Concepts of God

We may ask, is our concepts of God personal or impersonal?

At the beginning of spiritual life most people pay homage to a personal God. This enables them to fix their minds on their concept of God and strengthens their power of concentration. As long as one regard himself as a psycho physical being, conscious of body, mind and ego and aware of  weaknesses and limitations, he feels the need for prayer and other external supports. He prays to the personal God for protection, guidance and grace. However, as he awakens to his true nature as a spiritual being, he will realize that he is none other than the personal God, a manifestation of Spirit, the one without another.

Religious community

In practice, a religious community's conception of the Divine is determined by its conviction that the object of its devotion is of uppermost greatness. Its teachings are presented either by the spoken or written word and are based on oral tradition or texts. It regards authoritative, as well as metaphysical assumptions and valuations widely shared by the community's members.

Western thought about God has fallen within some broad form of theism. Theism is the view that there is a God which is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is unlimited with regard to knowledge (omniscience), power (omnipotence), extension (omnipresence), and moral perfection. Though regarded as sexless, God has traditionally been referred to by the masculine pronoun.

To Plato, God is transcendent, the highest and most perfect being and one who uses eternal forms, or archetypes, to fashion a universe.

Aristotle saw God passively responsible for change in the world in the sense that all things seek divine perfection. God imbues all things with order and purpose, both of which can be discovered and point to His (or its) divine existence.

Early Christian Thought

Having been born out of Judaism, Christianity monotheistic and affirmed that God created the material of the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo). But it also affirmed the Trinity as multiplicity within unity, a view it regarded as implicit in Judaism.

Consistent with theism, Augustine (354-430) regarded God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally good, the creator (ex nihilo) and sustainer of the universe. Despite these multiple descriptors, God is uniquely simple. Being entirely free, he did not have to create, but did so as an act of love. His creation reflects His mind.

Renaissance Thought

 God moved out of the intellectual center of knowledge as faith was no longer grounded in reason and reason was no longer supervised by faith. The power of the church waned and society found inspiration in the classical world. Interest in this life and the world drove interest in science.

Reformation

The Reformation period saw an emphasis on divine sovereignty over human affairs as a corollary to its emphasis on fallen humanity’s inability to achieve a right place with God. If humans cannot come to God unaided, then it is God who must choose some to be right with him. Since the Reformers affirmed that divine choice cannot be based on merit, love must be the central divine attribute operating in salvation.

Enlightenment

Philosophy began splitting from religion as the two moved in opposite directions with regard to reason. Religion was retreating from reason both by emphasizing the divine will over the divine intellect, and in the human realm, by emphasizing faith over reason. Meanwhile, broad elements in the culture turned away from the authority of the church

Modern Period

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also rejected empirical knowledge as a way of knowing God. In fact, he maintained that God cannot be demonstrated at all, yet neither can his existence be disproved. As humans, we typically go beyond what we can rightly infer, and our idea that God can be objectively known is an example. Nevertheless, as an idea, God has regulative value for our thinking in that it acts analytically and gives a sense of unity to our experience. Practically, too, the idea of God grounds important moral beliefs

Incorporeality (otherworldliness)

God has no body (from Latin, incorporale), or is non-physical. This is a central tenet of monotheistic religions, which insist that any references to God’s eyes, ears, mind, and the like are anthropomorphic. Christian belief in the incarnation is a unique case in which God takes on human form in Christ.

Immutability

Those who accept the view that God is outside time are able to argue, that God cannot change because any change would have to take place inside time. The view that God is an absolutely perfect being can also lead to the conclusion that he cannot change

Goodness

Whereas classical Greek religion ascribed to the gods very human foibles, theism from Plato onward has affirmed that God is purely good and could not be the author of anything evil (see Plato’s Republic).

In Judaism divine goodness is thought to be manifested especially in the giving of the law (Torah).

In Islam it is thought to be manifested in divine revelation of truth through the prophets, especially as revealed in the Qur’an.

And in Christianity it is manifested in the gracious granting of Christ as the way of salvation.

The form a religious community takes varies from one religious community to another.

(In 2012 according to the centre for the study of Global Christianity, there were 43,000 different denominations with their dogmas and creeds).

It may take the form of worship, and involve praise, love, gratitude, supplication, confession, petition, and the like.

But it can also take the form of a quest for the ultimate concern.

The two forms of ultimate concern may be combined or exist separately. Christianity and theistic (the belief that at least one deity exists) Hinduism combine both.

In Theravada Buddhism and Taoism, on the other hand, the ultimate concern typically takes the second form but not the first.

Disagreement exists between those who regard the divine reality as personal and those who do not. Theists believe that even though the object of their ultimate concern transcends all finite realities it is more like a person than anything else with which we are ordinarily familiar, and typically conceptualize it as a perfect person.

The major theistic traditions have therefore described ultimate reality as an omniscient mind and an omnipotent will.

Other spiritual traditions are non-theistic. Advaita (non Dual) Vedanta is an important example.

The Brahma Sutra starts with the aphorism (an inquiry into the nature of Brahman) it states that direct realization (of Brahman) is possible. Although unmanifest, it is associated with traits as being eternal, imperishable, ever-pure, without the attributes (of the Gunas), indivisible, full, perfect, all-knowing, ever free, considered vast (being all-pervasive), self-effulgent, beyond all imagination (associated with name and form), unthinkable, meaning its features cannot be thought of (the concept of truth, standing distinguished from mere imagination).

Another Vedic concept of the Supreme is: Sat Existence, Chit Consciousness and Ananda Bliss.

It is hoped that this paper has helped you toward a better understanding concerning the concept of God.