Is God Moody?

Time recently published an article by Robert Wright, which tries to sort out how “the God” of the three Abrahamic religions could start off as violent and then moved to be more graceful.  Wright gives the impression that God is somehow moody.  Wright also attempts to bring together the Christian Old Testament, the Hebrew Torah, and Islam’s Koran.  I found this article to be inaccurate and misleading because the author tries to make sense of God from a logical stand point and not a theological stand point.  Below are five statements from the article and my five reactions.

#1

“The Bible isn’t the only Scripture with such vacillations between belligerence and tolerance. Muslims, who like Christians and Jews worship the God who revealed himself to Abraham, are counseled in one part of the Koran to “kill the polytheists wherever you find them.” But another part prescribes a different stance toward unbelievers, “To you be your religion; to me my religion.”

My Beef: If you want to understand God, you must understand God theologically.  To understand God and compare the God of Christianity to another religion is like trying to compare apples and oranges.  These three religions say three very different things about God.  Most religion professors would tell you that.

#2

“But the fluctuations aren’t really random. If you juxtapose the Abrahamic Scriptures with what scholars have learned about the circumstances surrounding their creation, a pattern appears. Certain kinds of situations inspired tolerance, and other kinds inspired the opposite. You might even say this pattern is a kind of code, a code that is hidden in the Scriptures and that, once revealed, unlocks the secret of God’s changing moods.”

My Beef: The apparent fluctuations of God’s “personality” are the views of the biblical writers.  God is God and has never changed (it looked like God changed to God’s people, but God did not change, just God’s covenants changed), but from the early relationship of God and God’s people, God related to them like children.  Rules like this is wrong, this right, you cannot do this, etc…  Like a parent would tell a child.  When God “allowed” Israel to do something that was originally against God’s commandment it was a provision for the people.  Provision and divine grace are theological concepts, thus you need theological lenses.   As for the code, there is no code.  There is no secret.   God chooses to reveal himself in a way that God’s people would understand.  You cannot reveal the Christ until God’s people are ready.

#3

“The first step in seeing this code is to look to the world that gave us the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) and the Koran… There we’ll see how consequential God’s mood changes could be — how, indeed, a burst of vengeful intolerance helped give us monotheism itself; we’ll see that the birth of monotheism left us with what you might call a bad God.  But we’ll also see that this God then had bursts of moral growth — within both Judaism and Islam — and that the proven ingredients of that growth are around today, just when another such burst is needed.”

My Beef: God’s supposed intolerance is tied to God setting aside God’s people as holy and different.  This is what the kosher laws were mostly about.  Another theological concept that people often do not like is God’s providence.  God will do what God will do.  People now-a-days do not like the concept that God knows better.  People do not understand that when you believe in a higher power that higher power give you guidance, even if you do understand why, you follow that guidance.  When the accepted cultural morality does match with Christians they are branded as haters.  Most Christians do not (or should not) hate others for holding opposing beliefs.

#4

“Israel’s third King, Solomon… In addition to being famously wise, he was flagrantly polytheistic. The Bible handles this awkward fact by blaming it on his many wives of foreign extraction, who “turned away his heart after other gods.”  The Bible has the logic backward. In ancient times, when a man of royal blood married a foreign woman of royal blood, it wasn’t on a romantic whim. It was part of foreign policy, a way to cement relations with another nation. And that cement was strengthened by paying respect to the nation’s gods.  Solomon’s many wives didn’t lead to his many gods; his politics led to both the wives and the gods.”

My beef: Solomon’s story is typical of God’s people.  God makes a covenant, Israel follows, Israel breaks it, a prophet is sent to call for repentance, Israel comes back, and then the relationship is restored.  The author has it backwards, if you read Song of Solomon it is romantic in nature.  Even though marriage was contractual, wives and husbands still could  have romantic feelings.  Samson was talked into doing something that God commanded him not to do by a woman he had romantic feelings for, so why could not the same thing happen to Solomon?   Again, it helps to understand the theological nature to the biblical record instead of trying to only apply logic to biblical questions.

#5

“Paving the way for this eventual triumph of monotheism was a series of prophets who cried out for exclusive devotion to Yahweh, railing against the polytheistic ways of Israel. These prophets aren’t necessarily monotheists; they don’t deny the existence of gods other than Yahweh. They seem to be what scholars call monolatrists, insisting that Israelites worship only one God.”

My Beef: Not accurate.  The prophets of God were monotheistic.  Their inclusion of mentioning “other gods” in their prophetic speeches was an acknowledgment of the polytheistic world, but not a belief in other gods  (that is why English translations use a small “g” for other false “gods”).   If I refer to a god of Hinduism as a god, that does make me polytheistic, I am referring to their understanding of what their god is to them even though I believe they are not worshiping God, the triune God.  I am using language that is understood by another faith group.  We can distinguish between the actual divine being and things that are  incorrectly called gods.   In that last sentence I had to use the word “gods” because I am referring to the notion of false deities to reference what other religions call “god”.

Summation: I have a lot of other points, but those are the major ones.  Clearly, the author is writing from a non-faith perspective but still even secular scholars understand the theologial reasons why God acted in scripture the way God did.  We as Christians must think theologically about our faith and about God’s word because there are some important concepts that require theologically thinking.  Thinking theologically is thinking about “God things”  and how God relates to us.  Without it, we are left with a Bible that looks like just another anicent document.  The appearance of God’s changing “moods” are really the misunderstanding of how God’s people understood God to interact with them.  When God introduced a new covenant with Moses or David, it was because God was shaping his relationship with God’s people.  As we see with Jesus, the Messiah was foretold to come and redeem God’s people, but God’s people rejected Jesus because he was not what they wanted.  The story of God’s people and God’s providence clashing.