GOD REDEFINED

There is precious little agreement between me and atheists.  I not only believe God is, but also know God personally as my Lord and Savior.  The fact of God’s existence is no longer just faith to me, but is knowledge.  I have experimented with God in the laboratory of life, and have found Him real; I have personally experienced the new birth.  And I have reproduced the experiment for others; I have personally led many others to the same knowledge of Christ.  I know the Bible is true.  Webster’s Dictionary defines dogmatic as a teaching "asserted a priori or without proof."  I am not dogmatic, for I do have proof.  I speak with the authority of a person who has experienced what he is talking about.

However, I have recently read an atheist essay with which I do agree, at least partially.  Corliss Lamont, an atheist, a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, and at one time Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, Chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and a director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote the following in "Equivocation on Religious Issues" which was published in his book A Lifetime of Dissent (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988):

Most important of all among questions of religious belief I consider those of the existence of God and the existence of immortality.  And by God I mean a personal God and by immortality I mean personal immortality, survival of the  individual after death....

It is possible to make a classification of four different groups.  Firstly, there are those, still powerful in strength and numbers, who affirm the existence of God and immortality.  Secondly, there is a lesser group which is sincerely agnostic on these questions.  Thirdly, we have a steadily increasing class of persons who clearly and openly deny the existence of God and immortality.  They frankly acknowledge their atheism, since that term most accurately describes their position.  Then, fourthly, there is that rather large number who in various ways avoid the issue.  The greater proportion of these do not actually believe in God or immortality in any ordinary sense of those terms.  Most of them, I feel, belong by rights to the third group and ought to be supporting the group.  It is this forth and last class that I wish particularly to analyze.  The first three divisions for the most part know what they think and say what they think about God and immorality.  But I am tempted to believe that the members of the fourth division are somewhat muddled, and at least there can be no doubt that they muddle others.

The easiest and most frequent way of equivocating on the issue and qualifying for the fourth group is by indulging in the gentle art of redefinition.  (p. 9-10)  [Boldface italic emphasis added]

God Is Our Creator

God Is Separate From His Creation

God Is Spirit Not Matter

God Is Prayer Hearing and Answering

God Is Unlimited

God Is Absolute and Immutable

God Is Holy and Just

God Is a Trinity

God Is Living, Personal and Loving

God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.  (Rom 5.8-11)

The word atonement implies "at-one-ment."  It is the covering and washing away of sin by the blood of Christ so that whosoever believes in him shall be reconciled with God, and also receive forgiveness, peace, and everlasting life.
 

God Is Knowable

Know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind....if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever.  (I Chr 28.9)

The God of the Bible is the only true God.  Any God less then the God of the Bible is not really God at all, but mere delusion.
 

Redefining God Away

Kirsopp Lake’s Definition.  "God is the sum of all ideal values."

Julian Huxley’s Definition.  "I wish you here to agree to my giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as perceived and grasped by the human mind.  We can therefore now say that God is one, but that though one, has several aspects."

Jesse H. Holmes’s Definition.  God is "that unifying element within which moves men to unity in a brotherly world."

Henery Nelson Wieman’s Definition.  "God is that interaction between individuals, groups, and ages which generates and promotes the greatest possible mutuality of good."

John H. Randall, Jr.’s Definition.  "There is no room for God save in the aspirations and imagination of men....We take the word ‘God’ as the symbol of man’s supreme allegiance....faith in God may mean faith in the possibility of sharing ever more fully this vision of the highest perfection."

John Dewey’s Definition.  "We are in the presence neither of ideals that we completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.  There are forces in nature that generate and support ideals.  They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidarity.  It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name God.  And would not insist that the name must be given."

To Corliss Lamont’s list of atheistic definitions of God, I will add the following:

John Shelby Spong’s Definition.  "We have come to the dawning realization that God might not be separate from us but rather deep within us.  The sense of God as the sum of all that is, plus something more, grows in acceptability.  When theologians are pressed, however, to define that something more, the inadequacy of language becomes gallingly apparent" (John Shelby, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism [New York: Harper Collins Publishers <Imprint: Harper San Francisco>, 1991], 33).720

John Shelby Spong is a bishop in the Episcopal church.  However, that he is actually not a Christian but a humanist is obvious from the following quotation in which he redefines Christianity.  Lies Spong:

True Christianity ultimately issues in a deeper humanism.  That is why any attitude that kills the being of another person is an affront to the meaning of Christ.  To be a humanist is to affirm the sacredness of life.  (Ibid., 242)  [Boldface emphasis added.]

The presence of evil still confronts us with a threat to the reality of God.  It suggests that either the all-powerful God desires evil or that the presence of evil reveals the impotence of God.  Perhaps it argues that there is no God at all, and that all of us are at the mercy of a power called fate.  (Ibid., 68-69)

I suppose that the first and fairest question to ask our redefiners is, What is the purpose and value of this complex and bewildering game?  I imagine that their chief answer is that they do not wish to cut themselves off from the great and beautiful tradition that goes under the name of Christianity....They wish to work within the tradition or within the church and win people over gradually to a new and more acceptable idea of God; to evolve a religion relevant to modern conditions while retaining the hollowed and well-loved words of old.  All this would be impossible if they acknowledged themselves as atheists....The attitude of the redefinitionists perhaps comes most appropriately under the heading of what is sometimes called "strategy."

Lamont’s contempt for atheists who claim to be theists provokes him to write yet another truism:

I wonder what God, if there turns out to be one after all, would think about these people who damn Him with faint praise.  Would not He, too, be shocked?  And I wonder if He would not be justified in punishing these redefiners for breaking the third commandment, that is, for taking His name in vain....The redefiners mutilate a time-hallowed and well-loved vocabulary, yet provide very little in return for this questionable procedure.  For their God concepts have precious little religious value.  Their gods cannot be worshipped or prayed to; they do not govern the universe or the earth, or watch over mankind; they do not do anything, nor do they possess personality or mind or consciousness.  I cannot imagine any large group of men becoming emotionally aroused over such gods.  And these gods are so distant in meaning from the traditional God of Christianity that I doubt whether a continuity that resides merely in the use of the same word is worth bothering about.

There Are Phony Christian Preachers

Humanists could pretend to be Christians and to work within the Christian context.  They were not above using Christianity as a disguise or as a camouflage for their endeavors.  They argued about religion, defending those aspects of religion which served to promote humanism against those aspects which threatened it.  (Lucien Maumur, The Humanist Evangel [New York: Prometheus Books, 1982], 4)

Such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works. (2 Cor 11.3-15)

Liberal Religion Is Atheism

Beware of preachers "having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof" (2 Tim 3.5).  One atheist rightly described liberal religion as follows:

Now the increasing number of those who are liberal in religion do not take credal statements in a simple factual sense.  They agree that stories of the sun standing still or of devils enter into men or animals belong to a stage that we have passed beyond.  But the real difficulty goes deeper.  It is that the very idea of an originating or intervening supernatural power is ceasing to have the force that it formerly had.  The liberal theologian may feel that his religion is as real and as important to him as it ever was but his idea of a supernatural power is undoubtedly distanced: it has become something more like a philosophical ultimate.  If as many people as ever believe in a supernatural power it is a fair statement that they believe in it, or him, less immediately and less continuously than they did, and that there is a wider and wider realm of daily experience in whose working the conception is not invoked.  (Lionel Elvin, "An Education For Humanity," The Humanist Frame, [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961], 279)

Free thought, atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, deism, rationalism, ethical culture, and liberal religion all claim to be heir to the humanist tradition. (page 15)

The Doctrine of Salvation By Works Is Really Just Atheism

Dear reader, if you do not yet know God it is because you have not come to Him on His terms: "For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (Heb 11.6).  Faith in the true God is rewarded with knowledge of His reality.

To learn more about how you can know the true God, read "Ye Must Be Born Again."

(C) Copyright 1994 by Louis A. Turk. All rights reserved. You may  reprint this article, provided you do not edit it in any way without the author's consent, and provided this paragraph is printed at the end of the article.  Other publication requires advance permission of the author.