Competing Images of God

The Lord is gracious and merciful,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all,
    and his compassion is over all that he has made.

Psalm 145:8-9

If I were going to start a religion from scratch, I think I would devise a sacred text considerably shorter than the Christian Bible. The Hebrew texts alone are far too long, and the New Testament has a great deal of duplication. Why not hone it down to one gospel?

Another issue I would address in my sacred text is a consistent portrait of my divinity, a problem not unrelated to the Bible's lack of brevity. That some people use terms such as "the God of the Old Testament" or "the God of the New" point to this problem. In fact, the uneven pictures of God that lead to such phrases can be found in both Testaments. Many might hear the above verses from one of the morning psalms as sounding more like a New Testament God. Then again, there is something about destroying the wicked near the psalm's end.

Perhaps a short pamphlet or booklet that laid out the attributes of God, the rules God expects people to live by, and how God reacts to those who don't, would suffice. People in the church are always complaining about the problem of biblical literacy. If we cut the sacred text down to 20 or 30 pages, surely that would help with this problem.

We Protestants are heavily invested in the Bible. We say things like sola scripture or "scripture alone." We insist that the Bible is the witness par excellence, trumping all else whether it be church doctrine or human logic. But all too often, we have read it as a source of information, sometimes even as dispassionate history or reporting of events. And read this way, we are often can't handle conflicting pictures of God and so are reduced to cherry picking scripture, lifting up those passages that support our own notions of God. At times this can lead to different groups of Christians whose images of God cannot be reconciled.

I believe the Bible is divinely inspired, but that is a far cry from saying it simply contains accurate and true information. Rather it contains the work of deeply faithful and Spirit filled people who are trying to make sense of God who is beyond full human comprehension. Not surprisingly, their assumptions and biases of what God is like and  how a god should act make there way into these reflections, though inspiration often breaks through such assumptions and biases. And story or narrative is often the only way to convey what is too big a task for theology, logic, or doctrine.

As a preacher, I can go back and look at the Bible passages I use for the sermon on any given Sunday.  On top of that, I tend to preach from the lectionary, a collection of readings for each Sunday. And both the lectionary and I have a tendency to gravitate toward some texts and shy away from others. This of course means that anyone who depends in part on my sermons to help them picture God gets a certain slant. (If they attended some other church they might get a quite different slant.)

This suggests to me that most of us would do well to engage those texts we tend to avoid. If we won't go near a passage that speaks of divine judgment, or if we avoid those that demand self sacrificial giving to those in need, we probably need to wrestle with the picture those texts paint. This God of ours is far too big and too incomprehensible to be contained in any sacred text I would devise, or in any distilled image that fits my preferences. And so the very passage that most frightens, unnerves, or repels me is likely the very passage I most need to expand the constricted view of God I devise for myself from my own personal preferences.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.