"Our images of God - Clockmaker God"
Knox, 27 February, 2011 © Scott McAndless
Isaiah 45:9-13, Psalm 33:1-11, Matthew 5:43-48, Acts 4:13-30
God is not somebody that our limited human minds can pin down. Our human language is not sufficient to define the nature of the divine. And yet, if we are going to try and relate to God, we have to have some concept of the God that we are relating to. If we are going to talk about God, we have to use language. As human beings, this puts us in an impossible position. Unless we decide to forget about God altogether (as many have done, of course) we are going to need to use certain images of God which are going to be imperfect and are likely to give us a distorted picture of God.
That is a dilemma that we cannot escape as human beings. And knowing that, I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a little bit of time last week, today and next week looking at images of God – exploring how they help us in some ways to relate to God and also how they sometimes get in our way and leave us with a twisted notion of what God is like.
The image of God that I want to explore today is the image that I think of as, “God the Clockmaker.” This is a way of seeing God that first developed in the late 17th and the 18th century. The civilized world was emerging from the darkness and ignorance of the Middle Ages and it was like a new light of knowledge was dawning upon Europe and the Americas. For that reason, that period of time is often called the Enlightenment.
And during this Enlightenment era, a very new image of God began to emerge. Scientists like the great Sir Isaac Newton were discovering amazing laws of physics, biology and chemistry that made them look at the universe in new and interesting ways. They began to see the universe like a well ordered machine that worked in predictable ways.
This was, you need to understand, a very new way of seeing things. Previously people were more likely to imagine the universe as being inhabited by spiritual forces that influenced all manner of things including the movement of the planets, the blowing of the wind and the coming of the rains. But now it was possible to think of them happening according to laws and principles that humans could understand, manipulate and perhaps even control.
But it was not all that easy for people to let go of the old ways of seeing the world – to demystify the world, you might say. Nobody was really interested in letting go of the notion of God altogether (though, of course, eventually there were some who followed the path of atheism) but there was a real need to conceive of a world where God and other supernatural beings were not constantly interfering in events. After all, how can you come up with something like Newton’s theory of gravity if you already know (or think you know) that apples fall out of trees because an angel makes them go down?
So some people began to see God in a very different way. They primarily saw God as the creator, but as a creator who created a universe that was governed by complex but entirely predictable laws and rules. At the time, the most intricate machines that people had yet invented were clocks with their many gears and cogs and so they often spoke of this God that they imagined as a clockmaker who had wound up the vast machinery of the universe at the very beginning of time and had just kind of left it running ever since.
Most importantly, this clockmaker God did not interfere with the operation of his creation after he first got it going. There was little room in the universe that he had created for miracles or wonders that could not be given some sort of scientific explanation once we had gained enough knowledge.
The people who talked about this kind of God were called Deists. Many of them worshipped in Christian churches, of course, because that was just what people did. But they often dismissed large parts of the Christian Bible as being too fantastic and supernatural. And there was a time when there were a whole lot of Deists around – especially in the more educated classes. A lot of people don’t know this, but a good number of the founders of the American nation – including people like James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson – were Deists, not traditional Christians. Thomas Jefferson even published his own version of the Bible that had all of those parts that he thought too supernatural cut out.
I can understand why Deism developed like it did. I think it was a necessary development, in many ways. It helped those enlightenment era people to stop thinking of this world as a place where all sorts of spiritual beings were constantly interfering with the way things worked so that they could begin to discover some of those laws and formulate some of those theories that helped them to understand this world and the universe so much better.
It may even have helped our society to develop economically and in other ways. You see, a civilization that has a strong belief that supernatural beings – gods, goddesses or whatever – are constantly interfering in earthly events are much more likely to just withdraw, pray and wait for the gods to take care of any problem. Modern western society – led by the philosophies of the Deists – developed with the assumption that human beings could have a much bigger role in directing and changing the course of events.
But what are we to do with the clockmaker God today? I think that we all understand that this is not an image of God that is presented to us in the Bible. Oh, the Bible talks about God as creator often enough and it even talks about the Creator setting bounds and limits on various created things, like when it says in the Psalm, “He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses.” That seems to be saying that God intentionally limited where the waters of the earth could flow and you might interpret that to be saying that God created laws and rules that would govern how things would happen in this world just like the Deists suggested.
But as intricate and well ordered as his creation was, there is no sense in the Bible that, once it was completed, God just stepped back and let the whole thing run itself. I mean, yes, it does say that he took a day off after finishing the creation in Genesis, but that’s it. God, as seen in the Bible, is very much involved. He is hands on – choosing a nation as his own and working through them, speaking to his prophets, expressing his will through laws and commandments.
And I think that we know that. When we hear about the kind of God that the Deists believed in we recognize that he is not really the same God as the one we find in the Bible. But, I would suggest, when it comes to giving a practical place and role for God in our lives, we are actually more comfortable with the clockmaker God.
Oh, we are happy enough to honour and respect God as creator. We praise him as we admire the incredible splendour of a starry sky or the delicate beauty of a flower. But, if we’re really honest with ourselves, how much do we really expect him to step in and interfere directly with our lives? We may pray and ask for God’s help at certain points but we don’t really seem to think that God will respond in such a way as to suspend or change the order or natural laws of this world that were so important to the Deists.
We are kind of torn. On the one hand we want to be modern, educated people who understand that everything that happens can be explained through science. Physics can explain the movement of objects, biology and medicine can define sickness and health, neuroscience can even tell us why people make the decisions that they do and what their motivations are. We leave little room in our day to day life for God to do anything. And it is not as if we would want to give up the advances of science and the deep knowledge that it brings. But there has to be a place for God in our lives.
Now, I do believe that miracles can happen. Extraordinary things that defy explanation do take place. But, interestingly, the God that we worship doesn’t always go in for the really unmistakable sort of miracles – the kind where the ordinary laws of the universe are suspended or overturned in a way that nobody who sees it can deny. I mean, yes, there are some amazing things in the Gospels like walking on the water and the sudden appearance of food enough to feed five thousand and the like, but these kinds of things just don’t seem to happen every day. They are so extraordinary that few, if any of us, have ever experienced them directly.
As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose that most of us even look for such fantastic miracles from God. Yes, we pray for healing, but don’t expect things to happen that defy medical science. We pray for God to act, but don’t really expect him to act in ways that might convince a sceptic that something supernatural has happened. Perhaps, deep down, we are kind of like the Deists – comfortable enough with a God who creates the universe but we’d rather have one who then pretty much leaves the universe to run itself.
I don’t think we always need to be looking for God to act in utterly fantastic ways. But, let’s not fall into thinking of God as being disinterested. I have always been impressed by the prayer of the apostles recorded in the Book of Acts. There they were in Jerusalem, trying to live out their faith in God and their trust in Christ, and everyone seemed to be against them. The elders and the leaders of the people felt that they could pick them up any time, torture them and threaten them for preaching about Jesus. The authorities and the laws of their world seemed unbreakable and themselves merely victims of those powers.
But did they despair? No. Instead they prayed an incredible prayer. First they praised God as creator. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them.” But they didn’t stop there. A creator, no matter how amazing, who was not involved in their daily struggles would have been no help to them. They went on to reflect on their situation: “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”
Isn’t that amazing? They saw in their situation, where all of the powerful people were conspiring together against them, not hopelessness but hope. They were confident that, even though the system was stacked against them, that God was at work, and that was enough. They didn’t even ask God to change the situation – to make the authorities stop arresting them and threatening them. They only asked God to make them bold to carry on with what they were called to do.
And I think that needs be our attitude. The world, for the most part, will carry on acting according to its own laws and rules as it has always done. That is wonderful. But don’t make the Deists’ mistake of thinking that God is not involved. He is there, working out his will even within the laws and rules and systems that work in our world. We only need to be confident of that and to pray for boldness to act in the ways that he calls us.
I find this comforting as I look around at the world today. The world seems a pretty chaotic place – especially when you look at Libya and some other countries in the Middle East. In some ways, things are unfolding there as they must. People who have been oppressed for over a generation are standing up and demanding liberty and rights. But there is understandable nervousness about where such massive change might lead. For me, it is comforting to know that there is a God who is not far off or disinterested, who intends good for his people and who is able to work in and through some very complicated circumstances in ways that we can scarcely understand. This is sometimes our only reason to hope and our best reason to carry on.