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Chapter 13¹³

Theological Perspectives on God as an Invisible Force

An individual’s beliefs about God are one factor to be included in a multi-dimensional investigation of the social consequences and possible health benefits of religion, an aid in particular to scientific hypothesis generation. Scientists can better test for the social and health consequences of religious commitment when they know more about the character and range of beliefs about God that such commitment brings. This chapter hopes to show, in particular, that exactly what Christians believe about the nature of God’s influence on their lives is likely to have an important bearing on one of the questions of this volume: How can religion encourage a sense of connection to others, especially in situations of perceived social isolation, and thereby assuage the adverse health consequences of loneliness?

Depending on what they think God is like, Christians vary in the way they expect God to be a present influence on their daily lives. God’s nature is supernatural or transcendent, which means God is not very much like any of the ordinary persons or things with which they come into regular contact. Christians use the same terms for God that they use for talking about ordinary persons and things but they therefore know that neither set of terms is really adequate to capture who or what God is. On the one hand, God is something like a human being in that God loves them and wants to do them good, and in that God is unhappy with their failings and trying, through the use of carrots and sticks, to get them to change. But, on the other hand, God is really not very much like an ordinary human being in that God is present at all times and everywhere, working inexorably to bring about what God intends throughout the entirety of peoples’ lives by way of influences of both personal and impersonal sorts--for example, through personal words of advice and warning found in the Bible as

13 The lead author is Kathryn Tanner, Ph.D., the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research relates the history of Christian thought to areas of contemporary theological concern using critical, social, and feminist theory, with a special focus on the possible practical implications of Christian beliefs and symbols. She has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe, and is the author of six books: God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (1988, Blackwell); The Politics of God (1992, Fortress); Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (1997, Fortress); Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity (2001, Continuum and Fortress Press); Economy of Grace (2005, Fortress); and Christ the Key (2010, Cambridge).

Christian beliefs are not just theoretical matters, involving putative truth claims about the nature of ultimate reality, but practical ones: Christian beliefs are often promulgated with the hope of impacting the way human beings live, by establishing, for example, the meaningfulness of and motivations for certain forms of social behavior. Prior research has concerned the possible economic, social and political consequences of Christian beliefs about God's relation to the world. This essay extends such questioning to the topic of perceived social isolation. How might belief in God as an invisible force in everyday life affect an individual's sense of social connection?

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