Pacific Currents - November 2008

PALLING AROUND WITH RADICAL MONOTHEISM

by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, November 4, 2008

You and I worship the same God.  As do Anne Lamott, Ann Coulter, the Ayatollah, and my neighbor Larry Grossman.  I make this assertion because I wholeheartedly believe that there is only one Supreme Being, Who dreamed up the cosmos and loved us into existence.

Maybe you saw the clip of a pastor in Iowa who was offering serious prayer that the outcome of the presidential election would favor his candidate.  The pastor laid it on the line to the Almighty, saying, “What’s at stake is Your reputation…”  The minister made the case that there are a whole lot of people “praying to their God, whether it’s Hindu, Buddha…Allah” for the victory of the other candidate, and if they win everyone is “gonna think that their God is bigger than You.”  The prayer cranked up Stephen Colbert who exploded into supportive bombast after airing the video, extrapolating the message, “I’m pretty sure we’re packing the biggest God,” and hyping the notice that we are entering into “the final round of a centuries-long God-off to be decided by who wins Pennsylvania.”

All of which seems to imply that a belief in multiple deities duking it out for supremacy is poised to trump Christianity’s historic attachment to monotheism.

I was raised by monotheists, so the notion that there is really only ONE God came to me early in my life.  It was the theologian and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, though, who directed my soul to the more flamboyant applications of the principle.   He insisted that we Christians and Jews and Muslims trip over our tenets if we exclaim with the prophet Malachi “Has not one God created us?” [2: 10] while simultaneously assuring ourselves that the One God is actually our sole and respective property and/or Creator,  and doesn’t hang with the people we disapprove of or disagree with. 

Dr. Ricoeur further warned us monotheists against nurturing the antithetical notion that there’s one God for the Christians and some other God for the Muslims and a whole bevy of other gods for the polytheists. This was his doctrine of radical monotheism. To paraphrase crassly: there’s one God; deal with it.

Deal with it.  Consider the implications. Do more than speculate about it.  Make friends with it. Pal around with it.  What would it mean to our lives and our world if we passionately embraced the conviction that all people have sprung from the same Source of Life?  If we reveled in the understanding that none of us is ever left out of God’s care or treated with divine indifference?  If we totally abandoned the self-serving expediency of being theoretical monotheists while congratulating ourselves on backing the winner in the battle of the Gods?

What if there is only One God? One God, Who creates, redeems, and sustains us, no matter what names we utter in invocation. Incandescent with love, aflame with justice, yearning for the peace and well-being of all the earth; barreling toward us, crushing mountains, raising valley floors, causing earth tremors as the foundations of everyday politics and economics are rattled,  sloshing through the spilled waters of the upended rivers of pain and woe, in rushing wild exuberance just to be with us, to be in touch with us, to break through to us, despite our resistance, our stubbornness, our arrogance, our beaten-down spirits, our debilitating pain. What if we believed to the core that all human beings worship the same God?  What if it’s true?  What if it’s Gospel?

                                                                                                        ~ Mary Susan