Chaitanya Charan Das has written one book entitled: Oh My God [see Internet more on this book] I never read this. But I listened to his interview in one TV long before he published that book. After researching various concepts about God in several worldviews and scriptures, he wrote that book ‘Re-answering the Questions’ about God.
I too struggle with the same questions: Who God is. Because I don’t exactly understand the English word God till this day. Because we have different words in Indian languages and even several words for that God. For example we have ‘Iraivan’ ‘Thalaivan’ ‘Kadavul’ in Tamil; Takur, Gosain, Prabhu, Bhagavan, Malik, Brahman, Ishwar, Parameshwar etc., etc., in other languages. Though they all talk about a reality beyond us and behind everything, each word has a different meaning. For example ‘Iraivan’ could also mean King, ‘Thalaivan’ means Leader, ‘Kadavul’ means who lives within transcending everything viz., ‘transcendently immanent’ to borrow from Lott [Eric Lott, Vedantic Approaches to God, Macmillan, London, 1980, p. 5}. This being the reality about God in various languages, how to understand who God is.
The common perception is that whoever comes and helps us in our need is God. A famous Tamil [film song by Kannadasan] says: food is God for a hungry stomach; water in the desert; umbrella {or shelter] in rain and shadow in summer heat. Often people saying to the doctor when their close relative [most of the time child] admitted in the hospital struggling for its life, ‘Doctor you are my God’. And several saying, ‘Like God you came in time to rescue me’.
If ordinary people are considered as God or actually become God in distress, why not a guru who removes darkness cannot be called God? Because we Hindus consider all Gurus as avatara of God doesn’t mean that when I call Muktinath as my Guru and therefore become my God I also I am assigning Godship to Him because He is my guru. Or I am lowering His status to the level of other human gurus. We should remember the fact that He is Nara-Hari, viz., Man-God. As I said several times, if God has to come down to reveal who She is She cannot come down lower than Muktinath. If human can go up to become God, we cannot go beyond Muktinath. And Muktinath is the meeting point of Man-God and God-Man., Nara-Hari.
Is God a concept or a Person? According to Muktiveda He is a Person. At the same time it talks about a God who is beyond our comprehension. And the Lord in His Person helps us to understand that ‘Person-hood’ in God. But in Indian religious tradition, God is both a concept and a person. Mostly in advaita Brahman I Nirgun and transcendental whereas in His relationship with creation He becomes Ishwar. In all other bhakti Vedanta God is a Person. So a Guru becoming a Personal God, in my case MN is the way I understand about God.
Conclusion:
There is a famous Tamil poem that says, ‘Those who have seen didn’t explain; those who explained haven’t seen’. If we manage to comprehend and express who God is, then that God is She becomes less than our mind/buddhi. I think it was J. I. Packer who wrote, ‘Your God is too small’ [Knowing God?]. When it comes to God better remain silent and when it comes about your Guru, then talk loudly, even from the rooftop. About this there is a famous story in Upanishad:
These passages (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, IV.5.15; III.9.26=IV.4.22 and IV.5.15; III.8.8; IV.4.19; Chandogya Upanishad, VII.24.1; Svetaswathara Upanishad, VI.19; Katha Upanishad, IV.10-11) emphasize that it is impossible to describe what brahman is and that we can only say what it is not. Sankaracarya on V.S.III.2.17 refers to the dialogue of Baaskali and Baadhva declared the characteristic of brahman by his silence. Baaskali said, `Sir, tell me about brahma’; then Baadhva remained silent; when Baaskali asked a second and a third time Baadhva replied `we have been telling you indeed; but you don’t understand; this self is still (without any activity)’. J. Royce in `The world and the individual’ vol.I.p.148 is just like this episode of Baaskali and Baadhva “Believe not those prattlers’ says one often quoted mystical work `who boast that they know God.’ Who knows Him is silent”…— P. V. Kane. History of Dharmasastra, Pune, Bandarker Oriental Research Institute, vol. V. part. II. p.1505
Having said this as per my habit I began to search for all the information that I gathered through my readings in various books all these years and would like to share one or two important points only without adding any comments to them. To have a better understanding about God one should read the following extracts carefully.
DB
Gurukulam, 6-6-2023
On God by some scholars:
…The word God is, in the words of Don Richardson, “European tribal language.” The word God in ancient Europe was used to describe supernatural beings who occupied rocks and trees! ….— Daniel I. Kikawa, Hawai, Perpetuated in Righteousness, Aloha Ke Akua Publishing, 1994, p.24
The word for God, Elohim, mentioned earlier, is the plural form of El. God Himself confirmed that He was El, Exodus 6:2-3 says, “And God (Elohim) speak unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Lord (YAWH): And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty (El Shaddai–El Almighty), but by my name Jehovah (YHWH) was I not known to them.” This scripture says that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew God by the name El. The Hebrew name Elijah means El is Yahweh. El and his various names were incorporated into the Hebrew language as it was being formed (Abraham spoke chaldee. Hebrew was formed some time after 1400 B.C.[ Gribetz,J. The Timetables of Jewish History, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1993,p. 8]). It is found in the Hebrew words Elohim (El plural), El Elyon (El most high), El Roi (El who sees me), El Shaddai (El Almighty), etc. and in names like Elijah (El is Yahweh), Michael (Who is like El?), Gabriel (Man of El), and the author’s good Jewish name, Daniel (My Judge is El).
Who was this God, El? El was the highest God in the Canaanite pantheon. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament says that “The name ‘El’ is a very ancient Semitic term. It is also the most widely distributed name among Semitic-speaking peoples for the deity, occurring in some form in every Semitic language except Ethiopic… the term El (p.25) was used in reference to a personal god and not merely as a generic term in the ancient Semitic world.”[ Harris, R; Archer, G. & Waltke, B. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, vol. I, Chicago: Moody Press, p.42] (emphasis-the author’s)….—ibid. pp.24-26
…I do not think that Jesus thought he was identified with the being that most people in our culture think is denoted by the word god.
What most people mean by god in late-modern Western culture is the god of Enlightenment Deism. That far-off, detached being may perhaps have been responsible in some sense or other for the creation of the world, but he—or perhaps one should say “it”—is basically remote, inaccessible and certainly not involved with the day-to-day (p.96) life, let alone the day-to-day pain, of the world as it now is….— N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. Illinois, IVP Academic. 1999. pp. 96-97
In the languages of the Christian peoples of the West the ecclesiastical use of words for “lord, master etc.” is often based on loan translations. Our “Lord” goes back ultimately to the Jewish substitution of Bebr. adonaai—which was also used to denote a lord of a people, a house, a slave, a husband, a king, a god in the polytheistic sense—“the Lord”, which was faithfully rendered in the Septuagint bykurioV [kurios], one of those terms which was, at a later period, adopted by the Christians, who “in einem polemischen Parallelismus”, borrowed a terminology which had also been adopted in Caesar-worship (pantokratwr {pantokratwr} “almighty”, which was, however, also used of the god Hermes and of the Lord of the Old Testament; swthr {swter} “saviour”, which was also applied, by Pindarus and others, to Zeus and other gods, to Egyptian rulers, to the God of the Jews, etc.).12 The Greek kurioV [kurios] was followed by Lat. dominus, which served as a model for It. Signore, Fr. Seigneur etc. Some words of this category became restricted to the religious use, as Rum. Domn (< dominus), Lith. Viespats—which corresponds to Skt. vispati—“lord of the house, tribe, people”—Russ. Gospod’. These facts show that also in the West the same terms were, at least for some time, applied to ordinary human beings, gods, rulers, and God….— J. Gonda, Change and Continuity in Indian Religion, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, (1965) 1985, p.132
12 E. Lohmeyer, Christuskult und Kaiserkult (Tubingen, 1919); see also K.M. Setton, Christian attitude towards the Emperor in the 4th century, Thesis (New York, 1941).
…As Dionysius put it centuries ago, our language is fragmentary and fragile. We strive with all our might in broken language to talk about what is finally quite indescribable [Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, trans. C.E. Rolt (London: SPCK, 195), 1.1ff, cited in Oden, Living God, p. 321] … Therefore, Kierkegaard said, there is an element of comedy in all talk about God, which we who have received a measure of grace should be quick to confess [Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 250-51, cited in Oden, Living God, p. 321]….— Gerald R. McDermott, Can Evangelicals Learn From World Religions: Jesus, Revelation & Religious Traditions, Illinois, Inter Varsity Press, 2000, p.65
Biblical language, then, is figurative and analogical. It cannot be otherwise because while God created and is in the world, He is also above it. So language about Him is neither wholly like nor wholly unlike Him. But there are genuine points of similarity….—ibid. p.129
…Each of these [God, Son and the Holy Spirit] manifestations of himself, geared as they are to the human frame of reference, are met with particular perceptions of God and responses to him on the part of the human participants. In this interaction between God as he manifests himself and the persons to whom he manifests himself, and who in turn perceive and respond to God in particular culturally conditioned ways, both his self-disclosure and his leading take place. For we do not know God’s nature apart from his interaction with us occasioned by his leading activity. Wright (Wright, G. Ernest. God Who Acts. London: SCM Press. 1952:90) quotes Brunner on this point:
The Bible says nothing of a God as He is in Himself and nothing of a man as he is in himself, but only of a God who from the first is related to man and of a man who from the first is related to God (Brunner, Emil. The divine-Human Encounter. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1943:58)— Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective, New York, Orbis Books, (1979) 16th Printing, 2000, p.195
With regard to God Himself, I have expressed my full agreement that the application to Him of temporal duration, as it is experienced by man, is only a symbol or analogy for a life incomprehensible to us….— Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938, p.121
…Yet if you could not attribute to God a mind like man’s, what you did attribute to God—wisdom, love, justice, will—were still bits of the human mind, thought of as raised to a supreme degree of perfection. If you went on with the process and removed from the ideal of God everything which you knew as a characteristic or constituent of human personality, you would have nothing left at all. God would be for you a complete blank…—ibid. p.254
Reason alone can never tell us whether anything exists. If we ask someone to give us a rational ground for his belief that something unseen exists, all he can do is to lay hold of some concrete bit of reality which we know already by direct experience, or in whose existence we believe already on rational grounds, and show us that if the world has a pattern, as reason affirms, and if our view of the pattern, as at present advised, is correct, then that bit of reality which we see or believe to exist implies the existence of another bit of reality of a particular character which we do not see….all rational inference of the existence of anything unseen is inference from one part of the world-pattern to another part of the world-pattern. But when you ask for rational proof that (p. 362) God exists, or that the world-pattern as a whole is due to Mind, you are asking to be shown the relation of the pattern to something other than itself, something outside it, extending beyond it, prior to it. You can argue from the watch to the human craftsman because both watch and craftsman are parts of the pattern, but you cannot argue from the order found in the pattern as a whole to a constituting Mind, unless you make that Mind itself part of the pattern it is supposed to constitute….No cogent rational inference can be made from the world to what is outside it. If this is so, when the Rationalist asks for a rational proof of the existence of God, he is asking for something which in the nature of the case it is impossible to have. A rational proof would draw God into the world and make Him a part of the pattern He is alleged to create.—ibid. pp.362-363
…It is so easy to say that all ideas of God are nothing but an illusive personification of human desires….—ibid. p. 364
…God is a relative term, related to the creatures; God is not God to himself;…-Ibid. Hiranyagarbha, [The Birth Of God].— Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience, Second ed.1989, All India Books, Pondicherry, p. 68.
…If the proper form of the Greek name for God is the vocative, the Vedic name is a dative…-ibid. Hiranyagarbha. p.69.
…Probably no other name is more univeral and more appropriate to denote that mystery greater than ourselves which some traditions have called God. Not every tradition agrees in calling the Supreme either Being or Person or Creator or even God. Further, if we use a proper name, if we say Varuna or Siva or Yahweh, we are not only personifying but also limiting our reference to that one culture where the word is at home…-ibid. Isa. The Lord. p. 133.
The nouns Isvara and Isa are not found in the Rg Veda, although the verb form is frequently used to express the power of the Gods. Where the terms occur in the Atharva Veda and Brahmanas, they certainly do not have the connotations of later times…–ibid. Isa, The Lord. pp. 135-36.
…God without the creatures is no longer God, because he is, precisely, God of the creatures. To mix God and the creatures would be pantheism; to separate both amounts to idolatry [or atheism if we eliminate the divine]. the relation is more intimate than any causal thinking may incline us to suppose.–ibid. Savitr. p. 195.
…If God is to have any practical value [which idea one can contest, obviously–but then we have another problem altogether] he must be not only “available” but also approachable in our own “human” [and all to human] fashion….–ibid. Panyakamah vanijah, A. Merchant’s Prayer. p. 294.
…Ultimate Reality which is ineffiable and mysterious, the knowledge we have of him is symbolic, negative and analogical…– Ishanand Vempeny, S.J. Krsna And Christ, Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand,1988, p.81
…in general, Bhagavaan is not synonymous with any one name of the divine manifestations or descents; it clearly designates the Parama Purusa or Parama Aatman, the One (p.114) ‘personal’ supreme deity. Words like ‘deva’ (god) and devi (goddess), even words like Iisvara (lord) or devataa (deity) can be used in the plural number; Bhagavaan is always singular.— Editors R.De Smet and J. Neuner ,Religious Hinduism, Fourth Revised Edition, 1997, pp.114-115
Names may, however, also lead us astray. For instance, when a term which is usually, or may conveniently, be translated by “king” is applied to a god, we may not take his sublimity and omnipotence for granted. Many Vedic gods were addressed as “king” (raajan-) and yet, they were no (p.132) “lords” (isvara-) the well-known title given, in later times, to the Indian form of the High God. There must have been serious reasons why the ancient word raajan-could not serve to express the idea of divine lordship as conceived in the later or Hindu period. The Vedic gods were devaah, a title which, while denoting powerful beings, regarded as possessing super-normal faculties and as controlling a department of nature or activity in the human sphere, was—though, as far as I am able to see not in the ancient literature—also given to kings….— J. Gonda, Change and Continuity in Indian Religion, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, (1965) 1985, pp.132-3
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