Let me see f I can ease into this one. People think our God is batshit crazy. All right, maybe I can clarify that a little bit. People not raised in the church (which is most of them these days) think the God of the Bible is violent, judgemental, capricious, and indefensible. And who can blame them? The predominant paradigm for reading the Bible in our culture is literalism. When Christianity is portrayed as the religion whose God bespoke the exact words of the Bible (and that those words cannot be modified, mitigated, metaphored, or challenged) then the Bible becomes God’s self-portrait, accurate in every nuance and detail. And read that way, what a portrait it paints indeed.
It is a portrait of a God who taunts an old, childless couple with the promise of a baby. Then, years later, when that promise is finally redeemed that same God commands this late-in-life father to commit the human sacrifice of that same only child. For those of us not inculcated with the lesson of Abraham’s unflinching faithfulness, they see inexcusable cruelty in the demand itself – the belated appearance of a substitutionary sacrifice notwithstanding.
It is a portrait of a God who effects the liberation of the chosen people at the cost of the most innocent of lives. The firstborn of Egypt died to convince Pharaoh to let them go. A God whose end is justified by a terrible means.
It is the portrait of an imperialistic God who wipes the indigenous peoples out of the promised land without mercy or remorse. Young and old, male and female, even infants and, on more than one occasion, livestock (as if they had a political affiliation). Sometimes the goods and properties are decimated, sometime permission is given to pillage and plunder. This is God cum Andrew Jackson cleansing the land for the dominant species.
The New Testament has better packaging, but the crazy God is still there. Hell is a big deal in the New Testament. A God who loves us unconditionally constantly threatens to consign us to eternal torment. God who loves the entire world leaves one narrow path for acceptance and salvation or else we’re back to that hell thing again. And while Paul declares that in Christ there is no slave or free, Gentile or Jew, male or female at another point the women are told to sit down and shut up because that is godly. Interpretation of the Book of Revelation has been left to the Left Behind loonies. According to their incredulous reading of what is admittedly a difficult to understand book says: a few get saved, a bunch get to live through a lot of shit, but most end up inhabitants of a lake of fire. Because God loves us.
And that literalist reading of the Bible has been put to use in the stratagem of substitutionary atonement. God, who loves everybody and created the whole infinite universe somehow requires a blood sacrifice for the sins of the human beings on the third planet orbiting a nondescript star in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy and that the best way to pay off that blood debt is to send (in traditional language) “his only begotten son to take on the sins of the world, suffer and die on a cross that we might reconciled with God.” God, who is love, is so constrained by what, honor?, that this infinite being cannot conceive of any other way of forgiving humanity aside from the suffering and spilling of blood.
No wonder so many people not raised in the church say they cannot believe in God, when this is the only kind of God they see presented by the church. I think too many of those “nones” simply think that if this is what God is then they are better off with no God at all. And if God is something other than what is read to them in the BIble, then maybe God is not batshit crazy but that we in the church are batshit crazy for believing all that stuff.
But there is a simple and actually pretty obvious way out of the batshit crazy trap. God did not write the Bible. At all. The Bible is not words from God describing God. The Bible is a collection of human testimony, deeply pious and deeply flawed, about how these people understood God, used God to justify their actions and history, and hoped for God to stand by them in good times and disastrous times. That is is not to say that the Bible is of no worth. It is in my opinion one of the most miraculous things that, whatever God is, the Divine can still speak through these ancient, obscure, arcane, flawed, sometimes hateful authors to flawed human beings even today. The Bible is a human document that glimpses God through the darkest, most crud-encrusted windows of human experience. The God of the Bible is the God we describe.So the Bible is not a self-portrait of God; it is a gallery of human portaits of how those ancient people saw God. And by grace every now and again we might just snag a bit of something that actually points us in a Divine direction.
One of the most obvious places that our culture deems Christianity or its purported God as crazy is the obsession over human sexuality, particularly homosexuality. But when we give up the erroneous idea that God dictated those words about who is lying with whom of what sex (and actually there are very few of those verses in there anyway), and that those words reflect the historical and human discomfort with sexual variance, then we are freed to a more open and compassionate understanding of ourselves (created in the infinitely complex image of God) and of God (who is not limited by human discomforts or descriptions).To paraphrase eminent New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan: regarding the biblical authors and homosexuality, they got it wrong and it is time we get over it.
Yes, admitting that we humans wrote the Bible means that we also have to admit that we don’t know as much about God as we would like to think we do. Certainty is a difficult thing to give up. Maybe doing so will make us more careful about declaring what God wants, what is God’s judgement or punishment, or who is unacceptable in Divine sight. We have to admit that trying to talk about God is always crazy business, but at least we are all in the crazy together.
I also realize that those who rely on a literal reading of the Bible will find this whole discourse, and me as its author, batshit crazy There is nothing in this writing that will convince them to change their minds. But as is probably obvious, I’m more akin with those who cannot buy a literalist methodology and are searching for other ways to explore their spirituality. God and the universe and human beings are complex, often undefinable realities. There is more to life than certainty. We all struggle to discern who we are and who God is and how we all interact in this muddled life we live. This may not be the sanest of all possible worlds, but at least God doesn’t have to be batshit crazy.
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