One God.

Monotheism. One survey after another confirms that most people in the United States believe in God; most of them attend "the church of their choice' often enough to count as churchgoers. The United States has more houses of worship per capita than any other country in the world, and close to 70 percent of the population prays, regularly or irregularly, as Andrew Greeley has shown.

Factoids, like these regularly make the headlines. But why? If belief in God is established so widely, why treat it as news? With believers in the majority, wouldn't one expect monotheism to be treated like any other majority phenomenon: as a matter of course and a generally credible idea? Yet believers typically feel that this common belief in God is not what it could or should be. Is it easier to believe: in God than to believe that others believe in God? If God is such a sure thing, why do most of us become irresolute (or blandly tolerant) when asked what difference our belief in God makes? Avery Dulles reports that not until he was a Harvard undergraduate did he realize that if God existed, that was "the most important thing in the world." How many of us ever make this discovery, never mind acting on it? The wag who joked that Unitarians believe "in at most one God" could have cast the net a lot wider. Isn't it odd that our belief in God is as lackluster as it;is widespread? Thus, another question: How did this flat, anemic monotheism ever emerge and take root?

Isn't our belief in one God simply the biblical faith we have inherited from the Christian churches and ultimately from Israel? Good question. Answer: It is advisable to call this common assumption firmly in doubt. For this belief in one God, who has been creating the world but who remains nameless and dwells above all times and places, is, in fact, a modern development; not until the Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism did this notion become widespread. This idea of the "one God" strikes Jewish believers and Christians (especially the Orthodox, Catholics, and classical Protestants), not to mention Muslims, as pretty frigid. This faraway God, who never changes colors and thus rarely if ever compels people to show theirs, is so ghostly, and especially so neutral, that he or she (why not it?) seems only a kind of "Super-reality."

The more thought you give this Being the more incomprehensible it becomes. While it may appeal to our sense of mystery, it somehow remains baffling. It could be adorable, but who is to tell? This God remains faceless, without countenance, and thus, not a God of visions and dreams. A God who invites discussion maybe, but who elicits no real talk; certainly not a God who induces prophets to talk (or preachers to really "say it"). No God, therefore, who inspires deeply felt prayer, or liturgy--whether of the solemn kind with hymns of praise, or the exuberant kind with dancing and singing and clapping of hands in the Lord's presence. This God is a remote Supreme Being, as deadly silent as the endless, silent spaces of the universe (which Pascal found so frightening). Or perhaps (in the manner of the ancient Stoics) it is a kind, reasonable, exceedingly subtle gas that permeates all things with its presence (but which nobody has anything much to do with). Or perhaps (in the manner of the romantics or the modem humanists), it is the Higher Being, best approached philosophically, in which case it is apt to make us, modern, self-conscious human beings, aware of our own immortal, profoundly spiritual nature. (Thus God may have drifted out of our ken, but we turn out to have become more deeply religious in the process. Peculiar, isn't it?)

Again, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers have problems with so rarefied an understanding of God. Not that they are against it; this just find it terribly incomplete and impersonal. In this God, they hardly recognize the Living God: YHWH the Lord of Heaven and Earth, or God the Father of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, or Allah, Great and Merciful.

Yet, even this minimal divine Being does something to us. It gives rise to higher thoughts. It reminds us that there is more than meets the eye, more than can be had, acquired, gotten under control, or brought to heel. It suggests that all creatures are inherently worthy of respect, and especially every human being without exception or distinction based on class, race, or sex. Thus even this ethereal God reminds us moderns of the unity of the world-order and of our responsibility for universal conciliation. That is no small thing in our human world, violent and divided as it has been from time immemorial. Belief in one God helps inspire humanity, in the face of all this dissociation and dissipation, not to abandon the search for new thin s new knowledge, new ways; it positively encourages us to hold onto our high hopes for unity, reasonableness, meaning, solidarity, cooperation, peace.

Divine Menageries?

"Believing in at-most-one God." It sounds a bit cynical. Still, do not most of us find it reasonable to believe in one, and only one, divine being--"one God of the universe," as a Passover Seder song puts it? Monotheism is ingrained in us; if there is more than one god, we spontaneously figure, none of them is really God.

That may very well be logically and theologically correct; it is not what humanity has always and everywhere felt and thought. It is far from being thought and felt everywhere today. Look around in India or Southeast Asia or Japan; you may soon find yourself wondering how we modern Westerners have managed to reduce, in the name of reason, the entire supernatural world to one bland lowest common theological denominator--God. Notice India's many shrines, or read one of the Vedas in translation, or drive around Bali; let yourself be fascinated by the Hindu world, so alert to the staggering and often overwhelming diversity of life forms, life forces, and living spirits--a powerful and far from peaceful torrent of vital energy, emanating ultimately from the all-encompassing but utterly inaccessible One. Or take a walk in Bangkok, with its thousands of statues and statuettes of the Buddha. All of them obviously carry the same message, yet all of them also acknowledge the countless experiences that affect human life, and the innumerable storms to which it is exposed. Those images are meant to place all that scrambling and struggling in the perspective of Nirvana, the cool, transcendent, perfectly quiescent peace of soul that has literally Nothing' in common with the hot busyness of daily life. Or walk into a wayang show in Java, and watch all the gods, godlings, heroes, and demons that populate the Ramayana and Marabharata epics, recounted from time immemorial. Take time to listen to modern Javanese youngsters, and discover that the moral and religious imagination of innumerable Indonesians continues to be controlled by these great epics. And while you are there, visit a Chinese temple in one of the big cities, with its statues and statuettes, big and small, kitschy and elegant, representing not just the Buddha, but all kinds of gods and heroes and sages and fools and protectors and fiends.

Now those are the kinds of places you want to go to--small, insignificant person that you are. So you go, alone or with your family or your neighbors and friends, to make an offering or just to think or implore or lament, with your whole perplexed, torn-apart self, with your family feuds and your whole assortment of worries. There you can get squared away with all those invisible, inexplicable forces that dominate your life.

We, visitors from the West, must slow down to take in what is happening in such places. If we do, we may begin to realize, in a surge of either anxiety or realism, how we, too, in the monotheistic West, let ourselves be moved and guided and baffled and terrified by all kinds of prevailing or controlling mentalities and powers and authorities, big or small, cosmic or human, not to mention the inhuman. Then a thought may occur. Could it be that we in the West think as monotheists, without actually being such?

Back home again, you may find yourself stopping by a museum and savoring the quiet, stately figures, animal and human, by means of which the ancient Egyptians placed humanity's varied story in the context of the invisible world with its untold powers and forces. Or you may sense that it is really unseemly to dismiss, with typically modem arrogance, the worlds of the Greek and Roman gods and heroes as "divine menageries.' Yes, you could do worse than read somebody like Cicero on the subject. In his The Nature of the Gods' he left us a penetrating account of the religiosity of his day, though in the end his assessment of polytheism was mainly negative. But at least he helps us realize the notion that belief in one God is anything but ordinary.

In this way, too, you may begin to realize (unless an excess of rational prejudice has you deaf and blind) how many phenomena in the world really support polytheism. Take our earth with its amazing variety of landscapes and climates; look at the immense realms of plants and animals, not to mention humanity. All of them undeniably ordered and interrelated, yet also startlingly and awesomely dissimilar, and far from harmonious. Such observations open us to the inherent riddles of the universe. We discover that it is all really beyond us; really, it is all a bit much, everything seems charged with invisible energies.

That, if anything, is the most characteristic feature of polytheism: the stunning, irresistible omnipresence of the spiritual and the divine within our restless world (and in that sense not really above or beyond it). These invisible powers and influences are legion; it is characteristic of divinity to be multitudinous and to vary according to places and seasons. Yet always and everywhere it is part of human life--often benign, sometimes playful or roguish or mischievous, sometimes appalling or truly malicious, always enigmatic. It is almost palpable, too: a cross-fire of forces and processes: lunar, solar, astral, planetary, terrestrial, subterranean, pelagic, climatic, vegetable, animal, ethnic, dynastic, familial, social, political, you name it--a measureless mix of influences, subject to nothing but the One-Inexorable-World-Order, stark blind, unknown, and unloved.

What does it mean to be religious in such a world? Most of all, you find yourself steeped in narratives about the unseen world and its denizens. Thanks to these, you live in an encompassing system of cultivated attitudes and relationships--all of them incorporated in a web of traditional practices and observances in which awe, devotion, fear, subservience, and sometimes abject obsequiousness alternate with divination and playing the odds, with cunning, calculated reverence, and with desperate attempts at suborning the powers that be or buying them off, and even with recklessness, revolt, and hubris.

To have a dark intuition of the world's coherence and at the same time to experience its obvious disharmony on a daily basis is very perplexing. No wonder that the world of polytheism is characterized by division and tension. Each power, even the highest, controls only particular locales and seasons, so that jealousy governs the world. That is why mythologies are rife with rivalry. The unseen powers vie with each other; they are partial and rarely compassionate; often they will play games with particular regions and human communities, and they do not always play fair by a long shot. No wonder human life is unpredictable. No wonder human communities are apt to be rivals, not to say hereditary enemies. The simple fact is that all interests operate at cross-purposes; the nomad's death is the farmer's breath. So, if people want to create any order and stability at all, or at any rate within the circle of their own experience, they will do well to practice their own religion, sensibly and with moderation if possible. This means: take into account the invisible powers and forces and comply with their wishes, preferably out of piety, but at least out of enlightened self-interest. For only if you oblige the gods, the heroes, and the powers-that-be are they likely to be in your corner. Or at least you will have a chance, of keeping their influence within limits.)of course, you must stay vigilant. For that,,reason, religiosity demands a fair amount of self-discipline. But that, too, has a real advantage: it keeps you modest, and conscious of your place in this overwhelming world. For along with everything and everybody else, you are at the mercy of the play of powers and forces. And in the end, you are no match for them.

But even that has a bright side: in the end nobody is morally responsible. The great comfort of polytheism and mythology is the unburdened conscience. For in the last resort, life is a matter not of taking things in hand but of handing things over, not of giving of yourself but of giving in to what plays. So just play along in the ancient game, go along to get along, do what you have to do. Even do your worst! Isn't the bottom line that we really can't help it?

Israel's God--God the Father of Jesus Christ

Only those who appreciate that Israel was part of a duster of civilizations in which polytheism was wholly unproblematic can grasp the uniqueth. In the ancient Near East, Israel stood alone. Religiously speaking, it must have looked as explosively aggressive in its world as Islam does today in Africa and India. Like its neighbors, Israel acknowledged the existence of all kinds of gods and spiritual powers. But instead of being awed by them and honoring them, it lived in awe of, praised, gave thanks to, implored, served, and obeyed GOD--and nothing and nobody else. Israel's First Commandment, therefore, was diametrically opposed to everything that passed for religion in the ancient world: "In my Presence, there shall not be any other gods for you." This faith in God is so singular that it strikes one as nothing short of a revelation, and Israel is the first to declare that it is precisely that. Ordinary historical realism demands, therefore, that we, twentieth-century Westerners, who think monotheism is wholly reasonable, allow Israel's claim that its faith in GOD is a matter of being exceptionally favored.

Accordingly, nowhere and never does Israel's faith degenerate into a habit; it remains an immeasurably deep privilege, cherished in a living (and hence flexible) faith tradition. This is confirmed rather than contradicted by the fact that in the history of both Israel and later judaism one prophetic figure after another will be carrying on against the worship of other gods and of the powers-that-be. But since Israel's God is GOD, how could its faith ever become routine?

Before Israel's God, gods and powers and forces and heroes pale into insignificance. They turn into ordinary denizens of the heavens and the world: spirits, angels, demons, immortalized human beings perhaps. For GOD is beyond compare. Which of the inhabitants of the heavens is comparable to the LORD, and which of the mighty ones is a match for the LORD?" "Not one among the gods is like you, LORD.' That is why GOD is cared "God of gods," "Lord of the dominations," "Sovereign of the heavens," "God from everlasting to everlasting," "Lord of the earth and everything belonging to it." Obviously, you cannot abandon yourself, in praise and thanksgiving and supplication, to such a God, while at the same time keeping at hand the powers-that-be, just in case. For it is impossible to serve GOD only as needed, sensibly and with moderation. With the God of AR "of heaven and earth" you just do not negotiate or bargain. Once you understand that you have everything you are and have from GOD, you can only dedicate yourself to GOD with everything you have and are: "with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

This God is literally beyond all that is. First of all in holiness. In this regard, Israel is indeed amazed at its privileged self:

When Israel went forth from Egypt,

Jacob's house from a gibbering breed,

Judah came to be God's Sanctuary,

Israel God's Dominion.

Incomprehensible. But the height of incomprehensibility is this: this startlingly holy God is no stranger. Moses, face to face with God's holy fire, takes off his sandals and hears: "I Am Who I Am.' He prays that he be allowed to see God's glory and hears: "I will favor whom I favor, and befriend whom I befriend." This means: Just don't ask; just accept. Whoever and however I may be, I am with you, I favor you, I love you." GOD is friend--not faraway but nearby, not menacing but faithful. Israel's Holy One inspires awe, but does not create distance; GOD embraces.

To accept this revelation is being born anew. To be addressed in this fashion lays bare something unfathomable and wholly original at the core of every human being; it awakens a memory which seemed lost forever. In Israel's faith-experience, humanity recovers and recalls its native affinity with GOD. This is far more than an intimation of a shadowy existence after death; it is a positive aspiration to everlasting life. Like no other creature, humanity turns out to carry the Living God's ineradicable image and likeness in itself. Being human means living by an impulse implanted by GOD.

This has direct consequences for all Israel's doings. If God "has got the whole world in his hand," then human behavior in the world must not be determined by the inexorable play of the powers-that-be. Israel cannot salve its conscience any longer; it cannot deny its freedom any longer, nor can it satisfy itself with myths, idols, and ideologies; it can no longer sidestep its responsibility for itself, for the nations, for the world. Faith in GOD is inseparable from the works of justice and conciliation, laid down in Covenants old and new,'and (later on, in Judaism) specifically in the Torah. In this way, Israel will always feel the burden of God's plan for the world and humanity on its shoulders; it will serve GOD by becoming God's agent, creative and increasingly mature, in a world not only unfinished, but torn apart. In this way, Israel gets to acknowledge within itself the germ of the truly human life: in our deepest selves, all of us are called to enter upon Israel's dignity, as the Easter liturgy prays. If GOD is the stamp of our being, the world is ours: nothing and nobody is not worth our notice.

In Israel's footsteps, we Christians have been privileged to watch GOD actualizing this reborn humanity with a new, incomparable intensity, in Jesus Christ: the Covenant embodied, the Torah incarnate, the Word made flesh. "On him you have conferred authority over all that lives; he is to give everlasting life to all that you have entrusted to him. And everlasting life is this: to know you, the one true God, as well as Him--the one you sent, Jesus Christ."

Thus favored by God and made responsible for the life of the world you are empowered to go forward, from era to era, from habitat to habitat. For GOD is tied to neither place nor time, whereas gods and powers and authorities are dominant only here and there and now and then. This is why Jews and Christians, and Muslims as well, cannot sidestep their obligation to declare their God-given sense of both privilege and responsibility to the world, and to express themselves accordingly at all times and in all places. They will do so in countless forms of civilization, at home as well as in exile, whether free or oppressed, and for richer for poorer. In the long run, they will find themselves, in faith, at home in exile, morally free in oppression, and inwardly rich in poverty. Thus they will proclaim, praise, serve, and represent GOD, against the grain if there is no alternative. In this way, too, they will get used to taking responsibility, in GOD's name--in the teeth of the powers-that-be if necessary.

All of this harbors a deadly danger, of course. One fatal step (a step, we know, taken from the beginning, and no longer to be thought away), and the sense of privilege will degenerate into a sense of superiority: human beings will set themselves up as God's equivalent, and faith in God will cheapen into self-assertion, intolerance, and fanaticism. Only if, personally and communally, we keep experiencing our faith in the "One God of the world" as a lasting privilege, and not as the most reasonable thing in the world (let alone as God's seal of approval on our prejudices), will our faith in God be a source, not just of tolerance, but of creative, civilized realism, rooted in a deep, clearsighted, and truly searching appreciation of everything that the world offers to our quest for true life.

One God of the World: The Great Surmise

Feeling privileged makes one appreciative. Those who feel privileged have a taste for what is truly precious, anywhere and at any time. Accordingly, those who feel privileged by God and reborn in faith are apt to discover and appreciate the vestiges of that privilege and the germ of that rebirth in humane civilizations of every kind. Great Jewish thinkers like Philo of Alexandria and Moses Maimonides, great Muslim thinkers like Ibn Sina and Ibn Rosche, an early Christian apologist like Justin, and church fathers like Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine--all of them have perceived God's Word and intuited God's Countenance, not only in Israel's prophets and sages, but also in Socrates, Herachtus, Plato, and Aristotle, and in the civilizations that have drawn nourishment from those wellsprings of the human spirit.

Christian thinkers of the second, third, and fourth centuries came to regard the Stoics, with their disciplined life style and their respect for transcendent intelligence, as allies, not adversaries. Seventeenth-century Catholic missionaries in China recognized 'the Lord of the Heavens" in writings by Laotse and other sages. Roberto de Nobili, in the South of India, ventured to take the haughtiness of the Brahmin into the bargain, so as to combine his deep respect for the nobility of their civilization with catechesis. In our own days, Christians have beheld the Spirit of God and Jesus in great souls; Mahatma Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjold, and countless other peaceable, dedicated people. It is deeply Christian to say this. Did not Jesus himself acknowledge that he had found in some gentiles the kind of faith he had been vainly searching for in Israel?

Live faith in the Living God, in other words, must prove itself true in our capacity for religious surmise. It must open our eyes to the splendid variety of non-Jewish, non-Christian, non-Muslim religious sensibilities, discernible at all times and in all places. It even remains discernible in the sallow monotheism of North America. For to the eye blessed with faith, the Living God is simply the One Who is ever Present yet ever Veiled, ever Old and ever New, always according to times and places. This is how God is God. Think about it. Pray. Even better, be thankful and offer praise.

Frans Jozef van Beeck, S.J., teaches at Loyola University Chicago, where he is John Cardinal Cody Professor of Theology. He is the author of Catholic Identity after Vatican II and (forthcoming from Liturgical Press) God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, vol. 2, part 3. He was introduced to Commonweal readers by Robert Imbelli, "Catholic Identity after Vatican II. The Theology of Frans Jozef van Beeck," March 11, 1994.