“God is not a person, but is personal”

Bishop Bruce Wilson

A transcript of an address presented by Bishop Bruce Wilson, former Anglican Bishop of Bathurst, at the monthly Cathedral Forum at All Saints’ Cathedral, Bathurst, on Wednesday June 20, 2007

I’ll start with a quotation drawn to my attention only recently, from Oscar Wilde: Most people are other people – their thoughts are someone else’s opinions; their lives are mimicry, their passion are quotation.’ The problem is, I think Oscar Wilde wants to exempt himself. I actually agree with that, but I’m going to include him as I quote it again: Most people, including Oscar Wilde, are other people – their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives are mimicry, their passions a quotation.

We’re now living in a period where atheism is on the march. Much of it is crusading atheism. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, recently Good Weekend running an article in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald supplement on a French philosopher, that some of you will have seen, and even our own Andrew Denton, with his film also shown in cinemas and on the ABC, ‘God on my side’.

A crusading atheism. An atheism that seems so much more plausible, and certainly with younger generations, according to opinion polls, successful – thanks, in my view, to two reasons.

One, because of the violence being done in the name of God and religion, religion is on the nose. Violence being done in the name of Islam, violence being done in the name of Christianity. An American evangelical president who even, in the beginning of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ referred to it as a crusade. Violence, of course, in the Middle East, between Jew and Christian, and on the Indian sub-continent between Muslim and Hindu, etc, etc. And the crusading, missionary-zeal atheists are taking opportunity of course to say, ‘Well, this is what God does, this is what religion does’.

The second reason, in my view, why there is such a crusading atheism currently, is because in Western countries Christians convey a picture of God that is childish. A super, superhuman individual, not much to be distinguished from Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. And this is the issue that I want to speak about.

The atheists say that God is just a human construct. We make God up. We invent God. Now there’s nothing particularly new in that, although atheism itself is new, arguably there were no atheists prior to the middle of the 18th Century. But the idea that we create God is certainly not new in itself. Feuerbach, Marx, Freud are all names of very substantial thinkers of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Freud, for example, described belief in God as nothing more than an infantile wish for a cosmic protective father. In other words, we project God in order to feel comfortable about our world. The Christian Scriptures, and all Christian theology, says that the opposite is the case. God invents us. We are made in God’s image. Now, wherever you’re coming from today, I’m going to assume that that’s true: that we are made in God’s image. And thus we should be able to get a bit of an idea of what God is like, by examining what it means to be a human person – and that is the focus of the address I want to give. But let me first of all give a product warning from Aquinas: whatever you may imagine God to be, that God is not. That’s a very important product warning. Whatever you may imagine God to be, that God is not. Now that product warning doesn’t say, ‘Don’t imagine’. It simply says, ‘Don’t take your imaginings too seriously’. I would want to say, especially individualistic imaginings. And yet, probably that’s the dominant sense of the way many generations in Australia now see God in terms of their individual imaginings. But it would be another story for me to explore the notion of why we mustn’t take individual imaginings too seriously.

When I say God is personal, but God is not a person, I mean to be very provocative. In Western society – and this is where the atheists are – we have in my view a totally false view of what a person is. I wonder what you think a person is?

A book on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, by Catherine Mowry laCugna I think captures very well the way most people in Australia today, most people in Western culture today, think of a person. She says: ‘Largely due to the influence of the introspective psychology of Augustine and his heirs, we in the West today think of a person as a ‘self’ who may be further defined as an individual centre of consciousness, a free, intentional subject, one who knows and is known, loves and is loved, an individual identity, a unique personality endowed with certain rights, a moral agent, someone who experiences, weighs, decides and acts.’

Now my suspicion is that almost everyone sitting in front of me has that view, because that is the view of our current Western culture. That is what we see as a person. Christopher Dawkins’ idea of a person is certainly an individual centre of consciousness, and the two-part television series of his that was recently shown on ABC television, ended with Dawkins saying, ‘The here and now is all we have – make the most of it’.

His view of this individual is not that much unlike that of Plato, of the pre-Christian world. Plato saw the human individual as a soul or spirit trapped in matter, and in the body. Dawkins of course has a very opposite reaction to Plato as to how you might deal with this poor, isolated thing that’s trapped. Plato saw matter and the body as something to escape from. Dawkins, on the other hand, says ‘Well, let’s affirm our material being, our bodily being – and if you’ve read his book, ‘The God Delusion’ you’ll know how much he is on about the importance of our sexual fulfilment – let’s affirm it because that’s all there is. Make the most of it.’

In some ways the current crop of atheists are rather more crude than their predecessors. Bertram Russell has the same view of the person as was in the quotation that I made from Catherine Mowry laCugna – the individual, the self – but he has a rather more high-flown notion of how we might live being trapped as it were in the impersonal.

This is what Russell says in his book, ‘Why I am not a Christian’: ‘Brief and powerless is man’s life. On him and on all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. For man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day. Disdaining the cowed terrors of the slave of fate to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built (that is, God), undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from wanton tyranny that rules his outward life, proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.’

Russell’s view is the same, in a sense, as Plato; in a sense the same as Dawkins. The centre of conscious awareness – that’s what a person is. And when you’re a centre of conscious awareness, you’re aware that really you are nothing more than in the hands of an impersonal fate. For Russell it was matter, for Dawkins it’s … what? The evolution of energy and substance. For Plato, it was something evil – the body, the material world that trapped. And all you can do is, for Dawkins, indulge yourself, I think he’s saying.

For Russell, it’s ‘Be heroic.’ Make an heroic defiant stance against the terrible impersonal fate that you face.

But these are the intellectuals. They simply reflect, though, this dominant view of what a person is – the individual self aware, as in the laCugna statement – that is absolutely through and through the Western cultural notion of a person. There was an ad, it may still be appearing, for a particular brand of jeans. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It pictures a very attractive woman, windswept hair, and she has that defiant look that it seems that both female and male models have got to have in advertisements these days, and she’s wearing a pair of the jeans tightly, that are being advertised, and she says, ‘No-one tells me what to wear’.

Think about it. It’s the same view. A person is an individual. To be a person is to be an individual. And yet I love that ad because of the irony in it. Anything but an individual. And yet you’re encouraged to buy and wear those jeans so that you can be an individual. In my view this whole notion of the person is in fact quite false and there is virtually no such thing. No such thing as this Western idea of the person. It doesn’t exist.

Oscar Wilde again: ‘Most people are other people, There thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives are mimicry, their passions a quotation.’

Let me give you an incredible contrast of what a person is, that dates back prior to Russell or Dawkins, certainly not to Plato. It’s what is generally considered the first novel ever written in the English language. Recently the subject of a film, but a film can never ever capture this particular book which I consider to be one of the most important things I ever read. I read it as an undergraduate in English Literature at Sydney University back in the ‘60s: Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’.

Now this book purports to be the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy. It’s nearly 700 pages long. Tristram himself is not born until about page 500. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, and yet he doesn’t show up?

Let me give you a sense of what is in fact volume four of the book, of the sense that he has of what it means to be a person: ‘I am this month one whole year older than I was at this time 12 month ago, and having got as you perceive almost as you perceive almost into the middle of my fourth volume, and no further than to my first day’s life’ (have you got it? Four volumes – and he still hasn’t got past the first day of his life. Born, day one. That’s all he’s got to.) ‘tis demonstrative that I have 364 days more life left to write just now than when I first set out. So that instead of advancing as a common writer in my work with what I have been doing at it, on the contrary I am just thrown so many volumes back! Was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this? And why not? And the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description? This is day one!’

And of course, what’s day one all about? Day one is all about the world and the people into which Tristram is born. In particular, the problem of his nose being affected by his birth. Later on, his penis suffers a similar tragedy. These things that shape us – and of course it’s his mother, and his father, and his uncle in particular – who are his opinions. Oscar Wilde – we are other people’s opinions. And this is what Sterne is trying to say with ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’. What a person is, is an enormous complexity of ‘otherness’.

This notion that ‘I am the individual’ is a person in Sterne’s understanding is utter nonsense.

‘At this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I write. It must follow and please your worships that the more I write the more I will have to write and the more your worships will have to read. Will this be good for your worship’s eyes?

99.99% repeater of me – this thing here that Mum and Dad called Bruce Wilson – is relationship. Only the tiniest unimaginable grain, in my view, is an individual. Am I a person, though? I think I am a person, I claim that I am a person, I suspect you probably agree that I’m a person – and yet I’m hardly an individual. I mean, look at you lot, you’re so conformist. Just look at your clothes, for example. Nothing very individual out there – or here. Chemically, of course, I am the stuff of stars. Why Bertrand Russell should see that so negatively, I don’t know. If certain nuclear happenings had not happened in the stars, I wouldn’t be here. Or you. Matter has made me. I am of course, of the sun. If I didn’t get some vitamin B I wouldn’t be here. I see by the sun, principally, and even the artificial light is reproduced sunlight in some way or other.

I’m sound waves – or they are me.

Genetically, I’m Mum and Dad and … I’m a mongrel, really. I’m a Caucasian mongrel, even back to just grandparents – two Scottish, one English, one Jewish. And when it comes to my mind and spirit, I’m a culture. The best example is language – unfortunately I cannot think in language other than English. I’ve learned a couple of others, over time, but I don’t think in them though.

But I didn’t invent the English language. My goodness, its history, if you know anything about linguistics, is enormously complex. It’s much truer to say that the English language creates me. In other words, all those people who went before me in their millions and trillions make me. In other words, the personal is relational. But it’s not especially individual.

A couple of examples, for those of you old enough to remember the first circumnavigation of the world on a yacht by Francis Chichester. When he got back, he talked about how he had enormous trouble coping with hallucinations in the ocean by himself. He found it very hard to distinguish himself from waves, from birds, from anything. There just seemed to be a flow in and a flow out. And we all know from what we have been hearing recently of the kind of tortures that have been carried out by various people involved in the so-called war on terror, that one of the most successful but also terrible tortures is sensory deprivation. Cut people off not only from other people in solitary confinement, but cut them off from hearing anything, seeing anything, and what happens? The self disintegrates. Or the so-called self. And they simply are unable to distinguish anything in their stream of consciousness as different from anything else – dreams, hallucinations, etc etc.

In other words, I am relationship. Whatever I am, I am this enormously complex set of relationships to the universe, to the stars, to evolution and genetics, to culture, language – I am 99.9% repeater relationships. And if there is the tiniest bit of me that is individual, it is very tiny indeed and I cannot call that my person. All of this other is also me.

And so I want to say that that which fosters relationship is personal. In other words, what fosters relationship with nature, with animals, with other humans, that is personal – because it is relational-ness that is personal. That which destroys relationship is impersonal – whether it is to treat nature as a thing – all sorts of environmental questions we’re now facing as a consequence of our treating it as a thing rather than as a relationship, than as a mother to us – or other animals, or other humans. That which destroys relationship is impersonal – such as violence and hatred. Which is why you can understand people wanting to be atheists if they think God stands for violence and for hatred. Because that is impersonal, non-relational. And this is why St John says that God is love, why St Paul says the only things that matter are faith, hope and love – and the greatest of these is love. Because what matters is relationship.

Another way of wanting to say this, particularly in the light of the current missionary crusading atheism, is that what we do matters infinitely more than what we think. In other words, it’s how we relate that demonstrates truth – not what we think and say. Hence Jesus’ words, of course, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’. Now I said at the beginning to Kim Miller, that I’d bitten off much more than I could chew today, and he told me that Winston Churchill said something along the lines of, ‘Bite off more than you can chew, but chew quickly’. I’d hoped to go on and talk a little bit about God as Trinity – but maybe we can leave that till question time. But simply, what I’m saying is that while we image God with an understanding based on the false view of what a human is, that completely dominates our Western culture at the moment, we’ll have these silly pictures of God that are little more than pictures of a super-Santa Clause or a super-Tooth Fairy.

What we need to do is simply go back and just simply ask, ‘What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be personal?’ Because the Christian faith does stand for the notion that God is personal, but we look silly if we try it image God by this silly Western notion currently dominating us all, including ads for jeans, about what a person is.

(Question on links between scientology and atheism)

It’s years since I’ve looked at anything much to do with Scientology, but what I do know is that it’s a form of self-help – it’s part of the self-help movement. If you go into a bookstore here now, you’ll see rows and rows of self-help books.

But it’s a self-help movement that pictures its self-help in terms of science – science is prestigious, in terms of psychological science in particular – but other than that I know very little about it. I did know a lot about it 15 years ago, but I just haven’t followed it through. Yes, there are some celebrities like Tom Cruise and of course the young Mr Packer who are involved with Scientology, but I really know very little about it. Somebody else might enlighten me further.

(Q – is Dawkins connected with Scientology)

No, Dawkins is not connected with Scientology – Dawkins would be absolutely anti-Scientology.

(Q – Robin Williams’ book?)

Yes, Robin Williams’ book is really an attack on the current form of the argument from design – the Creationists – I read it some time ago. He really is coming from the same kind of space as Richard Dawkins. In old-fashioned terms, they’re like Russell – they’re materialists. Their materialism is more sophisticated in the sense that it’s connected with very profound understanding of evolution, and with a physics that is much more profound than was around at Russell’s time, of a matter-energy-space-time universe rather than the views of the material universe that Russell would have had. They’re totally reductionist – that is to say, what we are is, in the old Marxist terms, an ‘epiphenomenon of matter’. In other words, we are just a little bit of mist that matter throws up. It’s very powerful, because science and technology are such powerful interpreters of a certain way of looking at the world, which I acknowledge to be true and admire. Their problem, of course is, how do you get from the impersonal to the personal? If you see the fundamental world as matter energy, in whatever way you want to construe that, how do you get to the notion of the personal which involves self awareness or consciousness or self-consciousness? It’s a very dichotomised view of the world, and that’s where Russell found himself: here am I, a thinking, feeling, self-aware being, trapped in this impersonal matter which is just going to through death destroy me. Now I think religious people, Christian people, need to be very careful that they don’t just write of, as it were, the truths of the science that are involved in this. Really we get into philosophy and theology when we start asking the big questions, and my view is that you’ve got to take a ‘life-world’ view. There are two things that exist. Yes, there’s certainly a world out there which has made me; there’s a culture out there, though, that has made me and without that culture I’m unimaginable – and people like Dawkins hardly have a word to say about that. Even the way in which you’re constructed by language, for example. I would want to take a life-world approach. All that exists, me and my awareness of it, it and it’s creation of me. In other words, life-world. Not simply consciousness on the one hand, and on the other hand an impersonal world of matter-energy. I think that’s a huge mistake that they make all the time. And then they get themselves trapped in this reductionism: the here and now is all we’ve got – we’d better make the most of it. That’s fairly despairing view, in my judgement. Or Russell – let’s be stoical, let’s really make what we can of life, and be as big as we can, realising we’re going to be just smashed by it in the end. So I think that’s where Robin Williams is coming from.

(Q – Dawkins’ earlier writing on genetics?)

In a sense he’s still saying the same thing, I think, in ‘The God Delusion’. And that’s really another way of saying in my view what Russell was saying, except you just focus it in a particular area – whatever the gene is, I mean we know what the gene is, but whether you see it as matter or energy, it’s what makes us. Then you become aware that it’s what makes us, and we’re nothing. I think there’s a real contradiction in what Dawkins is saying, but that’s ultimately his view and I don’t think he’s shifted particularly from that. What he’s saying is, biological evolution explains just about everything, and what it doesn’t explain, in a way, isn’t worth knowing. But it certainly explains all the things religion purports to explain. And don’t trust religion, trust evolutionary biology because it can actually show the goods, where – look at religion, it does all these terrible things and it’s got all these people all claiming that they know who the true God is. And they fight one another over it. I mean, there’s a lot of plausibility in that way of arguing, which we’ve got to accept is a problem to deal with, not just give Dawkins a kick in the pants. His book is the crudest, in my view, of the new atheists, but in many ways will probably have the most influence because it draws on a lot of absolutely mad religion, especially Christianity – he really hardly focuses on any other religion in ‘The God Delusion’. But he’s got plenty of Christian nutters – in my view, Christian nutters – or, he’s got very sincere simple souls with very silly views – Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause views of God. Why I wanted to give this address today was to say to you, ‘Well, we can’t have these childish views of God. We need to grow up.’

(Q – inaudible)

There are a few things that are unique about me – one of them of course is my memory of the things that have made me. So I’m not denying that there’s no such thing as an individual, I’m simply saying that we have gone unbelievably too far, to the extent that to be an individual, hence my use of the example of the jeans ad, is seen as one of the highest possible goods – and yet it is a complete falsification preyed upon by all sorts of people – not just advertisers – to make us think that we can be individual. The best way we can be individual is to love. The worst way we can be individual is to hate and be violent. But there is a sense of course in which we are individual, and that is when we become aware of how non-individual we are. And the more aware we are of that, the more individuality we will have, in the sense of being placed in a position to make moral choices – to love or to hate, to be violent or non-violent. So I’m not denying that there’s such a thing as an individual, I’m just saying that we live in a world where I think people think of themselves as about 99% individual, and 1% not. And I want to reverse it. And if we’re going to think about God, we need to reverse it. Because no-one has yet mentioned how we possibly imagine God differently if we have a very different view of the person. If God is a person, not like the current way we think in Western culture, but the way I’ve described, then in what way is God a person? I don’t have time to develop it now, but we can go back now and start to see the importance of the things that the early Christians were arguing about, fighting about, etc. etc. What is God like? Because after several centuries, they came up with the idea that God is a Trinity. All I want top say about it at the moment is, what that meant of course was that singleness involved complexity and complexity involved singleness. Some of the most rational thought – it isn’t just scientists who think rationally – some of the most rational thought that has ever existed with some of the greatest minds of history, not least of all Augustine, that last of the great Ancients and the first of the great Moderns as some people have called him, rationally dealt with this whole question of ‘What is God like?’ And they said, ‘Well, the best imagining that we can come up with is this notion of the Trinity – that is what God’s like’. But of course, fully aware all the time of the Aquinas rider, ‘Whatever you can imagine God to be – even as Trinity – that God is not’.

(Q – relationships?)

If I’m understanding you, this might reflect the same kind of view. I retired as Bishop, I’ve lived a public life since I was 19, and my days for example as Bishop here in this diocese were spent with people – either on the phone or in the office or at their place. And when I retired – Boom! Zandra was working, and all I had was a cat. And I’ve learned so much from my cat, about life. The cat came along virtually at the same time as I retired, he’s nearly eight now. What can I say? One of the things that I observed, because I was thrown in for the first year or so so much with the cat, I developed the cat enormously – people who’ve seen my cat who plays ‘fetch’, who knows 42 English words, etc. etc., who comes when you call him, he’s not like those things you can’t herd, was that my relationship with the cat brought the cat to full potential. I can remember looking at him and thinking, ‘You come from the heart of God, too’. I don’t mean to be sentimental about that – I hope I’m not being sentimental – but that says something of what you’re saying, and I am horrified at the way in which we non-relationally objectify animals in our culture now. I mean, I’m not going to go off and join the radical animal lib group, and yet I’m horrified that we as Christians don’t take seriously the question of what our relationship with other animals is, and why God made them – we just think God made us.

I think we don’t learn things. One of the things I’ve learned is, my cat can’t talk, although my cat does know as I’ve said, 42 English words, my cat communicates in body language unbelievably – and of course animal behaviourists know that. I can sense what the cat says. I’ve used cat, but I’m a great bird lover, and I think birds are so incredibly. What I’m saying is that as a person, we’re relational – and yet we live in a culture where we’ve got this individual, where even Christianity unfortunately is being blamed by some conservationists for objectifying nature, just treating it as a thing, and of course having done that it’s coming back to bite us. I’m not sure that Christianity was as involved in that as some of the conservationists want to make out, but once again we’re back to relationship. The Aboriginal notion of, ‘The land makes me’ – it is my mother, it is my creator. This is what it means to be a person. Now when you start to think about God, if there’s this enormous relational complexity that makes me, just begin to imagine what the relational complexity that God is must be! Which is why I find the whole notion of the doctrine of the Trinity so relevant again now, and the discussions that went on about it.

The Orthodox Church says Trinity doesn’t define God, it’s just the best imagining you can get to when you just bow down at the unbelievable complexity and mystery that God is. But it’s the best picture that we’ve got, it’s the best imagining we can do. And of course it’s relationship: the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Spirit loves the Son, the Spirit loves the Father, all that wonderful Greek word ‘pericoresis’, they all indwell each other.

(Q – If God is relationship, what is God to us? How are Scriptures to be used?)

A very good question, and a very difficult one to answer.

Have a look at the way Muslims use the Koran. Here it is, the word of God. Reveals all the truth, and what can be found therein is the truth of God. You get many Christians treating the Bible in exactly the same way, and I think we need to re-visit this whole area. For me, the Koran represents a story and the Bible represents a story. I don’t want to jump on this ideological bandwagon which says, ‘This one is the Word of God, read it and you’ll get the truth’, because it doesn’t come to grips with the way they were formed. The Christian Scriptures are a story of people who believed that they had an understanding of God that was visited upon them, as well as who they were in openness to God, and Muhammad as an individual claimed exactly the same. The Revelations came to him through the Angel Gabriel and he wrote them down. Now one could talk about other religions and their scriptures as well, but there are certain kinds of Christians and certain kinds of Muslims who seem to argue in exactly the same way about two entirely different books. I want to short-cut all that and talk about stories.

This is a very brief answer to a very deep subject. I want to, for example, look at the difference between Jesus and Muhammad. I have become convinced over the last ten years in particular, that Jesus stood for a totally non-violent view of God, and that that was developing through the Scriptures, through the Prophets, through the Later Prophets up to Him. Muhammad was an extremely violent person who led armies of conquest – can you imagine Jesus leading armies of conquest? – who had his offsiders present some of his enemies’ cut-off heads at his feet, who had at least ten wives and a huge number of captured concubines. These are two very different stories, and it’s the stories I want to compare, and their outcomes. All claim, of course, that this was revealed of God. How do you test what is revealed of God? I think only relationally and communally, so for example, let’s pick up St Paul. St Paul contrasts living in Adam – and don’t think of Adam necessarily as an historical being – and living in Christ. Weird notions to our individualism today. He says when you become a Christian you are ‘in Christ’ – en Christa – before that you were en Adam – In Adam. He’s talking about two ways of communal being. Now, what does it mean to be in Adam? Or in Muhammad? Or en Christa? I want to compare stories, argue the stories and not play the game of competitive dogmatics: ‘This is the Word of God!’ ‘No, this is the Word of God!’

I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere there.

If I were not a Christian I’d be a Buddhist. I have considerable problems with Buddhism, but I think Buddha is a much more attractive figure than Muhammad. I won’t go any further than that. We’ve got to compare stories, but we mustn’t do it as individuals. We’ve got to say, ‘Well, we’re communally made,’ and if I’m going to understand truth it’s got to be communal. It’s no good me inventing my own god. And for so many people in our Christian culture at the moment who go off on all sorts of little new age stories, half-Buddhist sometimes, really inventing their own god. Whatever is true is only going to be true communally, because we are relational beings. Science knows that, and we need to know that in religion and we need to stop taking dogmatic pot-shots at one another, or authorities – ‘the Pope says, because what the Pope says is true’; ‘the Bible is true, because the Bible says it’; ‘the Koran is true, because the Koran says it’. Yes, God reveals, but where? And how do we know? Let’s compare the stories and the lives and what they produce and how true they are.