Answering Another Question

In the comments for this post, Patti writes:

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"I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday about just this thing! A couple of responses to your Priest A/Priest B explanation:

Priest A: I, personally, find the Bible to overall be very confusing and contradictory. Sure, it talks about God's love, but also about his tendency toward genocide, jealousy, violence and demand for love. How do you reconcile this? Do you just choose to ignore the parts of the Bible that are confusing and contradictory as the "human" part of the text?

Priest B: If I am reading this correctly, you are saying that you believe the Bible is truth because it supports people's experiences of the divine. But that implies an assumption that experiences of the "divine" are supernatural and not born out of wishful thinking, brain chemistry, or some other scientifically explainable, uh...thing. :)

I think this is just a very difficult bridge to gap (it's been on my mind a lot lately), because there are people who can, and are willing to, believe in something they have no concrete evidence for. And then there are people who just can't, and have no frame of reference for understanding how someone could believe so certainly in something so intangible.

After 20+ years in the church [Milkweed note: Besides being cute and stylish and a good photographer, Patti is an atheist, and I mention that purely for context], I cannot point to a single experience that I would identify as "divine". Beautiful, heart-stirring, etc. but nothing I would call otherworldly. I wonder if some people are just wired for this kind of thing? I remember reading somewhere that ENFP's are most likely to be very religious. So, possibly I am a broken ENFP. ;)"

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OK-- although I can't really speak to the Myers-Briggs thing (although, if I remember correctly, I'm an INFJ), I'm going to try to tackle some of your other questions. This isn't going to be perfect, by any means, because I'm just sorting a lot of this out myself.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the seemingly contradictory parts of God-- well, mostly just fretting about them, because it's obviously to me that I still haven't arrived at a clear way to conceptualize this whole thing. Recently in the Adult Forum class at my church we had an opportunity to raise questions that the clergy would attempt to answer, and I basically asked the same thing you did, although I phrased it as wanting to understand the OT God (wrath and smiting) versus the NT God (Jesus and flowers).

Priest C (yes, another one) noted when I asked the question that while there are aspects of God that come across more clearly in parts of the OT than the NT, it's not like we're talking about two different Gods here-- we're monotheistic. I did tend to think of the hard to reconcile parts of God as either/or rather than both/and, and this past Sunday Priest A made some excellent points about how there is love all over the OT just as there is judgment/punishment all over the NT-- so, again, both/and. Which means that yes, God is both a loving and a judging God.

So what do we do with this? What do we do with the parts of Judges where people after people are annihilated by the power of God as the Israelites come into Canaan?


Ha! PEGGED!...I am such a nerd.

Well...I'm still not quite sure. And I listened on Sunday, so much so that I didn't even take notes on this, which means that I can't parrot back what Priest A said in response to this question. I'm kind of glad about that, though, because I need to wrestle with it myself some more. Right now, I'm still a bit puzzled.

Here's what I do know: there is a "human" component to the writing of the OT, like you mention, inasmuch as the Israelites are presenting themselves as conquering heroes. I don't think that means that every time it's noted that God was at the head of an advancing Israelite army, he wasn't really, though. Maybe he was.

Let me just segue-way into Priest B a little bit here. If you go back to the post I linked, Priest B mentions the Psalms as human efforts to capture the beauty of God, and that beauty is the beauty of love. It's pretty common, though, to be reading along in a Psalm about how God is faithful and everlasting and worthy of praise and then get to a part about how God needs to trample on the heads of the Psalmist's enemies until they explode like grapefruit. Those parts typically don't get read out loud in church, but again...both/and.

Here's a bit of what I remember Priest A saying-- part of it is that this was just a really bloody time in human history. You don't need the Bible to know that if it wasn't the Egyptians conquering somebody, it was the Babylonians or the Persians or the Sumerians or the Whateverians. The Israelites weren't particularly large or powerful at all, and were constantly intermingling with other nations and cultures and diluting at the edges, so it's not hard for me to believe that God needed to be with them in a powerful way in order for them to remain a cohesive whole and gain any land anywhere. And powerful sometimes meant wrathful and smiting, which makes me uncomfortable. But there it is.

Again hooking back up to Priest B's comments, it's partially my experience of the divine that makes me sit with these uncomfortable parts rather than just chucking the whole thing altogether. I think the word "divine" is maybe a sticky one to use, though, because it definitely connotes a kind of Coach handbag experience of the Lord, and I feel him every day in a constant, machine washable, Target bag kind of a way.

When pray now-- and it wasn't always this way, so things have either changed with practice or age or "experience" (ha) or a combination-- I breathe for a little first and just try to get tuned in to the God channel. It's a very real current of peaceful energy that I can feel. Sometimes it's more readily accessible than others. Sometimes I can get all the way in, and other times I just make my best effort and and hope that's good enough, but I consider all of that an experience of the divine. And that sounds freaky and weird and totally illogical, I suppose, and I guess that's the separation you were talking about between people who are OK with that and people who are not.

This is so long now that no one will ever read it. Probably not even me. So let me close with something from the NT. In John 20:29, Jesus lays the smack down on his apostle Thomas, saying "'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.' "

This is the whole Doubting Thomas thing, of course, where he needs to touch Jesus in order to fully accept his resurrection, but I like to focus on the word "seen" and how it can also mean "understand," as in "Blessed are they who have not understood and yet have come to believe." That's definitely me-- I do not always understand. But maybe there's something holy in being able to accept the messy and uncomfortable parts-- the exploding grapefruit head parts-- with the frolicking lamb and flower parts? Maybe accepting the mystery is part of living the truth? I like to think that it might be.