Content warning: This post contains strong language.

An alternative theology: What if…

God isn’t an all-powerful Greco-Roman deity up in the sky, raining down hail and fire on those who displease him, and doting blessings on those who love him.

“The world is in his hands. He’s got my life under control.” What if this, too, is metaphor, just like “My body is a temple” or “I am a child of God” or “We are the salt of the earth.” It is not literal.

What if, when things suck, it’s not God’s doing. And it’s not that old “fallen-world-because-of-Adam-and-Eve” bullshit either… well, not exactly. What if it’s either because we chose to fuck something up (wherein the beginning of Genesis is rendered as mythic truth, not literal history), or because of natural, random processes.

What is God?

God is love.

The world may go to shit. It isn’t on him to stop that or prevent it. It’s on us.

God is love.

What is God?

He does not control the cosmos. He beckons. He invites. He tugs at our spirit, our soul, our heart. He is the still small voice leading us to do differently, to make things better, to reflect his nature of love in the world.

It is a voice we can ignore.

What if he won’t stop us from wrecking the planet or commuting mass genocide. Maybe we think he should. In our small minds, we place the blames of humanity’s sins on his shoulders. Where was God? Why didn’t he stop this? Is he not in control?

So we despair when we take metaphors literally. But the divine, if such a ground of all being exists, is far too nuanced and vast for our boxes.

God is love.

In a mysterious, complex way beyond our possible frames of thinking, operating as if from another dimension, he is – somehow – working. Sometimes we sense his handiwork when things slip into place in ways we can’t explain. As puzzle pieces slide and lock together, goosebumps prickle our skin.

So we believe. Until he is absent. Until a desperate prayer goes unanswered. Until children die of famine, and wars tear apart families, and disasters destroy cities.

So now he isn’t real. He isn’t in control. Because we think in boxes, in dualism. He is, or he isn’t.

What if God does not exist in boxes, in dualism.

God does not exist. God does exist.

God is love.

God is in control. God is not in control.

God is the author of our lives. God is not the author of our lives.

God is telling our story. We are telling our story with him.

God is love. And love will lead us.