                           20020424.00

     The foregoing considerations regarding Leviticus 26, suggest
to me that there is in the history of this religion a dialectic
between the personal and the spiritual God, a dialectic
profoundly imbedded and eloquently expressed in the tradition;
that this dialectic reflects, in the context of (Kantian)
transcendental criticism, not (so much) the nature of God as the
facts of our ignorance, of our inability to understand.  This
inability brings about a vacillation (oscillation) between two
representational poles, neither of which is adequate, neither of
which is unconditionally true.

     Thus what we learn from our religion is not what God is;
what we learn from our religion is not the truth about God.  The
truth which we learn from our religion is the truth about the
manner in which we cope intellectually with the opaqueness of our
experience; the truth about the manner in which we cope
emotionally with the complexity of our feelings.  The Bible is a
mirror in which one sees not God, but oneself.  It is a document
of human thought rather than an account of religious reality.

     ==========

     One may ask also in what manner, if any, the dialectic
extends to subsidiary theories such as the explanation of the
world's coming into being.  If God the Creator was pneuma, as the
text seems to imply, then there is made room for modern theories
(myths) of cosmology.  In the precess of creating the earth and
its inhabitants the creative spirit was defined, until it becomes
incarnate in the Lord of the Garden of Eden.

     Perhaps it is an oversimplification to say that the
pneumatic deity first appeared in the burning bush.  If one
amends Genesis 1 to read, in the beginning God created himself
and heaven and earth and the spirit of God hovered above the
waters (this citation is all from memory because I am hurrying to
start packing for the return trip to Belmont.) We are not told
what God "was" in the beginning, but the first reflection of him
that appears is his spirit.  Apparently as creates the world, he
creates himself.  In the process of the creation of the world,
God himself is created by himself. God evolves, and this
evolution continues through the Old Testament and into the New.
The beginning of the Gospel of St. John equates logos and pneuma.
To say God is logos is to say that pneuma is logos.  Who can
argue with that?

     ==========

     The notion of God is most persuasively explained as an
heuristic concept: a concept invented to provide an explanation
for the world and man's position in it. The world is there.  It
forces itself upon us; we cannot escape it.  Neither can we
escape our own consciousness.  We cannot understand how the world
came into being, except it had been made, has been created in the
manner in which we make, in which we create things.

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