Notes for a non-theist “theology”

1. Non-theism (post-theism?, transtheism?…) does not imply negating God, but a given “theist” image of God as Supreme Being, Subject as opposed to other subjects, who rules the world and intervenes in it as an extrinsic cause.
2. All images of God depend on a given culture and cosmovision. They are valuable and poor human constructs, always partial and provisional that sooner or later need to be deconstructed to recognize THAT WHAT IT IS or to let God be God. The first commandment of the Jewish tradition is: “thou shalt no make any image of God”.
3. The great mystics and philosophers of the different cultural traditions (whether religious or not) felt the need to transcend their human constructs on Reality, in general, or on “God”, in particular. Let’s remember Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao-zi, Vedas, Buda, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Isaiah, Jesus, Plotinus, Hypatia, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Luther, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Etty Hillesum, Simone Weil…
4. The theist image of the Mystery or the Absolute is no longer credible for an increasingly larger social majority, not because of its levity or superficiality but, on the contrary, because of its demand for depth, “spirit and life”. They, we, seek another way to express and live the Mystery of what IS. We need new metaphors. For example, among many others: Fontal Reality, Depth, Breath, Vibrating or fluttering spirit, Quantic Vacuum, Electromagnetic vibration, Light, Creativity, Flame of Goodness, Everlasting Presence, Cosmic Conscience, Original Energy, Universal Dynamism or Eros or Love, Open Potentiality, Being of everything that is…
5. Non-theism states that God is not “personal” in the frequently used sense of the word according to Boethius’s (V-VI century) classic definition: “individual substance [or subsisting entity] of a rational nature”, a conscious subject versus other conscious subjects. However, non-theism does not state that God is “impersonal”, but rather “transpersonal”, “beyond personal” (H. Küng). It is the universal I of all me and the universal You of all you. It is the Being of all beings. It is the Fontal Relation of everything with everything. Communion of all forms in permanent transformation, Creating Love creating itself in everything.
6. Non-theism does not mean pantheism: it does not state that the world is God, or that God is the sum total of the divine parts of the world. The world is entirely constituted of forms, but the whole is –at all levels– more than the sum of the parts (emergentism, systems theory). God could be conceived as the shapeless Whole present in all forms or as the emergent Whole of the forms.
7. Non-theist “theology” seeks to overcome the transcendence-immanence duality. God is “no-Other”, “it is No other of nothing” (Nicholas of Cusa, theologian cardinal, XV century). It is the absolute transcendence in the absolute immanence (R. Panikkar), like the Horizon, the Depth, the Vacuum, the Beauty… God and the world are not two, or one: they are no-two (Being and entity are not two, nor are Beauty and beautiful forms). God is not countable, as forms are. The relationship God-world could be expressed in different formulations: “Everything in God” (panentheism: God as the world’s space, vacuum or atmosphere), “God in everything” (theoenpanthism, if this new word can be accepted: the world as God’s body, home or “milieu”), “Everything towards God” (paneistheism: everything in evolution towards its full divinity, God creating itself in everything).
8. Non-theist theology knows that Jesus was a believer theist Jew: he believed in a Creator God, King, Judge, Father, who rewards and punishes, speaks and acts in the world whenever He wants, as He wants. He also believed in chorus of angels and legions of demons led by Beelzebub at the fore; he believed in the end of the world, in heaven above for some and hell below for others as a place of eternal fire and punishment. But we do not have to share those images or ideas about God over these other ones.
9. Non-theist theology states that the Jesus of the gospels (so different a Jesus in each one), although he was basically theist, clearly pointed to beyond the theist image of God: beyond the moral theist God (parables of the Prodigal Son, of the workers in the vineyard, of the pharisee and the tax-collector…), beyond the religious theist God (parable of the good Samaritan; his saying “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”, his critique of the temple system and his liberty in front of the Sabbath and the prescriptions for ritual purity…), beyond the dual extrinsic theist God (his recurring expression “I am” reminiscent of the “I am” of the Burning Bush; statements such as: “He who loves me will be loyal to my words. My Father will love him and we will come upon him and dwell within him”; “[Father,] I have given to them the glory you gave me for them to be one as we are. You within them and you within me, so that they may arrive at a perfect union”; “Break this trunk, lift this rock: I am there” (Gospel of Thomas)”.
10. Non-theist theology assumes that being Christian does not imply to “believe in” or “think about” God as Jesus did, but to live him, incarnate him, “create him” as he did, influenced by the free and compassionate goodness, creative and happy goodness, inspired by a profound, founding and original confidence in God or the Fontal Mystery of all that is.

Aizarna, December 10th, 2021 (text of my presentation in the Assembly of Atrio.org on that same day)

Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler