Complications
Does anyone else ever feel like studying religion is singularly and inexorably complicated?
I don't want to do another huge post. Really, I don't. But I have so much running through my head right now that it's hard not to. Frankly, reading more in A History of God is just blowing my mind with all of the information it's conveying.
Here's one interesting thought I came up with. I used to think that finding the "right" belief, or finding what you could believe, was only made difficult by battling the interpretation of the person giving you the information. An example of this would be disagreeing with what a pastor thought about a certain biblical passage (and what he further extrapolated from it). Now, I'm firmly convinced that not only are we battling the interpretation of the reader, but the writer as well. This complicates things even further.
Now, I know a lot of people don't buy the "theory" that human minds wrote the Bible; if you fall into the "divinely inspired" camp you can feel free to look away at this point. What History brings up is that there were actually cultural impressions on the books written by the prophets and writers as well as their own personal "agendas" (not in the political sense, but really what they were trying to convey from their personal attitudes) that change the message even from one "book" to another.
This caught my eye a bit because I've recently heard people question the validity of the Christian Bible because the "Old Testament God" seems so much different than the "New Testament God." What History brings up is that there is no "Old Testament God" - not in the sense that he doesn't exist or that he's not present, but in the sense that there are multiple versions of God portrayed in the different books. The God of Exodus basically exhibits different personality traits than in Deuteronomy, and so forth.
This complicates things even further.
I don't want to do another huge post. Really, I don't. But I have so much running through my head right now that it's hard not to. Frankly, reading more in A History of God is just blowing my mind with all of the information it's conveying.
Here's one interesting thought I came up with. I used to think that finding the "right" belief, or finding what you could believe, was only made difficult by battling the interpretation of the person giving you the information. An example of this would be disagreeing with what a pastor thought about a certain biblical passage (and what he further extrapolated from it). Now, I'm firmly convinced that not only are we battling the interpretation of the reader, but the writer as well. This complicates things even further.
Now, I know a lot of people don't buy the "theory" that human minds wrote the Bible; if you fall into the "divinely inspired" camp you can feel free to look away at this point. What History brings up is that there were actually cultural impressions on the books written by the prophets and writers as well as their own personal "agendas" (not in the political sense, but really what they were trying to convey from their personal attitudes) that change the message even from one "book" to another.
This caught my eye a bit because I've recently heard people question the validity of the Christian Bible because the "Old Testament God" seems so much different than the "New Testament God." What History brings up is that there is no "Old Testament God" - not in the sense that he doesn't exist or that he's not present, but in the sense that there are multiple versions of God portrayed in the different books. The God of Exodus basically exhibits different personality traits than in Deuteronomy, and so forth.
This complicates things even further.
Labels: a history of god, complicated, god, interpretation
posted by Todd Newton at 14:43
1 Comments:
i think part of the problem is that people believe that it is only human, and therefore, fallible to change, despite the fact that God says in the bible (assuming that the writer was writing a quote) that he has changed his mind on this or that thing. if one is going to be monotheistic, i think one also has to recognize that God's dealings with man changes as man changes.
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