Tag: living God

A Purified Theology Tended to Empty Out the Concept of God

January 8, 2026

My experiences with God were personal and intimate.  Philosophers drain the life out of Him.  God the Person becomes God the Abstraction—the Unmoved Mover, the One, the Absolute, infinite substance, the perfect being, the being whose essence is to exist.  The poet  William Butler Yeats describes the result:  “High on some mountain shelf/ Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck.”

The great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, explains the phenomenon.

“The philosophers and theologians were concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements.  But this determination to … reinterpret the recklessly anthropomorphic statements of the biblical text and the popular forms of religious expression in terms of a purified theology tended to empty out the concept of God ….  The price of God’s purity is the loss of his living reality.  What makes Him a living God … is precisely what makes it possible for man to see Him face to face.”

Pure being is not an abstraction but a living force.

March 7, 2024

To the philosophers and theologians, feelings, along with other affects, are weaknesses.  So God is regarded as passionless, so passionless that it is difficult to see how He can love.  St. Anselm puzzles over how a passionless God can be com-passionate.  His solution is that “we experience the effect of compassion, but Thou dost not experience the feeling.”  You can see the logical puzzle: we experience God’s love, but God feels no love for us.  For the philosophers, even to speak of a personal God is at best a metaphor or analogy.  But, in my experience, God is not a metaphor.  He is a Person to whom we can pray, who can give us guidance about our lives.  However, I was told,

They have some aspects of Me right.

“What do they have right?”

They understand that I am pure Being, Being unto itself.  They understand My metaphysical essence.  They do not understand My dynamic existence, a force …

“A Person?”

… yes, and a Person.  They use these categories in a way that makes them mutually exclusive, but they are not.  Pure Being is not an abstraction but a living force, focused personally.  Do not avoid metaphysics, but always listen to Me or you will go on the wrong track.