Materialism without ontology? On the question of God, again

Response to someone asking about definitions of God:

There is a problem with most such definitions. Discourse about God in the Western tradition has two not necessarily compatible sources. One is literary and the other theoretical; the former seems wedded to moral and ethical notions, the latter to metaphysical ones that may or may not accord with the former. Often what seems to have been achieved is to give argumentative grounding to what amounts to an interpretation of Being in terms of (God as) power. The sacred literature from which the idea originates as far as the religious traditions are concerned does suppose that this God is the absolute power in the natural and also historical worlds, but almost nothing elaborates on this, the texts instead focusing on various ethical and moral concerns. Surely some set of these would need to be taken as criteria for a satisfactory definition. And surely too many definitions fail to meet this test.

The problem may just be that the sacred literature fully identifies this God with its ideas of morality and ethics (or the good) as they do and should be considered by us human persons as compelling on us, in ways we must both choose and recognize as commanding. The Bible has almost no interest anywhere in it in informing us what this God really "is" or is like, apart from those moral demands and ethical possibilities.

The prospect must be considered that a metaphysical theory which did tell us that, and that only, would be of little or no interest, except to people interested not in the relationship of Being and human persons to the good, but only in the elements and workings of this Being, and that seems not only empty but betraying of all or most uses of the name not as concept but name of that being who thinks, speaks, wants, and does all the things attributed to him or it in the literature, which knows nothing of natural science or its philosophical analogues.

Must not a metaphysics which tells us ‘what’ is the Being of God will identify God with power, in a way that reflects the implicit basis of knowledge in this case in a desire for power (which we would possess of Being if we knew its ‘substance’, elements, description) rather than a desire to understand that more properly begins with and works within the realm of the ethical? This would be the good, but less as an abstraction than a set of concrete possibilities best given in metaphorical poetry and narrative accounts of persons living in situations? For while Greek thought is abstract, the Bible, which really is only literature and not of course science (whether empirical or as work of pure theory), is relentlessly concrete. Though its God has no image, only descriptions of acts and statements, its world is replete with images.

Of course, identifying this God as an actual person in one key element of the Christian trinity is a solution to the problem that may appear to have been achieved by avoiding it. In some forms, it neatly divides God into an abstraction, a person, and an attribute (the 'holy spirit'), its first and principle element remaining an enigma for those keen on defining a (perhaps intuitable, somehow) divinity or divineness. Could this divineness be an attribute of Being itself, understood in a certain way?

The minimal idea of God is a power or force that is in some sense absolute (in nature and society, and historical time) and also wholly identified with the good. God's unity or singularity and uniqueness is posited along with his thorough identification with the good, particularly that of us humans, and it is the latter more than the former that paganism excluded. The fundamental idea of a Biblical theology does not think God as a unity, primacy, or ultimacy given conceptually in a theory of Being (what is in, perhaps just, as with 'ontology', so far as it is); what is key instead is the identification of Being, or its authorizing power, with the good, and the universality of the latter.

That universality may be the best guarantee that 'technology' and governance are subordinate to ethics, because in relationship to an ethical God who is universal, I cannot intelligibly pursue my good (what I want or need) at the expense of yours. Thus, to the concept of the good corresponds concretely the reality in experience of the Other. The Other is both same as and different from me, same because we both participate in Being and the good, different because the world is differentiated and has materiality, difference, separations, contingency (God does not rule Being by promising and securing the good as necessary), and temporality. It may even be that what God's authority, reality, and presence give us is not the necessity but possibility of Being being realized as good. Paganism's commitments to using magic to master chance, and crediting ultimately fate in an ethical pessimism make it inferior in realizing a good that may not be what I wanted, or what of self, other, and world I understood. Thus, science is compatible with Biblical theology in a way that myth is not.

And art for us is not either. Tragedy set art on a path different from myth by giving us images that are not realities but metaphors with a revelatory reality effect: Oedipus seems to tear his eyes out, and we know it seems real but isn't, aesthetic feeling is affective, not bodily. (The Christ story in the New Testament violates this principle, and in at least two ways, having to do with personality and embodiment.).

The Bible only once poses the question (Moses does) what this God is; it is overwhelmingly concerned with what is and should be the relationship to him of human beings, and what with his authority is commanded, and perhaps also offered or given. It may also be that a phenomenological inquiry (a major position in philosophical theology today) or some other one that focuses only on the relationship between God and humanity, such as is suggested by the canonical ideas of creation, revelation, and redemption, is, if not all there is to the deity, all that we can understand, and all that we need to.