What if God is not personal?

Growing up in a fundamentalist household I was accustomed to the question, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I would hear it at the end of every church service right before an altar call. All these years later I could still orchestrate one if I needed to. The pastor asks everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes. The pastor then spews out some words, overly generic. “Are you burdened by life?” “Do you feel like there is no way out of where you find yourself?” And my personal favorite, “If you died tonight/today/on the way home from church would you go to heaven or hell?” And then the solution was presented to whatever poor soul either felt down enough about life or was scared shitless by the possibility of burning in hell that they would raise their hand or perhaps make their way to the altar to be assisted by someone waiting on the side or in the front pews to pray with them and, if possible, lead them to Christ. The main selling point, when it wasn’t avoiding eternal damnation, lakes of fire, or any other horror from a Heironymus Bosch painting, was the promise of a personal relationship with God.

I bring up all of this because, whether or not one is a fundamentalist, one of the main tenets of Christianity is that God is in some way personal. But what if this is not the case? The farther along I move on this personal journey towards something (nameless and indescribable as it is), it seems I keep dropping more and more beliefs off to the side like some pioneering wagon leaving a trail of discarded items behind to lighten up its load. For a while now, one of those things that I have tried to leave behind (and still it keeps popping back up) is the dependency on the idea of a personal God, and, even more troublesome lately, an agential God.

There is some place for salvaging some of the idea of a personal encounter with God though, but I think it is through both the presence of the other, and in interaction with the other. First, the presence of the other. I like the idea of panentheism. God, whatever it is, can be understood as being inside/outside all things, yet not identical with all things (pantheism). Thus God still remains an elusive substance, present to us in the other, whether it be bird, ant, tree, or person. Panentheism keeps a limit on how far we go with this though, keeping us modest from proclaiming ourselves to be God.

Secondly, interaction with the other. Gordon Kaufman comments on this in In Face of Mystery much better than I (see page 333). Nonetheless, here is my take on his argument. In 1 John (see chapter 4.7-21) we are reminded “that no one has ever seen God.” I like to think about that…all this searching for something that can never be seen, never touched, so ephemeral, so vaporous, like grasping at smoke. The chapter hints at this, I think, basic truth: Whatever God is, our experience of God will be found in our relationships with the other, whatever the “other” happens to be at any given moment. It is this interaction in which, dare I say, God is in some sense is created. That energetic surge, that give and take, and most importantly, the love given back and forth is what creates the space where God is found. I guess it is appropriate that the author of 1 John bluntly states that “God is love.”

So, in this sense, can God ever be truly personal. I think, in a way, God is personal only if we create the environment within and without in which God can be manifested. God is personal, but in the sense that the possibility for God lies within us and especially within our interactions.

What are the consequences of this, then? Is God constantly being created and destroyed? Becoming incarnate and crucified? Do the possibilities and capabilities of God evolve along with us?