By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
In The Point of Christology, I argued that it is "characteristic of theistic religions that they each develop certain other concepts and symbols [sc. other than "God"], the whole point of which is to answer their question about who God is by explicitly identifying someone or something that decisively represents God" (37). But what I did not argue there, notwithstanding the support it clearly provides for my main thesis, is that theistic religions, in their way, or in certain of their characteristic forms, also acknowledge, in effect, that even "God" is but one way, albeit the "true" way, of thinking and speaking about (strictly) ultimate reality in its meaning for us.
Thus, in the mystical form of the Christian religion represented by Meister Eckart, for example, a distinction is drawn between "deus, the personal God," on the one hand, and "deitas, the [transpersonal] Godhead of which God is a manifestation to humankind," on the other. Significantly, the (strictly) ultimate reality of which "God" is thus acknowledged to be but one way of thinking and speaking is designated "Godhead," analogously to the way in which, on the other side, the meaning of God for us is objectified so as to bring out its theistic meaning by talking, e.g., of "Son of God," "Spirit of God," and "Word of God."
Thus one can say that, just as concepts and symbols such as these are ways of thinking and speaking about the meaning of God for us, so "God" is, in turn, a way of thinking and speaking about the meaning of (strictly) ultimate reality for us, this being clearly indicated by the designation of this (strictly) ultimate reality as "Godhead."
June 1992
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