A good while back I wrote articles asking whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God and whether or not liberals and Evangelicals believe in the same God.
I was reminded of those articles by recent conversations following the death of the Pope. One person suggested that we should recognise our creedal unity with Catholics because we both affirm that Jesus is Lord. I will come back that specific creedal statement shortly.
As I outlined in the article about liberals, it is worth restating that there are two different ways of viewing the question. On the one hand we may be suggesting that there are two different deities, two separate entities,whether or not both are real. I don’t think that in the cases under discussion, that is our meaning. We definitely don’t think of Catholics and liberals as opting for a different entity. Nor do we think of Muslims as positing and alternative divine being in the way that we may say that Hindus do.
However, as I argued there, it is possible to think of and represent God in such a way that we lose, distort or add to his character. He becomes something different. It’s for that reason that we often respond when people describe the God they do not believe in by saying “but I don’t believe in that god either.”
I’ve recently described how my father in law would say that he believed there was a God but he thought of him as a monster and hated him. I think it is fair to say that you and I would hate that particular God too if we were to understand what it was that my father in law bristled against. However, I do not believe that the true God is a monster.
Given that this perception of God arose out of cradle Catholicism, the question about whether Catholics believe in the same God as us becomes pertinent. It is important again to place the usual caveats in place. I’m not talking about individual Catholics and their personal beliefs, I am not excluding the possibility of individual Catholics being saved. I am however talking about what the Catholic Church as a body believes and teaches.
This is where we come back to that creedal statement. It is important, that “Jesus is Lord” is not just an empty form of words that we pay lip service to.
If Jesus is Lord, then that has implications for who God is and what he is like. This means that we cannot say Jesus is Lord whilst denying that salvation is by grace alone. We cannot say that Jesus is Lord and allow for anything to be added to faith for our justification. Nor is it possible to say that Jesus is Lord, to really mean it and place various mediators between. Jesus and us whether priests, saints or Mary.
In other words, belief in God centres on belief in Jesus as God the Son and as God revealed. It centres on Jesus because we cannot believe in the same God without believing the same Gospel because the Gospel itself is a revelation of God’s character, of his sovereignty, his unchanging faithfulness and his love
It is no surprise then that many, exposed to cradle Catholicism end up with a God they fear and loathe. They may either believe in him to an extent that they think he must be appeased or they may seek to escape him by deserting the church and religion but they still think of God as the same kind of entity that my Father in Law hated .
You see, that God is distant, capricious, cruel even. He is not the good good Father. Think of the distorted view of atonement which sees Jesus suffering a piling up of excruciating pain as vividly portrayed in The Passion of Christ. As I observe here, the idea is that Jesus suffered enough to soften God’s attitude to us.
And such a God, even the ascended Jesus version is one tha might cause us to look to friendlier, more approachable figures like Mary and the Saints to shelter us from and speak to for us. I think that is why we often see devotional/experiential Catholicism focused on Mary.
To repeat again, it is possible and praise God perhaps often the case that Catholics find their way through all the obstacles that the Church puts up to the true and living God in the Gospel. However that is despite not because of those obstacles.
Faithroots 
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