What Is God?

St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston organized an education program during the season of Lent, in March and April this year. Over lunch on five successive Thursdays (Mar 17 through Apr 14) they invited guests to present their thoughts, insights and experiences on the topic, “What is God?” It was a joy for me to visit the beautiful cathedral on April 7 and share my thoughts with a group of earnest people. Given below is a summary of what I shared. Rev. Jep Streit, the Dean at the Cathedral, taped my informal talk and it is up on their website. Now the summary:

A simple and accurate answer to the question “What is God?” is that “God” is a word in the English language. Since every word generally means something, what is the meaning of this word “God”? For the meaning, we turn to what the different religious traditions say about it. The major religions in the world today have their revealed texts in languages other than English. There is something in those texts which gets translated into English as “God”--and whatever that something is, it gets defined, praised, described, explained, and argued about in the theologies of the different traditions. 

These definitions, praises, descriptions, explanations and arguments are not all identical, which makes one wonder whether God--the “something” or “someone” that they all refer to--is really one and the same, or there are, in fact, many and different Gods. The idea of many Gods conflicts with the internal belief-systems and world-views of religions. How is this problem solved? 

The simplest way to solve the problem is to declare that one’s own God is the one true God, and all others “God”-s are false and the people who believe in them are misguided. Another way tries to be a bit inclusive by allowing that other ideas of God, although not true, have just enough light of the truth in them to allow the misguided believers to eventually come to the true God that I believe in. A secular approach to the problem can be summed up as: “Why bother? Let everyone believe what they want, so long as they are good citizens, follow the law of the land, and pay their taxes.” 

Historically the oldest among the world religions today, Hinduism sees God as “beyond the reach of the mind and the senses.” Which means that all ideas, conceptions, descriptions of God are necessarily incomplete and, at best, represent sincere, earnest attempts of human beings to grasp the infinite being with the help of the finite mind and the senses, and the equally finite capacity of any language to express transcendent truths. Rather than argue endlessly about whose God is true or whose ideas regarding of God are better, Hindus believe that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The best way to know what God really is is to “experience” God directly--and this can be done, the Hindus believe, by transcending our human limitations. The practices that make self-transcendence possible include prayer, worship, meditation, study, and selfless activity. 

The Vedas are the revealed scripture of the Hindus. Among the earliest statements found in this text is this: “Truth is one. People call it by various names.”