Recently, God has been behaving very badly. Lectionary readings for Morning Prayer are taking us through Numbers. Just this morning Korah’s entire family got swallowed up, alive, by a big hole opening up in the earth and then closing over them (Numbers 16:31-35). It’s not an uncommon experience for any reader of the scriptures: a flood in which God commits genocide, the slaughter of all first-born innocent Egyptians the punishing children for the iniquity of parents, “to the third and the fourth generation.”
Next week’s Morning Prayer will involve God sending poisonous snakes to kill people (Num 21:6). The other week God gave them quails because they were grumbling – but then threw in a plague (Num 11:31-34).
It’s not uncommon for me to meet the acclamation “This is the word of the Lord” with the not-very-liturgical response: “Ew!”
There are various ways of approaching this sort of thing.
A common one is the “Mysterious and Holy God” response, where readers say things like “Ah, but we can’t understand God”. This is usually couched in talk of God’s holiness, abhorrence of sin, being beyond our understanding etc.
While this approach may work as a way of not acknowledging the dilemma of such readings, it is a bit naff. Firstly, it leaves us floundering with a God who does crop up in the readings of people who wonder how it is we can worship such a monster. I am sure I am not the only teacher who has encountered children who see round the ark full of animals and a smiling Mr. and Mrs. Noah and ask: “But what about the other people?”
I hope I’m not the only teacher who is relieved when children do this – after all, we really do want to raise generations who are attuned to the naughtiness of massed slaughter.
Secondly, we are supposed to enter stories. Indeed it’s in the nature of narrative that we instinctively do, often ending up on the side of those who get dumped on: I may not totally understand the Almighty but snakes biting people who complain cos they are thirsty – that I understand. To make God inscrutable feels like we’re blaming humanity for lacking knowledge.
There is another version of the “Mysterious and Holy God” line of thinking that finds ancient justification in suggestions that people were subject to collective guilt or that there was a greater good at stake. But even so, a flooded earth is not a good look.
A possibly healthier approach involves the recognition that , within the Bible, God develops as a character. Some may believe God is eternal and unchanging and omni-this and omni-that, but in ancient narrative this same God is depicted as a character with whom you can play hide-and-seek (Gen 3:9). You can’t do that with an omniscient God because, by very nature, they’d be cheating. This is a narrative God. A God who can change their mind – God did so only the other week in the story (Numbers 14:11-23).
In these ancient narratives, God matures while also disappearing.
Here is a God who can need a rest (Gen 2:2), regret a flood (Gen 8:21 & 9:11) and have a fight (Gen 32). This God can change God’s mind (Ex 32:14; Jonah 3:10).
Alongside this, the God of the Old Testament disappears a bit. Over the course of the Old Testament story God slowly becomes less apparent. God appears in Eden and makes lots of other appearances – but over time this changes. In these early books there is a move from this unmediated God popping around the place, to a God who is mediated and present in a tabernacle. A dangerous God needs to be encountered in ways with which we can cope. Writing about Moses descent from Mount Sinai to the creation of the Tabernacle, McEntire observes:
“The volcano has come to live in the tent because the tent was built by the volcano’s friend”.[1]
By the time we get to the exile and book of Nehemiah, the story tells of Ezra reading the story of God – and the people stand when it is read. It’s as if the reading of God has replaced God’s presence. (It resembles those times when we stand for the reading of the gospel). Here the presence of God (Neh 2:8) is being discerned, not in bright lights and big voices, but in the success of a venture.
Surveying Biblical narrative, Mark McEntire’s ‘Portraits of a Mature God’ looks across the sweep of character described above and sums it up with:
“The God at the end of the story is clearly more mature, but the God at the beginning of the story is easily more interesting”[2]
Underlying our approach to all such stories will be the extent to which we feel bound to affirm them as historical and accurate depictions of our God actually having historically said and done what the story claims. Given that most Christians read Eden as myth, we all have a cut-off point somewhere.
Lightening up on this is healthy for a couple of reasons. Firstly it places the stories. If we understand these stories as collected and edited together around the 6th – 4th Century BC, it is understandable that the exile-battered shaped stories about the way God batters enemies, however “Ew!” the results may be.
Secondly, it frees up our readings to enjoy the stories for the rollercoasters of mad earthquakes and angry God-types they become and, in doing so, to be inspired by liberation from Egypt, challenged by ideas of radical holiness or to join Moses in changing a vengeful mind. Historical scepticism isn’t dismissal of the story: it still comes in our faith tradition and speaks to us. As the Native American Storyteller says of a tale: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true”.[3]
Huw Thomas
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Other posts include this post on Hell, which may relate to the above. And this is on Biblical narrative, as is this book what I wrote.
It just so happens the new “Faith for Normal People” with Charles Halton is about this Biblical personal image of God. I also highly recommend two books that informed me hugely in this area: McEntire ‘Portraits of a Mature God’ and Seibert ‘Disturbing Divine Behaviour’
[1] McEntire ‘Portraits of a Mature God’
[2] McEntire ‘Portraits of a Mature God’ p.14
[3] Seibert ‘Disturbing Divine Behaviour’ 115
Huw Thomas 