Many of my doubts about some of the Old Testament’s versions of God could be further developed in the context of Easter week. Maybe readers can respond: How do you connect all these dots–especially with Jesus’ crucifixion?
What’s most problematic about the Old Testament is that we Christians too easily don’t find it terribly problematic.
Even if we feel some level of discomfort with the idea of a God-led Joshua destroying an entire city down to every last donkey (less one prostitute and her family), we ameliorate the gore by allowing God to morph from vengeful in the Old Testament to loving in the New, or maybe we let God’s self-revelation to people develop from opaque war paint to a dim mirror.
In short, swallowing Biblical violence can appear to be quite nicely compatible with worship music and sharing “what God is doing in our lives.”
However, after reading Shirley Kurtz’s vividly critical Sticking Points and attending still another Sunday morning service dedicated to an Old Testament story, it dawned on me this week that it is a common element that troubles me about the Christian standard mode of talk, people who believe God tells them things, and Old Testament stories of God-directed violence.
Regular Christians frequently talk about Jesus as a friend and pray for guidance or healing. More pronounced versions of this sort of connection with God might raise a few eyebrows and squirm factors; the person who stands up to share that “the Lord ministered to me this week when I saw a cross on a big rig grill,” or the “I have it on authority that such-and-such is what God wants us to do,” come to my mind. More extreme religious scenarios such as Koran burnings, the Crusades, and Gideon slaying the Midionites reveal the evils of hatred and violence in our religion and heritage.
These scenarios spawn from the beliefs that the creator of the universe at least sometimes tells people what to do and, as in the case of our pleading for healing or perhaps Gideon’s successful insurgency, is ultimately in charge of the battles we face. At times these beliefs seem a natural response to things beyond our control (check out Paul Simon’s Wartime Prayers), and I acknowledge that I am not qualified to discount them. (I am likewise not qualified to confirm these beliefs as well founded, and I am certainly not qualified to decide if anyone else is or isn’t similarly qualified.)
However, lest we find ourselves practicing theological a-humility or even genocide, these beliefs merit healthy skepticism: Is associating ourselves with a buddy-system God an attempt to position ourselves over our fellow earthlings or deny the down-to-earth reality of the nitty gritty? Is our praying or spiritual commentary a manipulative attempt at controlling our uncertain surroundings and futures?
The Old Testament puts into sharp focus the problems with confidently held but misconstrued faith ideology. Land grabs, murder, and more are not infrequently described as having God’s oversight. That’s what those Old Testament people maybe believed, anyway; I certainly don’t think it was God who told Gideon to kill the Midionites, but apparently he felt it was.
If Christianity is–as I think it must be–rooted in Jesus’ earthly minded practices and teachings, then reading Old Testament stories must be less about figuring out who Joshua’s and Gideon’s heck-of-a-killer God was (whom I’m guessing they designed) and more about two things: understanding the danger of self-conflation with God, and evaluating our own lives so that we may actually experience life-giving living.
Which, might I add, may be even more problematic than a bunch of old stories.
3 Comments
Second Sister
"evaluating our own lives so that we may actually experience life-giving living" What does this mean? please tell us more about this.
Mountaineer
This is the preface to your book.
dragonfly
Reader response (since you asked for rsvp 🙂
I suspect that all our human views of God are flawed, miniature, and certainly influenced by our personalities and experience. (I'm thinking about paragraph #7 "However…") But our limits don't constrain who God is or what God does.
We certainly get annoyed or offended or connect deeply with how others express or experience God, but I think as humans, our job is to be learning more who God is as we live along, and allowing what we learn to alter who we are, what we do, how we see the world. I'm picturing a position of learning, hunger, submitting to God as the very Source that keeps us alive.
I personally do believe that God reveals to us in ways that can get through to our little brains and hearts (not only, but including individually).
I believe the birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those ways God reveals in human experience. There are no exact words for the mysteries of God, God's interaction with the world, or what happens in our deepest souls. And so we struggle with triteness, silence, floweryness, or ignorance, or stumbling over our words for the freedom inside!
We do grasp at ways to make sense of the uncertainty of life- so do plants, trees and animals (I'm picturing my sugar peas). I think if we submit the precariousness of life and being human to God, that makes space for our Maker to inform and transform us, in the face of entropy.
I'm not sure I want this posted on your blog- I just finally took time to read your post and thought I'd join your conversation. I guess it's up to you 🙂