God in a Bottle

by Philip Sudworth.

“When a scientist brings a bottle of sea water back to his laboratory, it is still essentially sea.”  A church leader used this analogy to try to explain how the man Jesus was still actually God himself.  What it did  illustrate to me was how we can sometimes have too limited a view of God.

Suppose an exchange teacher took a bottle of seawater to a landlocked country, showed it to the children and told them that they had now seen the sea.  What a limited understanding of the sea that would be.

Even those who have dived into the depths only have a partial knowledge of the oceans. South Sea islanders may spend most of their lives by, in or on the sea but they have no appreciation of what the sea can be like for the crew on an Icelandic trawler in a winter storm.  Even oceanographers would not claim to know everything that goes on in the great deeps. On Boxing Day 2004 the world was shocked at the power within one wave. 

How much more beyond our understanding then is the creative force that produced the oceans and the thousands of species in them on this minor planet orbiting one of trillions of stars?  Yet we too often think that we can encapsulate God in doctrines.  Some even have the effrontery to claim that they have the only truth about God and all other religious experiences are invalid.   It is like telling people that unless they have ridden the waves on a surfboard, they have no real experience of the sea.

No such attempt to present the “the simple truth” about God as a neat package of ideas is going to come even close to doing him justice. He is far more wonderful and multi-dimensional than we can ever imagine.  St Augustine warned us that, “If you understand, then it is not God.”  When we insist that people see God as we do, we attempt to contain God within our own faith-shaped bottle.

Too often we project onto God our own understandings of unlimited power and complete knowledge.  Hence God is often depicted like a medieval king on his throne – listening to petitions, munificent to those who submit to him but executing terrible justice on those who disobey him. Just what we would do, if we were in his place.  Some even claim to know how God thinks and attribute to God motives, such as “God must always act against sin” or “God can only forgive people if they believe the church’s teaching.”  This measures their own level of compassion rather than the depth of God’s love and mercy.  Such thinking puts God in a bottle shaped in our own image. 

Those who believe that God is perfectly revealed in scripture forget that God cannot be contained in words.   The pre-scientific and often poetic descriptions of people’s experiences of God present such different pictures as a God who orders genocide and joins in battles by hurling great hailstones and one who is the good shepherd going to great lengths to find one lost sheep.  Whenever we read or discuss scripture, we interpret the words.  Unfortunately, we too often use scripture more to condemn others and to exclude their beliefs rather than to challenge ourselves.  Scripture becomes the word of God when it is lived out and so changes people’s lives.  God does not fit into a book-shaped bottle.

We should encourage people to develop their own personal experience of God rather than try to impose our own faith upon them by telling them what they must believe about God.  How many people have we lost because we insisted that their faith must be a particular shape and their experience of God did not fit into that bottle? 

Jesus compared the attempt to contain the power and vibrancy of a living and dynamic faith within inflexible religious traditions with the folly of putting new wine into old bottles. Attempts by church leaders to constrain new experiences of God within the bottle of orthodoxy have led to young people leaking out of the church in huge numbers in recent decades.

Albert Schweitzer only fulfilled his potential in God’s service when he stopped trying to shape and contain God with definitions and dogma and allowed God to shape him.  Like him, we have to worry less over doctrine about Jesus and respond to the call to live out our faith in Jesus by the way we live our lives.