The Difference Between Philosophy and Christianity

To be is to be the value of a bound variable.

– W.V.O Quine, From a Logical Point of View, p.9

God is Spirit

That God is spirit, generally, does not mean simply that his is not material but that he is able to encompass both what we call spirit and what we call matter. To have spirit is to be open to the other – God, the human other and the world; to be spirit, as God is, is to be able to cross the boundary between creator and creature, even to the extent of God the Son’s becoming identical with Jesus of Nazareth by the power of the Spirit. In scripture, God’s being spirit appears to refer to the capacity of the creator to cross ontological boundaries: to interact with and become part of that which he is not.

– Colin Gunton, Act and Being (2002), p. 115

In this confusing little passage, Colin Gunton attempts to suggest a way in which Greek Philosophy needs to be filtered out from the Christian understanding of God. The Bible states that God is spirit (John 4:24) and that he is creator. Gunton suggests that Christianity, fascinated with Greek Philosophy as it was in it’s early days, has then rushed into trying to erect neat theological categories in which to express these propositions – spirit contrasted with matter, creator contrasted with creation, self contrasted with other. These seem like helpful little categories, but Gunton suggests that what is more fundamental to God than being spirit and not matter,  or to being creator and not creation, or to being other and not one of us, is God’s inability to be bracketed in such dualisms, and his unique ability to cross between these categories.

Far from undercutting any sensible attempts to speak of God accurately, I think Gunton suggests that this has the possibility to allow for the development of a uniquely Christian vocabulary which aspires to speak truthfully and deeply about God. Gunton suggests that this ‘ontological modesty’ is actually a unique and fundamental hallmark of Christianity: that is makes sense of believing that God became human, that God died,  that God is knowable by those on the other side of the divide, and that God is more deserving of worship than any other being.