Old Testament Reflection (AUSOT w/Dr. Barry Ross): 9.17.09

Scott Schomburg

Reflection 1

17 September 2009

            What is the character of God?  Is God truly unchanging?  Does God need to be able to see the future to be God?  Questions and possibilities ruminated as I read.  What does the text tell us about God?  During the Adam and Eve narrative in Genesis God portrays God’s self in communion with others like God.[1]  Since Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they become like God and those like God.[2]  Is it possible that God is capable of choice and therefore broken relationships as well?  Is it possible for God to regret God’s own actions?  Does the possibility of authentic relationship with another personal being depend on the vulnerability of both?

            As the narrative moves eastward, there is a sense of God becoming more and more uneasy with God’s creation.  Adam and Eve sought to be too much like God, and now implications of that corruption lead us to the first murder.[3]  As God enters time, God enters relationship.  God reacts.  God makes decisions.  In God’s anguish over Abel’s murder God says to Cain, “What have you done?  Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”[4]  God’s character is revealed.  It is as if God was so closely connected to Abel’s murder that God suffered because of it.  How much has intimacy marked the journey of God with God’s people?  The story of Cain and Abel, the stories of Genesis, show the way God and God’s people heard, related, and reacted together in very human ways.  It is a dialogue through history.  It is a relationship.  Hamilton elaborates on this issue through a very human interaction between God and Cain in The Handbook on the Pentateuch when he says, “After his sin Cain has the opportunity to talk with God.  The dialogue swiftly degenerates into sarcasm on Cain’s part.  He answers God’s question ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ with a question of his own: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’”[5]  Later in the text of Genesis God recognizes humankind’s wickedness and “was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”[6]  God came to a conclusion.  Creating humankind had not turned out the way God had hoped.

            In my own experience with evangelicalism, I am often frustrated by our obsessive impulse to talk about how great God is and how terrible we are as humans in what turns into an infantile relationship.  In many evangelical circles a question outside the accepted doctrine is looked on in fear that God may be angry with us.  This may be so.  God has the freedom to be, do, and act how God will.  Does this text instead reveal to us a desire for God’s people to be in authentic relationship with a transcendent God that has chosen intimacy with us?  Can I desire a right relationship with a transcendent God; worship that God, and question the motives and actions of that God in the sacred text of my tradition?  I think I can.  And as hard as I may be on evangelical Christianity, I also have seen language that I don’t understand being used by people who desire a genuine closeness with the God of the Bible.  My own life and community experience has shown me a Bible that is much more an act of faithful imagination than a set of certitudes.  However, maybe all God’s people don’t look like me.

[2] Ibid, 3

[3] Ibid,4

[4] Ibid, 4

[5] Victor P. Hamilton, Handbook on the Pentateuch, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2005), 59

[6] Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4