After spending nearly three weeks on a two-week job, I find myself with a few minutes time to reflect on McLaren’s third question, The God Question. McLaren divide’s his thoughts in two chapters entitled: Is God Violent; and From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God.
Since we are free to eliminate the effects of the Greco-Roman distortion of the biblical narrative, we can read the Bible as a community library rather than as a constitution, and we can bring into the focus the stories of God as good creator, passionate liberator, and reconciling king, but we are still left with the fact that there are some much less palatable images of God to be found in scripture – ‘violent images, cruel images, un-Christlike images’ (98). So, now what do we do?
McLaren suggests that the answer is to recognize that the Bible presents the reader with an evolving understanding of God across biblical history. This is evident in five different areas: 1) God’s uniqueness found in the development of an exclusive monotheism; 2) Ethically, in the shift from a preoccupation with ‘religious and ceremonial fidelity’ to a concern for social justice; 3) In God’s universality, found in the development from tribalism to universalism; 4) In God’s agency, changing from sporadic and exceptional intervention to a more balanced providential presence; and 5) In God’s character, specifically the maturation process among biblical writers, and their evolving understanding of God’s character from violent and capricious to gentle and compassionate. McLaren sums it up here:
I am not saying that the Bible reveals a process of evolution within God’s actual character… I am saying that human beings can’t do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God, and that Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment. (103)
To take it one step further McLaren adds: “… we cannot, we must not, assume that we have arrived. In other words, if we can look back and see the process unfolding in the past - in the Bible, in theological history - then we have no reason to believe that the process has stopped unfolding now (105).” Just like you and I see our world through the lenses of the lives we have lived, McLaren claims that the human beings who produced the passages of scripture “would naturally see God through the lens of their experience (106).”
McLaren takes time to compare the biblical stories of destruction to the narratives being told in the ancient Near East at that time. Primarily the Gilgamesh Epic vs. the flood story. He notes how the biblical story is, at minimum, an improvement because the flood story has some morality within it. The understanding of God then progresses, somewhat like how an understanding of mathematics progresses from one subject to the next. Continuing through the Old Testament and into the New Testament, and the stories found within them, he adds: “This approach helps us see the biblical library as a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge (111).” He later sums up his line of reasoning by concluding: “we can only discern God’s character in a mature way from the vantage point of the end of the story, seen in the light of Jesus (114).”
Ok, so what do I think? I have been trying to wrap my head around all this stuff for about a month, and am still trying to process it. Nevertheless, I think that McLaren has given us a very intelligent, and biblical, framework for understanding the nature of God. As I deliberate these thoughts, and what I know of Jesus, I am drawn back to a saying attributed to Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood found in this book, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”
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