God SHOULD be imperfect

Introduction

In a previous post, I talked briefly about religious minimalism, with the aim of insisting that if I find Ian Ramsey's ideas about God interesting, it's not in a non-cognitivist or reductionist approach, but in a (Wittgensteinian) elucidation approach to the religious form of life.

In my view, the religious is or must be a form of life/language game sui generis, with “entities” that have a unique mode of existence (Latour).
In this respect, I believe that metaphysics and religion should be kept separate. A religion should not be seen as a form of metaphysical, historical and/or scientific treatise. God should not be seen as a metaphysical entity to which we resort in our metaphysical problems to play a metaphysical explanatory role.

This view is a bit “anti-theology”, in that it rejects the common debates on God's “attributes” (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.), on their coherence, on the philosophical arguments for and against God, and so on.
This view sees all this as a form of imperialism by scientific, metaphysical or philosophical language games, which colonize and recreate the religious in their own image, obviously distorting it and leading to a whole host of problems.

But then, what is the religious, if not a metaphysical, historical or scientific treatise? The problem is that if the religious is a form of life in its own right, it's very hard to explain what it is without playing the religious language game. Any attempt to explain what it is will use a different language, and will therefore distort the religious language game to some extent. Any attempt should be understood as metaphorical, or as trying to “point to something”, rather than as seeking a real translation or reduction.

In this post, I'm going to explain how I see the religious form of life, drawing on the ideas of authors such as Howard Wettstein, Tilghman, DZ and others. But keep in mind that, in the spirit of religious minimalism, this is not a reduction but an elucidation, a necessarily imperfect elucidation. I'm going to appeal to attitudes, practices, etc., but we shouldn't be drawn towards non-cognitivism, since in an anti-representationalist, Wittgensteinian approach, any language game can only be elucidated in this way: "according to the constitutive view, a language is first and foremost a form of life, offering a new kind of consciousness. A language transforms our world, the world of our engagements; a language offers new possibilities of behaviors, new purposes, new ways of feeling, new ways of reacting to things, new meanings, new social games, new ways of inhabiting the world, new ways of being, etc."

In this post, I'll also argue that this elucidation of the religious requires an imperfect God.

The religious

We have attitudes that are, in a sense, “spiritual” (more on this soon).
Mystery and astonishment at existence itself (astonishment that “all this” exists, or exists “in this way”) are very fundamental ones.
There are also more “reactive” attitudes, which the condition in which we find ourselves by virtue of existence itself may elicit or “seem to demand”; wonder, love, gratitude, trust, surrender, anger, protest, praise, indignation, disappointment, fragility, awe, hope, disorientation, etc.

These attitudes can be called “spiritual” because they seem (directly or indirectly) to have an “all-inclusive” aspect (as Ramsey would say); they are (directly or indirectly) directed at or sparked by or seem to be called upon by existence itself, by the “cosmos”, they are attitudes that turn towards an “all”, they have an “existential orientation” (think of when you feel like raising your fist in anger to the sky), they seem to be a form of “relationship to the world”, they seem to be addressed or “related” to “it all”, etc.

Now, what the religious proposes is a language/form of life, to express, frame, deepen, intensify, articulate, stabilize, orient, amplify, structure, transform, give form, etc., to these spiritual attitudes.
The religious captures spiritual attitudes in a shared symbolic history/narrative, ritualizes these attitudes, proposes a language to give them a voice, allows them collective expression, captures them in social games, calls for personal transformation for “better alignment” with the spiritual, etc.

If we were to say “what God is”, we could say that it's the “core concept” of this form of life (see this post).
We could also say, more metaphorically, that it's the “focal point” of spiritual attitudes, or that it's a voice we give them, or an object we give them, or that it's the place where our spiritual attitudes “come together”, or that it's the name given to the living relationship between the human and spiritual attitudes, or that it's the focus of spiritual life, etc.
Focus not as a “cause”, but as a structure for the symbolic gathering/organization of spiritual attitudes, as their place of confluence, as the knot of the religious form of life.

In this, the religious language game does not designate a metaphysical position, but rather something that shapes the soul or proposes an existential orientation.
God is not to be seen as something that metaphysically “explains” or “justifies”; his role is existential, not epistemic. He serves to live in the chaos of the world, not to explain it; to give form to trouble, not to resolve it; to inhabit suffering, not to justify it.
God is not to be seen as a metaphysical sovereign, but as an existential partner; he is the knot of our spiritual life (the “core concept” of the religious form of life).

Furthermore, according to Wettstein, this view of the religious and of God is far more faithful to the Bible than the kind of “omnigod metaphysical entity” of contemporary theology.
- The Bible doesn't really contain articulations of metaphysical theses, it contains mostly a lot of stories and narratives, poems and poetic prose, images, praise and lamentation, etc.
- The Bible doesn't really contain our notion of “belief”; it doesn't really talk about “believing that God exists” as if that were a metaphysical thesis, but mostly about believing in God, trusting God, fearing God, being faithful to God, etc.
- The Bible doesn't really talk about God's “attributes”, but mostly about his “roles”; father, king, friend, lover, judge, etc. And even when the Bible does speak of God's power, knowledge, etc., the context makes it rather remote from our concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, etc.
According to Wettstein, the sort of metaphysical-theological approach that treats God as a perfect ontological object comes primarily from a medieval transformation that is biblically dubious.

Imperfect God

The thing is, our “relation” to “it all” is necessarily troubled, complicated, dramatic... The world is not perfect, far from it. Among spiritual attitudes, there is not only wonder, love, gratitude, trust, praise, hope, there is also anger, despair, protest, indignation, disappointment, disorientation.
And these attitudes are justified. Theodicies (attempts to answer the “problem of evil”) are not only philosophically misguided by mistaking religion for metaphysics, they are above all an insult.

Evil exists, very much so. Nothing can deny it, and nothing can justify it. In fact, Wettstein considers this to be quite blatant in the Bible. The Book of Job, he tells us, shows great unjust suffering befalling Job and his loved ones. Job, at times, entertains negative thoughts and words against God, while his comforters try to convince him that the suffering God is inflicting on him makes sense. At the end of the book of Job, God says that the comforters spoke falsely of God, unlike Job.
According to Wettstein, what the book of Job suggests is that evil is not a mere surface appearance, but a ground floor phenomenon, not to be explained away, which runs counter to the very enterprise of theodicy. In the Book of Job, God seems to value protest and indignation against him, and condemns the justification of evil.
The world contains horrors, and it's crucial to call them horrors, without attempting to explain them away for some greater cosmic good, as Job did.

In this, God cannot be perfect. The world contains horrors, and so it is justified that our spiritual attitudes include anger, abandonment, protest.... If God is the knot of spiritual life and these spiritual attitudes are justified, God cannot be perfect.

God and our relationship with him will always be stormy. And that's a good thing. Seeking to erase justified spiritual attitudes, to stifle appropriate reactions to “it all”, is not healthy. God must be imperfect because the world is imperfect. God must not be an ontological perfection but an existential partner with whom we live and struggle, sometimes in disappointment and indignation; a living, troubled existential relationship.
Of course, when I say “God is imperfect”, I don't mean that he isn't totally omniscient, or omnipotent, or omnibenevolent... These very concepts are based on an erroneous understanding of religion. To say that God is imperfect is to say that, in the religious form of life, the word “God” is necessarily implied in tension, in tearing, in trouble...

And according to Wettstein, an imperfect God is, again, biblically far more faithful. The God of the Bible is never depicted as a flawless being, but as a being with various facets, some of them just, caring, benevolent, others cruel, petty, bad-tempered. The Bible depicts a God who does immoral acts, a God who makes mistakes, who sometimes has regrets, etc. The Bible depicts important figures who criticize God, blame him, criticize him, question his judgment; and a God who changes his mind several times in the face of these human criticisms.

But if God is imperfect, how is he “worthy of worship”, as we say in analytic philosophy? The question is badly put. In traditional theology, the reasoning is “you are perfect, therefore I adore you”. But this is misguided. If religious people have the attitudes they have towards God, it's precisely because he is God; he is the focus/knot of the form of the life of spiritual attitudes.

And with this interpretation of the religious, it's no longer a question of believing or not believing. The question becomes “do we want to participate in this form of life”?
“Phillips remarks that to wonder, meaningfully, about whether God exists is to wonder whether there is anything in religious practices such as prayers of praise, thanksgiving, repentance, and petition.”