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By Root 1556 0

of Scripture, the one living God is primarily concerned about religious and ceremonial fidelity—rituals, sacrifices, vestments, holidays, and dietary and cleanliness codes. This image is naturally promoted by the priests, who are passionately committed to maintaining purity in worship and devotion and who seek technical perfection in the fulfillment of religious regulations. But over time the voices of the prophets are also heard in the land. They depict God as passionately committed to social justice—to showing practical concern for the poor and forgotten and to addressing the systemic flaws that plunge people into poverty and imprison them in oppression. In fact, many of these prophets minimize the importance of priestly ceremonial devotion in view of the priority of social justice to the heart of God.3

Third, we could follow a pattern of growth in understanding God’s universality. In some passages, the living God seems very tribal: God favors “us,” but disfavors everyone else. But as time goes on, it becomes unquestionably clear that God created all people and loves all people. Chosenness, we realize, does not give one people privileges over others as God’s favorites, but rather responsibilities on behalf of others as God’s servants and as channels of blessing. As we’ve seen, one group is chosen not to the exclusion of all others, whom God disfavors, but for the benefit of all others, whom God loves.

Fourth, we could trace a maturing understanding of God’s agency. In some passages, God’s interventions have a magical and interventionist quality, as if God were generally outside and uninvolved in the universe until certain moments when God decides to step in and get involved. In other passages, we find two differing responses to this view. In one response (see Ecclesiastes, for example), God is largely distant or absent, and the world is mystifying and chaotic. In another response (Matthew seems to lean in this direction), God is hyperpresent, to the point of engineering and controlling everything or nearly everything, like a cosmic chess master moving pieces from square to square or a live-in mother-in-law who hovers judgmentally over her daughter-in-law’s every move.

But all of these views seem to be taken up into a more mature view, highly nuanced and delicately balanced. We learn to discern that, yes, God is indeed at work in, along with, through, or even in spite of events. In this way, God is not simply outside, distant, and uninvolved. But that doesn’t imply the opposite: God can’t be rendered indistinguishable from the events themselves, nor is God deterministically controlling the universe as if it were a puppet or a machine. Rather, God’s work and wisdom are gently but firmly present in the dynamic and unfolding processes of creation and history themselves. Even when some human beings do great evil, God is present to guide and empower other people to do even greater good. In this way, Paul can truly say, “In all things, God works for good” (Rom. 8:28), echoing Joseph’s realization that God’s good intentions had, through Joseph, bent even the evil intentions of his brothers toward unexpectedly good ends (Gen. 50:20).

And finally, if we were studying the Bible together over a period of time, we could trace the maturation process among biblical writers regarding God’s character. In some passages, God appears violent, retaliatory, given to favoritism, and careless of human life. But over time, the image of God that predominates is gentle rather than cruel, compassionate rather than violent, fair to all rather than biased toward some, forgiving rather than retaliatory. In this more mature view, God is not capricious, bloodthirsty, hateful, or prone to fits of vengeful rage. Rather, God loves justice, kindness, reconciliation, and peace; God’s grace gets the final word.

People who are part of what is often called fundamentalism today, whether Christians, Muslims, or Jews, often find it difficult to acknowledge this kind of progression in understanding across the centuries. If anything, they feel obliged to defend