The Two Views

Read: Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Genesis 2:4b-25

There are two main views on the nature of God and His relationship with the world that run throughout scripture. The Bible is not primarily one, but two, stories of God that have been interwoven together. These views compete and continue to compete to this day. Most people live their lives in both visions, bouncing from one to another back and forth without any real integration or, for that matter, reflection.

You see these two views right in the first two versions of the Creation Story. People have known for a long time, since before Jesus' time, that Genesis retells the story of Creation in two vastly different ways. In Genesis 1, man is the last creation of God (1:24-27), and is the crowning of the creation of the world. Man is the telos, or goal, toward with creation has been moving in the preceding verses. The creation of plants and animals precedes mankind (e.g., 1:11). What's more in Genesis 1 God creates by divine fiat. He doesn't in any way have to act to create things, rather, He simply commands things into existence. God's control over, and knowledge of, His creation is complete and absolute. Everything that happens is according to His will, and the entire outplaying of history is the outplaying of the divine plan of God. This is one of the primary threads that runs throughout the Bible. Everything that happens is taken to be the Will of God, and all events whether good or evil are the results of His divine plan, and so must be brought into line with an understanding that preserves the our vision of a perfect God.

This view is behind Joseph's proclamation that his brothers' evil towards him was really an outplaying of God's divine plan (Genesis 50:20), in the proclamation in Deuteronomy that God always intended Israel to have a king (17:14-2), in the proclamation of Job's friends that Job is responsible for his suffering (see: Book of Job), or in the prophets' proclamation to Israel that her oppression was the result of the idolatry of her people. And on, and on in the Bible, over and over we see a God who is changeless, who is in absolute control of all that happens, and who has a complete and total understanding of the world He has created.

The second view of God begins in the Second Creation Story, found mostly in Genesis chapter 2. There God's main reason for creation is not mankind, but His Garden (2:5). Plants, not humans, are God's main goal in creation. Water and mankind are created so that God can have this garden of a world (2:6-7). And man is created not by divine fiat, but by God getting His hands dirty (2:7). Plants are created after, not before, people here. What's more, God doesn't seem to fully understand what it is He has created, in the case of humans. He first tries to solve the problem of human loneliness by creating animals (2:18-2-0). He is 'experimenting' with His new creation, and trying to figure how best to deal with it.

The creation of mankind is an ongoing process from that time forward. God walks with Adam, but Adam falls. God fears the consequences of Adam eating from the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:22), and so expels him from the garden. But he remains in communion with Adam, as he sews clothes to protect both Adam and Eve (3:21). He becomes something of a voice in the sky, but as the result of this new relationship Cain kills Abel (Genesis 4), then God withdraws from the world and gives rulership to angels, who then are corrupted by mankind, and fall (Genesis 6). Then God floods the earth, having regretted his decision to make man at all (Genesis 6:6). After the flood, God realizes that man is inherently sinful, and so must be dealt with accordingly (8:21).

On this view, creation didn't end with Genesis. It is an ongoing process, that continues with the confusion of languages, and the on to the creation of a particular people, through which God will repair the world. This is a view of God needing other people, as He needed a helper before He could create a garden. It a view of God creating in and through another, and often doing battle against forces of evil that oppose him. This is the view that animates 1 Samuel when it proclaims that God never wanted Israel to have a king, and when God changes His mind on the matter in response to the prayers of the people (1 Samuel 8). This is the view that allows Jeremiah to say that God never imagined that children would be sacrificed by Israel (Jeremiah 7:31), that allows the Psalmist to suggest that the innocent suffer because God sleeps (Psalm 44:14-27) or another Psalmist to proclaim the problems of the world are the result of lesser divine beings that God is going to have to replace (Psalm 82). And this is what allows Daniel, in opposition to the prophets, to proclaim that it was demonic beings, and not God, that animated the great empires of the world when they oppressed Israel (Daniel 7).

The point is of all this is: there are not one, but two primary views of God in the Bible. In one God is not only all-mighty, but all-controlling. In the other God is a being that lives in and with other beings, and all that kind of relationship entails. One is not trapped by one view or the other. Some synthesis may be possible. In fact, it may be that Christ came to finally bring these two views of God together once and for all. This kind of synthesis may be what is behind John the Revelator's vision of Christ as the Lamb with seven horns that looks like it had been slain (Revelation 5), or that this Lamb was "Slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8).

Either way, one must, in the final analysis, ask how one is going to judge and analyze the events of life in this world. Are we doing to attribute EVERYTHING that happens to God, or will we proclaim that there are forces that God either does not or cannot completely control, at least not without giving up the very love that is his substance and being? The consequences for this on one's theology and relationship with God are huge. I know which way I tend. But when I tend that way, don't claim that I'm being unbiblical in my vision of God.