God is not all-powerful

The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, is awesome. The stories have been told for over 2500 years and are still gripping, despite the fact that most preachers and sunday school teachers don't have the imagination to make them feel alive. How a story told 2500 years ago to an illiterate group of farmers in the Near East forever on the brink of civilization collapse and destruction can still resonate with modern people across cultures and languages attests to how cool these stories are. More than anything, what these stories are about is a people's struggle to understand their God in the midst of some pretty terrible circumstances. In the end, the question is: "What is God like?"

We hear stories about God hearing something terrible has happened, goes down to Earth to fix the problem and does so through asking some nobody to confront someone powerful. That's the story of Moses, Jeremiah, Abraham, David, Samson, Elijah, and many more. This is a God who gets in a wrestling match with Jacob and nearly loses, a God who enters into a courtroom drama with Satan over the life of an ordinary man, a God who argues with Abraham about whether or not a city should be destroyed and loses, a God who acknowledges the existence of other Gods, who speaks as "us" before the creation of the world and a God who ultimately chooses a nothing, insignificant, constantly conquered nation to be God's chosen people.

Somehow, this God became something different by the 4th century. The God who nearly loses the wrestling match with Jacob, becomes all-powerful. The God who hears something terrible is going on and has to go down and investigate has become ever-present. The God who gets in an argument with Abraham and loses, has become all-knowing. This happened even after God's revelation of God's own self in the life of an illiterate peasant from Galilee, the most hated region of a nothing nation, who starts a political movement against the powers of Rome and the temple and is ultimately killed as a treasonous revolutionary. His followers scatter and are ultimately killed. The God who becomes human in Jesus of Nazareth, has become a God who cannot change.

How did the God of Scripture turn into an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present man with a beard in the sky looking down on us knowing everything we think and everything we're going to do?

In theology, we have to check everything we say against what God has actually revealed - through scripture, tradition, reason and experience. We find it a lot easier to say what God isn't, rather than what God actually is. Even if we say something easy like "God is loving" we have to reinterpret what "love" is through what "love" looks like in Scripture.

What's happened though, is as the Christian church transitioned from a small community of Jews in the first generation after Jesus, to a large diverse group of Greeks in the following generations, Christian theology began to look less and less like the philosophy and thought of Jews and more like the philosophy of Greeks. Plato and Aristotle became just as (or more) important as Isaiah, Jeremiah and the writers of Exodus and Genesis.

Plato imagines what "God" must be like. For Plato, for something to change, meant that it must have either improved or worsened. If it could change, meant that it wasn't perfect. Therefore, Plato's God couldn't change. God is the "unmoved-mover". For Plato, the world changes constantly and must therefore be imperfect/less-good than God. The minds/souls of men or philosophy change less than the physical world and are therefore better and closer to God. The physical world is therefore evil and the world of philosophy is good.

God is described through platonic thought as "omnipresent", "omnipotent", "omniscient" etc. Despite a God in scripture that changes constantly, who becomes human and one of us (and as human is no less God), whose power as a human is displayed through suffering - The greek conception becomes the Christian one and we have a God who is from Athens and not from Jerusalem - A god inspired by Plato and not by Isaiah - and a God that looks like Zeus, not like jesus. (Don't believe me? search for a picture of Zeus and a picture of "God")

You're probably not that interested in Christian theology, but I believe that many of our problems with God and Christian theology come from how we tried to make the Greek God and the Jewish God the same when the Old Testament refuses to allow anything to define God except for God - "I am what I am". I hear Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Pat Robertson, Pope Benedict and everyone else talk about God and they are firmly entrenched in a greek philosophical God. Tear those layers away and you'll find a surprising God in scripture that just might have a chance of claiming our lives.

Happy Easter! And go to church!



*bonus points to anyone (read steven) who can tell me where these two pictures are from.