The Invention of Israel's--and Our--Gods

 

            How many gods have graced human history? Probably many tens of thousands—perhaps even millions. From Marduk to Mars, Thor to Thoth, Bastet to Baal, and El to YHWH, the list is endless. Inventing gods is a uniquely, nearly universal, human activity.

 

            But why would I include El and YHWH on this list? After all, most Christians, Jews and Muslims would say that thinking of god as an “invention” is blasphemy. We believe our god, the god of Abraham, is the one and only, the compassionate and almighty, eternal and omniscient, and so on and so forth god of the universe and all that is beyond it, too. Really.

 

            Still, given the sheer multitude of gods humans have adored (read Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods for a fun take on this, and on what happens to gods who lose their audiences) isn’t it sheer hubris to think that we finally got it right? Did YHWH actually reveal himself to Adam and Noah and Moses? Did scripture objectively capture these theophanies? Did YHWH also reveal himself, later, via dreams and visions, to the prophets? Did the one god of the universe pour himself and his (always his) truth into scripture, and then into a man named Jesus? 

 

YHWH's Divine Council

           Most people will answer such questions based on what they were taught in Sunday school or hymns they sang in church. For years, I answered such questions based on the narrow but intense education I received in seminary. Scholars who suggested different truths were either ignored or panned. Everyone—whether persons of faith or not—answers questions about who god is based on their presuppositions. Presuppositions, after all, save a lot of time by winnowing and narrowing the evidence one has to consider to answer such questions.

 

            Nevertheless, over time, my presuppositions have been challenged and my theological paradigm has been overturned. I now doubt the Bible is an accurate historical record of anything that happened in the Old Testament. 

 

            Well, just for example, what sort of a god would use two bears to kill 42 young boys (or perhaps they were young men), just because they teased a prophet (2 Kings 2:23-25)? Did that really happen? Would you worship such a god if it did happen? 

 

            Why did god command Moses to kill 3,000 Israelites for worshipping a golden calf (Exodus 32)? It was, on their part, an honest mistake, given Moses’ absence and Aaron’s leadership. Or why did god send an angel of death to kill 70,000 Israelites just because their king counted the fighting men? 

 

            And these examples don’t even get us to a flood which is supposed to have killed off pretty much the whole human race and 99.9 percent (or more) of earth’s animals too. Where is the justice in such acts of god? The compassion? The kindness? And if such passages are to be explained not as history, but rather, as a bit of imaginative flourish by an unknown author or editor or scribe—well, what does that say about the rest of scripture’s dependability as a historical record? How can orthodox scholars defend this sort of god? 

 

            Why, if god is a spirit, does he so often appear as a human to people in the Old Testament, much as Zeus or Thor are often described? How is it that god is sometimes surrounded by a council of other divine beings (for example, Psalm 82, 89, 1 Kings 22)?

 

            Why, if the Israelites are god’s chosen people does he allow the Assyrians and Babylonians to destroy them? No freedom of religion for god’s people? But isn’t such freedom a universal human right? Wouldn’t a real god have known that? And, why should the Israelites stick with such a jealous god, anyway?

 

            Is there a better explanation for the Biblical god than that offered by orthodox evangelical scholars? I think so.

 

            Most contemporary (but not evangelical) scholars of ancient Near-Eastern religion believe that ideas about who or what the god of Abraham is all about have a history, and that history is partly visible in the mixed-bag picture of god in the Old Testament. In short, that history goes something like this—although there are scholarly variations on the details. Once upon a time—well over 3,000 years ago—a tribal people who lived south of present-day Israel (or perhaps closer, actually in Palestine) worshipped a storm god who went by the name of (or a variation of the name of) YHWH. 

 

            Certain tribes of Palestinian people—what would become Judah and Israel—worshipped this god along with others: Asherah, Baal, El, and so on. Everyone in what would become Judah and Israel worshipped and made images of these gods, putting these idols in high places and temples and even homes. Some of the stories they told each other about these many gods, including YWHW, had broad similarities to the mythic stories of neighboring ancient Near-Eastern peoples. At some point, for reasons that are disputed, the identities of YHWH and EL began to merge, although both names for God still appear in what Christians usually call the Old Testament.

 

            And, over time the relative importance of YHWH increased, especially in the North, where most of the Old Testament prophets worked. Though he was still seen as one among many gods, YHWH was also seen as a god who had a special place in his heart for Israel. This god also had a consort, Asherah, whose image, along with Baal’s and perhaps others, graced temples in both Jerusalem and Samaria throughout most of their histories.

 

            After the Assyrian defeat of the Northern kingdom, southern King Josiah undertook a reform of Judahite worship in order to centralize the cult in Jerusalem. He cleared the temple of gods other than YHWH, and perhaps even destroyed images of YHWH at this time. His scribes pulled together the many strands of oral and written myth and legend that existed at that time and began the job of editing it all from a monotheistic point of view. An early version of Deuteronomy, Moses’ farewell speech, was written at this time. 

 

            After Judah was also defeated and exiled, the remaining religious leaders—priests and scribes weeping by Babylon’s rivers—continued to refine the notion of YHWH. He was seen now not only as Israel’s god, but the god of the conquerors too—and by extension, the one and only god of the universe. This one, universal god was said to have used the conquerors to punish Israel for her sins. These religious leaders invented Israelite monotheism more or less as we know it. And the religious leaders of that time bequeathed this new, mono-, almighty god to Israel forever after. And eventually to Christians and Muslims, too.

 

            So, it turns out that the god of Abraham—the god Christians worship—has a history. This history explains Biblical texts that are mythic or contradictory—such texts come from different strands of memory, and so from different times, when people had different ideas and stories. Historically, the god of post-exile Israel was not always the one and only. 

 

            Does this reality undercut the claim that the god of scripture really is the sort of god the monotheistic religions of the world say he (or she) is?

 

            I think so. Seriously so.

 

            It has not been easy for me to come to this conclusion. It removes me from easy theological agreement with the Christian communities I love. It disorients me with respect to the shape of my own faith. It erases the easy back and forth I have enjoyed with many of my Christian friends. It makes me question the worth of my years of leadership in both evangelical and liberal denominations.

 

            So, what’s next for me, faith-wise? I don’t know. I still want to belong to a community of people who search for deeper spiritual and philosophic meaning. I love being part of a community that is focused on meaning and on social justice for neighbours both near and far. But communities that not only allow for, but invite, a wide range of serious religious flavors are rare. I’m searching. Wish me luck or providence, as the case might be, for you! 

 

            And stay tuned as I explore different possibilitities.

 

Post Script

 

            Interested in exploring this history of god more deeply, yourself? Here’s a top-six list of books that have influenced me. Although all of them are specialist books, any dedicated reader can manage them!

 

Thomas Römer, The Invention of God. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2015. (A very readable history of the idea of god in ancient Judah and Israel).

 

Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter. Translated by Peter Lewis. The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture. Cambridge. Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2021. (Great background read on the history of the Bible, which should be read in conjunction with Van Der Toorn’s book, below).

 

Karel Van Der Toorn. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2007. (Somebody had to edit the Old Testament to combine the many strands of tradition, oral or written, that existed in Israel five- or six-hundred years before the birth of Jesus. This is their story.)

 

Robert Bellah. Religion in Human Evolution. From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge. Belknap Press of Harvard UP. 2011. (The notion of an axial age is disputed, even if there was a remarkable convergence of religious developments around the world from about 800 BCE to 200 BCE. Still, Bellah’s summary of what happened in Israel, written as it is by a scholar who is not a specialist in OT history or language, makes it very accessible.) 

 

James Kugel & Ellen Geiger. The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times. New York. Houghten, Miflin, Harcourt. 2017. (Kugel is a great scholar who has had a long career. This is likely his last book, and though he is less radical than Römer and others, it is a great introduction to the literary world of the Old Testament.)

 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou. God: An Anatomy. New York. Knopf Publishing Group. 2022. (A tour de force. An intense reminder of how our presuppositions about scripture can lead us to miss some of its—and god’s—most obvious features. In this case, it is the fact that throughout the early history of YHWH, he was conceived of as having a body, not unlike Zeus or Thor. The evidence of this permeates the Old Testament.)

A Mighty Fortress Is Our God?

If you go to church, you’ve probably sung Here I Am to Worship, by Tim Hughes:
 
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, they great name we praise.
 
I don’t sing this song. Though God has always had an outsize presence in my life, I’m trying to tone it down. An almighty God just doesn’t make much sense to me anymore—though I’m still good with “invisible.” I’ll get back to that, briefly, before the end of this post. But right now, you might well be wondering, “what? Haven’t you read J. B. Phillips’ famous book, Your God Is Too Small?” This was a big bestseller in the fifties and has been continually in print since then. 

Phillips’ book contains insights. He says we shouldn’t think of God as our resident policeman or as a grand old man or as a managing director, among other things. Phillips’ bottom line is that we must avoid caricatures of God. They often reflect our own wants, needs, or psychoses.
 
Ironically, some of these caricatures do make God seem big—though in distorted ways. So, if God really was a cosmic policeman, keeping peace for everyone in the world world, that would be a hugely impressive God. Or, if God was everyone’s (nearly eight billion of us) managing director, serving as everyone's judge and co-pilot, that would be impressive.
 
After rejecting these metaphors, Phillips says the best clue we have to the greatness of God is our longing for beauty, good and truth, longing that he says cannot be explained by science. This is odd because biologists, psychologists, and philosophers all have theories about how such longings evolved and why we experience them. 
 
Phillips also suggest that a key truth that magnifies God is that he reconciles himself (always a "him" for Phillips) to us through the god-man Jesus. And while this section of the book mentions several other doctrines Phillips believes make the case for a really big God, I didn’t find it very compelling. In spite of his frequent use of phrases like, “the weight of the evidence,” or “indisputable fact,” he gives too much credit to, and offers too little support for, his own thinking. All in all, Phillips doesn’t so much establish the bigness of God as give a very short course in evangelical theology’s description of a big God.
 
Even if Phillips misfired here, it doesn’t necessarily follow that God is small. Orthodox systematic theology includes lists of God’s "divine attributes," each of which makes for a huge God. He’s apparently omniscient (knows everything), infinite (that means really big), omnipresent (everywhere—quite something when you consider the James Webb photos), immutable (unchangeable—though since this seems silly on the face of it, many theologians have tried to reframe this as faithfulness).
 
Scripture makes some big claims about God too, claims on which these attributes are partly based. This matters if you think scripture is the inspired and infallible word of God. Ironically, people who believe this usually pass over, lightly, descriptions of God that they don't like. For example, theologians don't enumerate attributes that could be based on other, less impressive sides to God: killing forty-two children with bears because they teased his prophet for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-25), killing the first-born of Egypt (Exodus 12:29-32), or killing seventy thousand Israelites because their king did a census (2 Samuel 24). Well, and there are more, similar, portrayals of God all through scripture. 
 
The attributes of God that theologians do talk about are deeply rooted in Greek, mostly Platonic, ideals. And they put God, ironically, in a box. They make God so big that God must be responsible for every good or ill thing that happens in the world. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. But also, on the theory if you can stop a bad thing happening, you should—all human actions, both good and bad pass through the hands of this big God. I recently read a post from a FB friend who wrote, “God is so good,” upon the safe arrival of a few guests from far away. Well, if safety after an eight-hour drive is a gift from God, then so too must car accidents and worse. Only double-predestinarian Calvinists, of course, would admit so gladly. 
 
I don’t like this line of thinking at all. I wonder if there are alternative ways of thinking about God. For example, I remember driving through Bali once, with my spouse Irene, to see Agung volcano.
 
The taxi-driver honked his horn incessantly, and it was bugging me. So, I asked him to explain. He said each honk was a way of honoring the Gods of the place he was passing through: the God of the bridge, the God of the great palm, the God of the dangerous corner. Gods, for him, were small and had limited scope. Their power and might was merely local. They were not omniscient, but could hear, so long as you honked loudly enough. 
 
God doesn't have to be big just because that's the sort of God we want. In truth, for most of recorded history, humans have often hewed to smaller-sized gods. Even the mighty Zeus had to share headlines with Hera his spouse, and a host of lesser Gods, many of them his children. For most of his history, the God of Abraham shared top billing with, variously, El, Baal, and Asherah. Judaism only became a mostly monotheistic religion just before, or during, the Babylonian exile. That development was then written back into, and mirrored, in the scribal compilation and editing of Hebrew scriptures. (More about this is coming in a follow-up post).
 
So, humans, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as King David and nearly all of his descendants—they all, more often than not, worshipped several wee Gods rather than one really big God.
 
This is not an argument for paganism. The wee Gods of most Old Testament Israelites were also wee in their morals, often vindictive and violent, as the examples above  remind us.
 
But a God with more limited scope would explain all our unanswered prayers. Such a God would not be responsible for Tsunamis because he or she couldn’t cause or prevent them. Such a God would not be choosing to be good to some travelers and not others. Such a God would not be coming to town, making a list, checking it twice, to find out who is naughty or nice.
 
What might such a wee God do? Perhaps haunt us with dreams of beauty, goodness, and truth. Such a God might be praying to us to fulfill all his or her dreams. Such a God’s greatest deed might simply be to come to us with a still, small voice. 

God Isn't In the Driver's Seat (or, If Evolution Is True, What Do We Do With God?)

 

            I sort of believe in the theory of evolution like I sort of believe in the theory of gravity. Think about it. That means evolution is not up for discussion. But while the theory of gravity bores me, unless I’m falling, the theory of evolution fascinates me.

 

            Here’s why. I went to Toronto District Christian High, in Woodbridge, as a teen. Unlike many Christian schools, at Toronto Christian we were taught about evolution. We were taught, in fact, that evolution was how God probably created the universe. This is called theistic evolution.

 

            However, there was a single exception. Humans. According to my teachers humans were sinless special creations God made in his image a few thousand years ago. We were not part of the animal kingdom. We did not evolve. 

            This was pretty much the line I was taught at seminary, too. After seminary, I spent a year of graduate study digging deeper, comparing the Bible’s several creation stories to similar older creation stories like the Babylonian Enuma Elish, a creation and flood story told by ancient Israel’s neighbors. I learned that the stories in the Bible seemed to be very intentional, shabbat-night-live satiric commentaries on the more ancient creation stories of Israel’s neighbours. 

 

            Since then, studying human evolution has become a hobby. And one of the reasons I finally left my previous denomination was because I couldn’t, finally, pretend to play along with my denomination’s official view that the Genesis myths were actually real history.

 

            More recently, scientists have unraveled the human genome and the DNA within it. Doing so not only allows us to find relatives several generations removed through sites like 23andme’s DNA kits, but unravelling the human genome has helped us find criminals by the DNA they leave behind, and now even cure some diseases rooted in genetic problems. Within that genome, we’ve also discovered the deep evolutionary roots of humankind that ties us to the rest of the animal kingdom. We humans evolved from other earlier hominids, as have the Great Apes and yes, even monkeys. We are also related to other branches of the homo species, like Neanderthals and Denosivans—both now extinct. 

 

            But why am I telling you all this? Because as I’ve studied cosmic and biological evolution, I’ve begun to ask myself, more and more, “so what role does God play in all this?” If everything evolved, and if science can describe that evolutionary process without needing a God, then what use is God?

 

            And this is what I came up with. It is tentative. It is the best I can do. And I am very, very open to better ideas.

 

            Imagine a car. The car loosely represents the cosmos. And imagine God. God can relate to the car in several ways. For example, perhaps God is the driver.

 

            That is, God gets behind the wheel. God has the key, turns the ignition, and gets the car going. God as driver is in complete control. God chooses the destination. He’s the driver, after all. God steers the car around every corner. In fact, God even built the car he drives—he’s a cosmic Henry Ford. This is how most conservative Christians think of God—he’s completely in charge of the whole cosmos—starting it, directing it, and so on. It’s why, when someone dies or they get a new job, such Christians will say things like, “well, it was God’s will. That’s God’s plan.”

 

            Prayer, then, could be imagined as us asking the driver, God, to steer the car in a certain way, and get us to places we want to go. But God is the driver. God might listen to us, as passengers, but God might not. God is completely in charge of our journeys. Nothing is up to us. In its most extreme of the Calvinist versions of this line of thought, God’s mind is never changed by prayer. God has already decided everything ahead of time. This is called predestination—God decides everything about the destination and our drive there. Humans don’t really have a choice. No free will.

 

            But many Christians (and people of other faiths) disagree. For example, some Christians imagine that God is not much like a driver, but more like a passenger in a self-driving car, a next-generation Tesla, say, that he (usually) invented and built. In this case, God provides the blueprint, gets things going, comes along for the ride, but doesn’t personally steer the car himself. This is called deism.

 

            Deists have their own favourite analogy. Imagine finding a watch in a field. You pick it up. You wind it up. And the watch ticks and tocks. It keeps time. Perfectly. 

 

            If you found such a watch, you would have to presume that it was made by someone. Watches don’t just appear, by accident, as it were. So, if you found a watch, you would have to believe that there was a skilled watchmaker who designed and manufactured it. 

 

            Well, when deists look about the cosmos what they see is something even more wonderfully and fearfully made than that watch. The planets in their circuits, our blood coursing through veins, and all the laws of nature suggested to these ancients that, as with the watch, the cosmos must have a designer and a manufacturer. But once a big bang sets it off, the cosmos runs by itself. God is inventor, creator, but once God is done, God lets the whole mess run itself. Deism. 

 

            I’m more inclined to a deist God than to a driver God who predestines everything. My problem with deism, however, is that modern theories actually can pretty much explain everything—the big bang, the appearance of life, evolution. The physical world doesn’t need an inventor or watchmaker to be properly explained. Which is why Richard Dawkins wrote a book about evolution called, ironically, The Blind Watchmaker. 

 

            Well, as you can see, if you don’t need God to create the cosmos and just come along for the drive, and if you don’t need God as the creator and driver either, there isn’t much room left for God. So, some Christians—liberal ones, for the most part, have begun to think of God not as the driver, not as a quiet passenger who just set things in motion, but as a backseat driver.

 

            You see, while science can explain a lot, some people don’t think science can explain morality, our human notions about what is right and wrong. And so, these Christians turn God into a backseat driver who is always telling us what is right and wrong, what direction to take our lives, which pedestrians and hazards to watch out for. This is a nagging God, a pushy God, a “you better get this right,” God. A liberal works-righteousness God who seems, always, to be saying, “Be better. Do more. Divest. Rally. Protest.” This God speaks to us insistently, mostly through theologians and denominational executives and pressure groups who are sure they know exactly what God wants when it comes to a whole list of contemporary issues. And while I often agree with these people, I don’t like the tone, and I don’t like the imagined God behind this tone, very much.

 

            None of these pictures of God ring true for me. Is there another possibility? I think there is. Perhaps God, in some wild but mysterious way offers guidance when we, alone in the car by ourselves, or together with each other as a community, seek that guidance. That is, instead of nagging us, perhaps God is more like Google Maps or the Waze app. Except those kinds of maps are too directive, too sure. So maybe God is more like the author of an old-fashioned paper map. We can unfold it and turn to it for direction, but we need to read it carefully, parse its options, interpret it, and rely on the corroborating (or not) advice of fellow passengers. Only when we turn to God “The Paper Map,” for direction do we receive it—in part and imperfectly. 

 

            But where might God provide such guidance, in real life? Well, I’d say that scripture is where we often—if not always!—find it; and in the cumulative wisdom we’ve built up about scripture as a community, over thousands of years. Scripture, and our reflection on it, is the divine roadmap we have for arriving (“perhaps,” says John Caputo. “We hope,” I add.) at our desired destination.

 

            I’m not saying that scripture is dictated by God, or that it is authoritative (so we better listen to it, or else!), or even that it is divinely inspired. But overall, scripture—including the scriptures of other religions and the Testament we received from the Jewish people—scriptures do represent thousands of years of deep listening on the part of humans to a mysterious divine wisdom that seems to permeate the cosmos and sometimes our own deepest selves, as well. God whispers, sometimes we hear, some of those who heard tried to write it down.

 

We argue about how to understand scripture, we question some of its odd suggestions that belong to another place and time, but overall, in scripture and in the communities that listen to it we are nudged along. In scripture we may find God gently, kindly, offering direction when we seek it, encouraging us to live full lives that benefit each other and help us find our place in the cosmos.

 

            Scripture in this sense is a lamp that prevents our feet from stumbling when all is otherwise dark (Psalm 119:105). Keep in mind that when scripture is described as a light, it isn’t talking about a modern flashlight or streetlight that reveals all. It is a flickering, uncovered olive-oil lamp with a sputtering wick that threatens to go out at any minute, and gives just enough light so that we don’t trip over what would otherwise be obvious rocks and chasms in the path. 

 

            Scripture is this sort of provisional and delicate divine gift. But gifts, to be true gifts, must be given unconditionally. There is no expectation of a return, no nagging about thank-you cards, no obligation to give something of equal or greater value back. If we were given a gift conditional on how we responded to it, it would be merely a financial transaction, a debt to be repaid, rather than a gift. We’d have to interpret it correctly, or else. But no. As a favorite writer of mine once put it: There is nothing you have to do, there is nothing you have to do, and there is nothing you have to do.

 

            The gift of scripture, written by humans, is an invitation, really, to explore meaning and purpose beyond our everyday matter-of-fact experiences. Science, and theories like evolution, explain a lot—everything, really. And yet, for such a world as this, we also have this one thing more, this ancient gift, this old map, for why and how to live a life—not just for survival, but for the love of all things bright and beautiful.

Is God a Narcissist?

Once upon a time, a pretty nymph by the name of Echo spotted a hunter, Narcissus, in the woods. Now, if Echo was pretty, Narcissus was gorgeous—a handsome, beautiful man. He was so sculpted and so fine, in fact, that just to look at Narcissus was to fall in love with him. And that is what happened to Echo.

      However, Narcissus was having nothing of it. He rejected Echo. She was devasted—so much so, in fact, that Echo melted away to almost nothing, until all that was left of her was a stuttering susurration in the wind.

      Nemesis, another Greek God, looked on infuriated and decided to punish Narcissus for rejecting Echo. So, Nemesis led Narcissus to a pool. When Narcissus saw his reflection in the pool, he immediately fell in love with himself, just as Echo had, before. All Narcissus could do was bow down, like this flower, and gaze upon himself in wonder and awe with worshipful abandon—so long, and so intensely, that he was never able to leave that pool again, until he finally died of hunger.

      In any case, ever since, narcissism has wound its way through Western literature. Consider, for example, fairy tales such as Snow White or Cinderella. Both feature wicked step mothers who cannot abide the thought that someone besides themselves should be the most beautiful, or beloved, or have the most attention from the king. Both Snow White and Cinderella are exiled so that the narcissistic stepmother can have all the praise and glory.

      Well, and it isn’t just Western literature. Politicians might be narcissistic. One in particular claims to be the smartest man in the world. He says, “in his great and unmatched wisdom,” that he is a “very stable genius.” His critics are, “enemies of the people,” and his congressional opponents should be, “arrested for treason.” Of the current world crisis, he says, “I alone can fix it.”

      Narcissism. According the DSM-V, the standard diagnostic tool of psychologists and psychiatrists, narcissism is “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

      And doesn’t that describe God, too—or at least, how God usually shows up in scripture? There, God (or his scribes) describes himself, rather grandiosely, as “creator of heaven and earth.” He demands that we should admire and worship him and him alone, so that there be no other Gods before him. God—rather unempathetically, I’d say—even sends all of Israel into foreign exile after tens of thousands of them die in sieges. According to scripture, God does this mostly because they were practicing freedom of religion and living a bit high on the hog.

      Doesn’t this God sometimes seem narcissistic, to you? As when, for example, Jesus says that the first and greatest command of God is that, you ought to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind?” Isn’t this just over the top? What drives this divine need to be the centre of our attention—even of our adoration?

      I’ve struggled with this self-centered, jealous God—jealous—another Biblical word for what God is like, by the way. And I eventually concluded that this picture of God must be flawed. What would the God of the universe gain, if there be such a God, by my groveling? So now I think that though the ancient writers tried to explain who God was, it was as if they were staring into too bright a light, with too much anxiety, and therefore ultimately offered a mistaken view of God.

      It’s a common mistake. Humans have long bowed and scraped before their gods, hoping thereby to gain their favour, just as politicians and lobbyists bow and scrape to gain the favor of presidents or emperors. Humans have long thought that if they adored God and worshipped God in the right way, wore appropriate vestments, waved censors with incense or chanted Latin, and sang songs of praise—Jews and Christians and many from other religions have long believed that God could be bent to do their bidding, and answer their prayers or (at a minimum) give them a passing grade on the way to a heavenly promotion.

      We Christians have long believed, deep in our hearts, that God the narcissist craved this adoration and attention and that we better deliver, or else.

      But now I think this picture—and even milder forms of it—is all wrong. Remember that Jesus once said that if we saw him then we have seen God? I think that is a better clue to God’s real nature. Thus, as his preaching ministry drew to an end, we see Jesus set his face for Jerusalem, where he sacrificed his life in an act of defiance against rulers who would be worshipped, and in an act of solidarity with the least and last who lived under the thumbs of their High Priests and Kings and Procurators.

      Explaining himself, Jesus said, more or less, that yes, the first great commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. But, the second commandment, which is like it, is this: you should love your neighbour as yourself.

      Because, you see, Jesus had figured out that the only way to actually obey the first commandment is by keeping the second. God never wanted formal worship—even if some writers of scripture thought so. Jesus corrected that notion by suggesting that worship is any act of love on behalf of our neighbours.

      If Jesus was right, then God is no narcissist who demands our burnt offering and calves a year old or thousands of rams or rivers of oil. Not at all. He (or she or they!) has told us what is really good, what he really requires of us. It is to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God, by bowing before and serving our neighbours.

      Not narcissism, but neighbours. No falling on our knees before a jealous God, but rather, rolling up our sleeves for each other. This is our true worship.

God Is not a Celestial Toll Taker

            Years later, I wonder about this.

            It was the first day of class. The course was, “The Doctrine of God.” Our professor, Neal Plantinga, was ill, so I thought the class would be canceled. 

            However, Plantinga had arranged for a guest lecturer, his brother. I had never met Alvin Plantinga before. He was known as a fine teacher and world-famous philosopher. He has since won the Templeton Prize, along with such luminaries as Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, and Canada’s Jean Vanier. 

            So, there we sat. Plantinga stepped up to the podium. And then, for what seemed like an hour but might have only been a minute, he stood there, silent, looking at us. Finally, he spoke. To the best of my recollection, he said something like this:

            “Class, today we step onto holy ground. We are about to pit our small, fallible human minds to the task of knowing God. This ought to fill us with fear and awe. After all, who can know God? Who can take the measure of him?”

            “Thus, I begin with a warning: to be flippant or sloppy in speaking of God is blasphemy.”

            “So, let’s being this class with prayer and ask our God to give us the gift of humility as we presume to speak about the one who gave us tongues.”

            I thought “Woe is me! I am lost! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).

             I was deeply moved. Plantinga’s simple words and pious manner pierced my complacency about being in seminary, about wanting to be a minister, and all that. He invited me to a deep curiosity about God. I’ll always be thankful for that.

            Years later, however, I’m wondering about that day.

            I’m still happy that my complacency was pierced. I mark the beginning of my interest in theology—a spiritual playground, to be sure, but a lovely one—to that class. 

            But I’m not so sure, anymore, that Plantinga approached this from the right angle. He seems to me, now, to have been too focused on God’s honour and potential vindictiveness, than on really knowing God.

            God’s honour. It’s a medieval concern. It imagines that human worries about rank and power must also be God’s, in a most anthropomorphic way. It used to be the case that if you dishonored someone above your station you were in deep trouble. So, you don’t speak back to your lord if you are a peasant serf—at least if you want to keep farming. You are nice to ladies if you are knight. You bow before kings, or go to prison. That sort of stuff. Human rights were not a big deal back then. Anselm (c. 1000) was so preoccupied with honor that he argued that Jesus’ death was necessary because we humans had offended God’s honour by sinning. 

            Sure, the Reformers backed off the honour argument some, emphasizing another strand of Anselm’s thought, namely that Jesus’ death was necessary not so much because we offended God’s honor, but because eternal damnation was a just penalty for our sins (for any single sin, in fact. One strike and you’re out). What the Supreme Court might call cruel and unusual punishment.

            I wish Christians would move beyond this. 

            Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we ought to be flippant when we speak or think of God. That sort of attitude is merely impolite. It doesn’t do justice to the complexity and wonder we feel when we try to engage mysterious divine matters.

            But Plantinga’s underlying, if unspoken, sense of God as a being to be feared, a being concerned about his (or her) honour, about the real possibility of tit for tat punishment, often connected to guilt we somehow bear for the sins of a mythical couple, just doesn’t seem very credible. It’s a “just so” story. Didn’t Jesus teach us about forgiveness, turning the other cheek, giving the coat off of our backs, after all? Should we suspect God of less? 

            I understand that there is a kind of internal coherence to Plantinga’s—and most of orthodoxy’s—theorizing about God. I get that you can parse scripture in a certain way to make it come out in this way. 

            But I’ve moved on. I like how John Caputo puts it:

God is not a celestial toll taker who charges a fee to undertake a spiritual journey. In short, God is not a Big Deal or Big Dealer, not the Omni-being who overwhelms our finitude with a plan to reward His (sic) friends and punish His enemies (sic, even sicker), which does not sound much like the Sermon on the Mount. (Hope Against Hope, 112)

            You’ll have to read Caputo’s book for the cultural, philosophic, theological reasons Caputo says such things. But ultimately, he wants a God who calls us “back into the toils and troubles of everyday life,” a God who does not so much exist as insist, not a being so much as a small quiet voice that whispers (prays!), “love, forgive, do justice, be merciful.” God depends on us to make all that come true. If we don’t, we don’t. But we can.

            Even if, once upon a time, we daydreamed through a class on the doctrine of God.

If Not for Answering Prayers, What Is God Good for?

            God does not answer prayers—at least not in the way we pick up a ringing phone or stop our car to help a neighbor push hers out of a snowbank. That, at least, was my conclusion in the previous blogpost. So, if God doesn’t answer prayers, what is God good for?

            This, of course, is a very contemporary sort of question, the kind that health and wealth preachers love to wallow in. Modern people want a pragmatic, sensible God who is useful, who blesses us and America (and Canada, too, maybe). God provides salvation in the hereafter, gives the church a reason for being (and a means of providing some with jobs and sometimes even power), and God is useful for unleashing passions that can overcome almost any political obstacle or tribal enemy and even inspire terrorist acts.

            I don’t like this sort of useful God. But if not good for answering my prayers, what is God good for? Why bother?

            Reflecting on this—I, and other theologians, have begun to imagine that God might not exist at all, at least in the sense that God is a person, place or thing as usually understood. I am trying on the idea that (perhaps) God is (certainly) not a substance or essence, a strong arm or a genie who snaps his (almost always “his,”) fingers. This explains all unanswered prayer, at least. There is no person, place or thing to do the answering.

            Instead, maybe God is a Spirit in the Vocative Case, a “weak force,” a cosmic plea hidden in a three-letter puff of air (interpreted, amplified, and corrupted by scripture and its authors), praying to us. God might be an inspiration (or better yet, an expire/ation) rather than a sovereign being who sits on a throne somewhere—even if such sitting is understood to be metaphorical.

            A Spirit in the Vocative Case? What might such a God be (leaving aside for a moment that by “Spirit,” I do not mean some “thing” one could put under a microscope or find with a P.K.E Meter)?

            Well, maybe a Spirit in the vocative case might be something like the call of the wild.

            Almost forty years ago I taught Jack London’s famous novel The Call of the Wild to my grade nine English class. You probably remember the story. A brave, well-trained, and strong dog, Buck, is stolen from his California home. Buck is shipped to Alaska to be a gold rush sled dog. He has a rough time of it. Ugly owners use, abuse, and starve him before he is finally adopted by a good man. This man, in turn, is killed by local Yeehat indians. So, Buck leaves human society behind and becomes leader of a pack of wolves.

            There is both much to commend this book and to condemn it. The Yeehat episode is particularly unsavory and racist. Ultimately, Buck’s life turns out to be a short course in Darwinian evolution, where Buck has to overcome technology and clubs, stupidity and ugly leaders of the pack in order survive. When the book opens, Buck is a pet dog, albeit a big one; by the end he has survived all thrown his way by civilized humans to find his true self. He has answered the call of the wild.

            What is this call? London never stops to define it, though he describes it. Buck “loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

            And again, “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” 

            This call of the wild, a vocative spirit in its own right, is not a being or substance or essence. It is not the cry of anyone one thing or even of many things. The wild itself, where the call originates, is also ever elusive, some “thing,” (maybe) that cannot be contained. We drag along our canteens and thread and needle repair kits and camp stoves in search of it, but thinking we have arrived, the wild is defeated by paths through the woods, campsites neatly arranged, and fire pits that have been in use (perhaps) for millennia. The wild recedes forever in the presence of our axes and knives and maps and the scraps of garbage we never quite manage to pack out. The closer we get to the wild, the more we realize that we cannot have it, or hold it, or pocket it, ever. And yet it calls.

            And for all the (literary) power of its call (powerful for some, perhaps, but not powerful overall) the wild is weak. It retreats under the onslaught of human tinkering. We cannot preserve it because even the act of preserving is to civilize, theorize about, and nurture—all actions inimical to the wild.

            God is as weak as the wild, and calls to us as the call of the wild did to Buck. God has no army (unless you count Swiss guards or terrorists or misguided nationalist troops), no place to lay his head, no kingdom other than the one that might be planted in your heart. God is weak, and God’s call is for a hope, a dream, an imagining, a utopia, a shalom that God has no power to bring to pass. Unless, perhaps, someone, some tribe, some Horton hears the God’s vocative case for such things. Maybe. And of course, when they hear, they haven’t even begun to understand. And when they understand and build, the thing called for is lost. Still, God doesn’t so much answer prayers as waft over us as a prayer of his or her own (or something’s or no thing’s own. Wouldn’t want to nail God down at this point!).

            Or, as Caputo writes, “God does not exist; God is a spirit that calls, a spirit that can happen anywhere and haunts everything insistently. I have found it necessary to deny existence in order to make room for insistence.”

Is Prayer Bogus?

            Here is the thing. Prayer—at least as imagined or practiced by most people—is bogus. And when they stop to think about it, people get this. In a roundabout way, even Christians understand this. When asked about unanswered prayer they shuffle their feet, scratch their heads, and wring their hands. And eventually they come up with explanations for unanswered prayer that feature mystery, inscrutability, or their own lack of faith—answers designed more to justify prayer while getting God off the hook than they are designed to make sense.

            Non-Christians, on the other hand, laugh. Facebook is full of their memes. A mouse praying, “And please don’t let the cat hurt me.”

Or Morpheus (looking inscrutable himself) saying, “What if I told you prayer doesn’t help disaster victims?” And, of course, there is the Jean-Luc Picard's famous meme, with apologies for the language, "Why the fuck are you praying to the same God who let this shit happen in the first place?"

             Of course, some people believe their prayers have been answered, at least occasionally. So, they keep at it. It looks to me, however, that what is really happening here is intermittent reinforcement. You will remember all about this from your Psych 101 class. A desired behaviour can be cultivated in someone even if that behaviour is only infrequently rewarded. So, for example, a door-to-door salesperson may learn to put up with many disinterested potential clients, and even the occasional slammed door, so long as the salesperson makes at least the occasional sale. Or again, someone may play the slot machines—and even lose a lot over time—in the hope of a big win, especially if that person is rewarded in the meantime with occasional small wins.

            Add in a few Bible texts that seem to suggest that if you pray long enough, with enough energy, and with great faith you will get what you want, and bingo, offering others your “thoughts and prayers,” becomes popular, low-risk pastime.

            I will not argue that there is no place for prayer. When I was in seminary, I was taught that the model congregational prayer, for example, should include adoration, confession and thanksgiving along with supplication and intercession. The Psalmists’ most common type of prayer was actually lament—sad dirges about everything that goes wrong.

            But people usually fast when it comes to confession or lamentation and choose for a steady diet of supplication and intercession instead. When it comes to prayer, if we’re not praying like soldiers in foxholes, we are usually praying like kids in a candy store. Most Christian prayer is mostly about getting what Christians want.

            In a further defense of prayer, though, my wife reminded me this evening that prayer is more than just getting in a word in with God. Prayer can be emotionally satisfying. For example, prayer with another person can be a very, very intimate way of opening your hearts not only to God, but to each other. Prayer alone in your closet can be very cleansing or centering or promote self-examination. And any prayer can make one feel as if he or she is coming into the presence of God—a holy moment, possibly—even if we have no idea what God really thinks of our prayers.

            I agree with her. Though praying for these reasons is not what most people aim for when they pray, and though these motivations for prayer are not often discussed in theologies of prayer, that does not mean they are not good reasons. They are.

            Ultimately, though, the issue for me is that people only intermittently get what they want out of prayer, and then fool themselves into believing that next time they may be more fortunate, all the while rationalizing that such beliefs are somehow consistent with (their favorite) Biblical texts. For me, it looks like prayer is a beautiful idea, like a perpetual motion machine, that just can’t do what Christians usually ask of it.

            And then, leaving prayer aside, I begin to ask the same questions about God in general. As a child, I memorized these words from the catechism. “Providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and so rules them that . . . all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand.”

            Really? What good father does not heal his children when he can, does not bless them with plenty, or pluck them from tsunamis, or encourage them with success when he can? Even Jesus said, “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11).

            Really? Where is this Father?

            I don’t know, for sure. That is why I’ve turned to John Caputo’s ideas about “the weakness of God,” for answers, of late. You see, maybe the problem with prayer is not that we want good stuff, but that God just can’t deliver, regardless of what Jesus seems to suggest in Matthew 7.

            But more on that Father in the next post.