Blog
 

God as Literary Character – Part 3

I’ve finished the book…meaning the book God: A Biography by Jack Miles.

Here are the last of my jumbled-up thoughts for you to ponder on this beautiful, frozen Tuesday.  [It’s one of those days where the frost lines each skinny tree limb, giving the illusion that each massive tree could crack into a million pieces.]

Forgive me for jumping right in, but I’m thinking there’s just no good transition for this, other than if you want to read Part 1 of my thoughts, go here, and if you want to read Part 2 of my thoughts, go here.

The Israelites understood that every nation had a god on their side.  “When speaking of the Lord’s victory over Pharoah [remember the plagues?], we said that for Moses and the Israelites in the victory song of Exodus 15, it was as if El, a god of immense power but one unlikely to go to war on anyone’s behalf, had turned up, astoundingly, on their side.  Every nation had some kind of god on its side.  At Judges 11:24, we hear a clear echo of this polytheistic view of the matter when an Israelite leader, hoping to avoid war with the king of Ammon, addresses the king in his own terms: ‘Do you not hold what Chemosh your god gives you to possess?  So we will hold on to everything that the Lord our God has given us to possess.’  So, yes, every nation had some kind of divine support, but no nation had the support of the highest, most remote god until, or so it appeared to Israel, that god turned up fighting on the Israelite side.”

I guess that thought lingers today.  That everyone’s own God will help them out, even if those people praying for deliverance are on opposite sides.  As a child, I always wondered about that.

This next statement is uncomfortable, but it has to be considered.

“If the characterization of God through his message to the prophets is reasonable in principle, however, it is difficult in practice because there seem to be more messages than one and because, worse, the various messages contradict one another freely and frequently….The major literary premise of the Bible itself…[is]…that these seemingly contradictory messages all come from the same divine source.

“The alternative path to coherence, not to minimize its difficulty, is to proceed on the assumption that these messages do all come from the same character but then to infer from the contradictions that the character must be in distress.  In such a reading, the breach of the covenant, the fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of Israel to Babylon become a crisis in the life of God as well as in the life of the nation.”

Wow.  Might God actually change?  Might God actually learn?  Might God feel things deeply?  The literary rendering of God indicates so, it seems.

Even after years of Bible classes, I had always assumed (naively) that worshiping God wasn’t an option for non-Jewish people until Jesus’ time.  Well, looky here, in Isaiah 56: “…the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, every one who keeps the sabbath, and does not profane it, these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar….”

There’s a shift here.  It’s not until Isaiah that God is thought of as remote and high. “The notion that God is inscrutable, loftily mysterious, and beyond the comprehension of mere men, though standard in the received, popular notion of God, is all but absent from biblical presentations of him before Isaiah.”

Doesn’t this make you think that, possibly, it’s the views of the scribes (and people) that are changing, and not God Himself?  Or could it be that God is changing, as well?  Either way, you’ve got a problem on your hands.  What do we continue to “add to” God today?  And if the latter is true–that God is changing–how is He changed for us today?

For those who might say that God operates outside of time: “Things happen to God one at a time.  He acts, then reacts to what he has done, or to what others have done in reaction to him.  He makes plans and adjusts them when they don’t quite work out.  He repents, starts over, looks ahead, looks back.  As a result of all this, he learns, and learning is the minimum necessary condition for a discussion of any character.

“Parenthetically, it might be noted that God begins in the Book of Isaiah to claim a past-and-future simultaneity of knowledge that, as it were, edges toward omniscience.  Thus at 41:4 he says: ‘Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning?  I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am He.’

“But the paradox is that this superhuman mental ability seems to be something he has learned about himself, not something that, as would be the case with true omniscience, he has always known.”

Onto the topic of suffering in the world:

God is seen as making amends.  “The good are rewarded, the evil punished; and if the accounts are out of balance, God will bring them into balance, though it may take a little while.  A little while is all that, most of the time, Isaiah expects will be necessary, but he has taken one of the basic options in coping with the problem of evil, as it has come to be called.  When the innocent are seen to suffer and the evil to prosper, what do we infer?  There seem to be only a few possibilities:

  1. Yes, the innocent do suffer and the wicked prosper.  The world is immoral–in effect, ruled by a fiend.
  2. No, the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper only some of the time.  Sometimes the innocent prosper and the wicked suffer.  The world is amoral and meaningless–in effect, ruled by nobody or by chance.
  3. Yes, the innocent do sometimes suffer here and now, and the wicked do sometimes prosper here and now.  But our world of time and space is only a part of the real world.  Later or elsewhere, the innocent will receive their just reward and the wicked their just punishment.  The world, if you see it whole, is moral–in effect, ruled by a just judge.
  4. The prosperity of the wicked need imply only mercy in a world judge.  As for the suffering of the innocent, it is not simply evil (option 1) or simply meaningless (option 2) or simply to be compensated for (option 3).  It may, instead of any of these, be meritorious by serving as a tool by which the just judge ultimately brings justice to all.  The innocent who suffer will ultimately be rewarded beyond the innocent who do not suffer.  The world is moral; in effect, it is ruled by a mysteriously just judge who sometimes requires human suffering to achieve his ends.”

Hmmm…a lot to think about there.

Another conundrum.  God didn’t always seem to need worship.  So why do some of us feel the need?  [“We” meaning those who do believe in God.  For the rest of you, I hope I’m not boring you.  At least you’ll know what people who believe in God struggle with.]

“At the start, it should be remembered, God did not ask or expect worship from mankind.  The first account of creation contained only the positive injunctions to be fruitful and multiply and to exercise dominion over the created world.  There were no prohibitions.  The second account added one prohibition, on eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But of worship, of honor of any kind to the name of the Lord, not a word.  And not a word on that subject was spoken to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Joseph.  Worship and indeed exclusive worship was required of the Israelites starting with Moses; but even then it was clear from the Lord’s hair-trigger readiness to abrogate the covenant that he did not need what he was demanding.  The covenant with Abraham was a fertility covenant; and as the nation descended from Abraham grew in numbers, it was necessary to police aggressively the borders that divided that nation from others whose fertility was not divinely fostered and guaranteed.  Worship was a part of that policing; it was covenant-functional; it helped to keep Israel as a nation apart.  But God did not require it in any more personal way.  Now, somehow, he does appear to require it.”

I’m flummoxed on that one.  Obviously, I’ve written about the sacrifices that Cain and Abel gave to the Lord, and those were never requested by the Lord (according to the text), so why did they do it?  Might it have been because others were doing it (to their gods), and Cain and Abel wanted to show they were loyal to theirs?

The Jewish text is arranged differently from the Old Testament.  The Jewish text ends with the ten books in which God is silent (such as Ruth and Song of Songs and Esther).  So, in the Jewish tradition, God seems to grow mute.  Just as many of us experience Him today.  [The thought is, among Christians who agree with the order change, that the books were rearranged to put the books of prophecy closer to the opening books of the New Testament, so we’d remember who was prophesied about.]

“A view common to nearly all commentators on the Book of Job is that, one way or another, the Lord has reduced Job to virtual silence.  Unnoticed is the fact that from the end of the Book of Job to the end of the Tanakh, God never speaks again.  His speech from the whirlwind is, in effect, his last will and testament.  Job has reduced the Lord to silence.  The books of Chronicles will repeat speeches the Lord made earlier, usually quoting them verbatim from the books of Samuel and Kings.  Miraculous feats and escapes will be attributed to him in Daniel, where, remote and silent, he will be seen for the last time, seated on a throne, and referred to as the ‘Ancient of Days.’  Though not so much as mentioned in Song of Songs and Esther, he will be frequently enough referred to in Lamentations and Ecclesiastes and even fervently prayed to in Nehemiah.  But he will never speak again.”

Later Miles attributes this to having the word of God preserved in scroll form.  “The scroll is not an idol; but when Ezra shows it to them, the people do bow down before it as to the Lord.  The people are not in the temple. Ezra has read to them from a ‘wooden tower’ or raised podium.  It is the sight of the holy scroll that brings this reaction.  The divine scroll contains all that God needs to say.  He need not speak again and does not.”

Is this the reason we haven’t “heard” from God?  Or is it that the scribes writing the older passages provided the words of God, as they understood them (and God has never actually spoken)?

See how slippery this can get?  But we must mull it over, if we are to make any progress.

Am I sending you away confused or energized?

[Post image: Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo, face detail of God]

Leave a Reply