Citizen God

[poliphilo]

This is prompted by something qos was saying.

Religious language is always conservative. We live in a age of democracies but we're still using monarchist language about God.

Why, when I don't want to be ruled by a King in real life, should I want to acknowledge one in my spiritual life?

I don't like Kings (or Queens or Princes.) If I got an invitation to Buckingham Palace I would (politely) decline. I'm a Republican in the European sense of the word. Ah ca ira, ca ira, ca ira and all that. I think Prince Charles is a national embarrassment.

But if I go to Church (which I don't, but if I did) it's all "crown him with many crowns, the lamb upon the throne."

No thanks.

Where are the rights of Man in all this? Why is Heaven still stuck in the feudal middle Ages?

"He hath put down the mighty from their seat". Does he exclude only himself from the levelling process?

The myth of the incarnation suggests otherwise. God becomes Jesus, becomes an ordinary Joe, becomes a citizen.

Citizen God- why not?

My God is immanent- a sister, a brother, a comrade- or I don't want to know.

Comments

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I agree with the spirit of your post. But I wouldn't turn down an invitation to Buckingham Palace. I'd be curious to know if these people are at all like their public images. And, of course, I've never been to Buckingham Palace, so that alone would be cool.

I think the important thing is to keep it all about you, not all about them.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I want to see the back of them- and so I'm determined not to do anything to offer them any encouragement.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Got it.

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

But I want to go!!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You can take Ruth......

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

Not if it's in your name I can't - please can we go? Pretty Please?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No. You want to go to Buckingham Palace, you're going to have to be awarded your own gong.

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

Pig

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Yes: "God is immanent." That's the only meaning of God I can relate to or understand.

I heard on the news this morning a small but instructive remark from a hiker: he and his friends were up in the Smokies and they came upon a group of shivering college kids who got caught in the snow and weren't prepared. One of them was hyperthermic.

"His human life was as valuable as mine," said the hiker to the reporter. "I stayed behind to help while my friends went for rescuers."

I've been thinking about this: he is exactly correct. There's no hierarchy here on earth. We're equally valuable. We can worship movie stars and Prince Charles all we want.

Kate tells me dogs have an urgent need to establish themselves in the pack by determining where they are placed in the hierarchy. Maybe our need to crown some people and ignore others is a vestige of our past.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Celebrity culture is so strange. It seems to be less and less the case that the people we "worship" need to have any talent.

There's a woman called Jordan who used to be a topless model. She's now one of Britain's top celebs. I was watching her "sing" the other day. She has a weak voice, she was out of tune and her "dancing" was feeble. The poor thing looked terribly uncomfortable about being up there on stage.

There's a cruelty about it. People like Prince Charles and Jordan receive as much mockery as adulation.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Celebrity culture is so strange. It seems to be less and less the case that the people we "worship" need to have any talent.

It was interesting to me how the "10 things I've done that you've haven't" meme was so linked to contact with celebrities.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed.

I think I had two celebs on my list.

In my own defence I would plead that these were both people of real accomplishment- a great actor and a great sportsman.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I don't think I "worship" the celebrities I like so much as 1) would really like to hang out with them and 2) find that they speak to something important that I either want to express or to learn (often simply an artistic style or technique, sometimes a lifestyle or attitude). Of course, these 'celebrities' are people like momus, neil gaiman, stephin merritt...not exactly your american idol types (I guess it's 'pop idol' for you over there?).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't actually want to meet the people I admire. They're mostly artists of one kind or another and I suspect their work is far more interesting than their personalities.

Yeah, our version of the Simon Cowell show is called Pop Idol.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I meant, we can worship movie stars and Prince Charles, but it is silly.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

And one more thing before I go brush my teeth for thirty minutes (I'll trade you your needle fear for my fear of flying. Deal?):

There's a deep prejudice in us that people who are beautiful and rich are more valuable and better than those who are ugly and poor.

Which is why we think the Queen (and she seems to agree) is a higher form of being than us.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've always been disappointed in the Queen. I find her dull. She's been delivering speeches for 60-70 years now and she still does it in a characterless drone.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Definitely more valued. But that doesn't actually mean more valuable.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I am feeling jittery this morning and am not completing my thoughts:

By "we" I do not mean myself or you or anyone else reading LJ.

I am totally without prejudice. If I weren't so modest, I would be proud of this achievement.

[dadi.livejournal.com]

My god is immaterial. Always has been. And has resisted every effort from my, or others', side to morph him into forms, oriental or occidental, no matter.

And I actually have met Prince Charles. Who, surprise, surprise, turned out to be a superbly funny, witty and intelligent person. I think he'd rather NOT be the public personality he has to be.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

In some ways I'm sorry for the Royals. Most of the publicity they get is negative and mocking. I think their job has become almost impossible and it would be a kindness to retire them.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I've also found the obsession with "King Jesus" in my country to be discomforting. I don't want a king or any royalty. But to hear the religious language around me, and the fervent hopes for the second coming, there are people who have no idea how horrifying an actual "king" would be.

But I've always felt uncomfortable with monotheists. Poly and pantheists are much more affable. A God/dess for everyone! Citizen deities!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And you guys should be setting the rest of us an example. After all you got rid of your king in 1776.

I don't think polytheism and monotheism are necessarily at odds. One of my favourite Wicca catchphrases is "All the Gods are One God and All the Goddesses are One Goddess."

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I don't think polytheism and monotheism are necessarily at odds. One of my favourite Wicca catchphrases is "All the Gods are One God and All the Goddesses are One Goddess."

I like this. I'm so mixed up about religion that I've just given up on it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't practice religion any longer, but I still like to talk about it.

I guess it's one of the few things I know anything about.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Possibly is the King Jesus thing because they don't have experience of one? Or seduced by the glamour? I can't think of republican fairy tales.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How about Hans Anderson?

You might argue that The Emperor's New Clothes was a republican fairy tale.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

However it was a literary work (besides Anderson was pretty sycophantic), and not a manifestation of popular imagination.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess the fact of the matter is that all the "true" fairy stories were produced in the monarchical societies of medieval or early modern Europe.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

What about Asian and Scandinavia?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Surely they too come out of societies which, if not strictly speaking monarchical, certainly had a similar kind of hierarchical structure?

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Indeed and they fill our imagination and inculcate us with hierarchical values. It is interesting reading myths from other parts of the world where they don't have such values.

However there are still stories of the poor trickster who manages to get the better of the king!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Hooray for tricksters.

And for orphaned kids and lucky third sons!

One thing about fairy stories is that they're almost always on the side of the under-dog.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Why is Heaven still stuck in the feudal middle Ages?

Probably due to mainstream Christianity's love affair with the KJV. Granted, that was 17th C and not the middle ages, but it's still heavily steeped in monarchical lingo. Here in the States, there is a sizeable number of Christians who refuse to accept any other translation (and I've even come across a few who genuinely believed that was Jesus' language and vernacular - scary).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Biblical fundamentalism ceased to be an intellectually tenable position about 150 years ago. But still the beast refuses to die.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Except the problem is that a lot of that absolutist monarchical stuff is still in the earlier versions. Jerome's vulgate uses 'rex regum,' king of kings, all over the place. And I don't know hebrew -- or much about hebrew -- but it does seem like the language of power and domination is also there in the hebrew bible. So I don't think it's as much about the KJV as it is about the nature of the text itself.

I thought the revised standard version was the one most people used, including evangelicals, or are you counting that as the KJV?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

And of course, by 'earlier versions' I mean the 'earlier translations' and 'source texts.'

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Except the problem is that a lot of that absolutist monarchical stuff is still in the earlier versions. Jerome's vulgate uses 'rex regum,' king of kings, all over the place.
Right, but I was speaking specifically to mainstream American Protestantism. This is speculation on my part, but I imagine that "John and Jane Christian" aren't even aware of earlier translations than KJV - it's why some of them think that Jews in those days spoke the King's English, so to speak.

It will, of course, depend on the denomination. There are some fundamentalist groups who do not accept any translation other than KJV. And while I hesitate to call Mormons "Christian" (in the Nicene Creed sense of the word) I know that they also prepfer the KJV to any other translation.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I think I've heard that George W supposedly once said "If English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me"...but of course that quotation may be, uh, apocryphal.

I wonder how intense the royal language is in the koine greek, which I've never learned.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

"Why, when I don't want to be ruled by a King in real life, should I want to acknowledge one in my spiritual life?"

(this is one for mobetametta, I think)

My sentiments exactly, and perfectly stated. This whole 'submission to an all-powerful lord' thing just perpetuates a paradigm of hierarchy and domination. I remember some silly neopagan book (not silly BECAUSE neopagan, mind you, just a SILLY neopagan book) that I read when I was young -- a lot of it was nonsense about dragons, but there was one part that affected me a lot which said something like "Always stand when you talk to the gods, do not kneel. The gods do not want us to be weak."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'll drink to that!

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

While I don't particularly cotton to the mainstream Christian notion of the Divine as some transcendant, omnipotent father figure who lords from on high and metes out reward and punishment, I have to ask - even in an panentheist rending shouldn't there be some level of heirarchy between the Divine and Creation? What's to make a god worthy of worship if he/she/it is no more than just an ordinary Joe? Although I realize I'm simplifying what you're getting at a bit.

I bring this up only as something of a reaction to much of the negativity some feel towards the worship of any deity (Christian or otherwise), which I feel stems less from a need to get one's neck out from under the Divine boot and more from hubris. When did humility as a spiritual or social practice fall out of favor? Something tells me it's linked at least tangentially to that cult of celebrity you find so strange.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't believe there's a distinction between creator and creation. The universe makes itself. Whatever exists is God and God is whatever exists. Since we are a part of universe we too are divine.

[ad-lumen.livejournal.com]

Ah, but "Citizen God" would have certain implications for the church hierarchy, wouldn't it? That's why it will never be an accepted concept to anyone other than Quakers and Congregationalists.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been a (lowly) member of an eccesiatical hierarchy and can testify that the power is sweet and (like all power) corrupting.

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of problems with the hierarchical language of worship, too. I believe God is transcendant as well as immanent, but I think there must be other, better ways to express that transcendance than in monarchical metaphors. Certainly the doctrines of the Incarnation and of the equality of Persons within the Holy Trinity should make us think twice about it, but they don't. And I don't think it can be blamed on clinging to older translations of the Scriptures. When the early Christians proclaimed, "Jesus is Lord!" they were making a direct challenge to the lordship of the Emperor. Nowadays when we say the same thing, we seem to be supporting the lordship of George W. Bush and his cronies. No answers here, only glum agreement.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Church sold out to the political establishment very early on. There have always been rebels- like Dietrich Bonheffer, the theologian implicated in the plot to kill Hitler- but by and large the churches have found it impossible to resist the seductions (and threats) of Caesar.

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

Of course, this has been a problem for as long as there have been democracies. If your heavenly master and your earthly master are both monarchs, then there is no need for there to be conflict in the model of obedience ("dei gratia" and all that). But when the people can make their own laws, when we are our own earthly masters, who can resolve the conflict between man's law and God's law? How can a God-who-must-be-obeyed fit into a democratic model? I feel sorry for the scholars in Iran who have this unenviable government task.

But if you believe in a God who loves, rather than a God who must be obeyed, then it's much easier to reconcile this.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A God who says- as Jesus did- "I am among you as one who serves."