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…