The God of Deep History

             I love finding pearls of wisdom in the rubbish pile of popular culture, and one particular pearl I found several years ago was a line spoken, appropriately, by the perpetually optimistic Barnabas T. Stinson, who said, “no one is hotter than God.”  This is a remark of deep theological wisdom with which the Christian mystics would concur, and the Muslim Sufis as well.  God is the end of all our desiring, especially those desires we will never admit to—and so, like any repressed desire, he is a perpetually hot topic of discussion, destined to be talked about—or at least around—not least by those who most passionately insist that he does not exist—and they do not desire him—at all.

            And yet, in all this perpetual discussion, there is much confusion.  It seems to me that a great deal of this confusion on the topic of God could be cleared up if we were a little clearer on certain points: specifically, on the difference between the god of the philosophers, and the God of Jesus Christ, with whom he is so often confused.           

            We Christians worship the God of Israel; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Our God is the God who works within history.  Since he is, as the creed says, “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible,” (indeed, on occasion, he has even been known as “the carpenter”) it is not inappropriate to describe him, under certain circumstances, at least, as a bit of an engineer.  But this hardly seems to be his own favorite self-description.  From at least his appearance to Moses in the burning bush, he seems to prefer presenting himself as the God who is there, acting in the midst of history.

            Therefore, since the theologians caution us that we cannot speak about God without analogy, and the cognitive scientists (literary theorists included) tell us that we cannot speak of anything without metaphor, let us reconsider this seemingly automatic response of ours in which we imagine God as a Great Engineer, to be praised by the pious for his wondrous works, and damned by the doubting for his failures of efficiency.  I would venture here to suggest that an even more appropriate image for describing this God, especially as he appears in the narrative of Israel—a far better analogy than “engineer”—might be that of “composer” (The analogy, of course, is an ancient one in the Church).  He is the composer of history, a grand piece of great length and breadth, with many themes and subthemes, concords and discords.  It is a story working with a huge array of characters, each with truly free will, and their own complex personalities and personal histories.  In the scriptures, we see how he does this work of composition, making music from the oft-discordant notes we play.  He turns Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers into salvation from famine for Egypt and those around her.  Moses, the 40-year-old murdering prince of Egypt who believed his people would soon follow him to freedom is forced instead to flee, and after four more decades herding the flocks of his father-in-law, he returns to Egypt as a liberator so meek his brother must be his mouthpiece.  Then, when he strikes a rock in anger instead of speaking to it, his so-called punishment is to shuffle off this mortal coil, be buried by God’s own hand, and then, in subsequent chapters, make a cameo appearance on Mount Tabor alongside Elijah the Prophet and the Transfigured Messiah.

            And that is just two characters from the first two books of the Bible.

            What if we were to imagine this very same approach being used by God from the very beginning of the creation, perhaps with Satan’s rebellion as the beginning of discord?  (Tolkien did something very much like this in the early cosmogonic sections of his Silmarillion.)  In that case, the history we might imagine for the cosmos, and for the earth in particular, might look very much like the story of our world as science has reconstructed it for us: a long, slow, historical unfolding process with ups and downs, twists and curves and seeming setbacks: “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said even before Darwin.

            We know from the scriptures that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  This is the theological axiom of creation.  God is the ultimate creator and sustainer of all things, celestial and terrestrial, visible and invisible.  But if we wish for a detailed  explanation of how this was done, we must ask our friends the scientists, who through much hard work have constructed a rather complicated (and long) story of how our cosmos, our earth, and the life upon it, came to be.  They still debate the details, as scientists will do, but the general story of a cosmos unfolding over vast stretches of deep time, and life on earth unfolding likewise slowly, seem quite well grounded in the physical evidence we have.  In the face of this, it is irrational to do as some have done, and read the first two chapters of the Bible as a scientific treatise, and so seek to compose a counter-narrative to the scientists’ tale based not on scientific data and inference, but on poor hermeneutics and a literary tin ear.

            The creation narrative in Genesis is indeed a counter-narrative, a counter-myth, but it is aimed, not against modern science, but against ancient mythology.  It demotes the heavenly bodies from gods, and conveyors of astral influence, to lamps and clocks hung upon the wall of the cosmos.  Leviathan becomes an eel in a bathtub, rather than some cosmic serpent—and the serpent, that symbol of life and immortality in so many cultures (because he sheds his skin), becomes, rather, the cause of the curse that expels man from paradise.  It is all orderly, all very much under God’s control (but with man’s disastrous free choice), and ultimately—lest we forget those who, like the Gnostics, condemned the material world as evil—it is all pronounced “very good” (but only after the creation of woman).

            If we do not insist on reading these words with strict literalness, we find not only a counter-narrative against the thinking of ancient pagans but a story not inconsistent in its general themes with the findings of modern science.  Here, we see a globe that moves from disorder to order; life forms come forth from it, not all at once, but first some, then others; finally, mankind is formed, as the beasts were, from the earth.  Science tells a similar tale, of life unfolding in stages, with various life forms appearing upon earth, existing for  a time, then, perhaps, vanishing.  The fossils show us, not a smooth transition from one form to the next, but the flourishing of many quite distinct forms, like themes unfolding one after the other in a musical piece, or distinct forms in a painting.

            It is all very symphonic.

            So many err by thinking of God as an engineer, and furthermore, one unhindered by any constraints, so he can conceive and instantly achieve the ideal form for all his creations.  Not for them the Biblical God of providence and patience, who took nearly 2000 years and several million people to produce from the seed of Abraham one woman, Mary, to whom was born the Christ.  These men and women deal with the god of the philosophers, that idol of the mind who is the mere projection of all our ideas of perfection.

            They were right, you know—Nietzsche, Feuerbach and Freud—when they said god was a projection of our ideas of perfection, that he was an idol that needed to be smashed with a hammer—or at least sounded out for its hollowness.  When Darwin and his disciples said that god would never have created the vertebrate eye, with its “suboptimal design,” they were right. 

            All these men were right in what they said about god.  But that is because they spoke of the god of the philosophers.  He is indeed a projection of our idea of perfection (and now that the ideology of evolution has replaced the idea of perfection with the ideal of the process of perfecting, the god of the philosophers has become for many the god of process philosophy).  Such a god would never have had anything to do with the messiness of vertebrate biology, or its even messier product: human history.

            But our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, does just that.  He dives right in to Earth’s history; creating, making, and shaping; calling, promising, covenanting, and cursing; and ultimately, donning our nature, becoming a lowly player in his own grand drama, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage of history.  He descends to the depths of our experience; he drinks full the cup of sorrow.  His idea of “optimal design” (bearing in mind that “optimal” always means “optimal for its intended purpose, given the practical constraints of the circumstances”) is the cross, the nails, the emptied tomb, and the nail prints in his hands on the third day.

            This is our God.  He is the God of Israel, the God of history; and if science is at all right about the cosmos, he is the God of very deep history indeed.  This history, as science and scripture both reveal it, is quite messy.  But then again, that would appear to be how our God works.  After all, he is eternal; he’s got plenty of time.