Questions about God

The most important of Pullman’s changes (to me) is that God in His Dark Materials is not the sovereign creator of the universe. He is merely the first angelic being who took it upon himself to lay claim to the title ‘God’. This is a catastrophic demotion. God, without any rights to call himself this, is unsurprisingly cast as a usurper, a tyrant, a despot. In fact he is an ageing figure who is reaching the end of his power and who is handing everything over to Metatron, the chief of his army and a terrifying figure. God is not a figure of love or mercy or grace. He is not a God of relationship, as he is absent from human affairs, except in that he opposes any freedom and individual thought because it is a threat to his power. Since he is not our creator, the giver of life, he prefers that humans are benign automatons. Since he is not the rightful judge of the universe, he is a tyrant.
In some respects this is so far removed from the true God that one might well think that this is no God at all. But Pullman explicitly identifies him as the God of Judeo-Christianity: ‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator’, Will is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.33). Pullman wants to have his cake and eat it: to make God no God at all, but label him specifically as the God of the Christian church.