally, Christianity has deemed God to be infinite. We will deem God to be an ever-increasing infinity.

Infinity can increase infinitely.

We may deny infinity the capacity to increase. Infinity is, after all, infinite. But first, the divine majesty cannot be limited by our human logic. Second, work by mathematicians on infinity suggests that it can increase. In the 1920s, David Hilbert pointed out that if you had an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was full, then it could still accommodate one more guest, if each guest simply moved one room number up (1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, etc.), thereby leaving the first room open for the new guest. So, infinity can increase by one, so long as there is movement.

But Hilbert also points out that infinity can increase by infinity. That is, if a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all full, were to be visited by an infinitely long bus of new guests, then the hotel could accommodate all of them by having each current guest move from their room number n to room number 2n (1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, etc.), thereby leaving an infinite number of rooms free for the infinite number of new guests, so long as there is movement. Hilbert then went on to prove that any infinite hotel could accommodate an infinite number of buses with an infinite number of new guests, but that math is over my head.

Infinity is capacious and always increasing in capacity. But again we ask: If infinity is infinite, then why is it not infinitely pleased with itself? Why isn’t God self-satisfied? Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. For this reason, creation can add nothing to the being of God, who is already perfect and not in need of development. Therefore, God’s creation of this universe is an act of sheer grace, doing nothing for God but everything for us.

Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform.

Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus. Above, we have shown that infinity can increase. Now, we argue that if infinity can increase, then the divine perfection demands that infinity increase infinitely, forever. Because God’s choice is to continually overflow God’s self, God is by nature creative. In fact, God is infinitely creative, ever increasing, and ceaselessly self-surpassing, without depletion or dilution.

This concept of divine development does not suggest that God is deficient in love, wisdom, or joy, always grasping for more. Instead, this concept insists that God is superabundant, overflowing with all three, in everlasting self-donation. It also implies that we, being made in the image of God, can become more. Godward change is humanity’s purpose.

The Trinity offers time-as-blessing.

God’s creativity is deeply tied to God’s trinitarian, interpersonal nature. In the Christian view, God had already decided to be interpersonal relationship, three persons as one God, “prior” to creation. This “prior” does not refer to priority in time, but to priority of being. God creates and sustains our time from God’s own time, which the Greeks call kairos, or time-as-blessing.

God is the many-as-one for whom the blessedness of time always abides. We call this blessedness eternity. According to the Christian tradition, God has chosen not to be a perfectly self-satisfied unity, a blissful One without a second. Instead, God has chosen to be love, and to overflow as love. But love gains reality only when it is concrete. God could not be content with an abstract love for abstract persons in an abstract place, so the ideal sought expression in the actual, and the universal sought expression in the particular.

This desire for particularity, for definite form in a specific location, necessitates limitation. For love to flow, those who are beloved must be somewhere rather than everywhere and someone rather than everyone. Differentiation allows agape to move: from here to there, from now to then, from me to you, from us to them.

Because limitation coupled with time puts love in motion, it is better to be limited than unlimited. Limitations are the means of God’s grace, because they permit completion through one another; they permit love. Our inabilities are completed by their abilities, while their inabilities are completed by our abilities. Through interanimation we find completion. Paul asks, “If the body were all eye, what would happen to our hearing? If it were all ear, what would happen to our sense of smell?” (1 Corinthians 12:17).

Divinity is beauty shared.

Abba also creates to share the divine beauty. An Islamic hadith states: “I was a hidden treasure, wishing to be enjoyed, so I created the world that I might become enjoyed.” Now, the act of creation is a gift from Abba to us. Again, Abba is evermore: evermore beauty creating evermore beauty to be enjoyed by evermore perceivers.

Crucially, Abba participates in this enjoyment, because Abba creates, sustains, and resides within the enjoyers (us), feeling what we feel. Abba is both the beauty that is enjoyed and the enjoyment of that beauty. This process is continual: we are the isthmus between Creator and creation, fully participating in creation while ever growing in awareness of the Creator.

Because our potential is never actualized, we can forever progress in our awareness, forever drawing closer to God, forever bringing pleasure to God, “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10). We are the conduit through which God’s infinite mystery is everlastingly revealed to itself.

Completion by another is better than self-contained perfection. The universe is not designed for independent self-sufficiency. It is designed for deep relationality, because even for God continual increase is better than unchanging completion. By divine design, mutual influence and related freedom produce ongoing novelty, rendering time everlastingly new. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 68-71)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Ali, Mukhtar. “Islam and the Unity of Being.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson. Maryland: Lexington, 2023.

Edwards, Rem B. “Axiological Reflections on Infinite Human and Divine Worth.” Journal of Formal Axiology 11, no. 1 (2019) 11–38.

Gamow, George. One, Two, Three—Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science. London: Dover Publications, 1988.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

January 4, 2025

If we are going to be true to the Bible, then God the Creator should take they/them pronouns

The Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos bears male, female, and nonbinary qualities.

According to both the Hebrew prophet Hosea as well as Jesus the Christ, YHWH the Father God (Abba), the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos, is compassionate.

In the Hebrew Bible, compassion is something you feel in your womb (rechem or beten). Scholars translate the Hebrew words rechem and beten as “womb,” “bowels,” or “heart” when referring to the body, and as “mercy” or “compassion” when referring to a feeling.

Both rechem and beten provide maternal imagery for God. When Babylon conquered Israel and took its leading citizens from Jerusalem into exile, many Jews felt forgotten by their God. But the prophet Isaiah (or his followers in the Isaiah school), writing in the voice of God, assures them: “Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion [rechem] for the child of her womb [beten]? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15 NRSV). And, sensitive to the yearning of the exiled for home, Isaiah also writes, again in the voice of God: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13).

Sometimes, the Hebrews’ maternal imagery for God is explicit birth imagery. Frustrated that Israel so quickly rushes to other gods, Deuteronomy accuses: “You deserted the Rock who gave you life; you forgot the God who bore you” (Deuteronomy 32:18). Later in the Hebrew scriptures, God declares to Job, “Has the rain a father, or who has fathered the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven?” (Job 38:28–29 NRSV). And there is substantial evidence to justify translating El Shaddai, traditionally “the Almighty,” as “the Breasted One.”

Such passages deny YHWH the Creator, whom Jesus called “Abba,” any single gender with which to identify. Instead, they implicitly declare YHWH/Abba to be omnigendered or nonbinary.

Jesus also asserts Abba’s transcendence of all gender categories.

Jesus continues this Jewish tradition, revealing the intimacy of Abba through the imagery of father and mother. Jesus had innumerable Hebrew images for Abba to choose from, male, female, and neuter: Creator (Genesis 1:1), King (Psalm 99:1), Lawgiver (Exodus 20:2–17), Judge (Psalm 7:8–11), Lord (Exodus 4:10), Jealous (Exodus 34:14; “Jealous” is capitalized as a proper name), Fire (1 Kings 18:38; Exodus 13:21), Warrior (Exodus 15:3), Potter (Isaiah 24:8), Rock (Psalm 31:1–8), Shepherd (Psalm 23:1), etc. But in his own teaching, Jesus chose imagery of warmth and care: God as Father (Luke 11:22; following Mal 2:10) and God as Mother (Luke 15:8–10; following Deut 32:18).

In contemporary English, persons who identify with both genders, or are nonbinary, use the pronouns they/them. Their decision to use these pronouns follows the English language tradition of substituting “they” for “he” or “she” when the gender of someone is indeterminate. For example, if you see an individual person far away and can’t tell if they’re male or female, then you might ask, “What are they doing?” “They” here serves as a stand-in for indeterminate gender. Today, we use “they” to refer to persons who identify as neither male nor female, or as both male and female.

In keeping with this practice of language, for the remainder of this book (The Great Open Dance), we shall assign they/them pronouns to Abba, our Creator and Sustainer.

Abba—God the Creator and Sustainer—should be referred to with they/them pronouns.

We do so for several reasons. Historically, the church has always recognized that God the Creator is beyond all gender categories. The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes this long tradition: “We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.”

Problematically, historical language for God has been exclusively male: God the Creator is a “he,” God the Christ is a “he,” God the Spirit is a “he,” and God the Trinity, those three persons as one God, is a “he.” Exclusively male language for a gender transcendent God misrepresents the divine nature; hence, it is theologically inaccurate. Moreover, exclusively male language for God misrepresents males as more divine than females and nonbinary persons, distorting our thought and, inevitably, our societies.

Everyone is made in the image of God, no matter their gender identity. Therefore, our language for God should allow everyone to see themselves in God. Referring to Abba, God the Creator, as “they” corrects the tradition, allowing nonbinary persons, so often excluded both socially and theologically, to understand themselves as manifestations of divinity. (Later in the book, we will introduce the Holy Spirit as Sophia, who is metaphorically female, thereby providing a gender-inclusive image of God the Trinity.)

We should refer to God the Creator as Jesus taught us, as “Abba”.

For the rest of this book our primary term for God the Creator and Sustainer will be Abba rather than the customary terms such as Creator, Sustainer, God, or Father. As noted above, Abba is the Aramaic term of endearment for Father, although (as noted above) it conveys more affection and closeness than its English counterpart. Jesus spoke Aramaic and used the term explicitly in his prayer life: when pleading to be freed from the pain of crucifixion, Jesus prays to “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36).

This usage continued in the early church. The apostle Paul promises that, because Christ refers to the Creator as Abba, Christians can do so as well: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. . . . Through the Spirit, God has adopted you as children, and by that Spirit we cry out, ‘Abba!’” (Romans 8:15b–16a). Today, many Jewish children in families familiar with Hebrew will call their father Abba, which is more readily translated as “Dad,” “Daddy,” or “Papa.”

Not only is the term Abba entirely biblical and appropriately intimate, it offers several additional advantages. Relative to the word God, Abba suggests the warmth of a person to whom we can relate rather than an abstraction that we ponder. Relative to the word Father, Abba suggests less formality and greater familiarity. And relative to the words Creator or Sustainer, Abba refers to the whole person rather than a function thereof.

Regarding gender, the Aramaic word Abba is clearly a masculine noun. Fortunately, for our purposes, it has the advantage of ending in the letter a, which provides it with a feminine tone in many European languages: for example, Maria and Antonia are feminine; Mario and Antonio are masculine. This fortuitous ambiguity in the word provides us with some flexibility as we try to develop a gender-inclusive concept of God.

Finally, since we will call God the Creator Abba, for the rest of this book the term God itself will refer primarily to God the Trinity, the community of persons—Creator, Christ, and Spirit—united through love into one living divinity.

Theological language should be dynamic and flexible.

These references will not be perfectly consistent. Theological language should be sufficiently precise so as not to confuse, but sufficiently elastic so as not to obstruct the divine plenitude. When writing about faith, there is always a tension between precision and transparency, logic and metaphor, reason and imagination.

Moreover, the perfect cooperation of the three triune persons deeply involves them in one another’s work; even though they have distinct responsibilities, they fulfill their distinct responsibilities alongside one another. This co-involvement consolidates their activity, rendering it distinguishable but inseparable. From the perspective of theological language, God the Sustainer, God the Christ, and God the Spirit together form God the Trinity, granting the word God an indefiniteness appropriate to divinity’s overflowing nature. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 66-68)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Biale, David. "The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible.” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (February 1982) 240–56. DOI: 10.1086/462899.

Bacon, Hannah. “‘Thinking’ the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?” CrossCurrents 62, no. 4 (2012) 442–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24462298.

Loughlin, Gerard. “What Is Queer? Theology after Identity.” Theology & Sexuality 14, no. 2 (January 2008) 143–52. DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087376.

United States Catholic Conference. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Merrimack, NH: Thomas More College Press, 1994.

December 30, 2024

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Is the universe a divine gift or glorious accident? Does it come from God or God-knows-where?

This question is the most basic of all the unanswerable questions that we must answer. By “unanswerable,” I mean “cannot be answered with certainty,” unless that certainty is manufactured by the answerer. By “must answer,” I mean that we answer the question with our very lives: how we interpret them, feel them, and act within them. We inevitably choose. For this reason, we should choose consciously.

Our traditions cannot make the decision for us. Fundamentalists may insist on a literal reading of Scripture and claim that Genesis is perfectly accurate as a historical and scientific text. In so doing, they reject scientific claims about the origins of the cosmos, creating an artificial conflict between science and religion.

But science cannot make the decision for us either. Science-believing Christians accept our powers of observation and reason as divine gifts. For these Christians, science is a sacred practice. At this point the Big Bang seems to be the best explanation for the origin of our universe, but we still have a hard time explaining what produced the Big Bang. In attempting to explain the origin of the universe, we end up in an infinite regress: If the multiverse produced our universe, then what produced the multiverse? Or, even more intractably: What produced the physical laws that govern the multiverse?

Eventually, our powers of inference reach their limit. Theists stop the infinite regress by positing God as Creator and Sustainer of the unceasing process. Science can neither prove nor disprove this claim, leaving us, as rational beings, with the freedom, necessity, and consequence of choosing our religious orientation.

A question is an opportunity.

For many people the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” begins a spiritual search. The question invites us to consider the very real possibility that there could be nothing instead of something, and this nothingness would be absolute. Instead of this vibrant, pulsing universe, and our living experience within it, there could be naught but a cold, dark silence, with no one to lament its emptiness.

But even the words cold, dark, and silent are only metaphorical descriptors of this desolation, which cannot be thought or spoken. Absolute nothingness lies beneath all qualities and beyond the reach of language. It is the tomb of being, and it is a very real possibility. We, and this cosmos that we inhabit, might never have been. At any moment, we could not be, were it not for our Creator and Sustainer.

What is the Creator and Sustainer of our universe like?

Our Creator is our divine parent. In keeping with the warmest strains of his own religious tradition, Jesus calls God the Creator “Abba,” Aramaic for “Father” or, more warmly, “Dad.” In Jesus’s Bible, Hosea provides one of the most affectionate descriptions of God as Abba, writing in Abba’s own words:

When Israel was a youth, I loved them dearly, and out of Egypt I called my children. . . . I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arm—but they don’t acknowledge that I was the one who made them whole. I led them on a leash of human kindness, with bonds of caring. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks; I bent down to them and fed them. (Hos 11:1–4)

Abba—the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, our divine Parent—is not cold, distant, or unfeeling; Abba is present, compassionate, and attentive. In choosing the symbol of YHWH as Father (and Mother, as we shall later see), Jesus is declaring that the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos cares for each individual. The full attention of the ever-increasing infinite is directed at every one of us, personally. Thus, Abba is omnipresent in two ways: Abba is everywhere, and Abba is undistracted. We may feel forgotten in the numberless masses, but we are precious in the sight of Abba—so Jesus assures us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 64-66)

December 22, 2024

God is unifying love: a personal experience

The Trinity is not an abstract concept; the Trinity is a potential experience.

God the Trinity is three persons—Abba, Jesus, and Sophia—united through perfect love into one God. We are made in the image of God to overcome the illusion of our separation and reclaim our natural unity. In this series of essays, I am trying to think through this Trinitarian thought and its implications for ethics and life.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action, which produces the Trinitarian experience of graced time. The Greeks called graced time kairos. We can call it “eternity,” so long as we define eternity to be time-as-blessing.

In our experience, thinking, acting, and feeling are themselves triune, both one and three, distinguishable but inseparable. Each influences the others, as each is influenced by the others. And these three are entirely relational. The entirety of each is affected by the entirety of the others. Thinking, acting, and feeling are conceptually separable yet experientially united, distinguishable from yet perfectly open to their counterparts.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action which produces Trinitarian experience.

At the risk of self-congratulations, for which I apologize, I would like to share a Trinitarian experience. My church was on a mission trip to northern New York one summer, to do rural rehab on houses in an impoverished area of the country with brutal winters. We would try to fix up the houses and make them “warmer, safer, and dryer,” so their inhabitants would feel protected from the elements, and loved, even in a cold world.

I was partnered with Keith, a high school student who knew ten times more about construction than I did. At one of the houses we worked on, a small hole in the roof leaked water directly onto the bed of the six-year-old girl below. Any time it rained in the middle of the night, she would wake up sopping wet. At this point in our workweek, we had completed our main project on the house and had only one day left for projects. We could fix the girl’s roof only if we could do it in eight hours.

We decided to try. The program had galvanized steel panels available for a metal roof. The problem was their slipperiness. Keith and I needed to drill screws through the tin into the rafters, but we would slip while doing so and risk falling over the edge. The ground, mind you, was a perilous six feet below.

So, Keith and I figured out a system: standing next to each other, we grabbed the peak of the roof with our outside hands to keep from sliding. Then I held the screw with my inside hand while he held the drill with his inside hand. In this way we were able to attach the metal to the beams without falling off the roof.

Our activity was meaningful, purposeful, and united. I disappeared into the flow of the action so that, even though I was acting, the action felt effortless. Such was the coordination of our activity that Keith and I seemed to act as one, although the job could be achieved only by two. Time itself—the medium through which our activity occurred—flowed as gracious opportunity. Temporarily freed from the burden of our egos through the synthesis of our egos, we found that relationship—to the person you act with and the person you act for, the little girl below, watching us—can render time eternal.

Love is vulnerability, and within God, this vulnerability is absolute. It penetrates to the core of each divine person’s being, flows through that core, then surfaces again, unceasingly. The persons of the Trinity do not possess any independent, preceding identity that then enters into relationship with the other persons. Instead, every person depends, has always depended, and will always depend, on every other person for their divine being—as do we.

If God is anything in itself, then God is relationship itself, infinite relatedness expressed as interpersonal love mediated by time. When we participate in this divine reality, when we manifest God on earth, we may discover a Holy Spirit—an undertow of grace that bears us to our goal—God’s beloved community. And, if we look closely, we may see its image reflected in the eyes of a six year old girl who will be warm, safe, and dry next winter. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 61-63)