The God of the Old Testament - Part 1
Perhaps controversially, we shall commence our brief reflection on God as depicted in the Old Testament (also called the ‘First Testament’ and the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’) by quoting the world-renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins. In his seminal work, The God Delusion, he writes:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
It has to be said that, from a particular point of view, Professor Dawkins makes a fair point. However, when you look more closely, his argument begins to unravel.
To begin to understand God as depicted in the Old Testament, we first need to take in the story as a whole. The critique offered above ignores many of the ways these earlier writers also describe God, ways that broaden and challenge Dawkins’ selective reading. There is more to the God of the Old Testament than what might be called his darker aspects. While that does not negate the troubling aspects of Dawkins’ version of God, it makes us wonder why he chose to be selective.
The second thing is that this depiction of God is also at times applicable to the human race. We need only look back over human history to see how easily Professor Dawkins’ words could be applied to us. Simply begin the paragraph with ‘The human race is arguably the most unpleasant…’ and the point becomes clear.
This is not an attempt to be clever. Rather, it suggests how the early people of Israel could not help but interpret and describe God in human terms, in their own image, placing onto God their own motivations, inconsistencies and weaknesses. The fact is, the way each of us describes God (and this includes Professor Dawkins) reveals an enormous amount about ourselves.
To be fair, there are certainly tensions in the Old Testament depiction of God. In Genesis 1 & 2, God brings order out of chaos and in Chapters 6 & 7, he brings chaos back with the flood. At times God is loving and merciful (Exodus 34:6-7), and then again harsh and vengeful (Deut.4:21–24). There is no easy way to account for this apparent paradox, except to observe that this inconstant portrayal of God is, in many ways, a mirror image of the very people who experienced God and wrote about him.
In a later blog, we will explore how Jesus Christ begins to clarify who God really is for us. For now, a further observation is worth making. A human being’s experience and awareness of anything significant develops over time. Things once regarded as certainties (such as childhood beliefs in Santa Claus, a toddler’s sense of life as one big playground or the teenage belief that they always know best) change with experience and, ideally, the growth into wisdom. That does not mean that earlier ways of thinking were somehow wrong, but that they were appropriate to a particular stage of understanding. As we mature, our beliefs about ourselves, the world etc. are reinterpreted and integrated into a more complete and authentic way of seeing things. The same is true of our experience and understanding of God. More in part two next week…