on being an almost monotheist

This is not going to be well received by everyone (which doesn’t matter because not everyone reads my blog :-)…. but a recent visit to a Hindu temple has reopened some thoughts I’d been having after engaging in dialogue with friends who are neo-pagans. I suspect Monotheism and Polytheism are not anything like as mutually exclusive as most of their proponents suppose.

Let me explain the less challenging (for a Christian) horn of the dilemma first. For religious traditions such as Hinduism and many forms of neo-paganism the manifest forms of the deities are just that – many different forms of the divine. All expressions of the divine are to be honoured and may be worshipped, but behind all of this (at least at the deeper levels of philosophy) there lies the ultimate unity of the divine (indeed of all things) to which they ultimately belong. So Hindus are not really polytheists after all. Polytheists are really monotheists with lots of bells and whistles on - well sort of.

What happens, however, when we scrutinise monotheism in the same way? Does a God who is absolutely indivisible make complete sense? How would such a God be in any kind of relationship with human beings, how could we ever know this God, how could the indivisible divine communicate with us? Although I know it is controversial to say this, the purest monotheisms of Judaism and Islam have actually struggled with these issues of knowing the unknowably, indivisible God. The Holiness of God in the Hebrew Scriptures makes him/her ultimately unnameable and therefore unapproachable, so various circumlocutions are developed “The Holy One (blessed be He)”, “the Almighty”, “the Lord of Hosts”. Then there are ways of describing the presence of God at one remove; “the Hand of God” “the Spirit of God”, “the Glory (Shekinah) of God” and so on. Not to mention the angels and all the hosts of heaven.

For Islam anything which threatens the divine unity is “shirk” – the ultimate sin. Yet the Qur’an is held to be eternal – yes that’s right it wasn’t created during time but always existed as the mind of God before creation. If you are a Christian does that sound a little iddy-biddy bit like the Logos or Eternal Word of God? A God so undivided needs the services of angelic messengers to speak to human kind – and what are they if not some kind of projection of the divine onto the great screen of the world?

Ultimately, taken to the far extreme, monotheism like polytheism stops making sense. We cannot affirm the unity of God at the expense of abandoning the knowability of God without becoming deists, and deism is just a well mannered term for godlessness. Enter the doctrine of the Trinity (with a flourish of seraphic trumpets, attended in glory by cherubim and seraphim, by saints and angels and archangels and all the hosts of heaven). God who is three, and yet undivided, God who exists not in isolation but in divine eternal relationship with Godself. It is confusing, it is contradictory, but it is divine, for it tells us the limits of proper speech about God. God is not to be divided: is was and always will be ultimately one, but not ONE in an undistinguished, unapproachable kind of way. Not wrapped up in him/herself and invisible like the dark inside of a tennis ball which only faces inwards on itself. Not unwilling to risk the confusion, change, division and separation of being in relationships, but rather willing, loving and desiring to be known in so many ways within this world.