Is God a Person?
Responding to the "spiritual but not religious" wave
Photo by RDNE Stock project: https://www.pexels.com/photo/jesus-christ-statue-5874951/
(An eight-minute read.)
Rainn Wilson—aka Dwight Schrute—is on a spiritual crusade.
The actor, famous for playing that lovable salesman, Dwight, in The Office, one of TV’s most successful shows ever (and, candidly, one of my favorite shows ever), sees the negative consequences of our spiritually-starved world and is on a campaign to stem the tide of a growing secularism.
A few months ago, he published his third book, Soul Bloom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, which sounds the religious alarm and paints his vision for spiritual revival. Since then, it seems like he’s been everywhere promoting the book—on podcasts, in articles, on social media—pushing what he perceives to be an elixir for a world that continues to divide and fracture.
I’ve been intrigued by everything I’ve read and heard from Wilson, resonating with a lot of what he says. He recognizes the deep wounds that religion has historically caused, and sets forth a vision that focuses on love, connection, and wonder.
One thing that’s especially caught my attention, however, though not to my surprise (since I already knew Wilson was a member of the Bahá’í Faith), is his understanding and definition of “God,” whom he talks a lot about.
Though Wilson roundly rejects atheism, and considers himself a theist, the God he describes bears little resemblance to the traditional Judeo-Christian God.
Indeed, God, for Wilson, is not a personal being. Instead, God is a force, an essence—a how, not a what.
For one, Wilson is particularly attracted to Native American explanations of God—what, for the Lakota Sioux people, is referred to as “Wakan Tanka,” or the “creative force that binds and generates life.” God is the “mysterious power,” which, as “the “soul of the world,” lives “within the world, not above the world.”
By way of analogy, Wilson speaks of the experience he had with his son, who almost died in childbirth. Holding his son for the first time, realizing how close he came to death, was obviously a moving experience for Wilson. And it was in that moment that he thought to himself, “This is God.”
The experience, the love, the connection, the joy—all that was God to him.
Wilson isn’t the only person to think this way, of course—and that’s precisely why I bring this up. Such ideas—which have been prevalent in eastern and native religions for centuries and even millennia—have been subscribed to by people in the West for decades.
And yet there seems to be a growing number of people in the West, especially of late, who’ve bought into this version of spirituality and this definition of “God.”
Indeed, as Western society becomes more secular and post-Christian, there actually seems to be an increased number of people, starving for spirituality, who are gravitating to such a version of “God.”
I can tell you story after story of people I’ve interacted with, and am friends with, who subscribe to this understanding—which is, to a large degree, essentially pantheistic (or, in some instances, panentheistic).
I’m far from the only one who’s noticed this phenomenon, of course. Among others, Tara Isabella Burton, in her fascinating recent book, Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World, has identified this trend as well, providing empirical evidence which demonstrates the exponential growth of the “spiritual but not religious” category in Western society—which, according to her, makes up some 50% of people in America.
Simply put, while Western society is increasingly becoming “post-Christian,” it’s not necessarily becoming “post-spirituality.”
All this is to say is that while people in the West are rejecting traditional views of religion and traditional views of God, they’re not necessarily rejecting the existence of God altogether.
They’re instead embracing a sort of “Wakan Tanka” version of God while rejecting—in Rainn Wilson’s words—the “Sky-Daddy™” version of God.
In other words, they’re rejecting “God-as-a-person” and embracing “God-as-a-force-that-unites-us-all-together.”
According to this understanding, we are—in words you might hear Oprah say—all connected in a universal oneness. And this oneness is, essentially, God.
I’m sympathetic to the likes of Rainn Wilson and applaud his attempts at promoting a more compassionate and inclusive spirituality that rejects the abuses and divisiveness of traditional religion.
I don’t entirely agree with him, of course—and I’d like to offer some feedback on that account.
But, to some extent, such feedback begins with paying close attention to the personal God Wilson rejects.
Indeed, a close reading of or listening to Wilson reveals some very interesting theology—theology which he ultimately rejects, leading him to reject the existence of a personal God altogether, rather than re-imagining a personal God who actually aligns with what his heart yearns for.
So let’s listen closely as Rainn Wilson describes the personal God he rejects.
Rain Wilson’s Sky-Daddy™
It’s quite revealing that Wilson’s favorite term for the traditional explanation of God, prevalent in societies influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview, is “Sky-Daddy™,” which is a term he repeats throughout his chapter entitled “The Notorious G.O.D.”
For Wilson, this “Sky-Daddy™” is a God who is constantly looking down from heaven, closely monitoring human beings’ every move.
He—and Wilson deliberately uses the pronoun “He,” since that’s the pronoun most religious people have used in the West—“judges us non-stop and tabulates naughty and nice.” He’s the “omniscient superhero” and “great big patriarch in the sky.” He’s the “Grampa God with a flowing beard on a cloud with a telescope and an agenda.”
At the same time, this God is a “gumball-machine deity, dishing out personal favors, good parking spaces, and lottery tickets to His favored children.”
In a longer description, Wilson turns his attention to a patriarchal version of God, which has had terrible consequences.
“God, as we have come to understand Him through the Abrahamic mythology,” he thus explains, “is so toxically male! It’s patriarchy personified. Big, disapproving, bearded, warlike, anthropomorphic, masculine, daddy-man who is going to spank you with plague or lightning or locusts or damnation if you don’t do his bidding.”
He elsewhere proposes that the “God of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is more than a little, shall we say, ‘all over the place.’ This anthropomorphized entity occasionally flies into rages; can be vindictive, envious, and violent; and is filled with irreconcilable contradictions.”
This, for Wilson, is essentially the God that has inhabited the collective imagination of people in the West, whether intentionally or not, seeping into “our collective Western psychology, and subconscious.”
Indeed, so pervasive is this understanding that even Wilson himself—who, being raised in the Bahá’í Faith, didn’t grow up believing in such a version of God—started implicitly believing it himself throughout his adolescent years.
This version of an “all-seeing, judgmental Sky-Daddy™” began to morph in his “mind and heart” in his teen years, with God “frowning down” on him as he was “fumbling pseudo-sexual activities” with his “seventeen-year-old girlfriend in the backseat of cars.”
This “Santa-Claus-God” was “scornfully watching” him and his girlfriend “struggle” with their “naughtiness and niceness from His angelic heavenly abode,” angrily saying to him, “Rain! Stop trying to take your girlfriend’s bra off in the back of that Volvo!”
Granted, Wilson is, throughout all these reflections, no doubt using a bit of hyperbole, laying it on thick as he presents a caricature of the Judeo-Christian “God.”
And yet I don’t think his explanation is too far removed from the perceptions of many people.
In short, the personal God Wilson roundly rejects is a God of judgment, shame, guilt, and toxic masculinity. He’s watching everyone with an all-seeing, meticulous eye, looking for any excuse to exclude them from his favor.
To be clear, I don’t think this is the only reason Wilson—or anyone else—has rejected the idea of a personal God. There are no doubt many other reasons for such an attitude.
But it does seem to be a major—perhaps the biggest—factor in gravitating toward a less personal version of God in the quest to pursue a more loving, compassionate, and inclusive spirituality.
Simply put, it’s hard to step into a spirituality of oneness and inclusivity if the God who runs the whole universe is a divisive and exclusive Sky-Daddy™.
Of course, my response, just as Wilson says he gleefully responds to others who tell them they reject this Sky-Daddy™ version of God, is simply this: I don’t believe in the God that you don’t believe in either.
The God I do believe in
Granted, we can’t just make up whatever version of God we want, taking all our favorite traits and attributing them to a personal Deity. Just because I may want God to be a particular way, it doesn’t mean such a God exists.
I can’t, in short, make God in my image and according to my likeness.
And yet I’d simply say this: I do believe that all the goodness and beauty and oneness and inclusivity Rainn Wilson—and other spiritually-minded people—longs for the universe to experience find their origin in, and stem from, a personal God.
All that Wilson yearns for, I do believe, finds expression in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Peter, and Paul.
And, truly, it’s all summed up—I might boldly propose—in Jesus.
After all, where does personhood and consciousness come from—if not a God with personhood and consciousness?
To be sure, there’s still a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to questions about the “God of the Old Testament,” and charges of patriarchy, and the idea of God killing his own son—and many others.
But these certainly aren’t new questions. And they’re ones that many of history’s most intelligent minds have grappled with for millennia.
The bottom line for me is that I embrace all the values Rainn Wilson embraces, and applaud his attempts to turn the West back to spirituality. But I happen to believe that all Wilson longs for is found in the personal God of the Bible (and in particular the person of Jesus).
This isn’t to say I can perfectly rebut every objection that’s leveled against the way God is portrayed in the Bible. Indeed, I don’t have everything figured out.
But what I have seen, especially in Jesus, leaves me satisfied enough to conclude that there is a personal God—and somehow, some way, that personal God is defined chiefly and wholly by love.
Truly, if God is just like Jesus—indeed, if God is Jesus—we’re in good and gracious and beautiful hands.
Keep your eyes on this space next week: though I’m in no way claiming to be one of those “intelligent” minds that history has produced, I’m going to try my hand at responding to one of the most challenging rebuttals, mentioned above, to the idea of a personal God and the “trustworthiness” of the Bible: all the blood and gore and violence the Bible attributes to God.
Admittedly, this has been—and continues to be—the most challenging “apologetic” issue for me when it comes to the idea that God is personal, and that he is “love,” and that the Bible is a trustworthy account of God and his ways. And I’m quite sure I don’t have it all figured out.
Nevertheless, I’ve come to some answers that are fairly satisfying to me. And I’ll share them with you—rather sheepishly—next week. So come on back!
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.