About God – What happened to YHWH?
The God of Jesus, YHWH, is not the God the Christian church worships. The Christian Church did not follow Jesus as they do not call the divinity YHWH, and added Jesus and the Holy Spirit, creating the Trinity.
The author of the Gospel of John surely is frustrated that his book, which corrects the misrepresentations in the other books of his day, was put last in the collection of writings that were deemed authoritative by the church experts 250 years later.
When we are reading Paul’s authentic letters, we are reading someone’s mail that was not written to us. In most cases, we do not know specifically to what it was responding.
The need for the bible to be inerrant is an indication of a need to limit the understanding who/what God is, as the bible becomes a box to keep God inside so they know him.
For some believers in the first three centuries, they needed a human like God, similar to the Greek/Roman gods, and so they made Jesus God, but had to merge him with YHWH to preserve the appearance of monotheism. The subconscious acknowledgement of that is Christianity renamed YHWH to God or LORD, as there is a difference.
God as the Ocean Metaphors
Glenn Siepert at BSA — These days (and this is just where I’m at) I see “God” like an ocean and all of us like individual waves – all the waves are different and yet all the waves are the ocean. We are all connected and connected to or part of “God”. And when the wave “dies” or “crashes upon the shore” after old age or a battle with cancer, etc. it doesn’t cease to exist as much as it just falls back into the greater ocean to support the other waves that are still roaming or have yet to be. And so in that way, when we fall back into the ocean we continue to exist and be connected in the same way we are now – just on a different plane of existence.
Marcus J. Borg
“we are in God as fish are in water.”
Borg’s language reflects a panentheistic notion of God — God is both greater than the universe and the life-ground in which the universe exists. He repeatedly ties that to Acts 17:28 (“in whom we live and move and have our being”) and says the comforting image is that God is the surrounding, buoyant “sea of being” that sustains us whether we’re aware of it or not. That is why he compares faith to relaxing and trusting (so you float) rather than clinging to a list of beliefs. marcusjborg.org+1
Click here to go to a post at this site for more of Borg and his explanations of panentheism, pantheism, and supernatural theism.
See our Kindle version’s Chapter 1 titled “Listening to the Spirit” of Borg’s book Days of Awe and Wonder, for a deep dive into his thoughts about other dimensions. Extracts are as follows.
- The “World of Spirit” The notion of a “world of Spirit” is a vague and difficult notion in the contemporary world. By it I mean another dimension or layer or level of reality in addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience. This notion of “another world,” understood as actual even though nonmaterial, is quite alien to the modern way of thinking. The modern worldview, or “picture of reality,” sees reality as having essentially one dimension, the visible and material realm. p. 2.
- But the notion of another reality, a world of Spirit, was the common property of virtually every culture before ours, constituting what has been called the “primordial tradition.” 6 (p. 3).
- 6. The phrase comes from Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth; see also his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (New York: Crossroad, 1982). Other scholars have developed the same basic understanding, but I find Smith’s phrase “primordial tradition” as well as his exposition of the notion to be especially illuminating and helpful.
- What is most important is the notion of another level or levels of reality rather than any particular set of terms. Moreover, the “other world”—the world of Spirit—is seen as “more” real than “this world.” Indeed, the “other reality” is the source or ground of “this world.” Second, and very important, the “other world” is not simply an article of belief, but an element of experience. That is, the notion of another reality does not have its origin in prescientific speculation about the origin of things, primal anxiety about death, or the need for protection, but is grounded in the religious experience of humankind.8 It is not merely believed in, but known. To put this second claim somewhat differently, the world of Spirit and the world of ordinary experience are seen as not completely separate, but as intersecting at a number of points. (pp. 3-4).
Borg, Marcus J.. Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 247-248). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
God is in, and beyond, our three dimensions and infinity
Drawing from the Flatlander analogy, we see only slices of God. God is multi-dimensional and we cannot understand or grasp those dimensions. An analogy is that a person born blind is not able to grasp light, much less colors.
I think it was Borg who said we are not the flatlanders watching the point and circles appear but rather are inside the spire that is God, watching the point then the circle appear and change size.
Bushmen Hearing the Stars. Do some people sense those dimensions? From a Facebook Post here.
In the vast expanse of the Kalahari Desert, [South Africa] Laurens van der Post encountered a profound truth about connection. When he confided to the Bushmen that he could not hear the stars, their initial laughter quickly morphed into a somber disbelief. For the indigenous people, silence toward the cosmos was more than a deficiency; it was akin to spiritual deafness, a severance from the rhythmic pulse of the universe.
In Bushmen culture, every tree, breeze, and celestial body resonates with a distinct voice, creating a cosmic symphony for those who choose to listen. In stark contrast, van der Post, a product of modernity, perceived silence as normal—a tragic disconnect. His experience unveiled a deep cultural chasm: industrialized society often measures and categorizes, while indigenous traditions seek harmony and participation in nature’s dialogue. The Bushmen’s wisdom invites reflection, urging a reconnection with the world that surrounds us—a world alive with sound, song, and spirit. Would we, too, become attuned to the celestial chorus?
About YHWH and the Bible by Me
The authoritative books of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible evolved over perhaps ten centuries and other writings that embellished and/or translated them continued to evolve in the first century after Jesus. I believe the writings we now call the NT were part of that literary stream. Why did the stream stop? Did it stop?
We have no recognized “sacred” writings since the first century, as the Romans who selected the books of the Western Orthodox Bible are no longer around, and no one else has been allowed to declare new writings as sacred. The “church” (all the many Catholic and Protestant organizations) has not allowed anyone, and never thought there was an ongoing role, to serve as the official decision authority. Our bible is forever caught in the Roman grip. For centuries, the churches have successfully worked to be the only controllers of the text (in its many similar versions) and control how it was applied, in their individual ways.
As the different societies with their issues and needs changed over the centuries, and with each new interpretation/application of the stories and commandments, new interpretations/messages were delivered but not committed to writing: likely for fear of losing the author’s life. To do so would have negated the Books deemed sacred that the church claimed the sole right to read and demanded they were the only ones able to read and tell the common man how he is to live. The common person accepted that authority as they believed the books were sacred, even though they could not read them.
After Martin Luther translated it into German and was excommunicated, an Englishman named Tensley translated the Latin into English, and that style became the KJV. For his hard work, the Church chased him down in Germany, killed him by strangulation, and then burned his body in the town square.
After the church murdered Tensley, his and Luther’s translations lived on, and the church and its control established in the end of the fourth century by Emperor Constantine, slowly began to fracture from one dominant entity into hundreds of denominations. Today, with the majority of believers and former believers able to read and interpret the many denominations many versions of their bible, the fundamentalists (today’s church guard who know what one must believe to gain salvation and eternal life) struggle to maintain their self-proclaimed authority and hence are angry.
That struggle is between two groups. One group is those who proclaim their chosen version of the Bible as inerrant and written essentially by the Trinity, while manipulating their version of the Bible with their versions of traditions. They also see God as an all-powerful and all-controlling human-like entity on a throne, passing judgment.
The other group believes the bible contains facts surrounded by metaphors, and YHWH is not a monarch far away. YHWH’s nature is only love and not wrathful. They are developing a new paradigm where YHWH is like the ocean, and we are like fish. Believers work to have a relationship with YHWH in the reality/dimension we know, while also knowing there is another reality we do not often sense–but some can see when a “Thin Place” appears. YHWH is in that reality. Sometimes, some of us can see/feel/sense that other reality.
To be fair, some churches do not follow the fundamentalist dogma, and their fellowship and love open up a “Thin Place”. Even in those churches, it is up to each of us to see it while remembering that we can find it in many other places if we try.
