This is most surely a primitive religious story featuring a religious artifact with strange and dangerous powers, an artifact with the power both to curse and to bless. But I am way too sophisticated for such a primitive religion or the primitive god it implies. I have no use for a god who is dangerous or unpredictable. My god must be reasonable, rational, and benign. I want a god who will improve the quality of my life but make few demands on me in the process.
I am quite certain that some biblical notions of God are very much colored by the violent, tribal, holy-war world view of the ancient Near East. It is to be expected that they saw God in ways colored by ways of life they took for granted. But does that make my "sophisticated, enlightened" view of God any more accurate than theirs. Indeed, sometimes my sophisticated, enlightened view of God envisions a god who is all but superfluous to everyday life in the 21st century. My god is often relegated to spiritual pick-me-up duties, along with the occasional get-me-out-of-a-jam request.
Sometimes I wonder if a "primitive" view of God might not have something to recommend over my own.
Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.
But didn't the Philistines redeem themselves a little in today's reading? After all of these cities have been plagued with tumors and rodents as the ark made its rounds, they still have to contrive a heifer and cart experiment to see if its really an act of God or a coincidence. We modern humans would set up some scientific inquiry to find out what infectious agent or radioactive material the ark carried. Only when we had proven that it wasn't carrying any natural cause would we concede that it must be God. The spirit is still the same. We still only attribute things to God if we're sure we can't explain them any other way. Now, I think that we are becoming more convinced that we can understand and explain just about anything, so maybe the scope of things we're willing to attribute to God has narrowed.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I totally agree with your post. Today's reading just got me thinking about it again.
Stefanie,
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "God of the gaps" sometimes gets used to describe the narrowing of what we view as God's arena of action. We reserve God for those gaps that we have not yet managed to explain. And so as "knowledge" grows those gaps get fewer and smaller. Thanks for the comments.