God of Many Colors

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.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

I'm just starting The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. This is a brand new book (released Sept 22 in multiple formats) that is receiving quite a bit of attention. Although only a few pages into it, the author appears to have done a great job capturing many of the fascinating historic and contemporary dynamics behind spirituality in general and monotheism in particular. Much of her conversation regards notions of God during the periods we are studying in class, that is the God of the Hebrew Bible. She seems to be particularly interested in finding "meaning" through spirituality.

Although a scholar, she does express her unique perspective on theological history. As such, there is a risk her ideas will stand in opposition to things we learn in class. That said, I'm willing to chance it. At 432 pages, it's a tomb. I've opted for the audio version in the author's own voice. Good bedtime "reading."

Here is a link to a great interview with Armstrong by the inimitable Terry Gross of Fresh Air fame: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112968197

The Case for God