Catalyst #6: Scripture and a Loving God

Catalyst #6: For some the Bible has portrayals of God that does not square with their understanding of God as loving. So often they will mythologize or allegorize some portrayals of God (often in the OT) and say that later pictures are the real thing--i.e. Jesus as the perfect picture of the God who is altogether gracious and loving.

Huzzah!
Hmmm...well, I agree with the "Jesus as the perfect picture of God" part...

The Danger
The danger here is that we are always tempted to make God into our own image. My systematic theology professor called it "going around the circle the wrong way."

Here's how this works: we start our engagement with God with us. We come with our own ideas of what a loving/just/perfect/righteous God "should" look like. We then encounter the God of the Bible and are shocked that somehow God doesn't look like *we* think he should. Who knew that my opinion would not be the perfect arbiter of what a perfect God is?

So we have a decision to make. We can reject this God. We can try to figure out a way around the description of this God. Or we can have our very definitions of what a loving, just, perfect, righteous God looks like re-defined by this God.

My professor exhorted us to think around the circle the other way. We do what we can to come to the God of the Scriptures ready to have that picture and that God inform our understanding of what a just/loving/perfect/merciful God is, rather than with our own agenda of what that God should look like.

This is Christianity, not Unitarianism. You don't get to get a ball of Play-Dough and decide what shape God is. God is mercy and love and justice, and his character and actions are what define what those words mean. There is no such thing as mercy and justice and love as disembodied, ethereal ideas. Love and justice and mercy are found alive and active and perfectly at work in God--yes, fully in Christ but it's the same God at work throughout the Scriptures.

Are we, then, the perfect evaluators of what true love, what true mercy, what true justice, what true judgment and righteousness and redemption are all about? Aren't all our definitions shaped by our own experiences, the cultures we live in, the whims of the times we happen to inhabit and how our digestive tract happens to be responding to the food we just ate a couple of hours ago?


The Verdict
Depending on the severity and the direction of this line of thinking, it's simply a re-mixed version of an old heresy: the Old Testament God is different from the New Testament God.

Post-modernity as a cultural movement is simply an over-reaction of the heart to the previous over-reaction of the head of modernity. In short, post-modernity tends to encourage us to think with our hearts. That's not always bad. But this is a good example of where it can go wrong.

Again, I'm not trying to say that there aren't hard things in the Scriptures that sometimes don't make sense. I'm not trying to flatten out a complex issue--there is some funky stuff in the OT especially that I sometimes just sit before and I say to God, "why?"

But I think that to iron out those tensions by simply writing them off conveniently as allegory or not "really" telling us what God is like at all is to miss the point. It gets us off the hook too easily. I think we're supposed to live in that tension, not erase it by pulling a Thomas Jefferson and whiting-out the passages we don't like.