Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [187]
How else to explain the “progression” of God in the Hebrew Bible? The God-Creator who walked in the Garden of Eden. The thunderous mountain God of Exodus. The somewhat removed God who used the prophets as go-betweens. The completely absent God of Esther.
Hand in hand with this view of an “Incredible Shrinking God” stands the rather cynical notion that the rise of both Judaism and Christianity represents another facet of humanity’s long Power Play. By adopting the view that human history is essentially about power—getting it and keeping it—the Bible emerges as one more form of power. History usually sees power in terms of muscle, military might, and money. But what hold is greater, what power more terrible, than the one that claims to determine a person’s earthly and eternal fate? In this scornful view, “orthodox” religion merely wants to establish the power of the priest over the people and take its place among all the other authoritarian institutions men have devised. God becomes a “Cosmic Carrot-or-Stick.” Be good and you will be rewarded—on heaven and earth. Be bad and you will suffer—here and forever.
This dismissive view, quite widely accepted these days, relegates God to mythology—an elaborately fabricated contraption with man-made glitches all over the place. But it is not the only answer to a question that has kept philosophers and theologians pondering for centuries. There are a few distinct alternative responses.
One of them is the answer Job got. This response can be quickly summed up like this: certainly God is still around. But he’s awfully busy with all the other things going on in the universe, which you are too puny to understand. So don’t even have the audacity to ask! It is short, sweet, and contains its own unrefutable logic. But like the Chinese food of countless jokes, it leaves us hungry for more an hour later.
Then there is the “Big Parent in the Sky” view. In this variation on the paternalistic viewpoint of traditional religion, God is a Cosmic “Ward Cleaver.” When we were little, we needed lots of attention, so God was always there for us. This God was a wise, caring, but occasionally imperfect Dad, capable of both unconditional love and a hard swat across the bottom. As time went by, and we humans “grew up,” God let us be on our own. This scenario, though naive, is still rather appealing. It means we are no longer bluntly faced with the threat of “Wait until your Father gets home.” And it allows humanity the right to make its own decisions and mistakes. People may feel about this sort of God the way many teenagers feel about their parents—“You are really so out of touch.”
The “Big Daddy in the Sky” is related to still another view I’ll call “Supernatural Selection.” In this scheme, God has evolved along with humanity over the centuries in a Darwinian progression. We’ve both become more sophisticated, less “primitive.” As we got “smarter,” God no longer found it so necessary to perform flashy parlor tricks with thunder, lightning, and parted seas. This God communicates with us on a more cerebral, or intellectual, level. The American philosopher William James may have had this type of God in mind when he wrote, “I myself believe that the evidence of God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.”
A twist on that notion is the suggestion that we humans certainly have changed, but God hasn’t. For many years, I wondered why the God of the Bible who spoke to people, performed miracles, and seemed so involved in human affairs had seemingly stopped calling. Had he lost our number? Only recently has it occurred to me that maybe God wasn’t the one who stopped paying attention. It was us. Perhaps our “primitive” ancestors, without all the competing