A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [134]
8. One fascinating dimension of the “new” or “social” trinitarianism is the idea that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live as a dynamic (as opposed to static) society, that within God there is an unending story of relationship (in which things happen), and that, in a real sense, the living God “has a life,” a history, a story. This dynamic vision, it seems to me, is fundamentally irreconcilable with a static, unmoved, and immovable Theos. Theos may be a Supreme Being, but the triune God is a Supreme Living and a Supreme Loving.
9. The tree, field, water, and tower in the story are intentionally and playfully chosen for reasons I hope are clear, or will be clear soon.
10. My friend Don Golden, coauthor with Rob Bell of Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), puts it like this, reflecting on the story of Hosea: “When God encounters evil, God doesn’t destroy it—God marries it” (personal conversation). By uniting with a people gone astray—loving, entering, incarnating, and remaining faithful to them in spite of their unfaithfulness—God absorbs their evil in God’s greater good, and evil is thus overcome. This insight resonates with a chapter on atonement theory I contributed to Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), edited by Mark Baker.
11. As we will see again when we read the story of Job in response to the authority question, it may help us here to see “God” not simply as the real God, but as a character in a story, seen and described unapologetically from a human point of view. This character is thus rendered in starkly human terms, which excuses the character for displaying less emotional maturity than we might expect in an actual deity. This character seems, if we’re honest, rather limited in foresight (threatening and then not imposing the death penalty with Adam and Eve, not anticipating Cain’s violence to Abel), and somewhat insecure and threatened by human potential, worrying first that humans “will become…like us” (Gen. 3:22) and later that “nothing will be impossible for them” (11:6).
12. Biblical scholars often use the word chiastic (or X-like) to describe the shape of narratives in the Hebrew Bible. Like Plato’s narrative (but without the philosophical dualism), there is descent through the stories of Adam, Cain, Noah, and Babel. Then there is ascent through the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
13. It should be noted that Joseph himself ends up selling the entire nation of Egypt into slavery to Pharaoh (Gen. 47:13–26), consolidating power and wealth for a dynasty that will eventually enslave his descendants. The complex entanglements of good and evil don’t disappear even in this otherwise happy ending.
14. The difference here—between simply “knowing” the difference between good and evil and actually overcoming evil with good—is more significant than it may first appear, and more inherent in the structure of the Genesis story than many realize. As further evidence of the book’s chiastic structure (see n. 12), Joseph serves as a kind of mirror to Adam: for example, he refuses to yield to the temptation of a woman (Potiphar’s wife) as Adam did, and he refuses to blame her for his plight as Adam did.
Chapter 6: The Biblical Narrative in Three Dimensions
1. “Natural” and “supernatural,” we should remember, are also terms alien to the biblical narrative, reflecting assumptions, dualisms, concerns, and constructions of the modern era.
2. The dream of a peaceable kingdom takes a tragic turn in the reign of David’s son Solomon, which