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By Root 1576 0

and give priority to the early, raw, more primal, less-tested and-developed views of God, minimizing or marginalizing what I am calling the more mature and nuanced understandings. So the God of the fundamentalists is a competitive warrior—always jealous of rivals and determined to drive them into defeat and disgrace. And the God of the fundamentalists is superficially exacting—demanding technical perfection in regard to ceremonial and legal matters while minimizing deeper concerns about social justice—especially where outsiders and outcasts are concerned. Similarly, the fundamentalist God is exclusive, faithfully loving one in-group and rejecting—perhaps even hating—all others. The fundamentalist God is also deterministic—controlling rather than interacting, a mover of events but never moved by them. And finally, though the fundamentalist God may be patient for a while, he (fundamentalist versions of God tend to be very male) is ultimately violent, eventually destined to explode with unquenchable rage, condemnation, punishment, torture, and vengeance if you push him too far.

Individual fundamentalists often don’t want God to be this way. They may become profoundly uneasy, especially if they feel themselves being conformed to the ugly image of the God they worship.4 Their emotional intelligence may actually recoil from this ugly view of God, as they tell themselves, “God may act this way, but I must not.” Meanwhile, their analytic intelligence tells them that they must hold to this view, because of the way they have answered our first and second questions about the six-line narrative and the Bible as religious constitution. These individuals may try to minimize the uglier dimensions of the fundamentalist image of God and emphasize the more mature views, but if they go too far, they will be labeled “liberal” or “heretic” by the gatekeepers of their community. The fear of being labeled, ostracized, and rejected by their beloved faith community (not to mention the fear of being blacklisted by the angry God in whom they partly believe) will force them to either capitulate or keep silent about their reservations for another day. And even if they manage to convince a small circle of friends to stretch into the evolutionary pattern found in the Bible—of moving from less to more mature views of God—periodic inquisitions will sweep through, seeking to reassert what the gatekeepers defend as the more pure and rigorous understanding. Month after month my email in-box fills with specific stories that illustrate this general pattern.

I hope you can see what I’m saying here—and what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that the Bible is free of passages that depict God as competitive, superficially exacting, exclusive, deterministic, and violent. But neither am I saying that those passages are the last word on the character of God. I am not saying that the Bible reveals a process of evolution within God’s actual character, as if God used to be rather adolescent, but has taken a turn for the better and is growing up nicely over the last few centuries. 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. If we read the Bible as a cultural library rather than as a constitution, and if we don’t impose a Greco-Roman plotline on the biblical narrative, we are free to learn from that evolutionary process—and, we might even add, to participate in it.5

An analogy may be helpful in seeing what this idea of progressive understanding means. Consider the Bible a collection of math textbooks. There’s a first-grade text, a second-grade text, and so on, all the way up to high-school texts that deal with geometry, algebra, trigonometry, maybe even calculus. Imagine opening the