Spiritual Hiccups - Messy Pictures of God

Regardless of whether we are religious fundamentalists or secular humanists, we all have a worldview that was shaped by Enlightenment notions of logic and rational thought.  We share notions of larger truths and concepts even if we disagree over what those larger truths are.  And we who are the religious sort tend to fit our religious beliefs into a framework of larger truths and concepts.  Yet the biblical picture of God is not nearly so neat.  Its picture of God refuses to be confined to our neat, theological constructs, or to early creeds written by those with a Greek philosophical worldview.

Today's psalm is a good case in point.  It celebrates the greatness of God
who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,
          both human beings and animals;
he sent signs and wonders
          into your midst, O Egypt,
          against Pharaoh and all his servants.
He struck down many nations
          and killed mighty kings —
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
          and Og, king of Bashan,
          and all the kingdoms of Canaan —
  and gave their land as a heritage,
          a heritage to his people Israel.

Describing a deity who strikes down - that is kills - infants, calves, lambs, foals, and so on, paints a deeply troubling picture of God.  Yet that is the picture of God found in the Bible's foundational salvation story, the Exodus.  The God of the Bible is known through this special commitment to this insignificant people, Israel.  And while we may manage to construct grander pictures of God that smooth off the rough edges, when we go back to the stories of the Bible itself, we are faced with a God who refuses to be bound by our constructs, a God who is wilder, more unpredictable, perhaps even more frightening than we would prefer.

And the person of Jesus does not solve this problem for us.  Jesus is a maddeningly particular, historical figure.  He is a First Century Palestinian Jew with First Century notions of how the world works.  Western Europeans have tried to make Jesus "one of them."  Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus is familiar to most of us.  But of course Jesus is not some generic everyman who is all things to all people.  He is a dark-skinned, male Jew who gathers around him a band of working folks, outcasts, women, and sinners, managing to upset both the religious authorities of his own faith and the Roman imperial apparatus that controlled the region.  Yet still we insist that we meet God in this person who is born, who grows and learns, who remains Jewish for his entire life, and who causes enough trouble to get himself executed.

The Bible's picture of God is messy and particular, not generic and universal.  Yet in my own faith life, as I've noted here before, I have been inclined to understand God more as concept and premise than a messy, particular personality.  I wonder if I can let God out of the theological, doctrinal molds and constraints I have inherited and/or constructed.  I wonder if that God might not be a lot more real, a lot more alive.

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