God Is Not King

God is not king. God is not a master, and we are not in bondage to God. This was the consensus reached by Fall 2016 session of the Seminar on God and the Human Future with the guidance of guest theologians J. Kameron Carter and Keri Day. A formal report on the session will appear in a future issue of The Fourth R magazine.

Given the problematic associations with property, possessiory closure, and mastery, the concept of sovereignty should no longer be used in reference to contemporary conceptions of God.

Both the scholars and the public audience reached a consensus that the idea of God as sovereign is no longer tenable, but on what grounds? And was this a vote against “the Master” an act of hubris, just another attempt to wander like Zarathustra with a lantern in daylight, intoning in new words the death of God?

‍A sovereign God is a God that, by God’s very nature, condones slavery and all forms of bondage. The rhetoric of colonization, subjugation, and human trafficking provides ample evidence of the usefulness of a sovereign God to any society, community, or family that asserts the right of one group of people to exploit another. Such language (literally) ties to the sacred to property and “propriety”—being “well behaved” and in one’s “proper place”.

‍A sovereign God is a God tempted to act for power and vengeance. Where God is adopted as an alternative master or king against a human despot, even an oppressed community is tempted to seek a simple reversal of power: “Now look who holds the whip!” This eye for an eye logic leaves us all blind, and none the better for it. In forging new language for God—as many slaves and oppressed people have done!—the allure of this metaphor should be interrogated.

‍Abject slavery is not the only, or even the best, way to honor an important source of wonder, guidance, regeneration, and authority. The God Seminar was not trying to suggest that God, however defined, may hold zero authority over human lives. Authority comes in many forms and can be honored in many forms. Total humiliation need not be one of them! This conversation had an ecological component to it, in that stripping land of life and destroying its ability to sustain whole systems of not only human but other living beings as well, is itself a form of slavery and subjugation. Think of a spectrum of attitudes toward whatever is ultimate, with slavery on the extreme end, and it is soon clear that other metaphors than “master-slave” hold more promise even for a world that is not 100 percent egalitarian.

It should be clear from these brief notes that the moral problems, rather than formal logical problems, of the sovereign God metaphor dominated Seminar discussions. As for prospective workable metaphors for God, this session of the Seminar noted several that have been birthed by resistance movements informed by the problem of racism:

• God as the wild place, the fugitive space, the space of breaches and breaks and exile
• Theology redefined as para-theology, that is, work “to one side, beside, and beyond,” and the Seminar’s work as “para-institutional,” asking which categories of Western theologies need to be released
• Religious practice as a promiscuous mixing of communities that normally don’t come together, as calling into question both hyper-local brutality and hyper-imperial brutality
• Appreciation for the reality that whiteness came to be associated with God in the sense of being the ruling collective that is “proper,” while blackness has been a “fecal” poetics of dealing with the “shit,” the mess, the excess. The white body gets its nutrients by brutalizing the rest (as cultural critic bell hooks has said, “they’re eating us”). How can this be disrupted? In working with communities that identify as white, slowdown metaphors that encourage an ethic of care might help, as long as it doesn’t turn into a starve-and-binge pattern instead.

The Spring 2017 session of the Seminar on God and the Human Future turns to another class of metaphors, meaning and the cosmos, with the guidance of Catherine Keller, author of Cloud of the Impossible.

Thank you for reading this report on the Westar Institute Fall 2016 national meeting, which took place in San Antonio, Texas. To see all meeting-related reports, visit the Fall 2016 program page.

Cassandra Farrin joined Westar in 2010. A US-UK Fulbright Scholar, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (England) and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Willamette University. She is passionate about books and projects that in some way address the intersection of ethics and early Christian history.