We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby
No verse today. Just some personal reflections. For many years now, you and I have been exploring the origins of our faith. That means investigating the history of the ideas that we once accepted as part of our religious beliefs. What I’ve learned, and perhaps what you have also learned, is that most of my naïve religion was founded on theological claims rather than on historical events. Of course, historical events are critically important. The Exodus, Sinai, the Babylonian captivity, the resurrection of the Messiah—events like these are the anchors of our involvement with God. Despite Christianity’s claim about critical events, what I’ve discovered is that most of these events have been interpreted theologically, not necessarily culturally, historically, or ethnically. Our investigations have revealed that the meaning of these events might have been shaped by religious institutions and religious paradigms that came hundreds if not thousands of years after the events. When we peel away those layers, we discover a much more pragmatic, personal, and ethnically oriented faith. Like Abraham’s. Devoid of theological constructs like transcendence, omnipotence, immutability, etc., Abraham’s connection with YHVH seems almost too “human” for us. His God appears more like us than like the “Holy Other” of later theological views, whether Christian or Jewish. Perhaps that’s actually comforting. We always wanted a God who could feel like we do. Abraham’s God seems to fit the bill.
But there are consequences. When I learned from great Jewish scholars that the chronology of the Bible is likely to have been deliberately reconstructed to fit political and social concerns, that the Babylonian captivity had enormous influence on how the text is actually written today, that the Genesis accounts are probably more tribal than historical, my faith encountered serious concerns. You see, I have always naïvely believed that the Bible is God’s history book. So I read it as if its chronology were like Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire. Of course, I knew that the gospel authors had personal agendas and that they altered sequences in their accounts in order to accomplish their goals, but that didn’t seem to bother me too much. After all, it made sense that Matthew constructed a genealogy based on Hebrew gematria because he was writing to a Jewish audience. He left out a few things and changed some stuff, but it really didn’t matter because I believed in the integrity of the stories. It didn’t occur to me that Moses would do the same thing, or that the histories of Kings and Chronicles might be different because the authors of those accounts had political agendas.
Then one day I woke up and realized that the Bible isn’t just “God’s word.” It is the human collection of what the Jewish religious community considered to be God’s word. Its authors had agendas, and they collected stories, facts, events, and dialogues to fit those agendas. They rearranged things. They left out things. They emphasized one thing over another. They embellished things. Of course, God’s handiwork is in the mix too, but the fact that Chronicles tones down the scandals of Kings isn’t a mistake. It’s political propaganda for the intended audience, and that audience isn’t us! Unless I acknowledge this, I will miss the point of the stories as they were intended for the original audience. Of course, I can ignore all this and pretend that God’s hand intended each past historical event to be interpreted as my faith, but I do so at the risk of converting the text into a sacred Aesop’s fable. I end up with application only, never really knowing how the ideas started or what God’s interaction was with the people He spoke to so many centuries ago.
The problem isn’t the Scripture. It’s my naïve view of the Scripture. It’s the fact that I made the Bible into an idol, a substitute for the relationship, because the relationship is dynamic. It fluctuates. Not because God changes His mind but because I am not God and my faithfulness wavers with my emotional condition. It’s human faith that causes concern. And in order to squelch the trauma associated with this dynamic relationship, this feeling religion, I treat the Bible as if it were like the tablets of the Ten Commandments—written in stone, unalterable, unemotional, certain—all to give me something I don’t have to actually trust but rather know as a fixed fulcrum point of believing.
But that’s not how biblical faith works, I’m afraid. That’s not how any real relationship works, because every real relationship involves risk and commitment despite emotional variation. There is no certainty in real relationships. Even if God never wavers in His love for me, I waver. I float along. I get depressed and anxious. I doubt. I wander. He waits.
Maybe this long journey of faith is really the objective—not to arrive but to travel in one direction, even if the path isn’t straight. Maybe faith is just faithfulness over the long run. It seems that the biblical message puts a lot of weight on bāṭaḥ, that is, trust, and, of course, trust is not about certainty. It’s about staying committed no matter what. I don’t think this means we give up being inquisitive. No, I think it demands all the more investigation, searching, asking questions, not only of the documents but of ourselves, especially of our emotional selves. Biblical faith isn’t rational apologetics. It’s lived experience, and for human beings that means emotionally lived experience. We run on emotional rails. To deny that is to miss the point of all of God’s interaction with humanity since, I believe, real faith involves feeling as God feels.
I want an enlightened faith, so I plod on. Some days it’s joyful. Some days it’s not. Some days it’s one step forward. Some days it’s two steps back. But I’m not changing trains in the station. I’ll stick with this one wherever it goes, fast or slow. And in the process maybe I’ll learn how to trust. That seems to be the key for me, an emotionally handicapped citizen of the Kingdom, being coaxed to grow up.
“The problem was not whether to trust God but whether to trust one’s acceptance of God. ‘For in much wisdom there is much pain, and he who increases knowledge increases pain’ (Ecclesiastes 1:18).”[1]
[1] Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth, p. 94.
