Disarming Toxic Monotheism
A Meditation on Isaiah 44:6-8
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
—Benjamin Brewster
THE IDEA IS NOT THE THING
When my wife and I got married almost forty years ago, our ideas of how our life would unfold and what it would look like were clear and idealistic. Looking back now, I can see how very different our journey has been from what we imagined at first. I have experienced the same thing in almost every area of my life: being a parent, serving as an ordained minister in a church, running my own business, writing books, producing music. Decades of comparing ideas and plans with outcomes have taught me that the idea is not the thing. It’s not even a blueprint of the thing. An idea is simply an idea that can sometimes lead to plans, actions, and outcomes that are connected to the idea but have a life of their own. And in almost every case, the outcome is radically different from the original idea that gave it birth.
I’m not telling you anything new here. Anyone with any experience of life already knows this. But this is why it is so frustrating and tragic that so few people realise that this also applies to religion. Our ideas about God are not God. Our doctrines about God are not God. The words we use when we speak of God are not God. These things may point to God—or may lead us, unwittingly, away from God. But God is way beyond our ideas about God, and God has a life of God’s own that has nothing to do with our theologies, dogmas, or Scriptures.
When we encounter a passage like Isaiah 44:6–8, which is the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures in the Lectionary for Proper 11A, it is essential that we remember that neither our ideas, nor those of the biblical writers, contain or define God. Like us, the priests, prophets, and preachers who wrote about their experiences of God were reaching for language to describe the indescribable and explain the unexplainable. And nowhere is this more true than when we consider the idea that there is only one God.
For centuries, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have held this one thing in common: that there is only one God, and all other gods are false. This ‘monotheism’, as it is known, is both taken for granted and elevated as a central and non-negotiable feature of faith. This has often strained inter-faith relationships as devotees of these religions have argued, and sometimes gone to war, in the quest to convince one another that their one God is the only true God, and that the one God of the other religions is false.1
What few followers of these religions recognise or acknowledge is that even in these monotheistic traditions, there are, and always have been, multiple definitions and understandings of the one God. For example, ask any group of Christians to tell you about the Jesus they worship, and you will get as many versions of the Christ as there are people in the room—with maybe a few extras thrown in for good measure! Which means that it is crucial for those of us who are seeking a benevolent, compassionate, and welcoming faith to be very clear about what we mean when we speak of God—especially if we view God through a monotheistic lens.
A MYTH OF MONOTHEISM
To a nation in exile that believed that the Babylonian victory proved that the Babylonian god was stronger than the God of Israel,2 the prophet we now call Second Isaiah sent a divine word. God wanted God’s people to know that the Babylonian gods were not more powerful than the God of Judah, but that there is only one God (44:6), and that this God is the Creator of all, the God of all, and the one who orders all of human history, including that of the Babylonians.
Scholars note that this monotheistic view of God, as expressed by Isaiah, seems to have grown in popularity during the time of the exile, although it may have begun to emerge before this.3 There is also some debate about whether Isaiah’s prophecy reflects true monotheism or rather God’s call for Israel to be exclusive in their worship of Yahweh.4 Whichever interpretation we embrace, though, there can be no doubt that these words have been used through the centuries to support a version of Christian monotheism which has often been arrogant, exclusive, and dehumanising.
To believe in one God alone is not problematic in itself. But when our belief in one God becomes toxic, unquestionable, and oppressive, then our faith in that one God has become false. The key question is not whether we believe in one God, but how we believe in that one God. Our failure to examine the nature of our religious devotion has led us to create a destructive myth about God and, based on this myth, to dehumanise our human sisters and brothers of other faiths and no faith. All too often our Christian monotheistic thinking looks something like this:
If my God is the only God, then your God is false and is either a demon (if my views are stuck in medieval times) or simply wrong. Therefore, you need to denounce your God and embrace mine.
The problem with this view is that it unknowingly undermines its own premise. If there is only one God, then there is no need to force that God onto other people because they are already, inherently, irrevocably, children of the one God. Richard Rohr expresses this truth beautifully and profoundly when he writes:
We live with an inherent dignity—our divine sonship and our divine daughterhood—by reason of our creation. This is a dignity that God has given to us and no one can take from us.
And it has nothing to do with our race or religion or past or sin. Every single person on earth is just as much children of God as we are. Objectively. Theologically. Eternally. Where else do we think they came from? Did some other god create them, except THE GOD? Their divine DNA is the same as ours. We deny our monotheism if we believe anything else.5
If we believe in only one Creator who gave birth to the whole of our wonderfully diverse manifestations of humanness, then we should expect that this God would appear to different people in multiple forms and with multiple names—and this is what we see in the scriptures. Even in just these three short verses of Isaiah, we see God identified as “LORD” (which is how most English Bibles translate the divine name “YHWH”); as “King of Israel”; as “Redeemer”; as “the LORD of hosts”; as “the first and the last”; and as a “rock”.6 We need to be careful, then, when we declare that someone else’s God is false or “not God”—we might find that we are denying one of the ways our God has chosen to reveal God’s Self!
