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…