Global Theology: Three Types of God
When we think of “God”, what do we mean by this?
Well, right off the bat this word means two kinds of gods depending on how you use it.
When “gods” is written without a capital, it just refers to any ol’ god out of the thousands out there. But when “God” is written with the capital, it is a name. A name for a specific god who’s assumed to exist as a proper noun.
The Christians will capitalize “God” since there is only their god. But the word “god” is actually of Dutch and Germanic origins, not the Hebrew origins of the Christian god. The Ancient Dutch, Germanic, and Mediterranean peoples understood the word “god” to refer to a spirit of the world that was called upon or invoked. Think of the embodied gods of these cultures as representing forces of the world as a spirit. These are the pantheons of the Greeks, Norse, and Hindu peoples.
This is different from the Ancient Hebrew understanding of the only god and the ultimate nature of reality as YHWH (pronounced “Yahweh”), which means “I am.” From Yahweh, also known as the God of Abraham, the religions of Christianity and Islam split off from Ancient Hebrew, but still trace their lineage and scripture to Abraham and his God. This is why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often referred to as “The Abrahamic Religions” since they believe in the same god.
These ideas of God are different from the Ancient Eastern conception of the ultimate reality as the Om, which is the combined nature of the Atman (Self Within) and the Brahman (The Universe). This is comparable to another Eastern idea of the Tao, more commonly known as the “Yin/Yang” symbol, which means “the path, way, the flow of the universe, order of the cosmos” and is often translated as “that which can’t be put to words.”
The Jews think God is One. The pantheists thought God is several and represented as the gods, who are the spirits of the world and archetypes of consciousness. The Ancient Indians thought God was Brahman, and that the true nature of reality is the Om and the Tao.
Notice how there are three types of gods the ancients believed in. Could it be the case that they are all slightly different perspectives of the same Divine reality?
There’s the God as the One, the “I am,” and the ultimate nature of reality. The ultimate ordering principle. That from which order is created from chaos. The Rules, the stern, and the patriarchal. The Abrahamic God. Allah. Yahweh. God the Father.
There’s God as the spirit of the world, the force of nature, the embodied spirit, the archetype of consciousness, that type of being which is the most godly and divine, the most godlike god of the pantheists. Zeus. Deus (Latin for “God”). Jesus as the living embodiment of what the ultimate reality would look like through a person. God the Son.
And there’s as God as the nature of reality. Both the forces of the universe and the patterns of consciousness. That which is not only embodied but is transcendent and pervades all. Cosmic order. The Force. The flow of the Universe. The Om. The Tao. The underlying Divinity in all of reality. God the Holy Spirit.
Is it just a coincidence that the Christian Holy Trinity maps onto the three different conceptions of the Divine? Could it be that an early sect of Christianity wanted to integrate the various religions across the known world into an updated theology, incorporating the beliefs of the Sacred and Divine from most cultures at the time? Christianity emerged from a multitude of religions in some of the most multicultural regions of the Ancient World. Would we be naïve to think Christianity didn’t incorporate that which came before it into a synthesis of Divine understanding?
