In Western culture, which for the last 2,000 years has been dominated by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the word God generally refers to one supreme holy being, the divine unity of ultimate reality and of ultimate goodness. God, so conceived, is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to bring it to its fulfillment. In the Old Testament, God was called YHWH, pronounced Yahweh by most scholars; the exact pronunciation of the name was lost because it was rarely enunciated. In its place was read Adonai ("Lord"). The written combination of the tetragrammaton YHWH with the vowels of Adonai was traditionally rendered as Jehovah in English Bibles. Although the meaning of YHWH is disputed, it is frequently translated as "He who is" and probably designates YHWH as creator. In ISLAM, ALLAH stands for a similar notion.

Thus, as a functioning word, God in the first instance refers to the central and sole object of religious commitment--and so to the center of WORSHIP, PRAYER, and religious MEDITATION. Secondarily, God has been the object of religious and philosophical reflection, the supreme object of THEOLOGY and of most forms of speculative metaphysics. God is a puzzling and elusive notion, by no means easy to define. As the supreme being, the creator and ruler of all, God transcends all creaturely limits, distinctions, and characteristics. If something is definable only by its distinctions from other things, its limits, and its special characteristics, how is it possible to define the source of all things, which is not limited, distinguished, or peculiar? God is in neither time nor space; he/she/it transcends all substances and causes; is neither dependent on nor an effect of other things. Thus, he cannot be spoken of simply as a being among other beings lest he be conceived as a mere creature and thus not God. For these reasons, the concept of God inevitably tends toward that of the transcendent absolute of much speculative philosophy: impersonal, unrelated, independent, changeless, eternal. In some theologies, the concept moves into even more distant realms of abstraction. God can only be described negatively, as the negation of all that is experienced here and now, for example, as nontemporal, nonphysical, and unchanging. In Jewish and Christian belief, however, God is also in some way personal, righteous, or moral, concerned with people and their lives and therefore closely related to and active within the world and the course of history. The reflective problems in this concept of God, the subject of debates throughout Western history, therefore, have a dual source: God, whatever he may be, is unlike ordinary things that can be described, and the notion of God includes certain dialectical tensions or paradoxes (absolute-relative, impersonal-personal, eternal-temporal, changeless-changing) that defy ordinary powers of speech and of definition. In approaching the divine, religiously or philosophically, one first of all encounters mystery and, with that, special forms or rules of speech--a characteristic as old as religion itself.

VARIATIONS IN THE CONCEPT OF GOD
Ideas of god vary widely from religion to religion and from culture to culture. Many Gods In those cultures that conceive of human life as totally supported and threatened by (and thus subordinate to) strange and uncontrollable natural and social powers, all such powers and forces--in animals, totems, rivers, trees, mountains, kings and queens, tribes, ancestors, holy men and women--participate in and manifest holy power. Here the divine is undifferentiated; it is universally present in important objects and persons. In other ancient cultures that conceive of the person as unique and differentiated from natural and social forces and recognize the role of personal power in politics, these varied natural and cultural forces are personified or symbolized by gods and goddesses who control, work through, and manifest themselves in these powers. For example, ARES was the Greek god of thunder and of war; APHRODITE, the goddess of love and beauty; and APOLLO, the god of light and order. The worship of many gods, known as POLYTHEISM, characterized the religions of most of the ancient world. In every case, a deepening sense of unifying order in reality was accompanied by a drive toward a unity of these plural forces, toward MONOTHEISM. Impersonal World Order In many advanced civilizations, the divine appears, not as a person, but as order or harmony; it is thus impersonal, universal, and omnipresent. Clear examples of this view are the Tao of TAOISM and the notion of the Logos in STOICISM. Both are ultimately an impersonal and unifying principle of the world. Other forms of this view appear in the hymns to Indra in HINDUISM and in the worship of Ahura Mazda, the god of light, in ZOROASTRIANISM. In each of these religions, there is a dualistic principle: an impersonal order, harmony, or light represents the divine; but disorder, chaos, or matter represents the rest of reality. In modern philosophy and theology, the process thought of Alfred North WHITEHEAD also emphasizes the divine as order, against an opposing principle of reality, creativity. Undifferentiated Unity Some religions conceive of the divine as the undifferentiated unity of all, a unity in and beyond all manifestations, powers, and persons. The ultimate becomes not only the whole of reality as its unity and ground, but it is so far beyond finite reality that it becomes relatively unintelligible and relatively unreal. In these cases, of course, the divine is thoroughly beyond ordinary speech and even beyond positive analogies, for language deals with the determinate and the finite. The clearest expression of this transcendence of all being and all thought is found in Mahayana BUDDHISM, which describes the ultimate principle in negative assertions and names it a Nothingness, or Voidness. In this notion of the divine the originating religious categories of power, person, and order are infinitely transcended as characteristics essentially related to finitude and therefore antithetical to the divine. Correspondingly, the religious practices of meditation and the religious hope of ultimate release also transcend relations to nature, tribe, society, the course of history, and even all religious praxis and symbols. Such religions regard the Western notion of God, with its implication of personal being and its emphasis on the life of the self in this world, as an extremely inappropriate and even insulting way of regarding their own ultimate principle.

PARADOXES OF THE BIBLICAL CONCEPT
The paradoxes or dialectical tensions characteristic of the Western understanding of God are derived from the Bible. In the Old Testament, God transcends all the limited and special forces and powers of the human experience. On the other hand, his central characteristic, or mode of self-manifestation, is his concern for and relation to history. Although he manifests his power in nature, the main arena for divine activity is the sequence of historical events related to the calling, the establishment, and the protection of his chosen people. In this activity, moreover, God reveals himself as moral or righteous, the source of the moral law, and is quick to punish those, even his chosen ones, who defy this law. He is, however, also a God of mercy, patience, faithfulness, and GRACE. This God of history, COVENANT, judgment, and promised redemption is assumed to be, and often clearly affirmed to be, the ruler of all events. These aspects of the notion of God reappear, with some modification, in the New Testament. There the one God is also concerned with history, judgment, and redemption, but his central manifestation is JESUS CHRIST, through whom God's will for mankind is revealed, his judgments are made known, and his power to save is effected. The New Testament writers generally use the word God to designate the God of the Old Testament. Christ is understood as the fulfillment of the Messianic promise and as the Son, or LOGOS. His relation to God the Father and the HOLY SPIRIT led to the development of the Christian doctrine of the TRINITY. Both Jewish and Christian theology therefore display a dialectical tension between God's transcendence over nature and history as creator and ruler, and his personal, moral participation in history for the sake of humankind.

PHILOSOPHIC APPROACHES
As the symbolic center of Western Christendom down to the ENLIGHTENMENT, and as the fundamental concept in its understanding of nature, society, and human existence, God was the object of endless philosophical and theological speculation. During the long period in which Western culture understood itself and the world largely through the framework of Greco-Roman philosophy (c.200-1400), the notion of God was shaped with the help first of Platonic and then of Aristotelian categories. Because of Greek philosophy's bias toward transcendent, changeless, eternal realms of being, this religious tradition greatly emphasized the absolute nature of God: God was understood as pure act, utterly independent, changeless, nontemporal, and unrelated. The active, related, personal aspects of God manifested themselves chiefly in piety and through numerous angelic and saintly representatives. During the REFORMATION, which emphasized the primacy of Scripture, the personal, purposive, active side of the biblical God again achieved prominence, and the philosophical side receded: God's judgments and his mercy toward humans were considered his central attributes. The transcendent and eternal aspect of this personal God was expressed in the eternal mystery and changelessness of his all-determining will, especially the electing and providential will, rather than in the mystery and changelessness of the divine being. The subsequent divergence of modern thought from Greco-Roman traditions led to the introduction of new philosophical options emphasizing change, process, and relatedness. They give expression to a new dynamic and immanent interpretation of God and can be found in systems such as PROCESS PHILOSOPHY. While recognizing and affirming in some sense God's absoluteness, eternity, and invulnerability, many modern theologians emphasize his participation in the passing of time, active relatedness to events, and consequent changeableness; they argue that such a view is closer to the biblical notion than is the older Greek view.

KNOWABILITY OF GOD
Throughout history certain returning questions have been answered in different theological and philosophical terms. Perhaps the most debated question has been whether God is to be known by reason, by faith, or by experience. Each solution has had powerful and persuasive adherents. Those who argue that God can be known by reason offer one version or another of the classical proofs of God's existence: the cosmological proof from the existence of the world; the teleological proof from the order of the finite world; the ontological proof from the implications of the very concept of God as a perfect and necessary being; and the moral proof from the implications of moral experience. They argue that any theology intellectually respectable enough to speak to modern, intelligent men and women must be grounded in rational philosophy. Those who believe God can be known only by faith tend to be skeptical of such philosophical proofs and possess a perhaps more transcendent image of God. For them, the God of rational theology, proved and tailored by thinking processes, is merely the creature of humanity's own wayward wisdom. God himself must speak to humankind if he is to be known rightly, or even at all, and therefore faith, as a response to divine REVELATION, is the only path to a true knowledge of God. Finally, there are those who assert that God can be known neither by reason nor by faith but only by direct experience.

REALITY OF GOD
The secular climate of today's world has led to a reconsideration of the old issue of the reality of God, which has been denied by many humanistic liberals and by most modern Marxists. The appearance of the so-called death-of-God theologies in the 1960s introduced the issue into the Jewish and the Christian religious traditions themselves where it has been the subject of considerable debate. Although most theologians have not followed the lead of the "God is dead" school, there is little question that today no theology can proceed, either by reason, faith, or experience, without raising and in some measure answering this primary query about the reality of God. Is the notion of God, which correlates so closely with the self-understanding of humankind, merely a projection of humanity's self-consciousness onto an unresponding cosmos? Many solutions have been proposed to this question, but the answer ultimately rests on faith.

Langdon Gilkey