God vs. the universe
Good news! God is different from the universe.
Fellow Pilgrims,
Somewhere in my adult years, a new way of talking about “the univesrse” made its way into cultural currency. This way of referencing the universe seems to be a pointer toward something quasi-divine, a “higher power.”
But God is not the universe, and that is very good news.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgement: William Blair (Johns Hopkins University), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I first noticed such talk of the universe in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which began in 2005 and ran for nine seasons. Thanks to the insanity that is the internet, I was able to gather a quick refresher on all the ways universe talk functions in the show, which is about friends searching for love.
Characters “believe in” the universe and ask for miracles from the universe.
The universe “wants” things and can be angered if those wants are denied. The universe “punishes,” “rewards,” and “conspires.”
The universe sends signs and “bad omens” and can be used to avoid making decisions; “It’s so much easier to let the universe decide.”
The universe “works on” things and “has a plan.”
The universe has “infinite wisdom” and works “destiny.”
Characters make “a deal” or a “binding covenant” with the universe.
One character wants “our kid to believe that the universe is magical.”
Universe talk points to questions about fate vs. free will; “Maybe we don’t need the universe to tell us what we really want.”
By the 2018 release of Ava DuVernay’s take on A Wrinkle in Time, this idea of a godlike universe was current enough in popular culture to make it the obvious replacement for God in the film adaptation. To Mrs. Which (who is presumably, in the book, an angel of God), Meg asks, “What are you?” and Mrs. Which replies, “I am a part of the universe. Just like you Meg.”
Today, I hear people talking this way often, from a woman on reality TV who believes in “putting” what she wants “into the universe” (a deformation of prayer? In which the woman thinks she can speak things into being?) to attempts at something like interreligious dialogue, which suggest that all the gods are really one thing, the universe.
All this could be interpreted as a cultural opening to the divine, to the spiritual, a starting point through which the good news of the gospel might get a foot in the door. But it also reveals rather horrifying assumptions about what the divine is like. The false-god who is the universe is capricious, plays favorites, metes out rewards and punishments, despises human freedom, and operates on magical principles. This universe is not unambiguously good; this is why Meg and Mrs. Which must fight against the dark side of the universe (reminding me of a description I once heard of Star Wars, from Jason Concepcion—I’m almost sure it was Concepcion; I heard it on a podcast—as a “Manichean space opera”).
Whatever we make of it, I know one sure piece of good news here: God is not the universe. And the universe is not God.
The universe is impersonal. But God is personal. While the universe is a thing (a big thing, but still at thing), God is a personal, relational being, constituted eternally in the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this personal God, having created humans in God’s image so that we too are persons, wants to be in personal relationship with us. We are invited into Jesus’s relationship of sonship with the Father through the power of the Spirit. We’re invited to get interpersonal with God. We don’t invoke this God with magic or try to make deals with this God; no, we talk to this God, personally, as a child to a parent, in prayer. The most fundamental truth about personal, relational entities is that we can love. The universe doesn’t love. God is love.
The universe is created. But God is eternal and uncreated. The universe has a beginning and an end. God was and is and is to come. The universe is finite and dependent. God is infinite, everywhere, and always, and God alone exists without having been created. God alone exists in God’s own right. Created, finite entities, even one as big as the universe, will inevitably fail, but God, the eternal one, stands forever. We can count on the eternal God into eternity. We need not fear the death of the sun or the collapse of the universe, for the one eternal and everlasting God invites us into everlasting relationship.
The universe is us. But God is not us. The philosophical idea that God is not fundamentally different from creation is called pantheism. (pan = all, theist = God, pantheism = God is everything.) Semi-divine universe talk robs us of the difference between God and us. Christian faith has rejected pantheism from the beginning, recognizing that it gives us a divinity far less than the God we meet in scripture. The prohibition of idolatry is also a prohibition of identifying God with the universe (or with us) or with any created being: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Romans 1:22-23). Reptiles can’t save us. No human we know can save us (until God becomes human for our sake). We need someone beyond us. We need God beyond us. We need power beyond human power, love beyond human love.
The universe is unfair. It is cold fate. But God loves the whole world and relates to us by love. I don’t know why the universe gives some woman on reality TV what she wants but doesn’t give it to another woman. This is cruel, capricious, fickle. It imagines a divine power that wants us to fawn on it.
Or, if the universe is rewarding one woman because she is good and not rewarding another because she is bad, then we have, here, a story of prosperity theology instead of the Christian story of salvation by grace, in which even I, a sinner, having earned nothing, am blessed by the love of God and invited into the gospel story.
Providence is not fate, because providence is personal, loving, and consistent with the character of the God of love as revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Providence, unlike fate, is compatible with human free will, because providence is the action of the interpersonal God who made us in freedom and loves us in freedom.
The God who made the universe, who is different from the universe, and who loves the universe, including you and and me, is infinitely more good, more holy, more beautiful and true, than our ideas about the universe can be.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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