Scripture as Autobiography
I’ve always found the story of the wedding at Cana exciting, because it shows God changing his mind. At least, this is how I’ve put it to myself. Mary asks Jesus to do something about the wine, which is running out. Jesus replies, “My time has not yet come.” She essentially ignores him, telling the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” And he proceeds to change water into wine after all.
It suggests exciting possibilities for prayer. The stories of Moses or Abraham petitioning God on various issues, arguing with him, even chiding him, are all of a piece with this notion that God is open to dialogue with us, and the end is not predetermined. But other places in Scripture suggest otherwise: here, for example. Or here. Or here.
Does he change his mind, or doesn’t he? It makes a real difference in one’s level of motivation when it comes to prayer.
Recently I picked up A Place for You, by Paul Tournier, a Swiss psychologist. It’s a book that my youth pastor loaned me during my first year of college, and it discusses the importance of place to humans. I’ve remembered snatches of it over the years and felt I wanted to reread it, so here I am.
Tournier is a Christian with a deep and broad knowledge of Scripture, and I’m finding all kinds of interesting insights. I think the book will have some uncomfortable things to say to me personally before I’m done. But where I’m going in this post is to Tournier’s discussion of this issue of God’s immutability. It makes people uncomfortable to consider that the Bible may not be inerrant on every historical detail, or that it might contain different theologies about the same God. But Paul Tournier speaks from a psychological point of view, pointing out that throughout Scripture there is a tension between our need for places and our desire to localize God, and his universality — his sheer bigness that won’t be entirely confined to a place. That was the tension of the tabernacle in the Old Testament. God would consent to meet with his people in places because that’s something we need. But then there would be an impulse to try to locate him there permanently — to say that’s where he always is, an essentially idolatrous impulse.
Anyway, here is a passage that provokes thought, and I note it because I want to remember it. Tournier is speaking of Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, in which Jung
suggests not only the idea of a progressive historical transformation of our conception of God, but also that of the psychological evolution of God himself. This is a bold concept, which runs counter to our traditional view of an immutable God. It must be recognized, however, that there are plenty of biblical texts which also contradict the idea of an immutable God — for example, all those which speak of God repenting. The God of the Bible is a God who acts; and he who acts is no longer immutable. Jung’s view throws quite a new light upon the fact of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
He goes on to clarify an overall pattern in Scripture toward God’s saving purpose, which grows broader and broader throughout the biblical story — from a covenant with Noah, to one with Abraham, then with the Israelites, then on to Peter as the foundation of the church, and to Paul’s statements about the whole creation being freed from its bondage to decay.
Seen in this light, all churches, all rites, and all theologies are provisional stages, instituted provisionally by God in order to bring the human race to full fellowship with him.
This post has bitten off much too large a mouthful.
All I really wanted to record was Jung’s idea that God seems to “evolve” throughout Scripture. I’ve seen the Bible as a story about God’s interaction with people. But to see it as an autobiography of sorts, a fuller and fuller picture of who God is in himself, not only explains the places where he seems to “change his mind,” but gives me another way of organizing in my mind the clues he gives us in Scripture.
I’m instinctively more comfortable with the idea that it’s our understanding of God that’s changing, rather than that he is “evolving.” How can perfection be improved upon?
