A Big Fancy Word

I find that there are tons of spiritual things that I believe in . . . until people start talking about them. Example: I believe in spiritual beings called angels and beings called demons. That is until people begin to speak about them. As soon as people start describing their experience, or more typically their Aunt's cousin's friend's experience of these beings, I suddenly find an eruption of skepticism that I did not realize lived within me. It's not just angels that this applies to. I believe in heaven and hell, until people begin (with no lack of emphatic detail) describing these places. Eternity is a concept I rest much of my hope on, but then people begin to paint pictures of it, and it ceases to sound like it's all that great. And at the top of the list: I firmly believe in God. Yet, when people describe God or even talk about him I find doubt, disbelief, and reactionary cynicism without limits filling up my mind.

There's a big fancy word for what it is that I am taking issue with: Anthropomorphism. Antropo = man. Morphism = transformation. As humans we have this irritating, egocentric tendency to transform everything we have no concept of into something just like us, or our experience. So, when speaking of various spiritual realities we find that they all resemble either places we could easily create or visit, or in the case of spiritual personalities, they basically look just like us.

Now for those who have experiences of angelic or demonic beings I can understand that it is very possible they appeared in the form of human beings. Even if they didn't, I can easily see how our minds would transform them to appear as such. After all, we are speaking of personal beings, therefore they would sooner appear as a man or even an animal than appear as a microwave or a tree. But, my frustration is when people assume that this appearance is the actual shape that they exist in. This is an assumption that I can see underlying almost every conversation I have heard about such beings.

What of heaven and hell? Heaven is the reality that God exists in. It's not a place. Yet if we listen to the descriptions of it, we would find it not only to be a physical locale, but also realize that it is a purely material reality as well. The joy of heaven is not friendship with God, not the presence of his uninterupted glory, but instead golden streets and gates made from large pearls. Hell too, is materialized. It's frightful because we're scared of fire and bugs.

And then there is God himself. Since we don't like the iconoclastic nature of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, we baptize Germanic and Greek religions to find that our mental picture of God has him appearing much as Zeus or Thor. He's got the face and hair of a wise 50 year old man, and the body of a 25 year old superathelete. He sits on a throne in a far away place called heaven. This accounts for why communication is so challenging; he's absent. This is not a Jewish picture, nor Christian, nor monotheistic. It is a pagan picture.

Paganism is the religion of anthropomorphism. It takes the spiritual and reduces it to our image. The problem with idolatry is reduction.

Dallas Willard explains that when we refer to God as the God of heaven, we are not refering to a God who dwells in a physical locale beyond our universe. The Jewish understanding of heaven is instead the air that surrounds us. It's actually very similar to the Eastern concept of the Divine. We are talking about a presence that prevades everything. When the psalmist asks "Where can I go from your presence?", he is not asking this to a God who reigns above and has really cool X-ray vision. He is asking this of a God who fills the space between the molecules of air which we breath. Willard explains that even in "outer space" where there is no atomic matter there is still God. The spiritual is the bedrock foundation that lays below all that is physical. And, where the physical is absent, the spiritual remains.

God is a great mystery. This is and without question should be an uncomfortable, disturbing fact to us all. He prevades everything. When we call him holy, we are not saying he is moral. Nor does holy imply that he is good. It means that he is a reality far beyond us. It means that we ultimately have nothing to say.

So, when we emplore speech to speak of God, we do so only in the knowlege that our words can never touch the mountain of which we speak (that's a reference to exodus). We should avoid the arrogance assuming that our words can contain the realities which exist far beyond them, or that our experience can indict the whole of a spiritual realm we are only partially aware of.

I don't believe angels or demons have physical shapes, and I imagine they are experienced more existentially than empirically. Heaven and Hell are not places; they are realities, and I think they are descriptive of the present as much as the future. God is holy, that's the only place to start with that conversation. Finally, anthropomorphism is a tool of expression. It belongs, like most things in Christian faith, in the hands of poets, songwriters, artists, and storytellers, not scientists, dogmatists, or close minded people. Please for the sake of generations to come, let's stop speaking as if our physical experience even tells a minute fraction of the spiritual realm which we long to understand.