If
I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Psalm
139
That God inhabits heaven is not doubted. If, like the Psalmist, I ascend into heaven,
it is certain that “thou art there.” But
what of those who take up residence in hell?
If I make my bed in hell, what will I find?
At this juncture in American history, this is the
critical doctrine of the Bible.
Our
culture has become permeated with a kind of Biblical naiveté that wouldn’t know
a figure of speech if it were turned into a pillar of salt. A hyper-anthropomorphism has so distorted our
conception of God that we embrace simplistic views of scripture that are
contrary to the very genre of the biblical passage we pretend to explain. So Genesis Chapter 1 becomes a detailed
creation manual of 24 hour time periods, without regard for its literary type.
At the time of the Revolutionary War, church
membership in the colonies was less than a fifth of the population. Today that number is almost two thirds of our
citizenry. Even taking into account
those early Americans who were devout, but not church members, the two century
trend line of increasing formal religious participation is clear. We are more formally devout than we’ve ever
been!
And yet the oft lamented fact of our biblical
illiteracy is strikingly true. Too
often, those who profess their faith in the most determined manner, are
obviously unaware of the real nature of the Bible they claim to love.
Nowhere
is this more true than in the use of figures of speech within the various
biblical genres.
Because we are anthropomorphs, we speak of
the divine presence in an anthropomorphic way.
Though the Bible states that God is not literally male (1 Sam 15:29), we
use anthropomorphic pronouns that figuratively make “him” just that. Of course that is fine, as long as we are
aware of what we are doing. It is only
when our anthropomorphic language becomes our literal theological model and
absolute frame of reference that a real problem begins.
God is spirit (or literally “wind”) as Jesus noted
in John 4. The divine presence is there
in our innermost being and flows up with joy (John 7). Humanity is connected by this immanence
within each of us. Acts 17 notes Paul,
quoting the poets, as saying that it is in this presence that “we live and move
and have our being.” Truly the light is
within every person coming into this world (John 1:9). Whether we are true to this light is another
question. But we are all aware of this
mystery of love within us and that joins us together.
