Armstrongism in Contention with Christianity: A Meditation on God and the of Attribute of Size

 

The Giant

by NC Wyeth (Fair Use)

 

 

Armstrongism in Contention with Christianity:

A Meditation on God and the of Attribute of Size

By Scout

 

When I was in the Ninth Grade, I discovered that size is an inviolable physical property of the Universe. Size is real and size has meaning. My physics textbook stated that the giant spiders that appeared in a recent horror movie could not have existed.  The reason why is that the proteins that form the hard exoskeleton of the spider could not support a creature of that weight.  If there were such a big spider, it would collapse under its own weight.  Likewise, even though dinosaurs are made of stronger materials, there is a limit to how big they can get before their weight can no longer be supported by their structure and they fall apart.  No doubt N.C. Wyeth’s great giant, illustrated above, cannot really exist either and for the same reasons. There is a range that governs the size that biological creatures can attain and humans are within that range.  This limitation is not something that evolved in the Cosmos.  It simply exists.

God is not Governed by Size

God is absolute and not relative.  Almost everything we know is relative.  (I will omit some of the spooky things in quantum physics that happen outside our zone of perception.) “That fish is bigger than this fish” is a principle that applies to everything in our environment.  Objects exist in three-dimensional space. And that space can be calibrated.  Just look at a ruler.  And every object has size as one of its properties. 

The idea that God has a body in his essence, as Armstrongists assert, means that he falls not into the absolute category but the relative category, like material objects.  He is bigger than this but smaller than that - he can move faster than this but not as fast as that,  etc. This is a great restriction because the Cosmos is very large and God, by comparison, would be very small.  So, he is confined to working remotely with the Cosmos since flying around to different parts of the enormous Cosmos to fix things up is an impossible task.  Some will propose that he works through his spirit which is like a “tractor beam” from Star Trek.  But this places God at the end of a tool as if he were a man fabricating something rather than God creating something.  The Gnostics call such a being a Demi-urge. 

If God were really big, the problem of governing the real estate of the Cosmos would not go away.   A Christian mystic, I cannot recall which, had a vision of God and he handed her a small object about the size of a walnut.  As she held it in her hand, he told her that this is all that was ever made.  The complexity of the Cosmos remains, however, independent of size.  If God is very small in comparison to the Cosmos, there is the macro problem.  His smallness is a hindrance. If he is very large in comparison to the Cosmos, there is the micro problem.   His bigness is a hindrance.  Either way, God is still like a Demi-urge, he just has to use a tool set that works for the size. 

But, of course, God can appear as big as he wants to be or as small as he wants to be because he is absolute in essence and not relative.  This is the nature of a theophany.  A theophany is presentation and not substance.  It is close to the idea of anthropomorphism.  A theophany is a presentation that is actually sensed and anthropomorphism is a presentation that is literary.  Yahweh is a storm God.  A powerful storm was about the biggest, most dramatic thing the ancient mind could encounter.  But one has to maintain perspective.  There are impressive, big storms on earth but the Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm that is 1.3 times the diameter of earth.  All of our yardsticks are relative and do not apply to God.

My guess is that if you were to ask Armstrongists how big God is, they would say that he is the same size as Jesus. This is because they misinterpret the scripture where Jesus states if you have seen me you have seen the Father.   Archaeologists know what the average Jew looked like in the time of Jesus.  If Jesus were average, and scripture does not suggest otherwise, he would be 5’ 1” and would weigh 110 pounds.  This is the logical conclusion towards which Armstrongism moves. 

But there is a problem with this conclusion and that is its implications about God’s “origin”.  Who said to God that he can be only a little guy and no larger?  He makes beings that are much larger.  I am just over six feet tall.  Did someone create God to be a certain size in his essence? This conclusion is an absurdity created by believing God is bound by size.  Jesus told us that God is a Spirit.  He transcends human categories such as size.   

My Personal Theory

I have a theory about this and I will present it in summary.  This is a conjecture and not a part of the Christian Doctrine of God that I know.   I don’t expect you to believe this but you might find it worth contemplating. I believe that God does not have boundaries and I think this implements what we call omnipresence.  And, of course, no boundaries, no size. But omnipresence is a much more limited phenomenon that what God actually is.  There is a difference between being at every location in the Cosmos and having no location at all.  

And here is the heart of my conjecture.  The Cosmos is bounded.  And the Cosmos exists within the unbounded God.  We could spend some time on the meaning of the spatial preposition “within” in this context but we can let that pass for now.  Paul said in the Sermon on Mars Hill, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being”.  If Paul had just said that we have our being inside God, I would have seen the whole statement as spiritual concept with no spatial meaning.   And the preposition “in” would be allegorical.  But he says we have our physical movements within God.  This gives the “in” our usual spatial meaning.  Paul is saying that we, citizens of the Cosmos, exist, have our being, both physically and spiritually, in (“in” both actually and allegorically) God. 

So, what do Captain Kirk and Spock see when the come to the boundary of the Cosmos, the really final frontier?  They don’t see anything.  Because human eyes cannot see spirit.  Kirk and Spock can see only as far as the boundary.  And on the other side of the boundary is God infinitely and God cannot be seen.  He is invisible to us.  So, what cannot be seen, appears to our retinas as the darkest dark that you can imagine - no photons, no image.  My guess.

Conclusion

God transcends the human notion of size which is bound to the physics of the Cosmos.  This does not make the Old Testament scriptures a lie but, rather, makes the scriptures poetic.  The problem is that some people do not want to admit that the Bible is literary and it uses figures of speech about God that are anthropomorphisms..  They insist on a literal Bible but who gave them the right to require that?  God gave the message he wanted to give and human curators added their verbiage as well.  It is what it is.  And it serves its intended purpose.