What does this say about God?
I have had a few questions regarding our process for the blog. As a result, let me begin this post with a few items of business. Please remember our summer read is not intended to be a place for my voice alone. If you would like to post more than a comment please contact me directly at markbradshawmiller@sbcglobal.net. I will gladly post your thoughts and make sure to give the appropriate credit.
Ok, now we have finished with the business items let me say I had not intended to write again until I finished all of Genesis. But after reading only the first twelve chapters I simply cannot resist sharing my thoughts. I appreciate the Author’s approach to the first twelve chapters of Genesis. It is as if he is reading a novel and these first chapters are intended to tell us about the main characters and story line. At least that is how I read his approach. After all, the basic question being asked is: “What do these stories tell us about God?” I find this a rather appropriate question for people of faith.
The answer to that question for the author seems a bit disturbing. In the first two chapters God seems unclear about the origins of the universe, as well as having an affinity for creepy crawly things. Later, God acts like an angry parent who sets the boundaries of punishment but does not follow through. God does not really punish Cain for killing his brother (a particularly disturbing inaction given our culture’s focus on law and order). Finally, God destroys people on the earth because they are “wicked.” A vague term which people throughout the ages have gladly filled in the gap with any sin of which they are not personally at risk of committing. The God that the author meets in the first twelve chapters is one that he finds troubling.
Instead of doing some defense of God, or offering an explanation I instead want to leave things open ended. What do you make of this? Does the author have a point? Has he overstated the case? (And in offering a response please do not say: Old Testament God=angry and mean, where the New Testament God= Love. Remember it really is the same God…) I am looking forward to your responses.
Peace and Grace,
Mark
Interesting translation question: Plotz quotes 2:17 as "as soon as you eat of it, you shall die." but my New English is "the day you eat from that, you are surely doomed to die." The difference is enough to weaken Plotz' point. What does the Hebrew say?
ReplyDeleteStan,
ReplyDeleteI am not a Hebrew scholar. In reviewing Bibleworks tool both the Hebrew and Greek translations have the word day. It appears to me and other commentators that Plotz’s actually stands on solid scholarship. I could find no one who responds or even notices his challenge. I assume mostly because it is a passage which has been understood as carrying larger truth than being interpreted literally.
I did find one interesting bit of commentary on the passage. It too seems to ignore the “on that day” but I still find it interesting. It comes from a work called: ETZ HAYIM: Torah and Commentary put out by The Rabbinical Assembly The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. In that commentary they make the following statement about that verse: "Perhaps this should be understood as, "you shall realize that you are mortal. You will have to live with the knowledge that one day you will die, a burden of awareness that no other creature bears" (Ramban)."
Peace,
Mark
"Remember it really is the same God..." Is it, really? OK, same God, but don't our limited human perceptions of God differ substantially among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which claim it is the same God? We could go further, Antiochus' insistance that Zeus was the same God as the Jewish God was one spark for the Macabee's rebellion. I've heard Hindus argue that they see the same God, and that Christ is another avatar of Vishnu. I think in particular the differences between the Jewish and Christian view of God are worth discussing.
ReplyDeleteI'm no scholar. And I'm only a quarter through the book.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that Judaism, newer than the polytheists, older than Christian and Islam religions, was the first to introduce the concept of the single, unique, all-powerful God? My God can beat up your gods.
I believe that most Christians understand God to be multi-dimensional; that is, complete enough to be experienced as a dichotomy (art and science, peace and war, bounty and famine, etc,), but not simple enough to be analyzed.
But Plotz is cynical about the God's fallable nature. Do we really believe God experiments, tinkers, changes mind, makes mistakes? Is this something that is a Jewish faith perspective? It's certainly not something that modern Christians talk much about. Or not, at least, Presbyterians.
And, yet, it's so clear in the Hebrew Testament. I guess I've never quite questioned the meaning of God's actions favoring certain people or of violence and permissiveness with the human condition. (Although I've been suspicious of the literary license.) But Plotz is all over it.
Maybe it works it way out in later chapters.
My father, a much more disciplined student of the Bible than I am, and a reformed fundamentalist, finally came to believe that God was very much the experimentalist. God kept trying everything he/she could to gain the faithful attention of human beings, but everything failed until finally God decided that he had to send his son to live among us.
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