Charles Hartshorne has characterized “God” as the One who is capable of being worshiped with all one’s heart, soul, strength and mind. He reflects as follows on this idea:
… Its lucidity is virtually mathematical: One hundred percent of our interest (mind), devotion (heart), energy (strength), and whatever else is in us (soul) is to have God as its object. It follows that if there be anything additional [i.e. “in addition”] to God, it must receive zero attention! Yet we are to love ourselves and our fellows. A contradiction? Yes, save on one assumption, that there cannot be anything “additional to God.” Rather, all actuality must be included in His actuality, and all possibility in his potential actuality. (For we must be interested in possibilities, if we are to love and help our neighbor, or ourselves.)
(Logic of Perfection, p. 40)
How can all actuality be included in His actuality? It is because God fully and perfectly knows and experiences everything there is to know. And all possibility is included in God’s potential actuality because, out of his perfect knowledge, he influences all things. Nothing escapes God. Even that which opposes His purposes can only do so by neglecting part of reality and so by failing to be fully itself (Hartshorne quotes Tillich as saying that sin is a failure of being). Anyone (per impossible) who chose that which negated all of God’s purposes would cease to exist.
Paul seems to intimate this idea about God eschatologically in 1 Corinthians 15:28 when he says, “But when all things are subjected to him, then also the Son will be subjected to the one who subjected all things, so that God would be all in all.” Other passages similarly speak of God as “all in all.”
Hartshorne gave this characterization of God in pursuit of his revival of Anselm’s Ontological Proof (see Anselm’s Discovery). I’ve been fascinated by this for some years now. But even more than merely proving that God exists, I find this line of thought sheds light on the nature and character of God himself.
For example, the question that was the springboard for this posting had to do with enjoyment of gifts and talents. Someone can play the clarinet, for example, and enjoys it. He feels the enjoyment more than he feels the love of God, and so he wonders if the clarinet is an idol.
If we see the enjoyment of the clarinet as competing with God, then yes, there is a danger of idolatry: worshiping the creature rather than the creator. But we can also see that enjoyment as part of what God has given us: “Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to put their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but in the living God, who provides all things richly for us to enjoy…” (1 Timothy 6:17). Similarly, 1 Timothy 4:4-5 says, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.”
Even more, we can see that the clarinet (or whatever) is a means whereby we can feel God’s love, because the clarinet is given by God for us to enjoy. We may not have some inchoate experience of “feeling God’s love” in a vacuum. (I find it interesting that the Bible never talks specifically about “feeling the Spirit”, for example.) But almost everybody enjoys many things in a normal day. Jesus talks about God’s kindness toward the ungrateful and evil (Luke 6:35), implying that when we enjoy the daily things like sun and daily food, we are receiving God’s love whether or not we recognize it.
Certainly it is possible to misuse the good things of God. As Paul says, those who are “rich in this present age” can become haughty, treating what God has given as something that makes them better than those around them. Or they can place undue hope in uncertain riches. But these are misuses. If we enjoy the things that God gives us with gratitude and generosity, we will please him and bless others. And in doing so, in seeing God in the things he gives us, we will be rightly worshiping him.