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.