The Personhood of God

It’s possible to “know” something in different ways, and on different levels. I’m sure that many people have had the experience of intuitively knowing something long before their rational mind put two and two together. What does it mean to have a personal relationship with Christ? That’s been my prayer, but I hadn’t really given much thought to the meaning of personal in this context.

In casual usage, “personal” often means “friendly” or “intimate” (as in “they’re close personal friends” or “That’s too personal to talk about.”) But that usage would mislead us in this case. To understand what “personal” means in this context, we have to look toward the bottom of the list of meanings in the dictionary:

• “of the nature of an individual rational being” (Dictionary.com)

• “having the nature of a person or self-conscious being” (American Heritage Dictionary.)

What does that mean? It means that if I am to have a personal relationship with God, then God is a Person.

I knew that on an intuitive level, but it wasn’t until last night that the intuitive and the rational clicked together. I was at a Bible study meeting, and one of the participants questioned my use of the pronoun “He” in referring to God. She argued that “God” was really “God-presence,” a kind of super-energy within and around us, that we effectively tap into and use when we pray. She pointed out Jesus’ reference to God as spirit and love, but completely dismissed my point that Jesus also referred to God as Father, with whom Jesus had a personal relationship. While she conceded that I might find it helpful to imagine God that way, it was quite clear that she regarded a personal God as mere superstition.

I was startled by the force of my own disagreement. Why was I so sure that God is very definitely a Person?

The foundation for my argument ought to have been the fact that the Bible is quite clear about it, but there are three reasons why I didn’t (and won’t) follow it up that way. 1. Scriptural backup isn’t helpful for convincing someone who had earlier dismissed the New Testament as folk-history and exaggeration; 2. I don’t know the Bible well enough yet to make a solid scriptural case ; and 3. that wasn’t how I came to understand the personhood of God anyway.

So how come I am so certain about the personhood of God?

Let me back up a bit to when I was going through the conversion process. I’d intellectually grasped and accepted God as Creator, as First Cause of the universe. In fact, it wasn’t too hard to take that step, since it didn’t really challenge any part of my naturalistic worldview other than to give a satisfying explanation for How It All Got Started. I t would have been relatively easy to have imagined God as an impersonal creative force, permeating the universe without directly relating to me. Certainly that view of God wouldn’t have disrupted my habits of thinking or my way of life.

Except that it didn’t stop there. God was more than just the First Cause; as I puzzled over my conceptions of reality, I started to see that God was also the source of morality. And if that was the case, then… what did that mean about my relationship to this God? I guess I could have worked myself around into a point of view that let me see morality as another aspect of a non-personal God. Except that He didn’t let that happen.

I’m not sure when I realized that God was truly a Person. Maybe it was when, after reading and thinking about Christ, I realized that Jesus was and is the Son of God… because for there to be a Son, there has to be a Father, and a Father is most definitely something different from a force that permeates the universe.

I think the defining moment of my realization of the personhood of God was the night when I fully understood that Jesus is the crucified and risen Son of God… because at the same moment I realized that the last remaining barrier to my acceptance of Christ was my fear of turning myself over to God in obedience to His will. “Not my will, but Yours, be done.” That was the hardest thing for me to come to terms with, but once I faced up to it, I found that I had the strength to go on anyway.

Although I didn’t think about it that way at the time, in that moment I came to an important understanding of the personhood of God. “Will” is a personal quality; we can’t speak of the “will” of nature or the “will” of gravity. To understand the preeminence of God’s will in my life is to understand that God is a Person, not a force.

If I had been looking for spirituality, I might have opted for a vague sense of God-presence, a pantheism that would fill in some of the blanks without rewriting my life story. Giving a nod to “God within me” would have been an easy way to feel in tune with the universe without actually facing up to the will of my Maker. Did I want to recognize God as a Person? Absolutely not! It meant I had to come to terms with a new orientation for my life: obedience to Him, not gratification for me. It meant I had to recognize that He actually cares about me – and while that’s a message that is usually presented as comforting, in practice I found it frightening at first and disconcerting even now.

Psychologically, I had every reason to want to see God as an impersonal force… except that it wasn’t true, and if there is one thing that in the end I cared about more than my own comfort, it was knowing what was true. I am very grateful that God came looking for me, instead, because when He found me, He didn’t let me get away with anything short of recognizing Him as a Person… and letting me know that He was going to expect a lot from me.

Yes, God is everywhere, within me as well as around me; but He is not some sort of spiritual force that I can plug into the way I plug my computer into the electrical socket. When I pray, it’s not a manipulation of invisible spiritual energy, but a conversation with a Being who can and does act in my life.

I know that God is a Person because I have met Him. I have felt His presence and seen His work in my life. I don’t think I’d have understood any of this when I was an agnostic; as it is, writing it down makes it sound hopelessly emotional. But in fact it’s not; it’s the cool and rational recognition of a truth that turned everything upside down.

All of this was in the background, until I found myself moved to speak about some of it at my Bible study. After our meeting was over, I went to the chapel for Compline (a short evening service of prayers and music). We sang:

Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit;

For You have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth.

Keep us, O Lord, as the apple of Your eye;

Hide us under the shadow of Your wings.

It was like a slightly blurred picture snapping into focus. I recognized with both mind and heart that the You of our prayer is a Person, and I thought: This is why I can trust myself to You.

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