Blowing the Lid Off the God-Box
explorefaith.org-Spiritual guidance for anyone seeking a path to God. explorefaith.org-Spiritual guidance for anyone seeking a path to God.
Explore God's Love Explore Your Faith Explore the Church Explore Who We Are  
 

Home > Living Spiritually > God-Box Overview

Living Spiritually in an Arguing World
Thoughts
for finding peace in the midst of the storm


Confining God in a Box Closes our Minds
to Each Other

A short overview of Anne Robertson's upcoming book Blowing the Lid Off the God-Box

 
 

By her own account, Anne Robertson was something of a fanatic. Growing up in the American Baptist Church, she slid as far over to the Christian Right as a young fundamentalist could and spent much of her childhood convinced that she had God pegged. Those people with different ideas about the divine were obviously in need of enlightenment. She describes herself during those days as “intolerant, religiously bigoted, and so immersed in literature about the end times that I had no use for the present.”

She wasn’t much better when, years and significant life-experiences later, she saw God through a more liberal lens. Her judgment of others still remained. If someone didn’t see things her way, they obviously had made some grave theological miscalculations.

Honest self-examination can result in wonderful things. For Anne Robertson the result was a book called Blowing the Lid Off the God-Box. Based on her own experiences of tamping God into a Robertson-made container, she probes deeply into the way we close God in, limiting the holy by the boundaries of our own conceptions.

It is good to have a God-box. It is “our experience of God and our beliefs about who God is and how God behaves.” The problem comes when we close up that box and clamp down the lid, replacing a God of mystery and omnipresence with our own small ideas about the divine. We create little gods molded by our own thinking, and inevitably shut out others’ beliefs and experiences of the sacred. “Perhaps if all sides realized that there is always more to be learned, and that any time we try to reduce the vast mystery of God to human words and formulae, we never will have it quite right,” Robertson suggests, “perhaps then we could settle down and learn from one another rather than aimlessly wandering in the wilderness with no real place to call home.”

Looking at the political and social landscape, Robertson sees that time and again, we lay claim to a specific ideology, dig in our heels and then insist that God has set up residence on our plot. “We cannot trap God in a single ideology, social agenda or political platform,” she writes. “Maybe if we could remember that, we wouldn’t be so tempted to demonize the other side.”

In this election year, with tempers hot and opinions unyielding, we can easily slam our God-box shut. More and more politics has become intertwined with religious beliefs, with each side claiming that God is in their camp. We look into our God-box and dismiss anyone or any notion that doesn’t quite fit, disregarding the fact that God can’t be confined. Robertson urges us to open our box, stretching it far enough to glimpse God’s presence on both sides. Perhaps in doing so we’ll begin to understand that there are God-boxes in places we don’t even know exist.

--Read an excerpt

 


(Return to Top)

Send this article to a friend.

Search  
Copyright ©1999-2007 explorefaith.org