Piper’s point is that God intentionally depicted Himself in masculine imagery, and that this sets the character for what Christianity is: God is Father and Son, God is King not queen.

In this post I want to outline some ways that scripture leads us to see that Piper’s view is selective to the point of being misleading. Tomorrow I want to tackle a much more serious issue: the way that Piper reads the Gospels as underpinning his theology demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the stories themselves.

The very first indication we get in scripture of how the nature of God maps onto human gender is Genesis 1. When God creates humanity in God’s own image, we read, “Male and female he created them.”

This is significant for two reasons. First, in what is the clearest connection of God to human gender, perhaps the only clear and intentional such connection in all of scripture, it is both male and female, together, who mirror God to the world.

This means that a “masculine” church or a church with a “masculine feel” is inherently lacking in its ability to reflect the image of God to the world.

But Genesis 1 isn’t simply about “being like” God in some general way.

To bear the image of God is to be the person to whom God has entrusted the rule of the world on God’s behalf. The purpose of humanity, “Let them rule the world on our behalf,” is inseparable from the categorization of these creatures as those made “in the image of God.”

In other words: it is not merely as humans that we reflect God together as male and female, but as those who rule over the world as male and female we bear the image of God. The kind of rule God has in mind is not a “masculine” rule, but a masculine plus feminine, male plus female, rule. Only this kind of shared participation in representing God’s reign to the world is capable of doing justice to the God whose image we bear.

Another dynamic of God, as God is reflected in the story of ancient Israel, is worth considering. As a religion without official goddesses, it falls to the one God to do the typically “feminine” duty of ensuring fertility.

In the ancient world, where being a woman was specially tied to bearing, nurturing, and rearing children, feminine images of God (and, of course, goddesses) were often tied to either literal or figurative bearing and nurturing of a people and/or of children.

This may lend some credibility to the idea that when the OT speaks of God as El-Shaddai. Although this is sometimes translated “God almighty,” other options have been suggested, including “God of the mountain.” But it’s worth noting that El-Shaddai is a term that appears in tandem with the covenant blessing of seed, offspring.

In Gen 17:1, God self-identifies as El-Shaddai and then institutes the covenant of circumcision which is tied to the covenant promise of offspring. Why does Genesis 35:11 say, “I am El-Shaddai, be fruitful and multiply” (cf. Gen 28:3)? Why this title for the God of fruitfulness and multiplication?

It has been argued that El-Shaddai is less a reference to God as all-powerful and more a reference to God as the one who grants fertility.

Genesis 49:25 reads:

by God, your father, who supports you,
by the Almighty (shaddai) who blesses you
with blessings from the skies above
and blessings
from the deep sea below,
blessings from breasts (shadayim) and womb.

It has been argued that Shaddai is related to the Hebrew word for breasts. Although alternative translation of “shaddai” has been “God of the mountains”–as someone who lives in a city with “twin peaks,” it seems to me that the options of “God of the mountains” and “God of the breasts” are not mutually exclusive.

In Gen 49:25 we may very well have an intentional juxtaposition of God as Father and God as nursing mother. The God of Israel is the God of womb and breast as much as this is the God of war and rain.

El Shaddai is the God who makes God’s people fruitful and multiples them. This is the God of fertility.

Good on the bra, but more "mountains" needed...

And so, when we see the Son appear in all His glory in Revelation, we are, perhaps, not entirely surprised to find this:

“His breasts are girt up with a golden girdle” (Revelation 1:13)

Ok, we are surprised to find it. So surprised, in fact, that the translations won’t have it! But mastoi are breasts. (Thanks are due to Jesse Rainbow for his article on the Son of Man’s breasts in JSNT 30 [2007] 249-53.) The great warrior king of Revelation? It’s the Son of Man, prepared to be nursing mother.

So when Paul says that he and his fellow apostles were present among the Thessalonians like a nurse or mother, perhaps we should understand that there is something distinctly “feminine” about leading the church of God. And, that this femininity is part of what it means to bear the image of God and manifest the presence of Christ.

Who is the Father of our Bible? Who is the Son? It is not only the king and conqueror, but the nurturer and nourisher, the one who cares for and holds close. Not only (I should say, stereotypically) “masculine” but also the (stereotypically) feminine.

It is the God who is only rightly and fully imaged as male and female. Together.

Is there some idea of “being” or essence that we simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand the God who is?

Do we begin with knowledge and being to know the God who truly is?

When we think about who God is as Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler, do we reason upward from our general ideas to a God who is Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler because he is such notions of ours writ large?

No, Barth will argue throughout the first part of his discussion of “The Readiness of God” (Church Dogmatics §26.1). We do not have general categories which God fills in a bigger way, and thereby conforms to humanity’s innate ideas. We know the true God as this God is revealed in Scripture. God is known as all these things: Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler altogether–so that knowledge of the true God depends on what I would call here the story to which God has bound Godself as primary actor, not simply human notions of what someone called god should do.

In fact, Barth wants to push it back farther than this and to say that it’s not merely our ideas of Lordship, Creation, and the like that are derivative from God’s revelation of who God truly is.

The very idea, and long-standing philosophical problem, of God’s very knowability, is dependent on a prior action of God as well. We can know God because God is actually known and has actually chosen to make himself known. We can know the truth of who God is because God “is” before we are, and this truth of himself is known: Father to Son and Son to Father by the Spirit.

Knowledge of God is, then, an act of grace in which God makes Himself known. This means that it is not an act of nature, in which people might simply reason their way to true knowledge of the true God.

That last piece, an argument against natural theology, takes up a great deal of Barth’s energies as the chapter moves on.

I confess to finding myself torn here. As someone who deals with the deeply contextualized, historically situated texts of the Bible, I stumble over the idea that our images and metaphors for God are revealed rather than varied human expressions of various people in various times and cultures. Note well! I do believe that God reveals and speaks through the images–but that this revelation is known and understood and used because it carries certain preexisting connotative freight for the first hearers.

But on the other hand, I appreciate Barth’s insistence that we not affirm some “god” in general in vain hopes that someone serving such a being will one day attain to faith in the Christian God in particular. This skepticism of natural theology, not only in its validity but also in its purported pastoral value, is well grounded.

Those were my impressions of these 30ish pages. You?

Taking hold of the far-reaching implications of Jesus’ restoration project is something I continually harp on because it can play an important role in transforming the posture with which we hold the gospel.

My experience within evangelical Christian circles has often been one in which followers of Jesus envision themselves as the small, minority truth-holders, struggling to cling to what it right, and ever cautious and even fearful about fully engaging in other “worlds” that might be tainted by godlessness, or liberalism, or the like (since those to are “alike,” right?! *ahem*).

Image: markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last night I had the opportunity to participate on a panel that was responding to questions posed by a group of college students. We fielded questions such as, “What are Christians supposed to do about evolution, especially science majors?” “What should Christians think about environmentalism?” “What about people who never hear the message of Jesus?”

The questions are important ones in many respects. But the overall sense I got from the questions was that Christian faith is a small fortress to be guarded carefully. And I wondered if we didn’t need to start reimagining a capacious vision of the reign of God as our gospel.

I think the problem of a small, carefully guarded fortress starts early. In youth group we learn that the gospel means: (1) Jesus died for your sins; (2) you shouldn’t sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend; and (3) drinking is bad.

There’s not much good news in that, except in the hope that if you can control your hormones you get to be with Jesus drinking grape juice one day.

But what if we begin, instead, with, “God was, in Christ Jesus, reconciling all things to himself”?

Then the world of nature and science does not stand as a looming threat to our faith, but as a witness to the breadth of the saving care of God.

Then the preservation of the environment becomes not merely a fleeting liberal hobby-horse, but a crucial pillar in the eternal plan of God. You think you care about the environment? Well, you’ve got nothing on the creator.

Maybe even questions about sex and sexuality can be received, gratefully, as gifts, rather than fearful lands to be trod, if at all, with extreme caution.

Paul talks about the reception of the Spirit as a transforming moment that moves us from slavish fear to the freedom of the glory of the children of God. It moves us into the realm where we know ourselves to be members of God’s family and instruments in the turning of the ages.

Posture, it seems to me, is as important as details. If we cannot posture ourselves with arms wide open to the cosmos that God has reconciled to himself, then we are not so positioned as to come to faithful answers to the questions that plague us. And we might not even be in the position to be plagued by the right questions.

It goes something like this: the idea that God is abusing his Son misses the point that Jesus is God. This is not God sacrificing some human, but God giving Godself for humanity.

This is a challenge to me on two fronts.

First, as a biblical scholar, this is not the language that the NT uses to describe the relationship between Jesus and God as it comes to describe the cross.

Even the high Christology of John puts it like this: “God so loved the world, that He gave his one and only son.” Indeed, John’s Jesus says that the Father loves him because he does the Father’s will–going to the cross to die for his friends.

Mark is more stark, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying for deliverance from the cross.

In the “high Christology” passage of Philippians 2 says that Jesus’ exaltation comes because he was obedient to the point of death on the cross. This is the same act of which Paul speaks in Rom 5–the one act of obedience through which the many are made righteous.

Jesus is pleasing to the Father, to God, precisely because as Son he obeys the command of the Other, the Father, to die.

When, for example, feminist critics of atonement complain about the atonement as divine child abuse, they are basing their hermeneutical dissatisfaction on a more accurate exegesis of the New Testament than the theologians who defend the cross by saying that God gave Godself.

It is, in fact, God the Father “who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all.” Those are strong and troubling words, and I’m not sure that we can hear them on the basis of the Trinitarian objection. This is not self-giving love in that Trinitarian sense, but the sacrificial love that gives the most dearly loved other for the sake of salvation.

The second reason I am hesitant to jump on board with the Trinitarian answer to the problem of atonement is this: the suffering of Jesus the son is the story of the other sons and daughters of God as well.

It’s all well and good to say that God gave Godself, not another, to suffer on behalf of the world.

But what, then, are we to do with Romans 8? There, the way that we know we are children heading toward eternal inheritance is that we are suffering with the Suffering Child.

The Trinitarian formulation makes this worse, to my mind. God chooses to suffer of God’s own accord. As incarnate God, Jesus executes this divine decision. And then, God calls those who are not God to suffer if they want to be like the God who chose suffering freely. The Messiah suffers of his own decision, but those who would follow him are bound to follow the order that Jesus had from within (not from without): to take up their crosses.

Or, again, if it’s out of character for God to give up another, to not spare this human Messiah, what then are we to make of the God “who did not spare the natural branches” for the sake of the gentiles?

To remove the scandal of the Messiah’s death by pushing the Messiah back into the divine person only takes the problem of the suffering people of God and edges it back one notch. Left behind is still the entire NT ethic that insists that the identity of us–those who are not members of the Eternal Ontological Trinity–is also cross shaped.

If the only answer to the divine child abuse accusation is to appeal to the Trinity, doesn’t that make God a divine child abuser for having us, his earthly children, suffer with Christ if, indeed, we are to be glorified with him?

So yes, my late high Christology causes me a problem. I can’t simply say that when the NT says “the Father gave the son” that this really means “God gave Godself.” But the Trinitarian answer has its problem as well.

And it begins with the inseparability of Jesus from Israel’s God.

There are a few things that this could mean. And some of them are (or at least should be) acknowledged by the academy at all times as well. For instance, the connection between Jesus and Israel means that Jesus was a Jew and must be understood (and understandable) as a first century Jew who spoke and acted among other first century Jews. (Though both church and academy have lost sight of this from time to time.)

But the church’s Jesus is not merely a historical religious phenomenon.

The church’s Jesus is the one in whom and through whom Israel’s God is bringing about the fulfillment of God’s promises to that people. And so, when we go to study the church’s Jesus we find that each of the four Gospels demands of us that we interpret the Jesus story as the culmination of the Israel story.

Matthew invites us to consider what we are about to see in Jesus as the end of the era marked by Babylonian captivity, the fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham, and the realization of God’s promise to David. The whole story of Israel as such is telescoped into a genealogy marked by these three: Abraham, David, Exile… Christ.

The point of the generations is not merely that time has passed or that history is being observed. In Israel’s story these moments are marked by the dramatically intervening hand of God–for deliverance, yes, but even more so for promise of a better future. The claim of the genealogy is that the God of Israel is at work again, and that this Jesus can only be rightly understood as the one in whom this story culminates (or, perhaps, the one who embodies the story within himself).

Analogously, Mark begins his Gospel with a declaration that all we are about to see is in answer to Isaiah’s Second Exodus. The way of the Lord is being prepared by John the Baptist–and that means that when we see Jesus we see the work of the God of Israel, the deliverance and restoration promised through the prophets is coming about.

Do you see how the Gospels take us into an interpretive field that can never be entered by the academy?

We’re talking here about Jesus in relation to God. We’re not merely talking about how to read the books well–though here, perhaps, we could agree even as an academic guild. But we are talking about who Jesus was and what the proper framework is for interpreting his ministry correctly. While “religious studies” must, as an academic discipline, seek to understand Jesus as like unto other turn-of-the-era religious phenomena, the stories of Jesus themselves demand a different starting point.

Jesus, claim the Gospels, is the one thing that the scriptures had prepared us for; he is the one event we were told to expect. Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel’s story, the great and saving act of Israel’s God.

And so when Luke begins with a declaration that the things he writes are things that “have been fulfilled among us,” when his story begins with an old barren couple conceiving a child and moves on to songs of promises fulfilled–the point in all is that we only know this Jesus rightly when we recognize that in his advent the God of Israel is at work again.

And when John begins his Gospel with the words that start all of scripture (in the beginning), we are being told that to understand this theos who is on the scene, we must first understand the theos who created the world and all things in it, according to the biblical narrative.

So when the church whose stories these are begins its creed with an affirmation of the God who created heaven and earth, they are giving a necessary (if insufficient) indicator of the identity of the Jesus from whom we derive our unique identity as a people. The church’s Jesus is the messiah sent and empowered by Israel’s God, by the creator God.

What the academy can never say is what the church must say first and foremost and most clearly, as Peter does in Acts 2: This Jesus was a man attested to by God.

By the One God.

By the God of Israel.

“Israel” is not merely a context within which Jesus makes sense, but also a narrative within which God was at work prior to Jesus and consummately at work through Jesus. This is the church’s Jesus. In part…

To be honest, I was afraid that the remainder of 1.1 was going to be sheer drudgery.

But when Barth turns in §1.1.10 to “God the Father,” we find ourselves once again in conversation about the God of the biblical narrative as the God of the biblical narrative. In short, all of my warm and fuzzy feelings about Church Dogmatics returned.

Barth is willing to live with the paradox that God is other–not a being like other beings whom we could master, and yet, at the same time, is not a being that remains separate from the created order. To answer the question, “Who is the Good of the Bible?” (notice–he says “who,” not “what,” a telling difference between Barth and some other Western Christian traditions who begin their reflections with the latter question and give answers that have nothing to do with the story), we are not directed to a “sphere beyond human history but rather to the very centre of this history” (384).

Barth goes into a description of God as Lord, kurios, that I found surprising and refreshing. In first instance, says Barth, when the NT is talking about the Lord and God, it is talking about “One who is quite other than Jesus” (385). Jesus as Lord in the NT often sees him as one subordinate to God, θεός.

The great things about this chapter is that Barth, in talking about the Father, is willing to recognize that this is what the Bible most often actually means when it says, “God.” The NT does not talk about Jesus as God in the same way it talks about the Father as God. Jesus is Lord because his ministry is a manifestation of the Lordship of God the father (386). Yes, yes. A thousand times yes. The Son of Man has been given authority.

The final piece I want to touch on is what it even means to say God is “Father.”

Barth rightly cautions against the notion that our earthly understanding of fatherhood is the model on which we build our understanding of God the Father in the Trinity. In fact, the Christ even provides a surprising and paradoxical picture of what God’s fatherhood looks like.

Always on the alert to keep us from building a “natural theology” that has simply written our experience with large letters and called it “God,” Barth maintains that God the Father is not identical with our life, not our “life-giver” in the sense of simply validating and affirming the life we already have.

It is in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead that he takes his truest standing as “son of God,” and it is in participation in such resurrection life that God becomes most truly our Father:

God the Father wills neither our life in itself nor our death in itself. He wills our life in order to lead it through death to eternal life. He wills death in order to lead our life through it to eternal life. He wills this transition of our life through death to eternal life. His kingdom is this new birth. (388)

In other words, it is the death and resurrection of Jesus that show us God the Father, and what it means for this God of this story to be our Father as well.

In the biblical story, these two questions are inseparable. The God of the biblical story is wrapped up in the story of God’s people–by choice. So that the praise of the people on earth is praise of the name of God, while defamation of this people is a defeat for God Himself.

And this is why it is so important that we define our God in narrative terms. God is the God who has acted among this people–the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and therefore the God who has made covenant and who has given children to the childless and life to the dead; the God who did not spare God’s own son but delivered him up for us all, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

We know God based on the story in which that God, and not another, is the principal actor.

Barth is dialed into this in the early pages of Church Dogmatics, but it’s a much older approach to getting ourselves straight about God. This assumption about God as the God of a particular story is what gives Paul’s letter to Rome so much of its energy.

There is an apparent tension in the audience of the letter. On the one hand, Paul addresses the readers as believing [former] Gentiles (e.g., ch. 1, ch. 11). But then there are rhetorical moments when he engages with an apparently hostile Jewish interlocutor.

It seems that within his envisioned audience, Gentiles can be presumed to be believers in God’s action in Christ, whereas Jews can be presumed to be hostile to the notion that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises for deliverance.

These are actually related, the latter stemming from the former.

Paul has seen great success in his mission. There are thriving, if dysfunctional, communities popping up all over the Mediterranean. And, these are full of Gentiles and not so much full of Jews.

This is a problem. A real problem. Because the God who has worked in the Christ event is none other than the God who spoke and promised in the scriptures of Israel; more, this event is supposed to be the culmination of God’s faithfulness to that word, to those promises, to this people.

And so when Paul tells the story in 1:18ff. of the world’s degradation, it seems to be the typical Jewish story of the failure of the Gentiles in contrast to the fidelity of the Jews. This is how similar material works in Wisdom of Solomon. But the point is turned on its head, as Paul goes on to say in ch. 2 that to condemn the Gentiles of such acts is also to condemn Jews.

In the end, the Law is an insufficient marker for the people of God. And this means, that if we want to know who God is, we do not look to the Law as the sphere within which God’s rewarding actions are found, to which God has bound Godself to reward or punish.

A different standard is emerging, a different definition of the people of God, a different way to understand how it is that God has fulfilled the promises contained in scripture, a revisionist definition of the seed of Abraham.

Romans is about salvation because it is about God and scripture and how the Christ event creates a new understanding of the people of God. God is faithful only if this Jesus really was raised from the dead, only if this Jesus really is the non-spared Son, and, finally, only if Jews and Gentiles together are the people of God, raising their voices in a unified song of praise.

There were two amusing moments for me in this reading. One was when he said on p. 330:

The statement: Individuum est ineffabile, can indeed be made but characteristically it cannot be proved, whereas revelation is ineffabile which encounters and reaches man and proves itself to be such. From this standpoint, then, we finally achieve full clarity regarding what was said in 1. and 2. about the unveiling and veiling of God in His revelation.

Full clarity? Right…

The other amusing moment came at the end:

Any child knows that [the church's doctrine of the Trinity] uses some of the philosophoumena of declining pagan antiquity.

I confirmed this with my three year old. He said that he did, in fact, know this.

Otherwise, this chapter was a mixed bag for me.

What I absolutely loved:

Barth is insisting in this chapter that we must wrestle first with the question Who is God, first and foremost, rather than the question, What is God.

Abstract categories of God’s identity and philosophical speculations about the necessity of some god’s existence are not the stuff of Christian dogmatics. This is absolutely true. The idea that we can “prove” the existence of some “unmoved mover” (for example) tells us absolutely nothing about Christian faith.

We must begin with the particular God who is revealed in the particular story of the Bible.

The other good things about Barth’s approach is that he is holding the line against those who want to suggest that Christianity is articulating universal truths that are generally experienced.

Barth avoids the temptation of this universalising by saying, no–God does in fact reveal. People in particular times know that in what are otherwise “historical” events God has made Godself known. Ultimately, of course, this is so in the revelation of God who is Jesus.

The place where I am not so happy with this chapter is the overall notion that it’s the Trinity that is the core of our understanding of God’s identity. While Barth is keen to make sure that the “who God is of whom we speak” is none other than “the God who has revealed Godself in this particular story,” the move away from the revelation of the story to the later reflection of the church on that revelation undermines the stated point.

The weakness of the approach is illustrated in the ways that it impacts exegesis.

Throughout the chapter we catch glimpses of where we’re supposed to recognize that it’s this God, this Trinity, who is at work. But all too often, these are not indications of Jesus as divine, or Spirit as divine person. Peter’s confession, even in Matthew, has nothing to do with Trinity. The baptismal formula in Matthew 28 is no more Trinitarian than Jesus’ baptism–and that’s not even getting to the Old Testament.

It’s the OT that creates the most significant challenges here. Can we so tie the identity of God with the Christian story that this same God is recognizable on the pages of the OT? Here is where the loss of narrative categories, and the adoption of the “philosophoumena of declining antiquity” is most unfortunate.

The continuity of God is a question for the NT writers, and we should follow their lead in recognizing that the God we worship is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who witnessed to Jesus by mighty deeds, the Father who did not spare his son but delivered him up for us all, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Who God is in Godself is insufficient cause of praise: http://bit.ly/flAoBS

One of my Facebook friends wanted to know what was up with this “Godself” business. Besides being a horribly clunky neologism, doesn’t the Bible constantly use masculine language to refer to God?

Here’s what she commented:

Daniel, I enjoy and appreciate so much of what you write – including this post. I’m wondering about the use of the (I think) very awkward “Godself” in the title. I’ve seen it before, but don’t get it. You’re making a biblical case about the God of the Bible but don’t seem comfortable using the language of the Bible to talk about Him. He has revealed Himself as the Eternal Father and Jesus as the Son, etc., etc. Why dispense with male pronouns? This is truly not intended to be snarky. I’m interested in your thoughts. I considered sending you a private inbox message, but figured some of your FB followers might have insights to share as well.

It is a great question! Here was my probably not-as-great reply:

great question.

I don’t have a problem with the Father-Son language of the Bible / NT; more that that, I think it’s important and should be preserved and promoted.

But I do otherwise attempt to refrain from using masculine pronouns when referring to God, in part because the use of awkward neologisms like “Godself” draw attention to the fact that I’m avoiding masculine pronouns.

I do this because I think it’s important to remind ourselves that God is not “male” as that those of us who are male humans are male. Consistently referring to God in masculine terms has the potential to serve the notion that those of us who are males on earth are more like God, closer to God, or occupying on earth the role that God occupies in the heavens.

In other words, referring to God consistently as “he” has the potential to empower patriarchal systems that exalt men at the expense of women–such as the male-only leadership that is sadly practiced, still, in the majority of churches in the 21st century.

Reminding ourselves that God is not “masculine” in this sense is an important step in remembering that we are not able to lead because we are biologically closer to God, but because the Spirit of God has endowed certain ones of us with the gift and calling.

What do you think? How important is it to preserve the masculine depictions of God in Scripture? How do we do justice to the fact that God is not male, despite these masculine depictions? How do we communicate that men are not more God-like either in nature or in function than women?

The article reviews a book entitled How God Changes Your Brain. In part, it seems, the upshot is that we must be careful in choosing what God we worship–we will be changed:

“But Newberg’s research offers warnings for the religious as well. Contemplating a loving God strengthens portions of our brain — particularly the frontal lobes and the anterior cingulate — where empathy and reason reside. Contemplating a wrathful God empowers the limbic system, which is “filled with aggression and fear.” It is a sobering concept: The God we choose to love changes us into his image, whether he exists or not.”

As another friend pointed out, the research is not simply about religion per se, but serves as encouragement and warning to any number of activities that both reflect and determine our beliefs:

For Newberg, this is not a simple critique of religious fundamentalism — a phenomenon varied in its beliefs and motivations. It is a criticism of any institution that allies ideology or faith with anger and selfishness. “The enemy is not religion,” writes Newberg, “the enemy is anger, hostility, intolerance, separatism, extreme idealism, and prejudicial fear — be it secular, religious, or political.”

The work also seems commendable for its refusal to allow the findings of neuroscience to weigh in on whether or not there’s a God. Describing religious experiences does not tell us where they come from or to what they may truly be directed.

Take and read. (And, make sure that the God you worship isn’t a jerk.)