God is a process, a phenomenon. Is the process natural? Is the process created by humankind? I really don’t know the answers to these questions. A part of me is perfectly okay with not knowing, because knowing isn’t all that important. In fact, as I’ve said before, true theology does not rejoice in knowing, it rejoices in seeking. Knowing may come, but it isn’t the goal.
However, I struggle with not capitalizing god. Yet I know as I go forward writing and reflecting on my faith, I want to stop capitalizing God. However, tradition runs hard, even for someone like me who is focused on recreating how a Christian life is understood and undertaken. Something looks wrong with that little “g,” it looses, it seems, its grandeur and magic. It becomes just another word in the sentence, rather than falling full force into the reading eye.
Yet, I also know that I cringe every time I capitalize God, because I know that god is not a proper noun. Making god a proper noun limits the meaning behind the symbol. It is like trapping all the mountains of the world into one single color snapshot. It takes your idea of god and my idea of god and assumes that they are exactly the same, that we are talking about the same proper God.
The argument I hear is that god must be capitalized to show respect and reverence. Do we capitalize the phenomenon of gravity? Do we turn the abstract notion of time into a proper noun? No. Yet, god is no more or less important than many improper nouns like these; nouns that have a direct bearing on how we carry out our daily living.
There is no proper God. There is only god.
