Did Jesus Believe in God?

Asking whether Jesus believed in God seems like a comical if not blasphemous question. Given the history of Christianity confessing Jesus as God, it seems strange to question whether Jesus believed in God. Also, as a first-century Jewish person, we would expect that Jesus participated in  the rituals and beliefs of ancient Judaism, which certainly included praying to God.

The question, though, becomes serious when you search for things Jesus actually said about God, which amount to very few. Most of the time, when it came to God, Jesus used metaphors or, what we today often call, imaginaries. Jesus was not alone in this way of talking about God among ancient Jews, but when God is either absent from discourse or present only in a metaphor, what sort of “belief” is involved? When we read the book of Ecclesiastes, we do not find much, if any, God language, and the same is true generally of other Jewish wisdom literatures. Jesus was a wisdom teacher, and wisdom as a genre is relatively secular, even in antiquity.

Parables Are Not Allegories

The way that Jesus participated in wisdom was through the construction of parables. A Jesus parable never includes God, either as a figure or a reference. To read a parable as something directly about God necessitates importing God into the story. Throughout Christian history, importing God into a parable has been a predictable practice. Mainly, it is assumed a parable is an allegory, which means that characters in the parable represent a reality outside the parable. Augustine, among others both in the past and still today, assumed the parables were allegories. The father in the Prodigal Son parable was God. Usually, any reference to a master (Kyrios in Greek is frequently translated as Lord) is assumed to be an allegory for God. There is a master in the parable of The Unjust Steward, and there is another master (often translated as owner) in the parable of The Workers in the Vineyard. In both cases, it is assumed that the final voice in the parable, the master’s voice, is God laying down the law. Authority, God, and Law seem to go together, but is this what Jesus thinks?

A parable, however, is not an allegory but a metaphor, so we have to read the parable as a story, and we need to realize that the figures in the parables are characters of literature. A master is a character who may perform an expected or unexpected act. In the first parable above, we do not expect the master to commend an unjust steward and in the second parable, we do not expect the master to pay all workers the same wage regardless of hours worked. God is not the master in these stories; rather, the masters are the masters in the stories. The masters are fictional characters.

God as a Metaphor

Jesus only hints at God in parables because he relates the fictional parable to the empire of God. He says that the empire of God is like a parable, but even in this reference, the empire of God is another metaphor for God. The empire of God is not God; it is an indirect reference to God, a kind of substitute for God. Jesus never says what God is like; he only says what the empire of God is like. And then, to portray what the empire of God is like, he uses a parable. So, Jesus uses a metaphor to explain a metaphor. This should tell us something about what Jesus believed (or did not believe) about God.

Allow me to venture an opinion. Jesus believed that God was a metaphor, but a metaphor for what you might ask? I will say a metaphor for a way of life. Jesus did not give instructions about how one should live but rather opened doorways to re-imagining what life is about. When it came to God, Jesus said practically nothing about what to believe but rather used metaphors to open doors to the imagination.

From these observations I can draw a couple of noteworthy points. One is that Jesus was not a fundamentalist. Religious fundamentalism is far away from his spirit. Another observation is that Jesus did not relate God to authority but to metaphors. Since metaphors are flexible, insisting on the observance of doctrinal forms of Christianity is also far away from the spirit of Jesus.

My comments above are derived from the question, “What did Jesus really say?” I have used standard academic techniques to answer that question, which can be found and explained clearly in Westar's notable book The Five Gospels. I have not used the Gospel of John as a source for Jesus sayings because the Gospel of John does not have Jesus sayings but orations written by a later gospel writer.

When it comes to what Jesus really said, we are dealing with metaphors, and metaphors do not give us certainty about what Jesus believed. They do, however, suggest that Jesus might instruct modern Christians not to center spirituality on “correct” beliefs about God and not to harm others in the name of God.

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Thumbnail Image: By Chen from Pixabay