How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Of course, the gods, like human kings, could also be kind and merciful; they’re not just wrath machines. Likewise, the God of the Bible is portrayed in diverse ways. But that doesn’t neutralize the fact that one of those ways is as a harsh monarch so typical of the Iron Age world of tribal conflict.

  To expect anything else of the biblical writers is to deny their humanity, which—for those who believe God is involved in all of this—God clearly wasn’t interested in doing.

  As I mentioned earlier, whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers. And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, “Is this what God is like?”

  Ancient biblical writers were already asking that question, as we saw with the story of Jonah and God’s about-face concerning the Ninevites. That writer’s answer to “What is God like?” was different from Nahum’s and from what Israelites had been thinking for who knows how long beforehand. Likewise, the curses of Deuteronomy don’t reflect what God is now and always like, but reflect the harsh realities of Judah’s political struggles with the Assyrians.

  Again, it is superficial to label these violent portrayals of God in the Bible as either “wrong” or “right.” They were right for at least some of the ancient Israelites working within the cultural horizons that defined the nature of reality and of the gods. The question of right or wrong only comes up when we expect from the Bible timeless, unchanging facts about God.

  To put it another way, the problem of divine violence becomes far less of a problem when we remember why some biblical writers portray God violently. They are making sense of God with the ancient vocabulary available to them in their world. And like most things in the Bible, God is presented in diverse ways along with the changing experiences of the ancient Israelites and then the first followers of Jesus.

  * * *

  In case I haven’t been as clear as I think I’ve been, let me say for the record that I don’t believe that the God of galaxies, light-years, and dark matter fights battles with other gods or has heavenly board meetings, or that other gods exist that can effectively be appeased by child sacrifice to win local skirmishes. Nor do I believe God passes out violent retribution like he’s sowing grass seed. I do believe that the Israelites at some point believed these things about God. They imagined God in the only way that God would make sense to them—through the language and concepts of their time and place.

  Such imagining of God isn’t a problem to be solved. We all do that. We can’t help it. And that tells us something about the nature of the faith and the role the Bible plays in our journey of faith.

  But now, let’s bring Jesus into this, at least a bit.

  Chapter 8

  Interlude: Jesus and All That

  God Is __________ (Fill in the Blank)

  The Bible does not leave us with one consistent portrait of God, but a collection of ancient and diverse portraits of how the various biblical writers understood God for their times. These biblical portraits of God are not there to test how clever we can be in making them all fit together nicely. They illustrate for us the need to accept the sacred responsibility of asking what God is like for us here and now.

  We can hardly turn a page of the Bible without seeing God imagined as a king, shepherd, rock, fortress, vine, or potter. God isn’t actually any of those things (obviously), but those ways of depicting God reflect the “givens” of an ancient culture that drew tribal boundaries, farmed, tended animals, and made their own pottery. It’s like when eighteenth-century philosophers and theologians referred to God as a “divine watchmaker.” Generations of smartphone and smartwatch users will come up with their own analogy.

  At any rate, images of God as a potter or king, though relatively innocent, are no less culturally conditioned images of God than are “Yahweh is the best God among all the gods” or “Yahweh tends to solve conflicts through violence.” They all reflect the cultural language used for God at the time.

  How else could these people of faith talk about God? How else could anyone talk about God? Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.

  Whenever we say to ourselves, “Well, that’s true, but of course God is ,” we should pay attention to how we fill in that blank. It will tell us a lot about how we imagine God in our here and now. Even something that seems really obvious and not culturally bound at all, like “God is love,” is loaded with all sorts of ready-made ideas about what we mean when we say the word.

  The ancient Israelites saw Yahweh’s love as his steadfast commitment to them, keeping his promises, holding up his end of the bargain—“faithfulness” to an agreement is a good way of putting it; God’s “love” is like that of a good king committed to the welfare of his people. For us, though our ideas of God’s love may include something like that, it tends to be more individualistic, personal, and emotional than how ancient Israelites thought of God. And for Christians, of course, how we imagine God’s love is deeply affected by God’s act of self-sacrifice—Jesus’s death on the cross. It’s unlikely, however, that ancient Israelites would have considered such a shameful death as an act of God’s love.

  All this makes me wonder at what point are we not reimagining God in ways that fit our here and now? Don’t we all go beyond what the Bible says and imagine God for ourselves? Whether we realize it or not, isn’t that happening all the time? I think it is.

  Rather than recoiling at the thought, we should embrace, as we’ve seen, the fact that reimagining God is modeled for us within the Bible itself. Do we really think we are so above the fray of the human drama that we can avoid it? Maybe that is exactly what God wants.

  In fact, what is the story of Jesus and the Good News if not a reimagining of the “God of the Bible”?

  It’s What Christians Do

  Jesus’s crucifixion, for example, represents a major reimagining of God. Child sacrifice for Israelites is condemned in no uncertain terms in the Old Testament. It is abhorrent and listed as one of the abominations committed by King Manasseh (whom we met earlier) that led to the exile. And yet central to the story of Jesus is God the Father doing that very thing while at the same time turning the idea of Old Testament sacrifice on its head. Now God is the one offering a sacrifice for humanity rather than humans sacrificing to God, as it always was.

  What’s going on here? Is this God up to something new? Yes.

  The New Testament writers did not reject the God of the Old—they reimagined God, because the gospel in their time and place demanded it. The God-language of their Jewish tradition could not fully account for what the (Jewish) New Testament writers believed God had done in Jesus of Nazareth in their time.

  The same goes for the resurrection. This was off script. Not only was the idea of people rising from the dead in general not really a thing in the Old Testament,* but the notion that Israel’s king would alone be raised from the dead after being executed by another power was utterly and completely unexpected—ridiculous, in fact. Yet, this is what Jesus followers believed God did.

  And so God had to be reimagined.

  No one struggled with this more than the apostle Paul, who pored over his Bible to find creative ways to connect Israel’s story with this unexpected turn in Jesus.

  Paul preached that God no longer required of God’s people circumcision or strict dietary observances, even though both are nonnegotiable commands of God in the Old Testament (Gen. 17; Lev. 11; Deut. 14). Gentiles who trust in Jesus are now also fully “children of Abraham” without needing to obey first these ancient divine commands that had formerly defined what “children of Abraham” meant.

  Paul reimagines God to account for his here and now, which is that Jesus, the crucified and risen Son of God, has come to save all people, Jews and Gentiles alike.

  The idea of reimagining God as times and circumstances change should, therefore, not strike us as odd
or the least bit troubling—our Bible is full of reimagining. Without it, there wouldn’t be a “New” Testament or a Christian faith tradition. The entire history of the Christian church is defined by moments of reimagining God to speak here and now.

  That’s what theologians do.

  That’s what preachers do.

  That’s what Christian pilgrims do as we journey through life.

  Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.

  And yes, that is yet another paradox—the God of old can only be accessed by being reimagined. Judging from the fact that this has been happening all along, even going back to the pages of the Bible itself, I’d like to make the rather bold suggestion that God is okay with it.

  At least I hope so, for we humans can never jump out of our skin and see things from above. We only see from below. And I count it a blessing, not a problem, when I see that the biblical writers did that for themselves, and that move has continued throughout the long histories of Jewish and Christian thought.

  Can we really escape this same responsibility? Should we even want to?

  Does Your God Recycle?

  Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see there made sense for that time but not necessarily for ours, and that the God we were introduced to in the Bible is not in every way the God we believe in here and now?

  My answer to that rather convoluted question is, “No, we should not be surprised.” God is relentlessly reimagined all around us. American Christians have reimagined God as feminist, environmentalist, capitalist, refugee, soldier, Republican, Democrat, socialist, and on and on. Some portraits of God I agree with more than others (and let the debates begin), but the act of reimagining God in ways that reflect our time and place is self-evident, unavoidable, and necessary.

  When the situation was dire, the ancient Israelites expressed their hope in God in ways that needed to be heard at the time—in pleas for economic justice, integrity of their leaders, success against their enemies. The questions for us, as they have been for all generations, are:

  What is our hope?

  How do we yearn for God to show up here and now?

  What urgent thing is happening right now to us, our families, and our world?

  What new thing will the God of old do now?

  These are the questions driven by wisdom that we ask ourselves as the biblical writers did ages ago.

  When I see God presented today as a champion of the full equality of women, people of color, refugees, or the environment, I say, “Yes, this is my God too. This is the God I believe in.”

  But this is a reimagined God.

  As hard as it might be to hear, the God of the Bible, strictly speaking, doesn’t actually champion these causes, however important they might be to us. If biblical writers could listen in to our God-talk, they might not recognize their God in what we say, at least not without some prompting.

  Sure, we might see hints in the biblical story where something like “God sides with refugees” can find a hook, and for some issues that hook is bigger than others (the justice and fairness hooks are huge, for example). But the biblical hook is brought in after the fact. The actual feeling of compassion for refugees doesn’t begin by reading the Bible. Rather, the Bible comes into the picture afterwards as a way of grounding that compassion in our faith tradition.

  We find in the Bible ways of anchoring our experience of God—even if that means reading the Bible in fresh and creative ways, which is exactly how we see the New Testament writers engaging their Bible when they talk about Jesus.

  We’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, and we’ll come back to this shortly. For now let me just repeat that this process of reimagining God is not a problem to be overcome, but an invitation to meet the always active, always present God here and now, where we are, and to trust that God is with us in that process.

  By saying, “This is my God,” I am accepting the responsibility of our inevitable task of finding those sacred places where God and our world meet. This is why I disagree with Christians who say, for example, that women are not permitted to have leadership roles in churches or Christian organizations. I understand that there are Bible verses that might preclude women from preaching or teaching men (which we’ll come back to), but simply lifting those verses out of the Bible without further ado is in my opinion to relinquish the sacred responsibility of reimagining God for our here and now.

  I can certainly understand why some might say that Christian faith and practice should not depend on the demands of our current pagan, secular, very unchristian culture. Fair enough. But if you throw down that card too quickly, it will backfire.* The ancient world, after all, gave us warring gods and heavenly board meetings. If that doesn’t fit the definition of “pagan influence,” I don’t know what does. And yet ancient Israelites imagined God within that world—and those images became part of our sacred scripture.

  I think it’s worth sitting with that last thought and pondering it for a moment.

  The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn’t need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.

  Perhaps this is at least one reason why the Christian faith has had such staying power and spread broad and wide—different people living in different times and places can connect with this God in ways that engage their world and make sense to them.

  * * *

  We are not the first, prompted by the time and place of our existence, to ask “What is God like?” But the question remains whether we accept the responsibility to answer that question. And we are not turning away from scripture (or God) when we do so, but turning toward scripture as it models that very process.

  All of which is to say, God is out ahead of us leading us on. We only need to follow.

  This is the God I choose to believe in, the one I imagine, a God who is quite aware of the fact that we cannot help when and where we were born, but remains with us just the same and encourages us to accept the challenge of owning our faith here and now rather than relinquishing that sacred responsibility by expecting others to have done it for us.

  And when we do that, we are joining an ancient conversation, and once we hear it, we’ll wonder how we hadn’t noticed it before.

  Chapter 9

  Seriously Updating the Ancient Faith

  Adapting to Survive

  I have all my computer software and operating-system updates set on automatic. I don’t want to think about the updates; I just want them to happen. I figure there are some competent Apple nerds out there who do nothing but stay up nights patrolling the internet searching out and destroying threats, foreign and domestic. There are people out there, equally nerdy, likely working out of their mom’s basement in some faraway place where they don’t have laws, who are also staying up nights thinking of new ways to invade and destroy my little cyberecosystem. As the bad guys keep adapting, so does Apple. It’s a matter of survival.

  Speaking of survival, more literally, I also get a yearly flu shot. I’m never really sure exactly what type of flu I’m being vaccinated for—is it the throwing-up kind or the coughing-up-a-lung kind? Or is throwing up not a flu thing? I forget. And how different is a flu from a really bad cold? But I get the shot anyway, not only for the neat “You Did It!” sticker, but because whatever a flu is (and please don’t send me hundreds of emails explaining the difference), I don’t want it.

  Those little viruses are so clever! They find all sorts of ways to adapt to last year’s vaccine, because those buggers are determined to give me whatever it is they give me
. I’m not sure why they are so highly motivated, though I imagine it has to do with their wanting to survive too—which is fine, but I’d rather they do it somewhere else, like my neighbor’s four dogs that bark nonstop or the mice that keep building a nest inside my lawn tractor.* But they adapt, alarmingly quickly, and the vaccines have to keep up, or else I’m going to feel like crap.

  I guess when you stop to think about it, most things adapt. I don’t mean coming out with a new version of something just because it will sell and shareholders need to be kept happy (once again, Apple), but adapting as a matter of survival. Blockbuster famously didn’t adapt and now look at it. You can’t. Blockbuster is as dead as pagers and typewriters. Companies that have an eye on market changes survive by reinventing themselves, like every electronics powerhouse that saw the writing on the wall for boom boxes when music went digital.

  And of course, there’s always McDonald’s and Taco Bell, changing their menu every six months to keep people walking through the door. I’m not sure how many people turn to Taco Bell for their vegetarian option, nor to McDonald’s to grab their side salad or a gourmet coffee (that tastes like swill). Only time will tell, though while we’re waiting I’m sure their boards of directors are driving very nice cars and living in very nice houses.

  Even life adapts, if you’re into evolution and that sort of thing. According to some cable show I watched, the only reason we human beings are here is because dinosaurs, after a rather hefty 160-million-year run, suddenly went extinct about 66 million years ago due to (as the theory goes) a massive meteor that hit the Yucatan Peninsula causing darkness and massive climate change to sweep over the earth. We are here today because some mammals of the burrowing variety survived by going underground and, when the all-clear signal was given, emerged and adapted. So, thank you, meteor, and thank you, furry little rodent-type things.