‘OMG,’ we allow ourselves to say. Once upon a time that would have been called a minced oath. The G stands for God. Similar mincing occurs with Blimey and Jeepers. We have left God out of things but the name lingers. So widespread is the linguistic switch that versions of the word ‘God’ are generally allowed to circulate nowadays without any masquerade.
Words like fascist, tyrant and autocrat present no parallel problem. We don’t like the words or what they mean. But a system that comes to fruition only after 50 years have passed is more likely to be regarded as wicked than one administered by a powerful organisation like the Church.
At the same time we have lost any concept of blasphemy. Our post-modern society has no place for religious language, though we do follow our Jewish friends when we wish them shalom.
To put it another way, God has become departmentalised. We are back in the days of polytheism. We thank God when we haver escaped a crisis. We farewell our friends with ‘Good-bye’. We may even mince matters further and say ‘Thank goodness’. We have different versions of God depending on the circumstances. He is not one God. He has been departmentalised.
We may not open our Bibles very often but when we do we find that the writers make it clear that in their view there is one God and he has revealed himself – in the Scriptures and in Christ. To be fair, we must accept that when we think about God, we think about a super-Wren or a super-Leonardo. We can but extrapolate from the best we know. God is the ultimate good.
And the other options? If we can’t accept the idea of a God and a Maker and one who made himself a Redeemer, we have to rely on our imagination or accept a series of unplanned incidents of a geological, or green kind. They may add up to a natural religion, with humans experiencing a sense of awe or of the numinous. But we are talking of a depersonalised divinity, a way of thinking about our invented god whereas Christianity recognises God in his wholeness, a God of character. We may think of him as a supreme mathematician, a life-giver, an unrivalled musician etc. It is a small but indispensable step to investigate what kind of God we find in the Scriptures.
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