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.

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.

How Strong Is God, Really?

            In The Wizard of Oz, a young Kansan girl, Dorothy, and her house are both transported by a tornado to the magical land of Oz. Dorothy wants to go back to Kansas, and so decides to ask the Wizard of Oz for help. On the way to see the wizard, Dorothy meets a lion without courage, a tin man who has no heart, and a straw man who has no brains. When they arrive, the Wizard promises them all they ask for, if only Dorothy can kill the Wicked Witch of the West. Dorothy does so, with a pail of water. So they all finally return to the Wizard’s throne room to claim their prizes.

            And it turns out that in spite of the fact that the Wizard seems to be, in turn, a great head, a ball of fire, or a terrible beast—it turns out that the Wizard will not deliver what Dorothy and her friends hoped for.

            Many Christians treat God much like Dorothy and her friends treated the Wizard. That God is bound to disappoint.

            What I mean is this.

            Many of us, certainly me, have been told since we were knee high to grasshoppers, that our God—if not a wizard, is sort of like an Emperor-Pharaoh-Caesar God, only better, because this God can do magic too. This God rules over every detail of our lives, sometimes answers our prayers and sometimes not, and after we die, he—God is always a “he” in this tradition—he sits in judgement over our lives too, like Caesar, offering some of us a thumbs up and some a thumbs down.

            In seminary, this God was described as—using words and concepts mostly derived from Greek philosophy—omniscient, immutable, impassible, infinite and omnipotent; God is omnipresent, of one substance, not mixed, uncreated, self-existent, self-sufficient, immaterial, perfect, and—in spite of all of these descriptive words, God is also ineffable, which—ironically—means “unknowable.”

            My professors also introduced me to Saint Augustine, who said, “Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen.” John Calvin added, “God foresees future events only by reason of the fact that he decreed they take place.” In other words, according to these giants of Western theology, it isn’t just that God permits terrible things to happen, but God actively insists that they happen.

            Finally, this God sends his son to death on a cross. This is because, according to most Christian theology, God cannot forgive us our sins unless his (mighty!) divine honor, which we have offended; or perhaps his (mighty!) divine sense of justice, that we have transgressed—God cannot forgive sins until he is appeased by blood. Which, to me at least, makes this mighty God of Western theology seem very small and very petty, because most of us know how to forgive—say our children, or our friends—even we know how to forgive without demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as forgiveness’s price.

            Look, I admit this picture of the mighty God of Western Christendom is a bit of a caricature. Forgive me. But this view of God is out there, everywhere, it seems. However, I would like to suggest another picture of God also found in scripture's pages that I find more helpful and more believable.

            This God is—surprise—not a God of power and might, but a God of weakness, a God who comes in the still quiet voice, the God who, says Isaiah, hides; the God who is about as mighty as a first century fisherman, who is so tiny and inconsequential that she lives in our hearts, as insubstantial as a puff of wind from who knows where going who knows where.

            And, with respect to all those theologians and philosophers who have important sounding Greek words to define God, remember this: just as you cannot nail down the wind to examine it, you cannot nail God down to examine her. The best we can do, actually, to describe God is to tell stories and use metaphors and similes. So Jesus said, “God is like the wind”—so also says Isaiah too—who then adds, you cannot measure this God on any scale. God is what no eye has seen, no ear has heard. God is weak, in the very best way possible, like an evening wind that refreshes after a hot day, one that caresses and rebirths us.

            God is weak. This means that as much as we would like God to interfere, fix things, answer prayers to repair Aunt Minnie’s gall-bladder or fix the US election, God will not. Such interference, like antimatter, would destroy our world and universe by compromising its very structure as a marvellous construction of cosmic law and matter, of human freedom and risk. The weakness of God is the tradeoff God accepts to give us life.

            God is weak. Jesus explains. He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you know me, you will know my father also.”

            Amazing. This ancient Jewish man, a poor pedestrian carpenter, says, “If you know me, you know God.”

            So if Jesus is mirror to God, this must mean that like Jesus, God does not raise her hand or lift a sword or use threats of hell to get her way.  

            If Jesus is our mirror to God, then we meet God especially in our embrace of the hungry and the refugees who cross our path, for Jesus says he is to be found in the least and the last.

            If Jesus is our mirror to God, then we must find God especially in the wisdom of parables that cannot be humanly explained, and in the humility of beatitudes that the strong in this world scoff at, for they are not at all impressed by divine weakness.

            God is weak, by her own necessary design. But God is also, says a Jewish rabbi, like a little girl who hides during a game of hide and seek, and then laughs to give herself away. And when the wind blows, if you listen carefully, you will hear that laughter, which is actually a divine invitation for us to find our true selves, to become fully human, to square our own shoulders and live as God’s own ambassadors of love and reconciliation.

            God is weak, like a gentle wind, so that we may be strong, like God.

I Love Theology. But.

I love theology. But.

I love theology. I’m not sure where the love comes from, other than that I was born into a healthy religious family. I grew up in a community that valued theology and honored its practitioners, like we might honor a software engineer or neurosurgeon now. In any case, I took to theology early and remain fascinated by it now. I read theology like other people watch TV or play golf.

I think what I liked best about theology, at first, was theology’s straight edges and square corners. It’s my nature to like order. At an early age, theology seemed clear and rational in a way I felt I could master. When I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I wrote a twenty-page (hand-written, of course) discourse on the Heidelberg Catechism’s “logical” approach to the atonement. I loved the sense of it, how human sin needed a human mechanic, and how the horror of human sin needed a divine mechanic, and how both needs were provided for by Jesus. It just fit, like a Rubic’s Cube (which I never did master) or a Lego pirate ship (a type I regularly construct, now, with my grandson). The feeling that theology made a lot of sense lasted a long time for me. I even did a Master’s degree in Systematic Theology—after I finished seminary, because I just couldn’t get enough.

I love theology. But somewhere along the way, the word “systematic” started getting under my skin. Especially the sense that I get from so many theologians (who nevertheless rarely agree with one another) that they get it—most of it, and what they don’t get is also clearly laid out. Their rhetoric usually breathes certainty and often mimics the language (and complexity) of scientific papers. But.

How do you explain a God who is love (one of two direct predications of God in the New Testament, the other being “God is Spirit”)— presiding over a corner of his or her cosmos where souls are forced to endure some sort of eternal torture? How is it that the “ecumenical” creeds rain down anathemas on people who can’t buy the Trinity—and specifically the Trinity covered by layers of Greek “substance” philosophy varnish? Does God, could God, might God really damn someone for getting the Trinity wrong, as the creeds insist? Or for getting the right measure of divine and human natures in the person of Jesus wrong? If this is so important to God, why didn’t God make matters a bit more clear in scripture? And what in the world is the book of Revelations doing there, on the tail end?

Well, of course, I could go on and on, enumerating one theological conflict (even war) after another, all based on “true” readings of scripture. Expecting to be able to put together a systematic theology as a “true” reflection of this scripture, though, seems like falling into the trap of expecting to see the emperor with clothes on. Even though that is exactly what people do.

And yet the stakes are high. That is, for most of the history of Christianity, and for much of Christianity today, the structure of theology is binary. You get the code right, and you’re okay. Get it wrong, and you are outside the pale. Excommunicated. Burned at the stake. Put in jail. Suffer pogroms or impending defeat in an end-time battle. That will put a damper on any curiosity about theological borderlands.

The impact of getting your theology “wrong,” in almost every faith tradition isn’t always apocalyptic, of course. It might just mean losing your seminary or college job. It might just mean having to switch denominations, as in my case. Or it might just mean having to keep your mouth shut if you’re not up to the big switch. I have quite a few letters from pastors in my former denomination who confess to having taken this latter path.

I’m remembering now, as I get on with this Jeremiad, how in my Introduction to Theology class we spent a long week learning about how theology was a science. So of course it had to be systematic. But if it is, it is the saddest science ever, because based on the same evidence, its varied practitioners rarely come out with the same results. If theology is systematic about anything, it is systematic in its inability to reach a consensus.

So why all this emphasis on “systematic?” I never find any systematic theology in the Bible. I find Parables. Wisdom literature. Exclamations of hoped for truth couched in streams of doxology (I’m thinking Paul here). Myth at the beginning and end. Stories about Jesus, sometimes constructed as just one thing after another with a crucifixion at the end (Mark) and sometimes constructed around ciphers (John). But not much by way of systematics as we understand it and churn it out.

So why so much systematizing now? Was it Constantine insisting on a religion that he could successfully wield to unify his empire? Was it a bunch of academics who took Greek substance philosophy too seriously, so that we’ve suffered from trickle-down idiocy ever since? Was it the very rationalistic fabric of Western learning? Was it the rise of the University? Or perhaps evolution of the Roman church and its episcopacy, its lust for power and its rage for order?

Well, it’s a complicated story. And more than a few books have been written trying to make the connections like those I hint at, above. But as far as I’m concerned, the whole systematic turn in Western theology was mistaken from the start. I was reminded, in a book by Catherine Keller, recently, of what Karl Barth (yes, he of the Church Dogmatics, all 14 volumes) ironically wrote: “All theology is theology viaticum . . . It is broken thought and utterance to the extent that it can progress only in isolated thoughts and statements directed from different angles to the one object. It can never form a system . . .” Oh.

Reflecting on this, so far, it strikes me that I might be sounding a bit anti-intellectual. I’m not trying to be. But I no longer prioritize “system.” My approach to theology tries to prioritize the divine whisper I can never quite get hold of when I read scripture or walk through the woods. My theology prioritizes the lovely indirection of parables, the ambiguities of myths, and everything the Bible shouts out from what is hidden between its lines. My approach to theology ignores whatever I find in scripture that does not build faith of hope and love. Mine tries not to skip over the life of Jesus to his death and whatever happened next. Mine tries to reflect on the mysteries of scripture and religion without hanging them out to dry. My ideal approach does not so much seek to pin a list attributes to God as it seeks . . . well, to do almost anything but put that list to paper. The only thing is, I’m not nearly as good at any of this as I’d like to be.

But. I’m having more fun than ever.

My Strange Lord

How does one find God after losing God? I’ve asked this question a lot, mostly in view of my own crises of faith. Looking back, I see that sticking with God wasn’t one thing for me but a number of circumstances not all directly related to faith. Being a pastor was certainly one. Friends and family made a difference. Some books made an impression. But here I am, still a pastor—albeit in a different denomination and in a congregation where post-theism is a going concern.

Others, like philosopher Richard Kearney, have left and come back.

Richard Kearney’s book, Anatheism: Returning to God After God is very good. He writes, “My wager through this volume is that only if one concedes that one knows virtually nothing about God that one can begin to recover the presence of holiness in the flesh of ordinary existence.” One does so by encountering God in the stranger.

Although I enjoyed the book a great deal, I think Kearney claims too much for such encounters. And anyway, I’ve always been suspicious of people who claim divine encounters.

Still, within scripture, God often seems a stranger. There is the whole concept of holiness, for example. The divine attribute of holiness has the sense of “apartness,” or “otherness” to it. When scriptural characters meet God—and there were very few who did, outside of dreams and visions—God’s holiness usually turned them away, put awe and fear into them, because God’s holiness is a wall of unknowing.

But there is also something incongruous about how God reveals himself to Biblical characters. I’ve just reread L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. In the first throne room scene where Dorothy and her companions meet Oz, he appears to them, in turn, as a giant head, a beautiful woman, a ball of fire, and a terrible beast. But in the end, these all turn out to be apparitions created by Oz. He is really something else, entirely.

And that is how it is with God in the Old Testament. God shows up in all sorts of guises.

God talks with Adam and Eve and walks with Enoch. Under the Oaks of Mamre, God appears as a guest to Abraham. God is a wrestler when he comes to Jacob at the Jabbok River. Gideon isn’t sure whether it is the angel of God or God who meets him, but thinks he’s going to die either way. The prophet Elijah can’t find God in the great wind, in the earthquake, or in the fire—though perhaps, oddly, God speaks in the silence. God is so bright and holy on Mount Sinai that the best Moses can manage is to get a glimpse from the back. Which one is the real God? Such encounters underline the strangeness of God.

God is a stranger in the New Testament too. Here we find the suggestion that Jesus—who goes around Palestine trying to keep his identity secret—is actually God. And then Jesus tells us that if we really want to meet him, we need to find him in the prisoner, the naked, the sick, and the stranger.

Over and over again, God is portrayed in scripture as a stranger—sometimes benevolent, sometimes angry, sometimes fearsome, and sometimes invisible.

The portrait of God as stranger is especially powerful in the non-name God gives himself at the burning bush. Yahweh.

Yahweh is probably best described as a verb that means something like “I am whoever I am.” So the name for God in the Old Testament is something like a long-running enigma or riddle—this God can’t be named, thus can’t be controlled, and can’t be explained. Every time I read this word in the Old Testament—thousands of times—I am reminded that it isn’t so much just that God hides from us as we can’t comprehend God, even if God is right before or behind us. In a way, Yahweh is saying to Moses, and to all of us, “I am a stranger to you.”

One of the ways that Jews acknowledge this distance between God and themselves is that they now refuse to say the word “Yahweh.” This honours God’s holiness and thus God’s strangeness. But I wonder if perhaps Jews also refuse to say the name “Yahweh” because they are also a bit disappointed with this apparent snub when Moses asked for a name at the burning bush. If so, I sympathize. Not ever saying “Yahweh” could be a Jewish strategy for asking God for a more personal and friendly relationship. It is a way of mourning the impossibility of a personal relationship with God. We are not on a first name basis with God. God is a cipher. God is beyond human knowing, explaining, or buddying around with. A stranger.

         I don’t mean, by saying so, to suggest that we can know nothing of God. I’m sure—no, better say I’m hopeful or I have faith—that God is the ground of all being. And, by saying God is a stranger, I don’t mean to suggest that in some wonderful and mysterious way, Jesus and his path of sacrificial love didn’t reveal something of God that we can hang onto. I guess that is why Jesus once said to the disciple Philip, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. But even here, we have not met and known Jesus like Philip did. The New Testament contains a fascinating portrait of Jesus. But this path to God is incredibly circuitous and obscured by the nearly 2000 years that have passed since these words were written. God is a stranger.

Which is why, I think, that in the Old Testament, we are told—so says Richard Kearney—thirty-six times to love the stranger, and only twice to love our neighbor. 

The bottom line is that Kearney’s book has made me wonder about the strangers in my life, in the news, the aliens in our gates we marginalize by defining them as "Illegal."I wonder who lives in and with all these strangers near and far. And I wonder whether seeing them, I can believe.