Ave Imperator: Systematic Theology in 40k

[MaltonNecromancer]

Because, as Lorgar puts it in First Heretic, the Emperor is a god in all but name, whether he admits it or not.

Consider the source. Lorgar was a primitive at the end of the day; he saw the Emperor in that context, because that's the context he had for these things.

The Primarchs are awesome beings, the mere sight of which leads people to fall to their knees and weep and they are pale reflections of the Emperor. It falls down to how you define what a god is in that universe (the Eldar worshipped the Old Ones, were they gods?).

Well, that's kind of the point. By defining something as a "god", it says more about the individual's desire to worship than it does about the sufficiently powerful being. I've been watching a lot of SG-1 recently and this comes up a lot; I'm very much with Teal'c, as he consistently calls out the Goa'uld - they're not gods - they're just very powerful individuals. He refuses to worship them, and so doesn't call them gods, normally just Goa'uld.

I mean, you've also got to consider that the Material Plane trumps the Immaterium every time: no emotions/psychic thought? No warp or Chaos Powers. Simple as. For all their villainous crowing about how they are the most powerful thing, the Warp exists because of people, not the other way round.

[Wildeybeast]

I disagree on Lorgar, he continued to worship the Emepror even when he knew what he was. In fact, even when the Emperor castigates him, he doesn't deny the Emperor's divinity, he merely adopts the view that the Emperor isn't a god worthy of worship.

Something that has just occured to me about the Imperial faith is that the Space Marines don't worship him. Is this because they don't think he is a god, or is that, as they share a genetic link to the Emperor's sons, they don't need to worship him, being in someway divine/closer to the Emperor/above the rest of humanity?

[Kawauso]

However, like all races in the galaxy, the have faith, but it is in each other rather than a god.

I don't know that that really constitutes faith in the strictest sense of the word, which is a belief in something in the absence of evidence for it.

Faith in someone you trust is usually shaped by past experiences and expectations with that person or persons.

As for the Emperor (or Chaos Gods, or Old Ones, or anything really) being a god, it really does depend on how you define the word. If the definition is just 'a super-powerful being', then they are all gods. If you're looking for something a little more, say 'creator of the universe existing outside of time/space', then I don't think any of them are gods.

The Chaos Gods are the closest things in 40k to legitimate 'gods', but even then, they are technically by-products of the physical universe, and they can be killed (remember what happened to the Eldar pantheon).

The Old Ones and C'tan might be close seconds - and the Old Ones even created entire races - but in the end they too were defeated, and I think it's unlikely that the Old Ones did anything quite as grand as creating the galaxy or universe or anything like that.

Remember, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Kawauso]

Something that has just occured to me about the Imperial faith is that the Space Marines don't worship him. Is this because they don't think he is a god, or is that, as they share a genetic link to the Emperor's sons, they don't need to worship him, being in someway divine/closer to the Emperor/above the rest of humanity?

This is something I've always found a little odd - it's stated in the background that the Marines don't revere the Emperor as divine like those who follow the Imperial Creed...but it seems to me more often than not that they do just the opposite.

They certainly hold him in a god-like esteem and commit acts of religious-like zealotry in his name...just look at the Black Templars. And the Space Wolves revere him as the All-Father.

And they (all Chapters, to my knowledge) pray to the Emperor all the time.

I think that despite any differences between Astates and human worship of the Emperor, at the end of the day he's still a god to all of them.

[Thornblood]

Can I just check I got the meaaning of the thread right?

Systematic Theology: taking all relevent sources in relation to the study of God simulatenously, weighing them and then drawing conclusions, in an attempt to guard against 'one angle' views of God which ignore other contradictory sources. (Of course this is an abbreviation of a 51 page definition).

So, this is my big thought, and alot of speculation; The Emperor exists outside of time as a God. Like Jesus he entered time and mortality to save mankind- maybe able to do so because of the shamans rituals, but he still exists outside of time as well (because its outside of time he dosnt stop existing whilst he is in time). So to take on full mortality, he has no knowledge of his former self as a god-like being outside of time, and preaches Aetheism. So in terms of the 'saint keeler' thing, she can draw on the power of the emperor because he still exists outide of time.

More than this, the Emperor outside of time is pure 'good' psychic essence. We know that there is a similrity and difference between psychic powers and sorcery. So heres a further theory.

Faith and sorcery are opposite sides of the same coin, with the side of the coin being psychic powers (or no powers, but lets assume thats an undeveloped latent psychic ability). 'Faith'- for lack of a better word to label a 'pure' power of the Emperor (or rather the Emperor is a manifestation of the power), and sorcery manifesting as the warp and the chaos Gods. Humanity is a little in each world, and thus rejected by both an unable to handle to power of either and so treads a fine line of psychic powers.

Am I waay off the mark?

[The Last Lamenter]

Thornblood,

I love reading your replies.

I am not insisting that the emperor is Jesus. God-forbid that I would even remotely or implicitly suggest that the universe is anything other than an atheistic, naturalistic, artless environment. I know how the hard sci-fi fans get pretty aggressive at the slightest mention of agnosticism much less outright theism. No. What I'm suggesting is that the emperor is a full-fledged representation of the monomythic cycle of which Jesus and Arthur happen to be representatives. They share similar characteristics and this would help explain their deification. As far as gods are concerned, to be a God does not guarantee omniscience. I am speaking of gods only within the universe of 40k. The gods are gods in every sense of the word within a polytheistic environment, much like the greeks. The gods are limited but gods nonetheless. I am convinced that the mere suggestion of a grim dark theistic world so offended the sensibilities of sci-fi and 40k fans that GW and the BL had to back track and do some serious relativistic stretching in order to explain scientifically how gods can be explained away and therefore diminished before sneering outsiders, such as us, who cannot think within the context of a work. For example "Well the gods always existed, but time flows differently in the warp, so that's how we explain their 'always being.' I get relativity, but that does little to diminish the influence of chaos. I just see them as limited gods. If the emperor returns though, we're going to have one helluva time trying to explain that one away through science. Unless we resort to rampant deus ex machine where Albert Einstein, Heisenberg, and Hawking swoop in from another universe and explain it all until anything remotely uncomfortable goes away.

[Kawauso]

If someone can't handle depictions of gods or theism in a work of fiction, that's their problem, not the author's.

And fantasy/sci-fi has a long history of having demonstrably true gods represented in it, so I'm not sure where you think there would be some hardcore anti-theist nerd rage over that sort of thing showing.

'God in every sense of the word', though, does depend on how one defines a 'god'. That's not anti-theist rhetoric, it's true. What that word means varies depending on whom you ask, and as a result some people would consider the Chaos Gods 'gods', for example, while others would not.

The science in 40k is pretty fast and loose - there's not really any scientific basis for the Warp or Chaos. For all intents and purposes, it's magic; psychic powers have no more basis in science than witchcraft. Interestingly enough, in 40k people don't really seem to make any distinction there.

I don't think the authors involved try to skirt around the god/s issue/s so much as...
Well, any scientific understanding - even when you're playing fast and loose sci-fi science - makes any sort of god claim flimsier and more difficult to verify. It's not the fault of the fiction, it's just how science works. That's my take on it, at least. The more you understand of science and how the universe (even a fictional one) works, the harder it is to take any sort of god claim at face value.

In summation: gods, supernatural beings and magic fit fine within 40k. It's not a hard science sci-fi universe, and doesn't try to be. I don't think that anything in the 40k universe is a god in the sense of any sort of 'supreme mover'-type entity, however. The Chaos Gods are the closest things to legitimate gods, being that they feed on reverence and worship from their followers and have a lot of other godly attributes. Ultimately they depend on the physical realm for their existence, however, so I don't know that they'd really, truly count by my definition - and that's one of the things I find really interesting about 40k's background. The Old Ones might have been closer to gods, but we don't know enough about them and can only speculate on a lot of details.

[The Last Lamenter]

Hey man that is a brilliant reply, that may wrap it up. I'll need to think on that one for a bit.