Does God Have a Sense of Humor?

Do you have to be boring in order to be good? This week Coleman Glenn wonders if God has a sense of humor... and what God's sense of humor might imply about human joking. Coleman acknowledges some gray area in distinguishing appropriate and inappropriate humor but works towards his own conclusion. -Editor

A person may frequent places of amusement, talk about the affairs of the world, and need not go about like a devotee with a sad and sorrowful countenance and drooping head, but may be joyful and cheerful. (Heaven and Hell 358)

Some persons from habit, and some from contempt, make use in familiar conversation of the things contained in Holy Scripture as an aid or formula for jokes and ridicule, thinking that doing so makes these more pointed. But such things of Scripture when thus thought and spoken add themselves to their corporeal and filthy ideas, and in the other life bring upon them much harm; for they return together with the profane things. (Arcana Coelestia 961)

Does God have a sense of humor? In the New Church we worship a Human God – and it seems hard to imagine someone who is truly human lacking a sense of humor. On the other hand, there is no story in the Word where the Lord tells a joke or laughs at one; there is nothing that explicitly says He does have a sense of humor.

That’s the first question I want to address in this article. The second is related, but not identical: if God does have a sense of humor, does that mean it’s okay to make jokes about Him or about the Word? Maybe you can tell from the tone of the question that I think the answer is “no.” But I’ll get to that in a bit.

First, the main question: does God have a sense of humor? Since the Word doesn’t address that question directly, we have to find another way of looking at it. One way of doing that is to ask, “Is there such a thing as a heavenly sense of humor?” Everything in our minds flows in from the spirits around us. Does laughter flow in from angels or from devils? Or just from intermediate spirits?

I think the Writings do provide pretty clear evidence of angels with senses of humor. In Conjugial Love 44, Swedenborg recounts the experience of a group of newcomers who complain that if love for the opposite sex is chaste in heaven, then heaven must be “sterile and devoid of life!”

To this the angelic spirits replied, laughing, “Angelic love for the opposite sex, or the kind of love that exists in heaven, is still full of the deepest delights.”

The angelic spirits had a sense of humor – they thought it was funny that these newcomers thought that heaven would be boring if love for the opposite sex was chaste, when nothing could be further from the truth. I picture them laughing in a friendly way, not contemptuously. In another passage from Conjugial Love, Swedenborg recounts a married couple from heaven “laughing pleasantly” when Swedenborg tells them that from a distance they appeared as naked children decked with garlands, when to themselves they had appeared the whole time as a clothed adult couple (137).

So there’s such a thing as heavenly laughter, and since the Lord is the essence of heaven, I think there is a kind of laughter and humor that comes from the Lord. In that sense, the Lord must have a sense of humor. Laughter comes from an affection for what is true or what is false (see Arcana Coelestia 2072), and when it comes from an affection for what is true, it is heavenly.

But there is a passage from Arcana Coelestia that makes it sound like laughter is not a heavenly thing. Arcana Coelestia 2216 says,

Celestial good and spiritual good do not laugh, but express their delight and cheerfulness in the face, the speech, and the gesture, in another way; for there are very many things in laughter, for the most part something of contempt, which, even if it does not appear, nevertheless lies concealed; and laughter is easily distinguished from cheerfulness of the mind, which also produces something similar to it.

I wonder if this is partly a translation issue. In Latin, the word for “laughter” is “ridens” – which also means “ridicule” or “mocking.” Cheerfulness of the mind produces “something similar to [laughter]” - and I wonder if this “similar thing” is the kind of laughter that you find in heaven.

I don’t know if we can say that the Lord laughs, any more than we can say that He cries. But we have to have some way of picturing Him as a person; and so even if we know that He experiences pity and mercy in a different way than we do, we can’t imagine it without attaching some of our own experience to it, which involves grief and crying (see Arcana Coelestia 588). In the same way, the Lord’s affection for truth is beyond our comprehension – but He wants us to have some image of it, and one way we can relate to it may be in our own experience of laughing from the recognition of truth or falsity.

That brings me to the second question: is it okay to make jokes about the Lord? I know that some people think, “The Lord has a sense of humor, He’s omnipotent, He’s omniscient – He can take a joke.” While it’s no doubt true that the Lord isn’t going to have His feelings hurt by a joke, I don’t think that actually addresses the issue. Arcana Coelestia 5957 says,

The Lord does, it is true, demand humility, worship, thanksgiving, and much else from a person, which seem like repayment, so that His gifts do not seem to be free. But the Lord does not demand those things for His own sake, for the Divine derives no glory at all from a person's humility, worship, or thanksgiving. .. Rather, they are required for man's own sake, for if someone possesses humility he is able to accept good from the Lord, since in that case he has been parted from self-love and its evils which stand in the way of his accepting it.

Whether or not we should make jokes about the Word or the Lord is not about whether it’s going to hurt Him; it’s about whether or not it’s going to hurt us.

There are several passages in the Word that make me think it’s harmful to a person to make jokes from the Word. I quoted one of them, Arcana Coelestia 961, at the beginning of this article. A similar passage is Divine Providence 231:

The first kind of profanation is committed by those who make jokes from the Word and about the Word, or from the Divine things of the Church and about them. This is done by some from a bad habit, by taking names or forms of expression from the Word and mingling them with remarks that are unseemly and sometimes filthy. It is inevitable that this should be accompanied by some measure of contempt for the Word; for the Word in all things, in general and in particular, is Divine and holy, every expression there having stored within it something Divine, by means of which it has communication with heaven. This kind of profanation, however, is lighter or more grievous according to the acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word and the unbecoming character of the talk into which it is introduced by those who jest about it.

According to this passage, and the passage at the beginning of the article, the problem with jokes from the Word is that they mix holy things with profane or worldly things. It’s important to point out that it is “lighter” according to the acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word and the “unbecoming character” of the conversation. The fact that it can be lighter, though, does not mean that it stops being wrong.

But there are a lot of gray areas. What about funny things in the Word? There are several passages in the Writings that sometimes make me laugh out loud. Is that profanation? I don’t think so – because I think that kind of laughter is the heavenly laughter that comes from the recognition of truth. But there are other areas I’m not so sure about. Is joking about finding your "CP" (conjugial partner) a joke about “the holy things of the church”? I’m not sure that it is, but I could see how someone could take it that way. The fact is, the Lord is present in every aspect of society, so you could extend it to a level where you say you can’t make any jokes about anything.

But you have to draw the line somewhere. Different people draw the line in different places. Personally, those passages I cited above, and others like them, make me draw a pretty strict line. Jokes about characters from the Word, for example, seems to be “making use in familiar conversation of the things contained in Holy Scripture as an aid or formula for jokes.” Does this mean I never make jokes from or about the Word? Unfortunately, no. But if I catch myself doing it, I try to stop myself. It’s not the biggest deal in the world – I respect the divinity of the Word, and they aren’t dirty jokes – but it’s still wrong, as I understand it, and I’d rather not get into the habit of doing it.

Coleman Glenn

Coleman Glenn is a minister in the General Church of the New Jerusalem. Born and raised in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, he now resides in Toronto, where he is assistant to the pastor at the Olivet New Church. He blogs at colemanglenn.wordpress.com.

Comments

[Freya Fitzpatrick]

Thanks - I enjoyed seeing actual passages which concretely grounded a variety of thoughts I've had vaguely rattling around in my head for years. I'm interested in whether you personally see any distinction between jokes based on the Word which use humor to reinforce a teaching from the Word, versus jokes which ridicule or undermine the Word. In general, I hold to the principle of not making jokes about or from the Word. But, there is one joke that I have heard (and repeated) which I don't personally find offensive. At the risk of offending anyone else, I will repeat it here, so that you can see what I mean. "It's not the apple on the tree that was the problem, but the pair on the ground." To me, this uses humor to engage a person's attention while reinforcing the lesson that it's not the evil outside of us (apple) that is a problem but the choices we humans (pair on the ground) make about that evil that is a problem.

Could this lesson be taught or reinforced without that joke? Of course. But I don't think that joke undermines the holiness of the Word, and I think the humor in it provides a tool to engage the mind. To me, this is very different from off-color jokes about the Word or the Lord, or any type of humor that detracts from the holiness or the teachings of the Word.

What do you think?

[Brian Smith]

I'm inclined to agree with Freya's distinction. I find the Adam and Eve story particularly funny at times because of how blatantly it tells of human weakness/foolishness. I think getting humor near the Word is dangerous because the line can so easily be blurred.
Humor, to my mind, is "the delight we find in being surprised at recognizing something". I think this description fits all humor... (maybe). Delight, surprise and recognition. Another way of describing this is to say, the moment of humor is a recognition of incongruity between two paradigms. In the moment of humor, one (or more) paradigm(s) is replaced or corrected with the new one.

A key purpose of the Word is to help us recognize ourselves for where we are and the Lord's goals for where we can be. Because of our delusional inclinations, this will involve surprise much of the time as we come to see where we truly are. I think laughter in spiritual growth is appropriate. (desirable, if possible).

If one is using the Lord's truth and paradigm (as best as it is understood) to laugh at inconsistencies and short comings in the human process of responding to the Lord then it strikes me as safe to laugh at characters and situations in the Word. The problem arises, I think, when the Lord's paradigm is the one that is broken in deference to another one through the humor moment.

Brian