The Absoluteness of God
Why the Anthropomorphic Language Describing God in the Old Testament is Allegory
By Ranger
“Imagery was never intended to define God; rather, imagery is a window through which we see aspects and facets of the nature and character of God.” -- William Paul Young, “Lies We Believe About God”, p. 73, 2017.
God is absolute. I think it is difficult for the human mind to deal with the concept of absoluteness. We are much more familiar with those things that are relative. “Relative” and “absolute” are opposites. If something is relative, it exists on a scale and it is conceivable that it can be scaled up and scaled down. For instance, one person can run faster than another person. If something is absolute, it is not defined across a graded scale but is total.
Absoluteness is a part of our reality. The idea of “nothing” denotes something that is absolute. The null set contains nothing and that is without conceivable exception. But it is a philosophical concept, an abstraction that does not map well to anything we know experientially. Absoluteness, however, is not just an abstraction. Physicists regard the speed of light as absolute among other absolute physical constants. And also, the Bible tells us that God is absolute and we will turn to that next.
The Exegetical Argument for the Absoluteness of God
Those who point out that God is absolute are often criticized for not having supporting scriptures. People are skeptical because, I think, that God’s absoluteness is profoundly disturbing to many. It’s like a scenario where some guy lives in a cave all of his life. And at the age of forty or so someone tells him the cave is not the whole world and leads him to the surface. As they stand on the surface in daylight, he sees the boundless sky for the first time. Does he exult? No, I think he would be profoundly disturbed, maybe even terrified, and would want to immediately retreat to the enclosed security of the cave. Same scenario concerning God’s absoluteness.
God’s absoluteness is difficult for those atheists who see evolution as the driving force of the Cosmos. Hawking said, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing". That odd statement assumes the existence of gravity, gives no etiology of the Cosmic infrastructure, and is apparently the best that advanced cosmology can offer. The absolute God is the source of the non-evolutionary features of reality, such as existence itself, time, space, the organizational infrastructure (particles and sub-particles) of matter, and others.
So, here are some scriptures. It is important to point out that this is not a proof of God’s existence. That is a separate discussion. This is a logical, scripture-based argument that the Bible asserts an absolute God.
An exegesis:
“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and all their host by the breath of his mouth.” (Psalm 33:6)
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1, KJV)
“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” (Heb 11:3, ESV)
“All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” (John 1:3)
It is clear that the Bible asserts that God, the uncaused first cause, created all from nothing. If God created all things then there were no already existing things from which to fabricate the universe. If God had pre-existing substances, then he did not create all things and is not a creator but a fabricator. In Gnostic terminology, a fabricator is not God but a demi-urge. The Bible supports God as creator and not God as fabricator. God the creator then created all things from nothing as testified by scripture.
This means that God created and controls, in totality and without qualification, the created realm including our Cosmos, which is our objective reality. The created realm is his in all of its existential features. Reality does not operate outside his purview as its creator. He created our reality and has absolute possession of it. His complete possession of it does not exist on a scale of some sort. He doesn’t just happen to own the created realm more than others who might be co-owners, for instance. He is absolute.
To Define God by Anthropomorphic Language is to Portray Him as Relative and Deny is Absoluteness
Without a doubt, the Old Testament describes God in human terms. But such scriptures as Psalm 33:6 above tell us that this is not the full story. While there is no neat, cohesive exposition of God’s absoluteness in the Old Testament, we may understand it from the distributed data we are given.
Humans are relative beings. A man may be very strong because of superior musculature. Others may be stronger or weaker than the man. Power in our realm is relative. Some stars generate great energy and other stars lesser energy. A similar scale exists for intelligence. God created human powers and capabilities and they are relative. To say that God is “all-mighty” is the application of a human relative term to God. God may be seen as all-mighty through the lens of human relativity in order to make God more intelligible to humans but it is not a characterization of God in his ontology, his existential essence. God is absolute. Levels of power are meaningless to him. This kind of relative power that is relevant to humans is utterly irrelevant to God. He is not just the biggest kid on the block. And human beings will never be absolute like the uncreated God is. There is an ontological category difference between God and humans in spite of the sound bite “God as God is God.” But that is a separate discussion. The sales pitch to you that you are going to be God-as-God-is-God is a blatant fable. You are relative now and forever. As a created being you will rejoice forever in what God creates ex nihilo (Isaiah 65:18). You will not be a creator but rather a fabricator.
The rule is that if a descriptor is scalable, it is anthropomorphic and allegorical when applied to the absolute God. To accept the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament as descriptive of God in his essence is to diminish him in the mind to being relative and a denial of his actual absoluteness.
A Remark on Poetry/Allegory in the Bible
I once heard from the Armstrongist pulpit that God rides on a cherub when he goes places. After all, in Psalm 18:10, it says:
“And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.”
This text creates a dramatic picture in the mind, but it is poetry. It is not literally true but is a vivid word painting. It allegorizes God’s swiftness in coming to the rescue of Israel. One might argue that this statement is poetry because God is omnipresent and does not need to go from point A to point B (he is already at both points) and certainly not riding on a cherub – a parallel to human equestrian travel. But while the intentions of the argument are good, there is a problem with the appeal to omnipresence.
On careful consideration, the word omnipresent is a relative rather than absolute concept. Human beings may occupy place in space. Three coordinates can identify that place. But omnipresence means that God occupies all places in space. But what about God’s presence in non-spatial realms? So, omnipresence is just an intensification of the human ability to occupy a place in space. It remains a relative concept. But, in fact, God created space and is not bound by the three-dimensional coordinate system. Humans do not have good words to describe this idea. There is very little language of absoluteness in our daily talk. Writers of theology tend to use the term “transcendent” to capture those qualities of God that are beyond our human relative experience. And if we are careful with language, we must admit that God transcends such terms as omnipresence that are based on human relativity.
Summary Statement
Among those who are close readers of scripture, to believe that God as a relative being in essence is the ultimate lèse majesté. God is great beyond our knowing. We cannot plumb the depths of his absoluteness. Like “infinity”, absoluteness knows no limitations. Yet, we are made in his image. He has placed a little flame of his endless, brilliant fire in the small lamps that we are. No doubt many followers of God down through the ages have thought of him in relative terms rather than absolute terms without injury but also without a fitting appreciation of God. But for those who wish to consider, the horizon is dispelled and boundlessness enters in.
Note: I always marvel that when I write something that exalts God, it makes Armstrongists angry because what I have written does not conform to HWA’s declarations. It as if they have no ability to consider anything for themselves but always default to what HWA said. If God is anthropomorphic and relative like HWA has asserted, I would like to see a well-reasoned rebuttal to what I have written here – not just a collection of ad hominem attacks and inane sound bites.
