On the God of the Christians by Remi Brague

   Remi Brague  makes no graven image in his treatise about God; on the contrary, he’s pretty clear that little can be known about a creator whom you cannot see. The first question is whether the Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same deity. He goes into this with the origins of what we call “monotheism,” which he also questions, since the term wasn’t used until the time of the Renaissance. The Muslims have a mantra that there is only one God and that God is one, so we can see a closeness to Christianity’s single deity. He also discusses the Xenophanes of the Greek world (around 600 BC) who opposed Hellenic paganism.

    Next comes the chapter To Know God, the author discusses whether God is a person or thing. If we were to see God as a thing, then we would not be able to attribute much in the way of accomplishment. Then there’s the issue of knowledge, which is something of a touchy subject in the Bible. On one hand, perhaps knowledge can deepen our understanding of the sacred, but at the same time there was suspicion about scientific knowledge. The Catholic clergy were wary of Galileo’s telescope, along with other scientific discoveries, and many wondered if it would lead the people astray. Keep in mind that in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve run their carefree existence by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but then again, is it better to be ignorant in luxury than knowledgeable in a world of work?

   “Is God the father?” wonders the author. On one hand, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t have a wife, yet he does have human attributes (as in the Book of Jeremiah, the sky is my seat and the earth is my footrest.) We say “the hand of God” or “wrong in the eyes of God,” so we can assume that God can have a body.