I’ve mentioned before how I first got in trouble in a Sunday School class for adding bloating bodies to the flannelgraph of our lesson on Noah’s Ark. It’s not a story I shared with my boys, as many of my antics, let’s just say I 1) didn’t want to give them any ideas and 2) want to have room to provide context and talk through to use my many, many failures as teachable moments. Hadn’t gotten around to that one yet.
Apparently, the boys were going over the flood story in their Sunday School class this past Sunday. They ended up drawing pictures depicting the story. Both boys became enraptured with the phrase “drowned like stones”. So they both ended up drawing dead bodies floating on top of the water. And began to regale me with tales they found in the Bible.
This book is awesome! As my youngest told me he found a scene where there was a beheading.
Uh … yeah, this is going to come back to haunt me. (I can already hear my wife saying “they’re your sons”—they always become MY sons after something like this—“so you handle it.”)
Just like we forget that there are other aspects to God than just love. We forget that God is also holy. And, like Aslan, the lion from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, we need the occasional reminder that there is a (righteous) fearful element to holiness. “Make sure you stay alert to these qualities of gentle kindness and ruthless severity that exist side by side in God” (Romans 11:22a, The Message version). This idea isn’t comfortable, but it’s good to wrestle with. You may spend a lifetime of journeying wrestling with many parts of this awesome book which seem incongruous or contradictory. But don’t let words like “inerrancy” keep you from loving people or pursuing knowing God.
1. The God who really is and the God who is sketched in the Bible, that is, the Textual God vs. the Actual God, must be distinguished. And here he is saying that the Bible’s depictions of God are from a human point of view and reflect Ancient Near Eastern views of God that are not modified.
2. The God of the Bible, he says, must be judged by God in Jesus or Jesus as God so that what conforms to Jesus is the Actual God and what doesn’t may be the Textual God.3. And he argues that the Bible’s inspiration is “general” instead of “comprehensive.” He doesn’t care for accommodation theories and finds the traditional evangelical view of plenary inspiration too problematic so he concludes that inspiration is general instead of comprehensive.
All of which would be lost on an eight and nine year old. So I’m left with yeah, the book is awesome. Yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff in it. Some of it is descriptive, telling us what happened and what folks did; and not prescriptive, that we shouldn’t imitate everything that everyone does in it. Words have meaning and power and stories often leave us with questions. There are stories which disturb us and stories that uplift us. There are things in there we like to pretend/wish weren’t in there and hope that no one notices.
A) I’d like to know where you got flannel animals in corpse form to stick on a flannelgraph. Did you craft them?
B) The “flood myth” is universal and found in most if not all cultures. There is a famous version in Greek Mythology.
C) What is “plenary inspiration”? And where is there cannibalism in the OT?(Are you sure modern Sunday Schools don’t sensationalize the Bible to compete with computer games.)
D) Did you know, that on my blog, which I’m sure even an incurious man like yourself has glanced at by now, a guy called Sam Urfer (Protestant-to-Catholic convert whose university essay about Odin and Loki I blogged about) on the subject of the “disturbing aspects” of Norse gods, maintained that Odin and Loki were both “selfish psychopaths”? And that he confirmed this to me when he got back to me about a year later, showing his opinion hadn’t altered/matured in that time? Seeing the motes in the heathen gods’ eyes but completely disregarding the beam in Yahweh’s eye.. Christians: often rude and arrogant but
always the first to cry blasphemy, persecution, etc.
I did briefly remind him of the violent nature of the OT god,in the comments section; he just quoted Plato at me. Also thought he was clever to cite the words of some Norse man who insulted the gods in the conversion period. I pointed out to him that if he decided to diss Allah, citing some rude reference by an Arab and putting it on an Islamic site would not help him much, to put it mildly – didn’t want to answer that one! Clever lad on the whole but his religion isn’t helping his closed-mindedness.
(I really just wanted to discuss Tricksters with him, since that is the theme of the blog.)
PS I think the boys are their father’s sons; in a *good* way, we hope!!
I approve. I always found the Christian God to be violent and creepy and even as a kid noticed most people sanitize the stories to draw more people in. My family often missed the love and peace part of Christ (which is the bits I like most) and jumped right into “If something bad happens to someone it’s because they weren’t Christian (enough) and God was punishing them.” That always seemed like a very angry spiteful way to treat things. Plus the most godly, loyal Christian person I’ve ever met, my mother, died a long slow death to cancer when I was a child. To make matters worse I have a letter my mother wrote before she died where she says she hopes I die rather than live life not as a Christian. I’ve always had a real hard time with the way most people believe in Christianity because of these things.
i think this is why it’s so important to interpret God/Christianity through the life of Christ. while understanding that everyone (Christ/God included) is a multi-faceted being, not just a single note character, the heart of the religion is love and peace and reconciliation. things that pull us away from the heart of it i view as suspect. sometimes i really wonder about the God and gospel message we’re presenting.