God, You, Me

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born in France.  He was a child prodigy and became a noted mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and a Roman Catholic lay theologian.  His most famous religious work is the Pensees, considered by some to be a masterpiece of religious philosophy and for others a Christian spiritual classic.  One of Pascal’s thoughts stuck in my mind years ago when I first read it:  “It is not from space that I must seek dignity, but from the government of my thought.  I shall have no more if I possess worlds.  By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom:  by thought I comprehend the world.”  Everything in the created world is inferior to a person.  Because I am aware, have purposes, and am able to know and to care, because I am a person, I am in a very real sense superior to the stars!  

Pascal affirms that to be person is to be able to be aware, to have purposes, to know and to care.  If this is so, and I believe it is, then it is absurd to think of God in nonpersonal terms such as a Life Force, a Cosmic Energy,  or as the Absolute.  Could it be that the Creator does not have the same powers (awareness, purposes, knowledge and care) that mark the brightest of the world’s creatures?  I doubt it.  If God is not a Person—if God cannot know a man and I can know that man, then God must be inferior to me!  “God may be more than a Person,” writes D. Elton Trueblood, “and probably is, though we do not really know what that means, but unless God is at least as personal as we are, God is not One to whom we can pray.”

Trueblood wrote something else that has stuck with me through the years:  “God is completely what we are partially.”  This is the main testimony of Jesus given throughout the four Gospels. It is true we must be careful of not seeing God in our own image, but we must also be careful of turning God into something inferior to our image.  To speak of God as a Person, in my mind, is to talk about God in the highest terms we know.  God is “He” and “She” because He/She is not “it,” and God is “Father” and “Mother” because God is not uncaring.  So Jesus tells us—and so does Pascal.

Rocks do not feel, nor does the sea--but I feel
the rocks and the sea