GOD AND WAR

GOD AND WAR

A short excerpt from my Oxford Interfaith Forum Lecture delivered earlier this year that may be relevant to recent events and claims about God.

"The understanding of the one divine reality as the source of all is as important as the distinctive understanding of divinity that our traditions offer. I believe that it needs renewed emphasis in our times. I am aware of non-theistic traditions that do not employ the language of the divinity to speak of the cosmos. In different ways, these traditions also teach about the unity and interdependence of all that exists. The grave danger of overlooking the universality of the divine is the danger of understanding the divine as a tribal, ethnic, or national deity of our religious community, our ethnic group or our nation. The consequence is the privileging of our own particular identities in relation to others. "

"When God becomes our God, sharing our own partialities, prejudices, and narrow interests, it is uncomplicated to invoke that God on our side in times of conflict with other communities."

"We are historical beings, conditioned by our experiences and by the cultural lens and symbols through which we see and interpret reality. It is natural that we also interpret the divine though the familiar prism of these symbols and the cultural world view in which we are immersed. We need, however, to complement these localized understanding of the divine with the insight that the divine is universal. Our particular and distinctive ways of speaking about the divine are precious and are not displaced by the universal. "

"Without a vision of the divine as the source of all life, there is the real danger of centering ourselves in a being that we create in our own image, having our own prejudices, our own likes, and dislikes, hating those we hate and loving only those we love. This is “our God,” taking our side in conflicts and giving approval to our acts of violence against others."