Each person’s life journey includes intense wrestles with the matter of “authority.” When we are young, we are in a position in which we must defer to another’s authority in order to survive. As we grow, we soon become self-conscious, taking into account how we are viewed by others. And in order to fit in, we will often defer our own authority to that of the group. At first it will be to our immediate friends and acquaintances. Heidegger noticed that we give away our authority to larger, more diffuse cultures and societies, referring to it as “the tyranny of the they.”
In our maturation processes, we hopefully will come to understand these pressures on us and begin to form a firm sense of our own self and can more easily walk our particular path without relying on others for the final word about what we should do and think.
Our religious lives bring extra complications with regard to authority. When we view certain texts or particular leaders as spiritually and ethically authoritative, it becomes even harder to stand our ground because we worry that we might be upsetting God should we stray from its or their directives.
This podcast discusses our views of God and how these are typically quite influential when it comes to whether we yield our authority to these texts and people. Do we view God as completely “other,” external to us, and distant, or can we allow ourselves to believe that God is a part of us, intimately caring, compassionate, and ever encouraging us Godward? If the former, we are more likely to allow authority figures more sway, perhaps complete sway, over our thoughts and actions. If the latter, we can typically differentiate from these others and begin to trust our own experiences over their interpretations and directives. Certainly, these will align with each other at times, but when they don’t, we will follow our own light.
LDF host Dan Wotherspoon is joined by board members Mark Crego and Terri Petersen in a lively exchange about these issues and more. They are vital ones.
I love how Terri immediately points out the problems of a personalized God — because it is so easy to personalize it to reinforce the worst kinds of traits (e.g., the stern Father). But I think it goes further than that.
Speaking of the history of the development of God in the Old Testament, I have been watching videos by Dan McClellan, and one recent one was pointing out how earlier views of God in the Old Testament were very territorialized — that is, God was the God of not the entire universe or world, but of Israel, and outside of Israel, other countries had their own patron deities. With the Babylonian exile, *then* they had to reinterrogate that view to account for the fact that they couldn’t be in their ancestral land.
But I think the example is that the personalized, anthropomorphic God ends up being exclusivist and exclusionist. E.g., the God *of Israel* certainly excludes gentiles. It was by cutting down the geographical emphasis that a more inclusive monotheistic concept — especially that of classical theism which would later develop — could develop.
Similarly, the problem with a personalist God where anthropomorphic concepts are literalized, then it’s easy to take traits literally — if God is *literally* a straight, married, maybe white man, then it’s easy to make maleness Godly, heterosexuality Godly, etc.,
And I get that Dan or Mark don’t subscribe to that, but I appreciate that Terri continually emphasized that we simply don’t have a feminine in Mormonism *because* we literalize divine gender (and then insist that the figure who *could* serve as the feminine divine must simply not be talked about). We can’t then metaphorize gender as Dan and Mark were trying to do in the episode because we have this impoverished commitment to literal gender roles. Saying God can have masculine and feminine when these things are concrete attachments to literal gender therefore would imply God is a hermaphrodite. This is not an issue for classical theism, where gender is always metaphorical or allegorical.
great discussion on how personal transformative experiences can lead to a different view, but those are not available to everyone, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯