A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [54]
Now the talk-show host has turned a bit gray, as if he might be about to vomit. We wonder if he will call for a commercial break, not realizing that although our descendants still have TV talk shows, they no longer have commercials. He brings on the third caller, who says: “I’ve heard that in the olden days people who claimed to be devout believers actually used fossil fuels. They felt their personal comfort, convenience, and transportation needs justified toxifying the planet and throwing the climate into imbalance, which as we all know resulted in billions of deaths and millions of extinctions. That isn’t true, is it? It was only careless, amoral people who drove internal combustion cars and used dirty energy, right? Believers in God would never have participated in anything so destructive, right?”
What would we say? How would we feel? Does this little imaginative exercise—this role reversal—help us look at violence, patriarchy, religious supremacy, and other disturbing characteristics of some biblical passages in a new light?
PART III:
THE GOD QUESTION
11
From a Violent Tribal God to a Christlike God
Some readers were no doubt uncomfortable in the previous chapter when I suggested that less mature images of God can be found in the Bible along with more mature images. To say so painfully grinds against their constitutional view of the Bible, and it exposes the degree to which their vision of God is cast in the image of the Greek Theos and Roman Caesar. But it might help these readers if I add that even those less-mature images must have been improvements over the even more immature images they were replacing.
For example, for me, today, the Noah story, in which God wipes out all living things except one boatload of refugees, has become profoundly disturbing. True, I learned it as a cute children’s bedtime tale complete with cuddly pairs of furry animals. In line with the old maxim “What you focus on determines what you miss,” I was trained to read it as a story of divine saving, so I missed the small detail of divine mass destruction on a planetary scale. In recent years, though, I began thinking about how some might use the story as a “constitutional precedent”—if God single-handedly practiced “ethnic cleansing” once, and if God cannot do evil, then there is apparently a time and place when genocide is justified. And that means that maybe we (or our enemies?) could be justified in playing the genocide card again at some point in the future—another sobering reason to take this quest for a new kind of Christianity seriously in spite of the risks and opposition. The possibility of using the Bible to justify using the genocide card is chilling, especially when one recalls that this is not a hypothetical question. This very thing has happened again and again in the past, from Genesis 7 to Deuteronomy 7, to American colonization, to the Holocaust, to the Rwandan genocide, to Darfur. In comparison to a global flood that destroys all life except for a tiny remnant on one lifeboat, a few nuclear bombs are, after all (I shudder to write this), minor disturbances.
In this light, a god who mandates an intentional supernatural disaster leading to unparalleled genocide is hardly worthy of belief, much less worship. How can you ask your children—or nonchurch colleagues and neighbors—to honor a deity so uncreative, overreactive, and utterly capricious regarding life? To make matters worse, the global holocaust strategy didn’t even work. Soon the “good guy” Noah gets drunk, and soon after that his sons are up to no good, and soon after that we’re right back to antediluvian violence and crime levels. Genocide, it turns out, doesn’t really solve anything in Genesis, even if a character named “God” does it. (Could that be a worthy moral lesson to draw from the text?)
It’s useful to compare the Noah story to the earlier story it seeks to adapt and improve upon, the Utnapishtim story (from Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in the mid-1800s,