Why Should God Care Less? part 5

This carries on from the post below:

So I get very nervous when I meet evangelicals whose first line of faith is ‘Propositional Revelation!’ And I want to say to them ‘You’re god is way too small.’ It’s not to say I’m against proposition, but if there’s no room for metaphor and image then your god is way too tiny. Metaphor expands horizons. That’s why the prophets use metaphor over and over again. This thing in which we are involved is ENORMOUS! It’s huge. And you caught some of that with that video. Singing those songs about creation and just seeing the glories of this ... it’s too big, isn’t it? It’s too big for us. And then you hear the Psalmist – the wonder of creation. How glorious this is. That’s what metaphor is really good for dealing with.

Now, so I’m arguing for this: metaphor is used in the Bible as a striking way of telling the truth and often the most important truths are going to be told in metaphor. I simply want to do that because in my theological education, theology was kind of like an atomic table of God. Euclidian theology. The geometry of the trinity. Eh, and it all gets reduced this kind of mathematical statement. Pardon me, but a pox upon all such houses. Because really what’s going on with that Euclidian geometry is, well we don’t have time to talk about it, but if you know some philosophy, they’re basically responding to the critique of creation as a way of finding the truth from Parmenides and Heraclites. And that’s not the Biblical view in Genesis 1. Creation is good, good, good, good, good. It’s not to be disparaged. And often these ways of talking about God I think, actually, at bottom, imply some denigration of the goodness of the material world. But that’s another thing. We can have questions and answers about that later on. [someone’s cell phone rings] Who wakes up at this time of the morning? It’s a cell phone, isn’t it? It’s a cell phone. Those of you sitting around that person, feel free now to pounce upon them. [laughter]

O.K., so let’s go to Genesis 1 and quickly work through some of this. We’re going to do what we’ve done with The Simpsons, what we’ve done with Blake, what we’ve done with Isaiah. Let’s look at the form! And the first thing you get, as we heard in this wonderful presentation. Wasn’t it amazing? Did we actually say thank you for that? No. [Clapping and cheering] It’s really moving. You read Genesis 1 in a new way, don’t you? You know, I think that’s part of our task – is to read these things anew every generation to find new ways in telling the same truth. I think that’s the real exercise. It’s one thing to exegete. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is reframing these in a new incarnational moment for every generation. That’s the hard part. It takes a lot of work. Let’s do this now for Genesis 1. First of all, the repetition. And God said, and God said, and God said, and God said, and God said, let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be, and there was, and there was, and there was, and there was, and there was, and God saw, and God saw, and God saw, and God saw, and God saw .... You’re familiar with this, aren’t you? You’ve sung choruses over and over and over again. [laughter] Now, in terms of content, maybe some of you know the book of Samuel. Maybe some of you know the books of Kings. Or even the narratives in Genesis chapter 12 about God’s call of Moses. Let me be provocative. I defy you to find me one piece of biblical historiography that has this kind of repetition. I defy you. What’s that telling you? At the very outset it’s telling us this, folks, whatever you do, don’t read Genesis 1 as straight forward historiography. It’s just not that. You’d laugh at people who misread Blake or who misread The Simpsons, don’t become a laughing stalk by misreading Genesis 1. That doesn’t mean it’s not true! I’m not saying that. But clearly, the form! In terms of genre, this repetition is telling us this is not straight forward historical narrative. It is some other kind.