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By Root 1490 0

in stone, as it were. This approach also warns us about the danger of another kind of idolatry to which we today are more susceptible. Although few of us today are tempted to freeze our understanding of God in graven images, we may too quickly freeze our understanding in printed images, rigid conceptual idols not chiseled in wood or stone but printed on paper in books, housed not in temples but in seminaries and denominational headquarters, worshiped not through ancient ceremonies and rituals but through contemporary sermons and songs. In this way, the constitutional approach to the Bible, it turns out, too easily camouflages a subtle but vigorous and popular form of conceptual idolatry.3

This idea of trading up our images of God will still be scary to many. What’s to keep us from trading down? What’s to keep us from throwing out good things and keeping bad things? The concern is an important one, but it is not sufficient—especially in light of the ethical abuses of the Bible we considered earlier—to cause us to abort our quest. In fact, if we set our course as any ancient mariner would, by making use of three guiding stars, I believe we can move forward with proper confidence.

First, we must align ourselves with the trajectory set for us by the Scriptures read in a narrative rather than constitutional way. Consider this diagram, in which each letter represents a biblical story, arranged in more or less chronological order:

It’s pretty clear that we can trace a certain narrative trajectory or plotline through these data points, like so:4

Now imagine that we are trying to choose between three different views of God in relation to the biblical narrative. Even though View 1 has close affinities with stories J and L in the biblical narrative, and even though View 2 has close affinities with stories M and P, wouldn’t it be clear that only View 3 can be seen as consistent with the whole narrative, even though it is distant from the earlier stories in many ways?

Of course this diagram simplifies a somewhat complex and nuanced interpretive process, but I think it also makes clear that this evolutionary view of our understanding of God does not leave us cast adrift in an “anything goes” theological sea. We have even more clarity when we add a second feature to our diagram. Let X, Y, and Z represent various visions of the future given us by the biblical prophets:

When we seek to orient ourselves with these visions of the desired future, together with a sense of the trajectory of the past, we have an even clearer sense of the kind of story we are in and a clearer feel for the kind of God who would be the protagonist in such a story. And finally we can add a sun:

The sun represents Jesus, for us as Christians the ultimate Word of God. Now we have not only a rich sense of the biblical narrative in the past and a sense of a desired future, but also a profound sense of the character of God whose light shines through the whole story, from beginning to end, alpha to omega. In this way, God’s character is never revealed fully at any single point in the story, nor can it be contained simply in any list of propositions or adjectives derived from the stories of the past. Instead, we can only discern God’s character in a mature way from the vantage point of the end of the story, seen in the light of the story of Jesus.

The Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood approached the Bible this way. One of Trueblood’s students told me that he often heard his mentor say something like: “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.” In other words, the doctrines of the incarnation and deity of Christ are meant to tell us that we cannot start with a predetermined, set-in-stone idea of God derived from the rest of the Bible and then extend that to Jesus. Jesus is not intended merely to fit into those predetermined categories; he is intended instead to explode them, transform them, alter them forever, and bring us to a new