What you (and I) think about God, isn’t God. In other words, what we think about God, or believe about God, or say about God doesn’t determine who or what God is.
In the same way, you must know: what I think about you, isn’t you. You are you. Now, of course, my thoughts about you affect our relationship but let’s be clear, what you and I say about The Divine doesn’t conjure some kind of magical framework that alters God’s very existence.
Part of the mystical and apophatic Christian traditions that have been around for millennia understood this. It is the immature young psych, and the modern certainty-addicted mindset, that believes (and desires) God be definitely as they say. And you will find most petty arguments, most hatred, most violence, most antichrist behaviour is fueled by those who cannot decenter their idea of God to actually make room for God and others.
I unpack this idea of ‘decentering God’ across a chapter in my new book, Decenter Everything. I argue that it is necessary for maturing, largeness of soul, and the practice of eldering. When I sent the book draft to some beta-readers to give me feedback, I found a good number of people struggled with the way that I had first written it. So I had re-write much of the chapter to state my position.
See, so many of us have been told to put God in the centre of our lives, and I get this; We are to have no idols. Plus, making God central is good for piety and devotional confession. However, the point I was trying to make is that most of us have simply centred our (concrete) idea of God, and this is not God – instead, it’s an imagined concept of God.
If you want to know how I pitch a remedy you’ll have to get the book – suffice to say, it seems that many of my evangelical friends had a difficult time decentering their concepts of God because much of the theology they had been presented was contractual and forensic. Meaning, that much of what they had come to believe was based upon a lot of rules, rites, and rituals which placed them in a powerful and central place of power over how, and when, and why God loved them – largely based on THEIR faith, action, abilities and beliefs. And this is problematic because it is steeped in an underlying message that separation from God, and union with God, are ontologically possible. Plus, it makes our faith and works more contractually powerful than God’s work as/in/through Christ.
I realise there are some big concepts and words in what I’ve just written. But I think it’s really important because I sincerely struggle to see how we can mature, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, (particularly as people who confess they are following Christ), when our religious world-views are constrained and constructed by conditional imaginations of separation from all of Life itself – instead of leaning into the mystical divine union with God that simply ‘is’ our reality. In other words, “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”