by Peter Enns
Connecting with the God of the Bible would be a lot easier if we didn’t know as much—which would be pretty much any time other than this stupid time in world history that all of us were dropped into. Take me back to the carefree days of medieval Europe, with its small, flat, young earth and a dome overhead rather than an infinite universe and infinite time.
It’s just a lot to take in is all I’m saying.
And as if science weren’t enough to process, believing in the “God of the Bible” is challenging for another reason—at least it is for most people I’ve encountered.
God seems uncomfortably touchy. It doesn’t take much to set him off to kill, plague, or otherwise physically punish these frail human vessels God has created. Swift physical retribution seems to be this God’s go-to means of conflict resolution.
We only need to get to the sixth chapter of the Bible to see God already so fed up that he drowns all flesh in which is the breath of life—humans together with animals (for good measure, I suppose)—except for Noah and his family (eight in all) and two of each kind of animal that God will need for pressing reset and repopulating the earth, plus more animals so the proper appeasing sacrifices can be made, which, given the circumstances, seems like an excellent idea.
Even if we think (as I do) that God didn’t actually drown all life on earth except eight humans and a boat full of animals, and that the story of Noah isn’t historical, but one of many ancient stories from greater Mesopotamia to explain (it seems) a cataclysmic local (not global) deluge of some sort, that doesn’t get us off the hook entirely. We still have the problem that the God of the Bible is portrayed as doing something rather brutal in the first place and so early in the game.
Was that the only solution? Was there no backup plan? Was this the only conceivable way forward?
Is this what the God of the 546-sextillion-mile-in-diameter universe is really like? Is the God of all there is, was, and ever will be also so quick to erase humanity off this speck of dust we call home like someone hosing grass clippings off the driveway? That just seems out of character to me for a God who set in motion the galaxies, with all their mystery, awe, and incomprehensibility. Is a God like that really going to melt down in Genesis 6 like a frazzled ill-equipped parent of a toddler?
And this same God will later, with disturbing regularity, rain down plagues, pestilence, and war on his own people, the Israelites, when they disobey, not to mention command the annihilation of Israel’s enemies and hand out death sentences to adulterers, perjurers, young men who dishonor their parents, and those who falsely claim that a woman is a virgin.
The Bible says a lot about God that is comforting, encouraging, and inspiring, but at other times not so much. The Bible sends us conflicting messages about what this God is like. The LORD is my shepherd or Even though I walk through the darkest valley (Ps. 23:1, 4) aren’t always enough to balance out I am going to . . . destroy . . . all flesh in which is the breath of life (Gen. 6:17) or Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . and stone him (Lev. 24:14).
Making sense of this God creates challenges for me, and when I bring the universe into it, I don’t mind saying once again, I have a hard time connecting the God of back there and then with my world here and now.
And I’m not the only one. I know many people of faith who struggle regularly with the God of the Bible, because this God seems so locked in a world we don’t recognize, a world that is so distant from ours—a world we have worked hard to get over. I know others who say this God isn’t worth the trouble and therefore choose to believe in no God at all.
No one should underestimate the force of this dilemma or the stress and pain it creates for people trying to believe. Those who have a hard time with the God of the Bible can’t be dismissed as faithless rebels against God’s word. Some want to have faith—but they also want to have integrity. They live here and now, not there and then, yet they have this ancient Bible and a Christian faith bound fast to it, and the way forward feels like walking on a razor’s edge between two options—belief in the absurd God or belief that the idea of God is absurd.
The Wisdom Question for All of Us
So what do we do about this? We could try not thinking about it. If that works for some, I don’t feel it’s my place to interfere, but it doesn’t help me or others I know. If faith in God means having to keep the universe and the Bible under an invisibility cloak, that’s much more stressful for me than trying to work it through. What kind of God would give us minds with which to ponder our existence and then expect us to clamp down the lid when we actually ponder?
I just don’t think that we are meant to isolate ourselves from our time and place as we think about God—in fact, we can’t. And with that we are getting to the point of all this.
We are who we are and when we are, and rather than avoid these facts of life, we should look this challenge square in the face and (stop me if you’ve heard this already) embrace the sacred responsibility of asking a question that I feel is at least as important as any other we can ask, if not more so: What is God like?
That question isn’t just for children in Sunday school, so they learn to check off the right box. It’s a wisdom question.
In fact, “What is God like?” is the wisdom question around which all others revolve, the question that is ever before us, as each successive generation tries to pass on the faith of the past, which comes to us from an ancient time and in an ancient book, to the next generation that occupies its own unique moment in time and space.
Having faith in God does not mean having to keep our distance from our own humanity. We should be fully connected to it and honest about what we are thinking—though we also must operate with humility and trust in this infinite Creator of infinite spaces. That paradox is the true perspective of faith—not fear that makes us retreat from our humanity, but faith that encourages us as humans to explore it in God’s uncontrolled presence.
And so, as a person of faith who studies the Bible for a living and who also lives (as I mentioned) in the here and now, I have come to terms somewhat with this dilemma of matching the God of the Bible with my faith: The God I read about in the Bible is not what God is like—in some timeless abstraction, and that’s that—but how God was imagined and then reimagined by ancient people of faith living in real times and places.
By “imagined” I don’t mean the biblical writers made up God out of thin air. I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.
At least I hope so, because it would certainly explain an awful lot.
And to give a preview of where I’m going with all this, not only in this chapter but in the ones to follow, reimagining God for one’s here and now is what Christians and Jews have been doing ever since there have been Christians and Jews, and invariably so, because we are people. And that process of reimagination began, as we’ve already seen, within the pages of the Bible itself.
The sacred responsibility I’ve been talking about is really a call to follow this biblical lead by reimagining God in our time and place.
There. That pretty much sums up the entire book. I hope you have your highlighter handy.
As full-fledged card-carrying humans, we don’t have a choice. We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.
Imagining a boundless God from within our bounded moment in time is a paradox of faith—as inescapable for us as it was for the biblical writers. And when we reimagine God for ourselves and do so deliberately, consciously, and as an act of faith, we find ourselves, once again, walking the path of wisdom—in principle no different from wondering how or whether to answer a fool, what it means to remember the sabbath, how to treat slaves, or rewriting the story of King Manasseh. We reimagin
e God in ways that account for and make sense of our experience.
Lying just below the surface of all the things we’ve peeked at to this point is this God question. It’s not really about fools, sabbath keeping, or which slaves get to go free, but “What does it mean for God to be present here and now, in this moment in which I find myself? What does God’s presence look like right now, and how is that like and unlike God’s presence in those other human moments in generations past?”
Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, “What kind of God do I believe in, really?” This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.
And, once again, the Bible—simply by being its ancient, ambiguous, and diverse self—invites us to engage this God question for ourselves. Even here, where the topic is the very nature of God, the Bible simply doesn’t let us sit back as spectators, but summons us on a journey of wisdom along with the biblical writers themselves who trod this same path long before.
We’re Stuck Being Human
Where do we see the biblical writers imagining God within the boundaries of their time and place? Simply put, everywhere. There is no God-talk in the Bible that isn’t already filtered through human experience.
The ancient languages the Bible was written in—Hebrew, Greek, and a little Aramaic—are not some special divine code dropped down from heaven. The languages of the Bible were quite ordinary—more like what you’d find in a TV ad than in the polished work of a poet laureate. These languages developed (“evolved” is really the better word) in a particular part of the world over time and were spoken by ordinary people from peasant to king. And those ordinary languages were then called upon to do the extraordinary: speak about the boundless Creator.
So even on that most basic level of language, God is known through our human experience. In fact, the Creator must condescend to our humanity in order to be understood—as any parent will remind us. Parents have to stoop down to their children’s level to speak into their world. Expecting children to operate at their parents’ level is bad parenting.
Or grandparenting. As I write this, my granddaughter is eleven months old, and I say things to her like, “How big is Lilah? Hoooow big iiiis Lilah?! She’s soooooooooooo big.” And of course she laughs and throws her little arms up in the air. I have to talk to her like that, because if I tried, “Lilah, let me tell you about this book I’m writing about reimagining God,” she might just reach for my nose.
Those ancient languages were used to describe God in ways that made sense to the ancient writers—so Yahweh is a shepherd, a king, a warrior, a gardener, and so forth. Those descriptions of God were taken from the surrounding world. God isn’t actually a shepherd, but God cares for Israel the way a shepherd cares for his flock. God isn’t actually a king, but God is like a king.
In a way, when the biblical writers look at God, they all reflect back something of their own experience as humans living in a particular time in a particular culture. They use familiar metaphors when speaking of God. They don’t—“poof”—magically take off their cultural lenses.
No one does.
To do so would be to cease being human, which I don’t believe God is asking any of us to do.
As I said earlier, I don’t mean to say that the biblical writers were simply creating God out of their experience from the ground up. But still, the only means they had at their disposal for talking about God were the language and the thoughts of that point in the human drama that they happened to occupy.
And that holds not only for the tenth century BCE, but also for us in the twenty-first century CE who have learned how big the universe is.
God alone is God, so the words and thoughts we use can never be equated with God; when we make that false equation, we are actually limiting God. Although—and I think this is just as important to emphasize—human words and thoughts are also adequate for talking about God within each cultural moment. And no human culture is more equipped to speak of God than any other—and that most certainly includes my own Western, white, male tradition that has tended to think of itself as the norm for everyone else.
Yes, what we think God is like and how any of us talk about God may not be the final word, but they are still adequate. Maybe that is how all our God-talk is. Maybe (if I may venture beyond my horizon) that is precisely how God intended us to think and talk about God, as people in our time and place, because God is fine with our being human. After all, this God, as Christians claim, walked among us.
Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension. Perhaps accepting that paradox is true faith. And the Bible—in all its ancient, ambiguous, diverse weirdness—models for us how invariably limited any God-talk is, to make sure that we don’t ever come to think that we have reached the end of the rainbow.
Psalm 68—to take a quick example—says that God rides upon the clouds (verse 4), an image also used to describe the ancient Canaanite storm god Baal. I don’t mind saying that I don’t think God rides a chariot across the sky to make weather or for any other reason—but the ancient Israelites certainly seemed to. Or at least they found the metaphor helpful. But I don’t.
And I think it’s perfectly fine to say with firm conviction that we don’t think like that anymore, because we see the heavens differently and therefore God differently. This doesn’t make the ancient Israelites “wrong” or “unsophisticated.” It makes them human. Neither should it make us snobs who think we “get it” more than others. We, too, are human, seeing God from the limitations of our own time and place in ways we probably don’t even realize.
And what if God is just fine with our being human?
Recognizing how our thinking of God is bound to our own time and place is freeing in that it helps us make sense of some of the rather uncomfortable things we read about God in the Bible, like Psalm 68—or the following that has caused more than its share of quiet panic among alert Bible readers.
The Israelites believed something about God that would get some of us in very hot water today if we uttered the thought in polite Christian company. As we saw earlier, just like every other ancient people of biblical times, the Israelites believed that many gods existed and that their God (Yahweh) was one of them.
Not “the only God,” but one of the gods.
And just like their ancient neighbors with their own religions, the Israelites believed that their national god was the highest and best among all the gods. But as Moses’s warning illustrates, these other gods nevertheless had a purpose.
And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven. But the LORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron-smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very own possession, as you are now. (Deut. 4:19–20)
Translation: “Worshiping the sun, moon, and stars is what I set up for all the other nations. But you, Israel, are mine. You worship me only.” At least here, it seems as though God really doesn’t have a problem with other religions for other people.
What made the Israelites different from their neighbors, religiously speaking, was their belief that only Yahweh, and not any of the other gods (heavenly bodies included), was worthy of their worship. To use the technical language, the Israelites were not monotheists in the strict sense of the word, but monolatrists: they worshiped one God, but believed in the existence of many gods.*
All of which is to say, when it came to worshiping something, the ancient Israelites had options. I don’t mean in some poetic way, as when preachers today speak about the “false god” of money or poli
tics. The Israelites of long ago believed that other gods really, actually existed and that these real, actual gods could do real, actual things to them—like withhold rain, give victory to the enemy, or send a plague of locusts.
I can understand how odd this “one God among many gods” idea may sound, but it’s the Bible itself that drove the idea home for me—one story in particular, truly one of the stranger and more unnerving passages in all of the Old Testament, a story that might get a lot more attention, were it not buried in the middle of a rather long and tedious section of the Old Testament that recounts the five-hundred-year line of Israel’s kings.
Looking at that story and others like it may put us in a weird place for a few moments, but it will drive home a central point about how the Bible works.
Chapter 7
Imagining and Reimagining God
You Mean to Tell Me That Actually Worked?
Around the year 850 BCE, almost one hundred years after Israel split into the northern and southern kingdoms, King Mesha of Moab rebelled against the north. Moab was one of Israel’s eastern neighbors, on the other side of the Jordan River, and had been under the thumb of the north for about a century. The northern king, Jehoram, understandably couldn’t let this go, so he mustered his troops and, along with the help of the king of the southern kingdom, Jehoshaphat (as in “jumpin’ Jehoshaphat”), and an unnamed king of nearby Edom, went to put Mesha in his place.
The story, told in 2 Kings 3, may sound as interesting as watching plaque form on your teeth, and for the most part it is—until we get to the end of the story. The outnumbered Moabites were pinned inside a walled city. Out of conventional options, Mesha did what any of us would have done in his position: he sacrificed to his god his firstborn son on the city wall.
