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by
Peter Enns
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January 11 - May 24, 2020
And so the writer of Jonah told a story of God’s expansive mercy for non-Israelites; in other words, maybe God cares for other people too. And the author used as his illustration a clearly fictionalized account of their long-gone ancient foe to express his newfound belief, or at least hope, that God is more inclusive than they were giving God credit for.
Chronicles is not a repeat of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. It is a retelling of those books from a much later point in Jewish history. In fact, it is nothing less than an act of reimaging God.
1 Samuel through 2 Kings were probably written before and during the Babylonian exile, and the main question these books address is, “How did we get into this mess? What did we do to deserve exile?”
And these books answer a different question altogether, not “What did we do to deserve this?” but “After all this time, is God still with us?”
The reign of King Manasseh in 2 Chronicles—with his deportation to Babylon, repentance, and return to his homeland—is not an account of Manasseh’s reign. It is a symbolic retelling of Judah’s exile and return home after the captives had learned their lesson and repented of their sins.
Those were the active questions of their day. Not, “What did we do to get into this mess?” as the author of 1 and 2 Kings was asking, but, “How much longer do we have to wait for a sign that God hasn’t abandoned us?”
That is to say, the retelling of the reign of Manasseh (and 1 and 2 Chronicles as a whole) is an act of wisdom—of reading the moment and reimagining what God is doing and, more important, what God will do in the (hopefully not too distant) future.
Watching how the Bible behaves as a book of wisdom rather than a set-in-stone rulebook is more than just a textual curiosity to be noted and set aside. Rather, it models for us the normalcy of seeking the presence of God for ourselves in our here and now. Like that of the biblical writers themselves, our sacred responsibility is to engage faithfully and seriously enough the stories of the past in order to faithfully and seriously reimagine God in our present moment. The Bible doesn’t end that process of reimagination. It promotes it. Isn’t this what all this Jesus business is about, anyway,
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Connecting with the God of the Bible would be a lot easier if we didn’t know as much—which would be pretty much any time other than this stupid time in world history that all of us were dropped into. Take me back to the carefree days of medieval Europe, with its small, flat, young earth and a dome overhead rather than an infinite universe and infinite time.
The Bible says a lot about God that is comforting, encouraging, and inspiring, but at other times not so much. The Bible sends us conflicting messages about what this God is like. The Lord is my shepherd or Even though I walk through the darkest valley (Ps. 23:1, 4) aren’t always enough to balance out I am going to . . . destroy . . . all flesh in which is the breath of life (Gen. 6:17) or Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . and stone him (Lev. 24:14).
“What is God like?” is the wisdom question around which all others revolve, the question that is ever before us, as each successive generation tries to pass on the faith of the past, which comes to us from an ancient time and in an ancient book, to the next generation that occupies its own unique moment in time and space.
The God I read about in the Bible is not what God is like—in some timeless abstraction, and that’s that—but how God was imagined and then reimagined by ancient people of faith living in real times and places. By “imagined” I don’t mean the biblical writers made up God out of thin air. I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.
The sacred responsibility I’ve been talking about is really a call to follow this biblical lead by reimagining God in our time and place.
As full-fledged card-carrying humans, we don’t have a choice. We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.
It’s not really about fools, sabbath keeping, or which slaves get to go free, but “What does it mean for God to be present here and now, in this moment in which I find myself? What does God’s presence look like right now, and how is that like and unlike God’s presence in those other human moments in generations past?”
Those ancient languages were used to describe God in ways that made sense to the ancient writers—so Yahweh is a shepherd, a king, a warrior, a gardener, and so forth. Those descriptions of God were taken from the surrounding world. God isn’t actually a shepherd, but God cares for Israel the way a shepherd cares for his flock. God isn’t actually a king, but God is like a king.
The Israelites certainly believed other gods existed, but Yahweh alone was to be worshiped because he was the best god. How they thought and wrote about their God was absolutely shaped by the world in which they lived—which is a very different world from ours.
The whole cosmic battle is summed up nicely in Exodus 12:12, where Yahweh tells Moses, On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments.
the biblical authors speak of God in ways that reflect their experience in a world where many gods are a given. They are processing their experience of God through the limitations of their world.
And with that we should be very careful to avoid two extremes. The first is looking down on this ancient view of God as simply “wrong.” The other is elevating this view off the pages of history, of taking it as timeless and “correct” because it’s in the Bible.
We follow the lead of these writers not by simply reproducing how they imagined God for their time, but by reimagining God for ourselves in our time, which for us (as we’ll get to later) includes taking into account the Christian story as well. In doing so, we will necessarily commune with God differently with respect to those who went before.
whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn’t mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers. And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, “Is this what God is like?”
They are making sense of God with the ancient vocabulary available to them in their world. And like most things in the Bible, God is presented in diverse ways along with the changing experiences of the ancient Israelites and then the first followers of Jesus.
we humans can never jump out of our skin and see things from above. We only see from below. And I count it a blessing, not a problem, when I see that the biblical writers did that for themselves, and that move has continued throughout the long histories of Jewish and Christian thought.
God is relentlessly reimagined all around us. American Christians have reimagined God as feminist, environmentalist, capitalist, refugee, soldier, Republican, Democrat, socialist, and on and on. Some portraits of God I agree with more than others (and let the debates begin), but the act of reimagining God in ways that reflect our time and place is self-evident, unavoidable, and necessary.
The ancient world, after all, gave us warring gods and heavenly board meetings. If that doesn’t fit the definition of “pagan influence,” I don’t know what does. And yet ancient Israelites imagined God within that world—and those images became part of our sacred scripture.
This is the God I choose to believe in, the one I imagine, a God who is quite aware of the fact that we cannot help when and where we were born, but remains with us just the same and encourages us to accept the challenge of owning our faith here and now rather than relinquishing that sacred responsibility by expecting others to have done it for us. And when we do that, we are joining an ancient conversation, and once we hear it, we’ll wonder how we hadn’t noticed it before.
These examples illustrate a vital concept for us—Jews at the time changed their sacred text to “clarify” in their time and place what God is like. They changed the Bible to accommodate their culture.
Actually, to take a commercial break, one great thing about the Apocrypha is that it was written almost entirely during the Greek period—it’s a window onto that period of Jewish history.
“Is God just? Fair? Righteous? Dependable? Steadfast?” These are questions familiar to people of faith across the centuries, including ancient Jews. Given their circumstances—still strangers in their own land, even hundreds of years after the return from Babylon—these were active questions. “What kind of God is this?”
resurrection of the dead was an adjustment to the story, a reimagining of what God will do that arose (an unintended yet fitting pun) during the Greek period to solve a pressing problem that had to do with God’s justice and fairness to his people.
Full restoration will be an act of God, God’s demonstration of justice and faithfulness to the children of Abraham. And yet decades and then centuries had gone by with no sign of a Davidic king, during which time—guess what?—faithful and obedient Jews died without seeing the restored kingdom.
The brothers’ faith that God will raise them from the dead for being obedient is a huge shift in Jewish thinking, brought about by the difficult reality that God seemed to be taking his sweet old time restoring the kingdom of Israel—centuries, in fact—while Jews were dying for their obedience to God. For God to remain just, for God to remain faithful, something had to give—and what gave was the finality of death. To be just, God would have to raise the dead.
When the kingdom finally appears and the golden years of ancient Israel return, God will be faithful to all those martyred Jews: they will be raised from the dead so that they too can take part in the kingdom.
The reason for this increased prevalence of angels is to make God more accessible. Prophets who relayed God’s word to the rest were becoming scarce, a thing of the past, one of the side effects of having God’s written word.
The presence of an anti-God figure solved (somewhat) a problem caused ironically by Judaism’s deep belief in only one God: Why do bad things happen? Where does evil come from? Who is responsible?
The Satan we take for granted is a new addition to the ancient tradition. Satan, actually, is a great example of a New Testament “given” that wouldn’t exist were it not for the Jewish reimagining of God that went before.
Christians have said rather freely for almost two millennia that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and present everywhere at once (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent). We do not always realize how completely dependent these ideas are on the ways Greek thought influenced Judaism before Christianity and how ill-fitting these descriptions of God are, biblically speaking.
In the Old Testament, God is not everywhere at once, but moves from place to place, even if one of those places is high above the created order on his heavenly throne. And rather than all-knowing, God clearly sometimes has to find things out. An all-powerful God is consistent with the Old Testament, where God moves nations and puts the heavenly bodies in their place, but the pressing implications of that wouldn’t be felt until the Greek period.
Our experiences, what life throws at us, drive us to think about what God is like here and now and consequently what it means to believe in this God. And without making these wise adaptations, however diverse and even conflicting they might have been and regardless of whether some lasted and others didn’t, Judaism would not have survived.
the story of Jesus transforms the ancient tradition and reimagines God. And that reimagining is pretty dramatic, which we will see if we take a moment to step away from the familiarity of it all.
The New Testament writers faced the challenge of bridging the past tradition and present circumstances, and they did so with a lot of thoughtfulness and creativity.
Christians throughout time, including today, have had to face that very same challenge of bridging the past and their own unique circumstances. The New Testament, in other words, is our Exhibit A for how vital it is to adjust and reimagine the past to meet the challenges of a new day and time.
In order to account for Jesus, God’s surprising move, Israel’s story—and even Israel’s God—had to be reimagined. If anything, that is what the early Jesus movement was, one big wisdom act of reimagining God in light of Jesus.
I suppose one reason for this lack is that wisdom gets messy, compared to thinking of the life of faith as a set of rules and clearly defined and never-changing boundaries.
Think of Jesus’s main teaching method: telling parables. If your aim is to get people to comprehend black-and-white information, try a lecture or a press release. If you want to move people to own the moment and take responsibility to work it out for themselves, you tell them a story to stimulate their imagination.
