Plotting God From the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome.  I wish you joy and safety today.

Here is a plot that can be extrapolated from the Bible.  God as the main character in the Bible story is my starting point.  

Next time, I will review the story of God as Israel's god.  For now, I want to explain God as if he, and in the Bible God is an extraterrestrial, magical Male, were a character in a novel.

Once upon a before time, there was a god who lived in the sky with an inexact population of other sky dwellers generically dubbed the heavenly host.  His name was Elohim which meant El and the other gods. 

For no particular reason, God-Elohim called forth light, presumably so he could see, and even though there were yet no actual sources of heat like stars, the light worked.  So Elohim began shaping land and sea so that they could nourish life. 

In the end of the creation week, God-Elohim created men and women.  He declared that the entire creation was all good, and then he took a Sabbath rest. 

In another once upon a before time, God-Yahweh began his creation in a desert devoid of life until water came up from the ground.  Using this same ground, Yahweh created a man named Mankind, which in Hebrew is Adam.  He planted a garden and put Adam there to live. 

Yahweh made animals for Adam, but they were not great companions, so Yahweh made a woman out of the Adam’s rib.  Her name was Eve.

God’s children, Adam and Eve, were disobedient children.  Their children became worse.  God decided to wipe out most of humanity because of the violence and wickedness or wickedness that was violence in the world.

Since men in general were disobedient, God decided to make a nation all to Himself who would be obedient and follow his laws.  He would uplift his nation among all the other nations as a shining example of obedience.

So God chose a man named Abraham to spawn his own country.  The children of Abraham become slaves in Egypt, so God recruited Moses and Aaron to persuade the Pharaoh to set his own slaves free.  God threw in a few plagues to help Pharaoh make up his mind. 

After his nation was set free, God gave Moses his ten commandments on a mountaintop so it would be clear to his people what God wanted them to obey.  

His people, including Moses, continued to disobey him so God confused them for forty years in such a way they wandered in a wilderness between Egypt and Palestine, also called Canaan. 

Once they reached Canaan, God made the sun stop in the sky so his nation could win a battle.  When everyone obeyed him, God let his army win battles.  If one person disobeyed him, God let his army lose battles.  

Since it is impossible for everyone to obey God, he allowed some of his nation’s enemies to live in the land alongside them.  That way, he could send his nation’s enemies to plunder and kill as a punishment for disobedience. 

To be continued…  Blessings…

God Story: the Plot

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. During my morning perambulation the thought occurred to me that there may well be more than three plots in the God story. When there is a break in tradition, such as we find after Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses onto the Wittenberg church door, a new tradition is formed and with it a new way of perceiving the God story.

Of course, the new tradition always claims to be the true tradition.

Then I began thinking about John Milton's Paradise Lost. It is a theologically driven plot in the story of God that emerged centuries after the canon was established for the Jewish and Christian Bibles. It is a literary-theological rendering of the God story in the Protestant tradition. Biblical characters such as Jesus and Satan exist before creation.  

Paradise Lost is Milton's extrapolation of the God story from the Bible. It is mythic, and as myth, Milton's epic is entirely appropriate and wonderful to contemplate.  However, the tiny cosmos of Milton pales beside the vast infinity of what we know our universe to be.  

When we actually read the Bible, little of what Milton imagines exists in the various books.  It appears to be a normal expression of devotion for artists and theologians to craft their own rendering of plot God story.  If enough people agree with their story a cult, a movement, or an institution can emerge.

Indeed, God people craft their own story from the Bible.  For example, when you read The Great Controversy, which is a primary text for Seventh Day Adventists, it is a story about a struggle between two magical beings named God and Satan who battle each other in history to save or destroy a chosen people that eventually becomes the Seventh Day Adventist Church. 

The story told there is selectively extrapolated from certain books in the Bible while others are ignored.  

I am not writing this to disrespect Seventh Day Adventists.  In fact, I believe they are truly remarkable and their members whom I met love God and life. My point is this:  their Ellen White has crafted a narrative plot taken from the Bible that is her own and has become the preferred plot of her church.

My Baptist tradition does the same thing.  In fact, Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists are theological cousins.  

We see the same sort of selective extrapolation in popular culture today.  Little of what exists about Moses in DeMille's The Ten Commandments can be found in Exodus.  The story as it is in Exodus would take a few minutes to tell, yet DeMille's movie is nearly four hours long.  

In a true narrative story, the plot as a sequence of events is easily identified.  The plot in God's story is not so easy to explain with a precision that we can all agree upon.  

I find it suggestive that the God story begins with two creation narratives that have two different names for God.  The so-called J Source which contains the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden uses the name Yahweh for God.  The so-called E Source uses the name Elohim for God.  

Both sources tell different stories about God from different points of view; both are interwoven into the Torah fabric. 

With two distinctive names for God and two different traditions, a consensus on a plot might be problematic for many.  As it is, the Bible manages to cobble together certain books that express a traditional veneration of Israel’s god.  A true narrative plot barely exists.

Israel's history often underlies any attempt to create a narrative plot of the God story. Plots are extrapolations that can be contradicted by other passages in the Bible. 

Even though what I am writing about is true, it strikes me as appropriate that our God of Love cannot be expressed by one narrative plot.  God is as comprehensible to us as we are comprehensible to an amoeba. 

To begin to capture the profound reality of our God requires the best storytelling, the loveliest poetry writing, the most profound devotional contemplation, and most inspirational preaching imagined by women and men. 

Blessings…

Plotting God

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome.  I hope my return here finds your return here to be satisfying and happy.  

I have been applying the elements of good storytelling to the Bible. Recently, I wrote about character and setting.  Now, I turn to plot.

There are two primary plots in the Bible, three if you are Christian. The first plot tells the story of God. The second plot tells the story of Israel. The Christian plot adds a new twist, what the early theologian Arius would call a "tertium quid," or third something.  I mean that not as a theological statement, but as a plotting statement.

Plot is the sequence of events in a story. In the Bible the plot is not so much a sequence of events, but a rendering of experiences, themes, and motifs gathered within an anthology of literature concerned with Israel's relationship to God.  The sequence of events is Israel's history, imagined and real.  

Just as there are elements of a story, there are elements of a plot too. Exposition is the first one, also called the basic situation, wherein the information of the story is narrated.  It is the actual rendering of who, what, when, where, how, and so forth.  

Complication is also an element of plot.  When I teach fiction writing to my students I tell them that their characters must squirm in the wind.  Life, such as it is, abounds daily with complications. 

Riveting stories necessarily must do so as well. I tell my students if their story is boring to create a hole for their character to fall into, and, often, they take that literally. So I get stories with big holes or lots of little ankle breaker holes.

The climax is that part of a story we are all waiting for as we read or watch a movie. A good plot has a satisfying climax.  

For example, when Moby Dick slams into the Pequod, leaving Ishmael as the sole survivor, the climax serves the duo function of transmitting a symbolic meaning and providing an exciting, conclusive event in the life of the narrator.

In Moby Dick, a story of biblical scope and scale, the symbolism suggests that evil wrecks its destruction, but something is saved.  

Sound familiar? 

In the story of God there is no climax since history keeps moving along.  According to the apocalyptic tradition, we are awaiting a climax of cataclysmic proportions whereby God flushes this crappy world down the divine toilet and replaces it with a new sky and earth.

We are told that the new world will be inhabited by the most devout believers.  That should give us all pause as we contemplate where we want to spend eternity.

For Christians, the climax happened after God raised Jesus from the dead. 

Finally, the last element of plot is the denouement or resolution of the story.  This one is tricky.  As long as history keeps expanding college textbooks, there is no resolution. 

The same story of greed, oppression, poverty, rape, greed, rapine, murder, greed, destruction, and greed goes on and on with extinction in sight. 

Christians believe a resolution may well be unfolding.  We will see it when we see in history the advent of peace and justice based on love.  According to Jesus of Nazareth, God’s rule is already here.  He and a handful of others were the first signs of its emergence.

Surely, there is more than a handful today who would choose to love. 

Blessings…

Technical Difficulties

My Internet service will be down until Wednesday.  Blessings until then...

God and Bible Settings

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  May God’s good providence lead you through your way in life.

I have been writing about the element of good storytelling known as setting.  I turn now to Bible settings. 

All action in a good story happens in a time and a place.  The primary settings for the Hebrew and Christian Bibles cover an area that spans Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Middle East in the Jewish Bible and Europe in the Christian Bible. 

Within those areas, writers tell the story of our main character, God.

The first setting is the sky above a formless earth.  As the earth is being created, a setting is being established.  This earth is understood to be a flat disc fixed into mountains below a sky where immortals live. 

In this setting the crowning creation is humanity.  On this earth, the story of God will happen.

The next setting is a magical garden.  It’s magical because Adam magically appears before the other animals magically appear.  The garden has at least one animal that talks.  It also has two magical trees.  One is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  The other is the Tree of Life.

The next setting is not clearly defined.  We know it is outside of the magical garden.  The symbolism of this place and time suggest that it is where we all live today. 

In this setting, Cain murders his brother and builds a city.  In this setting some of the sky dwellers lust for human women, copulate with them, and impregnate them.  In this setting, God regrets having created humanity so God sends a flood to drown everyone and everything except Noah, his wife, and six other people on an ark.

After the flood, we are suddenly in a world filled with countries and cities.  The ark lands on Mount Ararat.  The sons of Noah become fathers of named nations.

God’s action occurs in cities like Babel, Ur, Mamre, Sodom, and Gomorrah.  Regions like Canaan, Egypt, the Valley of Sidim, and the land of the Philistines are named as well. 

God comes and goes with a body in some settings.  In others, God appears in dreams, in a burning bush, as a visible, ethereal presence called the shekinah that dwells in a tabernacle and eventually a temple.  In some places, God appears in visions.  To Elijah, God came as a still, small voice on Mount Horeb. 

One of my favorite settings is Habakkuk’s place on the tower, possibly overlooking the wilderness for an invading army.  The poet muses about theodicy, or the justification of God in an evil world. 

Why is this world such a setting as it is beyond Eden where men must watch for invaders who will butcher and pillage their brothers and sisters?

All of us have been on that tower.  We see the news.  Everyday we see the terrible evil humans afflict on other humans.  

Just yesterday, I saw images of dead children stacked on top of each other as if they were logs.  These children were murdered by chemical weapons.  

To Christians, God continues to appear in all times and places.  For God is present where there is love, and we are commanded to love always. 

We need more of that kind of presence in the world.

Blessings…

Settings and Snakes

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I have been writing about God and the element of good storytelling known as setting.  Let me share a personal story.

There was a hill in Southern California where I walked everyday with three lemons in my hand.  I had taught myself how to juggle with lemons so I ambled the two miles or so to the top of that hill to practice.

A subdivision had begun there.  The road was already paved.  Strings were attached to stakes marking the lots that had already been landscaped.  A yellow bulldozer with clumps of soil stuck to its blade was left near the entrance along with a black dump truck.

My heart was heavy.  I loved living in California, but not in Orange County.  I missed San Francisco.  I could not go back there, but my best friend had offered me a place to stay in Atlanta until I got back on my feet.   

I was experiencing a career crisis that ran much deeper than where I wanted to live.  I could no longer be a professional minister.  I refused to stand before people and tell lies. 

My life had been a preparation for a pastor’s life.  Even in 1987 I was too scientific to really teach the Bible.  I had not matured enough to know I might want to minister and teach.  But I could not be a pastor in a denomination that was succumbing to the demonination of idolatry. 

My crisis was practical as well.  I couldn’t hammer a nail worth a flip.  I could change an alternator in a car, just barely, and not much else.  My talents resided in writing and speaking, but my prospects were Seven Eleven, Kroger, or JC Penny. 

I had used up my school energy and resources on philosophy, religion, and literature.  The idea of being a teacher occurred to me, but that would mean more school. 

I wended to the end of the road in that nascent subdivision seeking direction.  I stood atop that hill juggling and wondering, my mind naturally bending toward God.

Now, juggling is a yoga especially if lemons are involved.  If they strike the ground and burst apart the yoga is over. 

I heard a sound behind me as I juggled.  I held my lemons, turned, and saw to my astonishment two brown snakes were grappling on the pavement.  They had fallen from an embankment onto the cul-de-sac. 

These snakes were fairly long, about three feet in length, and were furiously engaged.  I thought they were fighting.  Later on, after viewing a nature documentary, I realized they could have been mating. 

I stepped away, even though I was at a safe distance.  I turned to leave, but I started thinking that I was a lot quicker than a snake as long as I did not get too close.  Since I wanted a closer look, I went back.

The snakes had vanished.  I decided to look for them.  I saw a small aqueduct ending into the cul-de-sac.  I began to walk into it.  At one point, near the zenith of the embankment, I realized those snakes could have gone in any direction.  They could also tumble upon me. 

I stood there, listening and waiting and feeling the warm California day.

Nothing happened.  There was no voice, no direction.  I imagined the messenger wrestling with Jacob, but no one appeared.

It was an event that, because of its timing, seemed numinous to me.  I had two directions in my life.  Also, I had seen two snakes battling or mating during the time of decision.

Was this what Jung called a synchronicity?  That is when an event from life coincides with what a person’s consciousness is feeling or thinking.  It happens in a way that is not related by cause and effect, but can be related symbolically.

I thought about Jung then.  I knew God did not send those snakes.  However, life is such that it is filled with signs and intimations if we could see them.  I decided to move to Atlanta.  That decision along with infinite other choices put me where I am today.  I am truly blessed.

Blessings…

Setting: Sitting Bull and Sacred Places

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome.  May you be happy and safe this day.

I have been writing about God in light of the elements of storytelling: character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme.  My last few posts have been about character.  I would like to consider setting.

In his fascinating book, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade writes about sacred space.  It is the place where people encounter the numinous, which is a technical term in religious studies that points to an experience of the divine or a sense of transcendence attributed to a god.  

Once the divine has been encountered there, that place becomes sacred for that person.  If he is a Moses, Mohammed, or a Siddhartha then the sacred place becomes the subject of lore.  Its numinosity spreads from a village, to a race of people, a nation, a planet.

The sacred place is often given a name, like Beth-el which means “house of god,” and a sacred pillar or altar is erected there to mark that place.  This is uncommonly common within all human civilizations, ancient and modern.

Many times, people experience the divine through a vision.  Often, the place is a high place like a mountain or a hill. 

Eliade says that the sacred can break through anywhere and at any time.  When the sacred happens, the place and the time can become holy for the one who experiences the divine.

I wonder if such experiences are so peculiar that a man or woman senses a special manifestation of their god. 

Setting in a story is as important as setting in battle, a sporting event, or a date.  Setting often determines the action of a story or it influences the action in a singular way.

Read the story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, and you will see how an island makes a story happen in a powerful and fascinating way for a hunter marooned there. 

There’s a sacred story about Sitting Bull that depends greatly on time and place.  Some white men who are landscaping around Lakota ground begin shooting their rifles at Sitting Bull and his friends who show up to investigate their activities.

Sitting Bull invites his friends to sit with him and smoke a pipe.  As the white men fire their rifles, Sitting Bull and his friends walk toward them and sit.  They begin to smoke a pipe as bullets hit the ground and whiz around them.

According to the story, Sitting Bull finished his pipe.  Slowly, he bumped it on a rock to loosen the ashes.  He picked up a twig and took his time cleaning out the pipe before he stood up and walked back to a safe distance.  All the other Lakota there marveled at his courage and his spiritual strength. 

The setting is the sacred place that is the land belonging to the Lakota people.  This story could happen in Neyland Stadium or the moon, but the characters and motivation must change.  The sense of what happened could not be replicated in the spiritual way with the spiritual meaning that this story communicates on Lakota soil. 

The Bible has many settings with such profound, spiritual stories.  Next time, I will write about a few.

Blessings… 

Westboro Baptist and the Content of God's Character

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome.  May the Lord protect and defend you.

During my daily perambulation this morning, I began thinking about God's character in the Bible.  Yaweh kills a lot of people.  Yet I could not recall any passage that says that God hates anyone.

I thought about something I had written earlier, how in a sentence the subject "God" should never be followed by the predicate "hates."  I may be wrong about whether or not the Bible says that God hates, but as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who preached a God of love, I cannot imagine that in all the God lore there is in the Bible that any statement of God hating a person would be true.

It was a beautiful this morning with a near full moon glowing from a wide nocturnal sky place bordered by tall trees.  Hate is certainly not suggested by the loveliness of the world.

Suddenly, two associations popped into my head.  I thought about Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."  That sermon is in the 11th grade textbook in our public schools.  There are a lot of stories about people falling to the floor when they heard that sermon.

It must have been the times in which it was written and spoken that caused such a reaction.  They must have been days full of fear.  Also, I know Edwards was a Calvinist.  Few theologies are as saturated with fear and loathing as Calvinism.

However, I would have fallen to the floor too, and I nearly did the first time I read it--from laughing. 

Edwards actually says, "God abhors you," in his sermon.  I reckon that means God abhors him too.

I don't know for certain, but abhorrence is a little more intense than just plain hate.  I hate working all the time.  I abhor working for little pay and support.

I hate drinking my coffee black.  I abhor not having coffee to drink.

I hate my personal sins, but I abhor the temptation to give up the struggle.

I hate hating people, even for a moment, but I abhor any thought of retribution or fantasy of anyone else's destruction.

I abhor war.

Poor John Calvin hated Catholics.  That hatred drove his theology.  He had to imagine a way to plunge everyone into his god's hell so only his kind could be spared.  Alas, it is his kind of theological hatred that pulsates among some hearts in our churches today.

The other association that popped into my head was Westboro Baptist Church.  If you go to my web site, you'll see a rainbow.  If you go to their web site, you'll see various ways of saying, "God hates fags."  We know where their hearts are.

My Westboro brothers and sisters have been woefully misled by their minister.  We should not follow ignorant men.  

I cannot tell if Brother Phelps is charismatic and misguiding his flock or is he misguiding sheep who, like him, love to hate.  

Most likely, the latter is the case.  Charisma works only for partisans.  Rarely, are we persuaded by someone's personal brilliance unless we are already in the same place they are.

Of course, Westboro Baptist members would believe that I am misled for preaching that God loves us all.  I'll go ahead in that case and be misled, but as a Christian it is my duty to discern what love commands and what it does not command.  

If my minister is a fool, I shall love him anyway and seek to edify him by word and deed.  

Blessings...

A Thousand Years to Know God

Christianity For the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth

Welcome back.  I hope my post finds you well today.  I have been writing about God as the main character in the Bible's story.

I remember how distressed I was to learn about heterodoxy.  It is a technical term used in religious studies. Heterodoxy is the belief that God is one god among many. Think of Zeus and his mountain host.

I learned that term in my Old Testament class when I majored in philosophy and religion at a public university. 

In the oldest tradition of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh is imagined as the chief, dwelling in the sky with other sky dwellers called the heavenly host.

As a character in a story, Yahweh is jealous, vindictive, remorseful, loving, and kind.  As we read the Bible, we learn a lot about Yahweh that contradicts our faith that God is love and justice.

For instance, Yahweh becomes a liberator of his enslaved people.  He does not merely cause the Hebrews to vanish and reappear in Alabama, which should be as easy as winking for someone who can instantly make stars appear; rather, he sends Moses, ten plagues, and a spell that coerces Pharaoh to deny the Hebrews their freedom.  Yahweh really wants to use those plagues.  

It's a great story, but it seems like such a fuss with so much needless suffering.  The story is consistent with an idea that runs throughout the Hebrew tradition.  Nothing in the world happens without God allowing it to happen or making it happen.

That is why we have 90 year old women birthing babies.  That is why we have boys with slingshots defeating armored, sword wielding giants in battle.

Eventually, in the later books the heavenly host fades and the one God emerges.  That God's concern has shifted as well from being a god of the one nation to the God of all nations.  

By the time Jesus begins his ministry, God has become a God of love, justice, and peace.

I asked my Old Testament professor, Dr. Thor Hall, how God can be the same yesterday, today, and forever yet change so much in the Bible.  The answer is obvious, isn't it?  

Dr. Hall said that it is not God who changes, but God's people who change.  As people of faith live and breathe and have their being in God, they are transformed by revelations of God's nature. 

God has always been love, justice, and peace.  The earliest tradition glimpsed that God, but was a thousand years away from knowing that God.  

I appears, then, that the spiritual evolution of our species can be as graduated as our physical and cultural evolution.

Blessings…

The Content of God's Character

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I am having so much fun thinking of the Bible as God's story.  

Let’s begin with character.  Dr. King said that we must judge people by the content of their character.  This is true in fiction and life.  Both, I would argue, are often very nearly identical.

If God were a person living on earth, that is, one living specifically as a world ruler, then God would not be able to become what God became in the Bible.

For one thing, God would be locked up by an international court, and the key would be thrown into the fires of Mordor.  It is difficult to transform in prison from a person who kills thousands to a person who loves so much that when people speak of love they speak of the one imprisoned.  

In the Jewish Bible, God transforms from a fiend to the God of steadfast love for the nation.  In the Christian Bible God has become the very essence of love empowering Being-itself.  

First, the fiend:  God uses weather to commit genocide, and then to nuke two cities.  God murders individuals such as Onan.  God told Moses to return to Egypt to set his people free, but on the way, he meets Moses in some godforsaken place and seeks to kill him until a flesh bribe is paid.  

The argument that God does not murder because God is God is lame.  It would be like a president saying anything he does is legal because he is the president. 

Back to God:  he (and this god is most certainly a man) inspires other people to waste whole families because one among them disobeyed a silly commandment.  

As far as commandments go, Yahweh's obedience test for Adam was also silly.  If Yahweh did not want Adam to eat from a certain tree, then he should have created the garden in Utah or some other place away from where the tree had been planted.

But those of us who love stories know that the Hebrew story of humanity would have ended if Adam had died for his disobedience.

Back to God:  to punish the people he loves, he raises armies in order to teach them a lesson by destroying their homes and lives.

Imagine those Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans who thought they were merely expanding their worldly influence, but in reality, they were pawns sent to punish disobedient Hebrews.  Think of empires as various switches God yanked off the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  

We love to say, rather piously, that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  That expresses a Platonic yearning for a place where goodness is real and unchanging since in the world of experience we find goodness is often commingled with the bad.

However, there is a beautiful dynamic shift in God's character that is expressed among Hebrew poets, those whom we call prophets.  In their verses, God becomes a God of love and justice.

Blessings...

Sabbath Today

I'm resting from writing today.  Blessings...

Harry Potter and God

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth

The Harry Potter books are such great page turners for many reasons.    

The main characters are Harry, Hermione, and Ron.  They are such adorable, riveting, and interesting characters.  Whether reading the books or watching the movies, I experience the joy of watching three people whom I care about transform into adults whose lives are imperiled by withering adversity.  

Three of the minor characters, Professor Snape, Professor Dumbledore, and Voldemort, are so important to the story that they arguably are main characters.

Indeed, you could make an argument that in all seven books, the main character is Professor Snape.

There is a host of minor characters too who drive the story to the end.  For example, Professor Slughorn does not appear in the books until the sixth book yet he knows something that is crucial to the plot. 

Setting drives the story.  The action that unfolds at Little Whinging and Hogwarts is uncommonly from each other.  When the Hogwarts setting spills into the Little Whinging the story juices up in remarkable ways.    

For example, when a house elf, something I've never run across in fiction, suddenly appears in Harry's bedroom in the second book.

The conflicts are many and interwoven in interesting ways. I cannot think of any conflicts that do not unfold in these books: man vs self, man vs man, man vs woman, man vs supernatural, man vs nature, man vs machine, and man vs society--muggle and magical.

The plot is a seven book narrative string, or cord I should say, that never frays.  The plot has exposition, that is, the stuff that happens.  It has complications, many in all those magical devices imagined by the author.  It has a climax, possibly two, that is explosive.  Finally, the denouement or resolution makes the world right again.

And such multifarious themes that touch on common human experience!  Themes of love, loyalty, duty to friends and family, the struggle against evil in oneself and others, death and salvation always for some, punishment and forgiveness always for some.

After I read all seven books, I felt so much sorrow as I neared the end.  It is grief that one feels because we know the best things in life must end.  Once the books and the movies were done, I longed for more because I fell in love with the characters.  

I read the books three times and not once was God mentioned, but that's okay.  I've read a lot of God books that never mention Harry Potter...except...well...there are...arguably...thematic links.

When we turn to the God library, there is only one main character in the Jewish Bible.  That character is male and has several names:  Elohim, Yahweh, Adonai, Jehovah, El-Shaddai, El-Elyon, and El.  

The character called God is a dynamic character in the fictional sense that God changes.  God is not a flat character who remains the same throughout the story.  All the other characters, from Moses to Mephibosheth, are minor.  Many of them are dynamic, however, and that’s a nice touch.  Moses changes from a fearful, hesitant servant to a powerful leader who screws up.  

Even Samson changes.  He's a dummy until the very end when we see he has transformed from a seeing man who was blind to a blind man who can see.  Alas, in his wisdom he murders a lot of people...and I thought blind men saw better.

There is only one setting, and it is expressed in the first verse: everything.  God dwells in everything, or to make my theistic friends happy, God dwells so nearby everything that God feels as if God is in everything.

"Everything" is broken up into many places:  Eden, Ur, Mamre, Babylon, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Judah, Galilee, and Jerusalem.

Look at all the conflicts:  God vs self, God vs gods, God vs man, God vs woman, God vs supernatural, God vs society, God vs machine.

There is a narrative strand that courses through the Bible although it frays in all kinds of directions.  I see the same story of a good world gone bad and a God that uses people, places, and things to return the world to its goodness.

Look at all those themes.  Many would argue that the Bible is a foundational repository for all themes literary.  

The Bible is not a page turner however.  That is because it is written by many people and it contains all kinds of writings written for different purposes:  myths, legends, poetry, history, genealogy, proverbs, short stories, hymns, gospels, sermons, letters, and a terrific Stephen King bloodbath at the end to punctuate all the books with finality.  

Just like Harry Potter, the main character wins in the end...with help.  

Unlike Harry Potter, the story ever ends and the love I feel for the main character goes on and on.

Blessings...

How To Tell An Everlasting Story

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I teach fiction to teenagers.  When I teach it, I give them examples of the elements of fiction:  character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme.  

All those elements appear in all stories.  Rarely, as in some short stories, is there one of each element.  In stories, there can be a multiplicity of characters, settings, etc.

Every time I teach these elements we talk about what makes a story sparkle, what makes readers turn the pages or go back to the story over and over.  The elements, combined with tone, mood, and point of view, appeal to everyone, but only one in the short list gives stories their dynamite.  

You can create ho-hum characters, an exchangeable setting, a clunky plot, and hackneyed themes, but throw an interesting conflict into a story and watch it ignite.  Conflict is why lousy movies make so much money.

The story of Adam and Eve is allegorical from the get-go.  Anytime anyone reads a narrative with obvious symbols, a bell should go off in their heads that lets them know they are not reading history as it happened.  That bell, by the way, is only for people who are incapable of detecting lore before they step through its portal.

Look at this story of Adam and Eve.  The Hebrew name Adam means "mankind" (bell ringing softly here).  We have a garden (bell ringing a little louder) with a talking snake (ringing like Scrooge's now) and trees with long names (clanging everlastingly).  

Adam is shown all the creatures of the world, having named every single every single every single one (except the microbial creepy crawlers and raccoons).  We must assume Yahweh created them in pairs, but maybe not since Adam was the only one of Adam's kind.  So goes the logic of the story.

Yahweh figures out that Adam has no suitable mate.  That one cow, elephant, roach, kangaroo, kangaroo, the really funny one called an armadillo, and let's not forget the toucans-- none were great chums.  
Adam must have named the snake.  He could talk at least, but the things he said must have made him unsuitable too.  

Of course, the list of animals goes on and on.  We cannot be certain that the animals Adam named boarded Noah's ark.  

We can shorten the list if we imagine only species indigenous to Mesopotamia, but then we would have to take out the armadillo and the kangaroo.

It's funny to imagine Adam, if you follow the logic of the story, having the intellectual command of language and experience of reality to come up with all those names, in Hebrew, of course. 

What is the Hebrew word for kangaroo, armadillo, and raccoon? 

The story is as much about women as it is about men.  

All those animals are not doing it for Adam so Yahweh puts him to sleep, takes out one of his ribs (and we must imagine it growing back immediately since men and women really do have the same number of ribs), and Yahweh then grows Eve, the first test tube fully grown non-baby.

Now, this story that began so bizarrely suddenly takes an interesting turn as an incipient conflict emerges from that one rib.

Blessings...

Chief Among Chiefs

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.

Every Sunday morning at church, I make my way to the fellowship hall where the coffee pot awaits me.  My cup runneth over on the Lord's Day; one sip pushes my soul beyond regular glory to that elevation of presence uplifted a smidgen more via caffeine.  

On the way into the kitchen, where the great silver idol pours the divine sacrament into wholly hot and bulbous modern pottery made of glass, I always pass a table of old white guys who sit and visit through Sunday school. One of the men always quips that they are the sinners class.   

The voice from the old church-me of long ago blurts from the back of my head a comment that would seem wholly appropriate were these old guys young teenagers.  It goes along the lines of the responsibility to refrain from skipping Sunday School mired in a tone guilt. 

That voice is a throwback from more pious times that I am happy are passed.  

Instead, I laugh.  I say I should join them, and I would gladly, and may yet someday.  I feel I must attend my Sunday School class since I began going there a few weeks ago.  In Sunday School we are examining various affirmations of faith that have appeared in the history of First Baptist.  In a couple of weeks we will be studying the Gospel of Mark.  I would not want to miss that, for it is my favorite gospel.  Maybe I'll hang out with the sinners before we begin Mark.

I really should attend the sinners class.  I heard Barbara Brown Taylor explain sin as a word that points to something real in life.  Indeed.  

When I was in Campus Crusade for Christ, I always thought the strongest evidence that humans needed God was sin.  I was one generation removed from the worst blood bath in human history punctuated by a weapon that incinerated 150,000 people in a few seconds... twice.  Sin was certainly indisputable.

In my own life, I have always been blessed with the ability to look at myself in the mirror and wish I could file for a divorce.  I find the ability to blame myself for my bad decision making to be lacking in so many people today.  

Those who say we live in a culture of entitlement are correct.  It extends even more it seems to the attitude that I am entitled the right and reason to place blame for my faults on others and other circumstances.

Few want to place blame on that man or woman staring back in the mirror with a tooth brush in his or her mouth.  I know in a world of sin and iniquity, I am a chief among all the other chiefs.  

Blessings...

Night of the Soul

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I have known some dark nights of the soul.  There was the time I sat on a man's porch waiting for him to come home.  I had every intention of wrecking violence upon him.  He had betrayed me in one of the worst ways a friend can betray another friend.  

The adjective "wrecking" is intentional for it points to the ideas of collision and its woeful aftermath.

I found myself feeling like Montresor in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" who said:  "The thousand and one injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Montresor served his dish of revenge coldly.  He planned revenge that would escape God and man's punishment.  I had been seized by a deadly seventh sin.  My soup roiled with heat.  

I fully intended to be my own avenging angel: wrecking, reckless, without impunity, impetuous, and without the wisdom that stays the hand of self immolation.  I would have lost everything, my job and self respect and my right to number myself among others who love in this world.

I remember the wooden porch where I sat and pondered as I cooled off was painted the color of dolphins. A concrete walkway extended from the stairs to the public sidewalk where pinched grass squeezed between long cracks.  Nature had broken the walkway in places so that deep fault lines raised the concrete and pushed it against the sections where they had been seamless.  A morning mist rose from wet, hot grass from the lawn.  

I thought about the great men I knew from history whom I sought to emulate:  Socrates, St. Francis, Gandhi, Clarence Jordan, Dr. King...and Jesus of Nazareth...always.  

Just planning violence, even thinking it had caused me to fall short of God's way.  I must have gone through all the stages of good sense.  I pondered jail.  I felt in my heart the terrible rip in my life that would never heal.  A long time passed and I transformed back into myself.  I departed a lucky, wiser man.

Today, I am yet ashamed for having held such thoughts in my heart. We fancy ourselves such great and holy men and women of God yet in a moment find ourselves in need of forgiveness, healing, and time.

Of course anything could have happened.  I was no spring chicken then nor was I a winter rooster. Had I been injured, thinking pragmatically here, who knows what scars I might have carried through life, scars that might have ached in the mornings and evenings of my days along with the spiritual scar of being a monumental weakling before God. 

God was silent and invisible that morning.  But I walked away.  I am glad of it.  My life did not convulse that day.  Now, I am merely ashamed to have entertained that old demonic temper I have struggled so long and hard to incapacitate.  I am embarrassed for having acted like a jackass towards my friend who really had not done me the wrong I imagined.  In fact, what he did revealed to me that so many of life's best surprises emanate from those paths directed by the worst surprises.

Blessings...

God Is Our Rainbow

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I can understand why someone would be an atheist.  God is utterly invisible.  If there truly were no God, how would men and women reason to create God?  Well, it seems obvious to atheists that we would reason pretty much the way we have been for centuries.  

God is like the void in the void.  We see all this splendid life around us, all of it working very well on its own, and we would add another functional force upon it: a god, an all emanating, all inhabiting Presence, a personality?  

Many mystics speak of the dark night of the soul.  The absence of God could be keenly felt by them.  William James' still relevant work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, recounts spiritual lives of faith seized by exuberance and by absence.  

There is a dreadful time that all serious mystics for God, all seekers after God, experience the Great Silence and dreadful invisibility of God.  For such who would not live a wasted life that time can be so terrible.  How do you live beyond it without losing faith?  

Even worse, how do you live with the terrible question of what might yet be once you cast your faith aside?   What do you do with those moments when you brush up against death or are surprised by a numinous startling rainbow, and you wonder, "What if?" 

In Mark's gospel, the first gospel written, the one wherein Jesus is not as magical as he is in the other gospels, Jesus cried out on the cross, "My God!  My God!  Why have you forsaken me?"  

If Jesus believed, as some scholars suggest, that his ordeal would have finally called God down to "disingentile" the world, thereby making the world right again with God's people ruling in their right place in God's holy land, then his last words carry great weight. God did not arrive and Jesus may have felt the Deuteronomic curse. 

Even if, as other scholars believe, Jesus had started trouble in the Temple, and was taken to be immediately crucified without any of his followers there to witness it (according to Mark's gospel they fled), then his words are the words of Mark's community.  We infer that they too suffered great persecution, possibly by Jews, most likely by Romans.  If your government is killing you and your friends and loved ones, you might feel forsaken by God. 

Another "if" about Jesus:  if he knew that he could call down angels to save him, then the words in Mark are pointless drama.

However, those words spoken point to the sense of God's utter absence.  In life there are for many people interminable stretches of there never being God.  

Like this morning, as I walked, ensconced in thought about the coming day, the first day of school and all of its certain trials and indignities, I had no sense of God.  I was not even thinking about God.

Suddenly, I saw scurrying in the dark a tiny animal that looked like a worm, it's body rigid and straight, moving rapidly across the street beside my foot.  I detected the movement near the rim of a street's light and used my cell phone to illuminate a closer look.

Was it a centipede?   If it had multiple legs, and it most likely did, they ambled beneath its body.  A centipede does not look tubular like a worm.  

I do not know what kind of critter I was seeing.  I will look it up.  But the affect on me was profound.  It changed the temper of my morning perambulation.

I am always utterly surprised by nature.    

And then, like a rainbow, a magnificent natural, surprising rendering of marvelous colors that still can be and still can seem so miraculous, God broke into my consciousness.  

I began to ponder what I might write this morning as I pray with this keyboard tapping.

Blessings...

Gods and Generals and Rainbows

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Welcome back.  In the movie, Gods and Generals, there is a scene after the battle of Fredricksburg where the Northern Lights appear in the sky above the living and the dead.  

Shelby Foote mentions this rare occurrence in Ken Burns' excellent documentary The Civil War.  Foote suggests that the aurora borealis would have engendered religious meaning to both sides. Indeed, religious sentiment is expressed in the movie.

I have never seen this magnificent display, but I have seen pictures. I hope to one day travel North to watch the night sky blaze with those luminous streams.  I imagine it appears quietly over the night sky, looking so eerie and divine that one cannot help but attribute it to a god.  

It is, however, a natural display of electrons from solar winds interacting with our atmosphere.  The swirls "follow the lines of the magnetic force generated by the earth's core."

The timeliness of the event struck the soldiers, and scholars today, as being significant.  It happened on the very night after the Rebels decimated the Federal army.  

If the Rebels saw the Northern Lights as a sign that God was with them, as they most surely did, they were proven to be bad interpreters of a natural event.  History has proven since Appomattox which side God favored, if we think of God favoring one side over another in a war.

RAINBOWS

A rainbow is similar to an aurora borealis in that it appears in the sky.  We have all seen a rainbow.  It is a spectacular sight, often making us stop what we are doing to stare.  This can be a bad idea if we are driving.

To ancients, the appearance of a gigantic arch of many colors bending over the sky must have been a miracle.  In the Hebrew stories of the flood, the rainbow signifies God's promise to never destroy humanity by flood again.  

In the older, Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the rainbow is Ishtar's necklace shown yet with no promise.  

Of course, a rainbow is merely sunlight shining through raindrops.  It tends to happen later in the day because of where the sun's position is in the sky.

A rainbow would appear anywhere, and anytime, on any planet with sun and rain without gods or a God making it happen.  It is a law of nature.  It just happens that sunlight through rain or glass is bent into a prism.

I took a picture recently of a rainbow fragment shining on my dining room wall.  It was not much bigger than a half dollar.  The sun had dipped close enough to the horizon to shine into my window and create those splendid colors.

Again, to the ancients, the appearance of a rainbow must have been a sign that the gods or a god were real. Even now, I thrill to the sight of a rainbow.  If the sun is shining late in the day, and there is rain, I start looking for it.  I have to be careful not to wreck my car.  
It makes me think of God too, but not as a divine, corporeal being who waits for the sun and rain so he can stop what he is doing, and then bend a bow, and then make it appear magically in the sky.  

Rather, I am one who appreciates how a natural world generates an epiphany or a numinous sense of God.

I often wonder if an atheist can see a rainbow without the idea of a god ever occurring to him or her.  Often, the experience of God comes as an emanating association with life as easily and naturally as colors come from light and rain.

Blessings...

Sabbath Today

Have a happy day.

Christianity for the next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Thanks for visiting.  I hope my words today give you a sense of being okay with your faith if you are someone who wants to have faith in our modern world.


I have been writing about cosmology.  I can think of only one statement in the Bible that was insightful and accords with what we know today.  Job wrote that the world hangs on nothing (26:7).  In other translations, the world is suspended on nothing.  

Well, we know our planet is not suspended.  It is moving on its axis and in orbit around the sun.  Nonetheless, we have here an ancient writer whose mind grasped for outer space without him really knowing there was an outer space.

In his mind, the skies rested on a foundation of mountains and the earth just sort of floated.  Or did he imagine that entire cosmos was suspended, including the realm where God and the heavenly host lived?

In our world, gravity is a property of mass.  Planets and stars tug on one another in outer space.  Without gravity, everything would just move in a straight line.  Instead, solar systems and galaxies are moving through space and time.

This is what Being does and our God, who is love, empowers it.

Blessings...

Atheists, Agnostics, and Whatever the Heck I Am

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Yesterday, I overheard fellow teachers discussing so and so as being an atheist and another so and so being an agnostic.  Everyone pretty much knows I'm ordained.  Because of that I did not expect anyone to ask me what I thought about the subject.

The truth is there are different ways to believe about God.  Most of them have to do with God's relationship to Being.

Animist:  gods or spirits exist within Being
Pantheist:  Being is God
Panentheist:  Being exists within in God
Polytheist:  many gods within Being
Deist: god made Being then moved on 
Theist:  Being was created by a god

Agnostic:  does not know if there is a god
Atheist:  knows there is not a god

That's about it.  If I've forgotten anything let me know.

Atheists and theists are kinfolk in the sense that they are both absolutely know they are right.  They really do not need proof or evidence since they already know the truth.  Both can be arrogant. Both can be dogmatic.

If I had to choose whether atheists or theists had the better evidence and arguments, I'd have to go with the atheists since they are not required by logic to prove that God does not exist.  

No one goes around proving that gods, unicorns, abducting aliens, zombies, goblins, angels, vampires, demons, and Vanderbilt football national championships do not exist.  The burden of proof is always thrust upon the person who makes a fantastic claim. 

Indeed, fantastic claims require fantastic evidence.  If I declare the earth moves in a world where everyone believes the earth is flat and immovable, then my evidence better step up to the challenge.  

Prophets and seers are lousy evidence.  In fact, in our world today, few people accept the word of an authority as proof.  

Let's say in an imaginary world a prophet wrote in scripture that the earth moves.  If he did that, if that were in the Bible, then that prophet made a lucky, insightful guess.  

That it was written by prophet who is sanctioned by God, according to the scriptures, and in a world that accepts prophetic writings as conclusive proof, does not make the prophet's claim true--especially in a world that requires scientific evidence.  

Theists have lousy arguments that do not justify their smugness, so it is tempting to believe that their smugness is a smoke screen.

Atheists seem to have the arguments and evidence on their side, but their claims of certitude are not persuasive for many reasons.  

To be an atheist implies omniscience if an atheist truly believes he or she knows there is not a god.  I do not ever see myself having that much certitude about anything.

I am a blend.  I am agnostic in that I most certainly am not certain that God or gods are real or illusions.  I suspect they all are illusions in some way.  However, I am a person of faith.  Although I do not know for certain that God is or is not, I do love God, and in that sense I do believe in God.

The more I love God, the more comfortable I am with not knowing.

Instead, I prefer to be humble.  It is okay to admit that we do not know as we love one another.  Doctrine is highly overrated and has caused much grief in the world.  

So I operate as an agnostic panentheist with deist tendencies.  I believe we live, move, and have our being in God.  I believe we are made in God's image because we have consciousness, and we have the ability to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.  We do not need God to tell us where to go to college or whom to marry. The thoughts that pop into our heads are not God's thoughts, but we are connected to God as we live.  

We have everything we need to reveal God in our lives to this world.  We must be about that business.

Blessings...