Different Gods
Traditional Christians continue treating the bible as a uniform whole, so that they can lift any verse out of it and treat it as a source of final truth. This flies in the face of everything that biblical scholarship has concluded over the last 200 years. The bible is a library of many different books, that came into being over a long period of time. Hence it is not surprising that the view of God and many other things, varies between these books. Tom Hall has provided the following poem that cleverly points out this variety.Surely the Yahweh who ambled in the garden
With our first parents, then drove them out for fear
A second breach might render them his peers
Was not the Elohim who with a word
Called into being heaven and earth and life
Of every kind, and saw that it was good.
Nor was the God who ordered Joshua
To wage a genocidal war on Canaan
That Israel might live secure and free
Cut from the same cloth as Micah’s muse,
Whose sole injunction was to lead a life
Of justice, kindness, and humility.
Whatever the creed that drove the heartless Ezra
To cancel priestly marriages and condemn
Mothers and children to shame and desperation,
Its author’s deity was not the God
Who inspired the contradicting tale of Ruth,
The alien whose love was holiness.
Could Jonah’s mild taskmaster, who exhorted
That prideful prophet to display concern
For all the folk of hated Nineveh
Have led a vengeful post- exilic psalmist
To wish that all the babes of Babylon
Might have their brains bashed out against the rocks?
For Jesus Jews we meet in Didache
And Galilean archivists of Q,
Their Lord was a new David or a sage;
In Mary’s Gospel and in that of Thomas
He seems a Spirit with a human form;
Thus early on his nature was in doubt.
And what are we to understand when John’s
Report that Jesus (aka “the Word”)
Was co-creator of the universe
Beggars belief, only to learn that he
And his father Joseph hail from Nazareth,
A place of generally low repute?
Why is it John has Jesus early on
Declare that to be saved we must ingest
His body and his blood, then near the end,
At that climactic final meal together,
Replaces the salvific loaf and cup
With after-dinner footbaths for The Twelve?
We’ll never know why Matthew changed “the poor”
To read “the poor in spirit” and erased
The curses Luke found in their common source,
Nor make good sense of Luke’s chronology
That places Jesus in Jerusalem
For six weeks after his ascent to heaven.
When Luke’s Paul scolded fellow Jews who failed
To see his Jesus as God’s new Messiah,
He prophesied a Gentile supersession:
“They will listen!” But what sort of God
Would on such grounds desert his chosen people
And pave the way that led to Holocaust?
To what broad vision of the great scheme of things
Will you entrust the guidance of the one
And only life you get the chance to live?
From what commitment then derive the strength
To choose and sanctify in word and deed
A way of life that gladdens and fulfills?