I'm often perplexed by the many ways God is represented in the Hebrew Bible.
At times there is one God and one God only as stressed in the book of Isaiah, yet at other times God is characterized as reigning over other god-like creatures line Satan (Job). In Exodus, God demonstrates his superiority over other gods. Meanwhile, the God of Genesis is all powerful and able to create the universe in the blink of an eye, while at others he battles to calm the powers of chaos (Psalm 89).
And then there are the passages in which God adopts female characteristics, as in Isaiah, yet throughout most of the Bible God is seen as masculine.
I believe part of the solution is reflected in the words of Karen Armstrong in her newly released book A Case for God. She argues that throughout most of the time during which the Hebrew Bible was being drafted, people understood stories about God were meant to be heard as metaphor. Literal interpretations were ridiculous as no human words could possibly describe God.
Among many points of wisdom she observes:
"People have written reams and talked unstoppably about God. But some of the greatest Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians made it clear that while it was important to put our ideas about the divine into words, these doctrines were man-made, and therefore were found to be inadequate. They devised spiritual exercises that deliberately subverted normal patterns of thought and speech to help the faithful understand that the words we use to describe mundane things were simply not suitable for God. "He" was not good, divine, powerful, or intelligent in any way we could understand. We could not even say that God "existed," because our concept of existence was to limit it. Some of the sages prefer to say that God was "nothing" because God was not another being. You certainly could not read your scriptures literally, as if they refer to divine facts. Do these theologians some of our modern ideas about God would have seemed idolatrous."
She goes on to say the concepts of mythos and logos were both essential and neither was considered superior to the other in our attempts to understand the world. While Logos was necessary to understand the world of our perception, mythos was essential to understand things transcendent.
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I agree that many of the stories served to help understanding the world around them. I think that can get sticky though. I teach at a Catholic high school, and in the past have taught a year long scripture course. Many of the students grapple with the fact that some things in the bible are taken as literal and others figurative.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to acknowledge that some of the stories were metaphors, however, can't that lead to a slippery slope for some? Where does the line get drawn? Maybe it seems juvenille, but in class, I see my students struggle with it regularly.
We find literal and figurative language in most writing, the difference with scripture is that both are scattered about one collection (or series) of books.
ReplyDeleteI also struggle with it from time to time and even find myself closing the Bible and returning later! Sometimes what helps me (and I am not sure I should do this) is to remember that we are made in the image of God. If we are taking on the many characteristics of God, then perhaps multiple images should be used to illustrate how well God relates to us.
ips417