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By Root 1532 0

I address my uneasiness about those images, I need to say again that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do I find anything as horrible as Theos. Yes, I find a character named God who sends a flood that destroys all humanity except for Noah’s family, but that’s almost trivial compared to a deity who tortures the greater part of humanity forever in infinite eternal conscious torment, three words that need to be read slowly and thoughtfully to feel their full import.1 Yes, I find a character named God who directs a band of nomadic former slaves to fight and claim from more powerful nations a piece of land for themselves, but never does this God direct them to expand their borders, brutally conquer and occupy weaker nations, and create a global totalitarian regime through slavery and genocide as Theos-Zeus-Jupiter likes to do. Yes, I find a character named God who does a good bit of smiting, but those who are smitten are simply smitten and buried, and that’s it. They are not shamed and tortured for a while by the “godly” before death and then shamed and tortured by God after death—forever and ever, without end. Now, I am in no way interested in excusing or defending divine smiting, genocidal conquest, or global quasigeocidal flooding; I’m just saying that even if these are the crimes of Elohim/LORD, they are far less serious crimes than those of Theos.

Many, perhaps most, perhaps all of the disturbing deeds of God in the Bible look very different in light of our responses to the first two questions in our quest. In my own experience as a lover and reader of the Bible, as I am freed from the literalistic and dualistic straitjacket in which the Greco-Roman and constitutional approaches constrained me, I feel I can breathe a little freer, and I begin to notice things that had been there all along, but I had been trained to ignore. Most notably, I begin to see how our ancestors’ images and understandings of God continually changed, evolved, and matured over the centuries. God, it seemed, kept initiating this evolution.

For example, in Exodus 6:3, God tells Moses that the mysterious divine name rendered in English as “the LORD” had been intentionally withheld from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They had only received a preliminary revelation under the name God Almighty (El Shaddai), but now God takes Moses deeper into the knowledge of God’s identity. Similarly, in Hosea, the Lord says that a time is coming when Israel will no longer refer to its creator as “master,” but instead as “husband” (2:16). The more dominating understanding of God will fade and give way to a more intimate one. Jesus similarly tells his disciples that the time for thinking of themselves simply as his servants is passing, and the time for understanding themselves as his friends has come (John 15:12–17). He goes on to explain that after his departure, the Spirit will continue to guide them into new, as yet unrevealed truth as they are able to bear it (16:12–15). Paul similarly describes the people of God graduating from a childhood in which they had the law as a tutor (Gal. 3:23–26) to an age where they walk free in the Spirit.

The more comfortable I get with this evolving understanding of God across biblical history, the more I find myself able to love and enjoy the Bible—and love and enjoy God as well. I think you will have the same experience. If we could sit down and experiment with this approach over several months together, we’d begin to notice at least five specific lines of evolution in the biblical writers’ understanding of God.

First, we’d trace a gradual maturing among biblical writers in their understanding of God’s uniqueness. Some early biblical passages present an image of one God—our God—who is supreme among many.2 But over time faithful people come to see that only one God, in fact, is real and alive, and all the others are fragments, illusions, imposters, superstitions, or deceptions. The Creator is not only unique among gods; the Creator is uniquely God.

Second, we would notice an important shift in understanding God’s ethics. In many passages