On having a god: it's a relational thing

Introduction 

There is a mistaken assumption that if Jesus ‘has a God,’ then this tells us that the divine being excludes Jesus. This post will look at why that assumption is mistaken. You understand God, and Scripture, relationally if you want to understand it well. Relational theology, not philosophy, is the better key for understanding God.

You see interestingly sceptical (anti-Trinitarian) questions such as: "Can a God pray or worship to another God?" The obvious answer from ancient literature outside the Bible is a clear "Yes, a god can indeed treat another god like this." (You just have to look at ancient Greek stories of how lesser gods revered their chief god Zeus!)

So if you want to deny that a god can worship a god, you have to have another understanding.

For anti-Trinitarians, underlying their scepticism is an assumption that God, like us, is a uni-personal being. That is, a critic's personal experience of him/herself is of being a single person themselves, and they can hardly imagine anything different. But there is no valid reason why God has to be uni-personal. There is no valid reason why the divine person has to be just like us.

So here's my starting point. You and I are not like the being of God. You and I, as a human being, might think of oneself as a private individual. And that's because of what you and I are. But the divine being is different from you and me. Unlike us, the divine being is eternal, omniscient, existing before and beyond creation. Obviously, just because we ourselves are none of those things doesn't mean God has to be none of those things. Therefor, just because we are singular individual persons does not mean the divine being has to be a singular person. Unless one wants to imagine God in a very anthropocentric way. 

Start with this understanding: the divine being is not like us. 

We ought not to dictate what the divine being can be. And then we start to observe how different and unusual the divine being of Scripture is. An open mind will see the divine being doesn't have to be like us and can be multi-personal. For the flesh and blood Son - Jesus - for him, having a God, is a relational thing. That is the key. There was a relational life which a human Jesus had to fulfil. Having a God is not an ontological thing. It is a relational thing. When we have a relational theology, we are freer to observe God, and see that the divine nature is quite unlike us. We have a key to dismantling our human, anthropocentric, assumptions. If we are brave to dare to see further.

Having a god

Having a god is a relational thing. People have their gods. To an adoring man, a woman can be a goddess – this is not healthy, and probably unwelcome to the woman! To football fans, the “star” who lifts their team to the “heights” may very well be a “god” to them. I’ve seen it. Anthropologists have written about it. There are even academic papers about the close similarities between football and religion. Gods are all the things we worship, be they earthly figures or heavenly figures. It’s relational.

Our language is full of signposts to it. If people comment on someone else’s romantic relationship like this – “she worships the ground he walks on” – we know this is a relationship at an early immature stage, and the girl/woman needs to stop “putting him on a pedestal.” That is to say, she needs to stop treating him like a god. Gods on pedestals are a thing.

The Bible is critical of ancient peoples who built models of the things they worshipped and fixed their models on top of pedestals to raise them higher up for all to see. And for all to worship. The Greeks did such. The Romans did such. These gods on pedestals were not necessarily heavenly beings. Having a god, remember, is a relational thing, not a matter of where the god is found. But they liked to keep their gods close.

Some say it’s human nature to metaphorically put people on a pedestal. As a football fan myself in the 1980s, I well recall a team manager who “saved” the club from decline and “performed a miracle” un raising the team to the “heights” of success. The fans loved him, really loved him, to his dying day. From the heart, they adored the man who had given the gift of a footballing lifetime to them, dignity and worth as fans of a most successful club. He was, and though dead still is, an idol to them with an undying love. Lesser “servants” of the club are “not worthy” to be compared with him. I am not exaggerating the devotion.

He was “just” a man walking the earth, but he was loved as much as any God in heaven for many of them. In no-one’s eyes was he a heavenly being. He didn’t need that attribute to be a god to them. Having a god is a relational thing, Being a god is a relational thing.

I won’t talk about all the ways in which football is like a religion, with its many cultic (in the academic sense) features. Others have done that amply.

So fans and their idols is a thing. An idol is something you worship. Photographs of “teen idols” adorn the walls of many a young person’s bedroom. That’s just a teen phase you pass through! But the language is apt: teen idols are worshipped a little bit. Sometimes more than a little bit.

The Bible contrasts idols with the “true God” who should be worshipped. But that doesn’t disallow teenagers the right to go through a rite of passage! To some adults – and children – their favourite television programme is said to be “his whole life.” This is more true of science-fiction fans devoted to a television series or a film franchise with lots of content to absorb, where their time and money is consumed by their love of that show. Effectively, their idol has eaten their time and their money. Curiously, this resembles another pattern. I refer to religions where worshippers lay edible food at the pedestals on which their models of gods sit/stand, as if to nourish their gods. (Of course, what it’s doing is nourishing their devotion to their gods, the object of their devotion.)

In summary, someone’s god, the object of their devotion, can actually be here on earth – a “star” of music or sport or TV – or in heaven. What makes anything a god to someone is our relational attitude to it. The Bible says that the object of worship will be a created thing or the Creator, and it approves only worshipping the Creator. It talks of those for whom that relational attitude to the Creator is lacking, and who instead tend towards worshipping created things. Thus, “they turn to other gods.” Or “their god is their own stomach,” and so on.

So by definition, having a god is not a matter of a contrast between the god being a heavenly being and you being an earthly being. It’s not about where you are. It’s a matter of the heart.

It’s a relational thing, not an ontological thing per se. Being ‘a god’ to someone doesn’t of itself tell us if their god is a supernatural being or a human being. That’s something we have to find out from more information.

So, that was a very long-winded way of introducing my subject, that Jesus on earth spoke of having a god.

 

Jesus having a God

So what relational thing is this? It’s in the context first of a Son to his Father, but it’s not this that tells us the Father is a supernatural being – that is just taught anyway. (In fact, the gospels present both Father and Son as supernaturally able, so that doesn’t divide them.)

The second context is created human form to Creator. Something about being the flesh and blood Son in Galilee made it appropriate that his relationship with his Father was one of worship. Why was this needed?

In Christian terms, to have God at the centre is to have your worship oriented in the right direction. Relationally, Christian worship is directed towards the Creator, rather than to created things. It’s because God is Creator (I’ll say more), not because God is supernatural (other things are too), and not because God is in heaven (other things are there too). Of course, God being in heaven signposts us towards God’s ultimate status. And God’s being supernatural signposts us towards God’s ability to create the universe. But these signposts don’t tell the whole story.

It’s because God is Creator and Ruler of all things, and ultimate source of all good, that is why we worship God. That defines the relationship. It’s still a relational thing.

What we worship isn’t to be decided simply by what our hearts like. In Christian worship, we find in God the thing that most truly warrants that place in our hearts.  

So, back to this: something about the flesh and blood Son in Galilee made it appropriate that his relationship to his Father is one or worship. And it can be only that the Son took upon himself the life of created things. This, vitally, gave the Son the power to re-set humanity’s right relationship to the Father. By virtue of the mould he has made, we can be fitted into that mould, conformed to the likeness of the Son. This way, our relationship to the Creator is put back into shape. That’s why Jesus of Galilee says he has a God. It’s to perform the great re-set of humanity, to re-set history and the human race.

So having a god is relational. In itself, it doesn’t tell us that one being must be supernatural and another not. Having a god is not intrinsically ontological. It’s having one’s heart oriented in worship to the right person.

Jesus’ heart was always in the right place, turned towards the Father. That was true before he came to earth. It was still true while on earth, with the added dimension of being in human form, performing the great human re-set, having a God in his heart, so that we can too, facing the right way. It’s love with an extra dimension. That’s what it is for Jesus to have a God. Once this is understood, we begin to appreciate Christian worship more deeply, and why Christian worship to God is through Jesus, the Great Re-set man himself.

And as we observe Jesus, the very image of God, we realise what God has been like all along, the very best of all, adored by hearts that have been re-set. Now we understand truly what it is to have a God. If the eternal Son who is in the bosom of the eternal Father (John 1) had not come down from heaven and “dwelt among us,” none of this would be possible. We are simply caught up in a Trinitarian embrace.

He who truly loved the Father from the beginning cam down so we could truly love the Father. He had to have a God in terms of the Father in order to re-set us towards the Father. It’s a relational thing from start to finish. The joy and life of this can be missed by wrong assumptions. 

If this seems in some ways paradoxical, I’ve written a post about that here.

And finally, to quote R. Andrew DeFord, ""The God of" is not just a general, relational statement. It's also a covenantal designation. 1) Those under the law/covenant established at Sinai have YHWH as "their God". 2) The Son was born under the law/covenant at his incarnation. 3) Therefore, in virtue of being born under the law, the Son has YHWH (the Father) as "his God"." (https://x.com/andrew_deford/status/1791480885897810189)