The Christian Century, a highly-respected theological journal formed at the beginning of the 20th Century, took its name from the belief that that was going to be the Christian century. It didn’t happen. God was on trial in the twentieth-century. He had an excellent team of advocates for the defense, and a multitude of character witness were called to give their testimony–testimony sworn on the Bible. Most of those character witnesses did not serve him very well. We often found ourselves doubting the credibility of those who served as God’s character witnesses. Their tone of voice and melodramatic character didn’t ring true, so it was easy to dismiss the testimony they gave in defense of God”s character. No, the 20th Century didn’t turn out to be the Christian century.

The Christian church and its God were on trial, a lengthy trial that did not reach a clear verdict. Apologists for the trinitarian Father, Son, Spirit were razor-sharp, hard-hitting and indefatigable, but for all the “evidence” they amassed, conviction was rare. Between the counsel for the defense, the extreme rationalism of their arguments, their lack of evidence compelling to heart and soul, and the dubious character of their character witnesses, the most generous verdict is that the century ended with a hung jury. A mistrial should be declared.

Once upon a time a photographer impressed Pablo Picasso so well that the controversial painter broke his rule about photographers and allowed the fellow to bring his camera into the studio and told him he was free to shoot pictures of anything he wanted to. In fact he allowed him to move in and live there six weeks, knowing the photographer intended to publish the pictures The most informative page in the book showed photographs–taken at intervals throughout the day–of the painter’s way of developing a painting.

Picasso approached a steer standing in a nearby pasture and did a painting of it, right on the spot. The photographer took a picture of the steer itself, and then of the painting at that time. The painting and the photo looked almost identical. (Many people don’t realize that Pablo could paint realistic representation with the best of them, and did until he was fourteen-years-old.) The next several shots show the progress (some would say regress) across the day as the painter modified first this color and then that shape until when he was finished it looked like what we have come to expect from Picasso. It bore little resemblance to what we all know steers look like.

Picasso, one of the most articulate painters of history, explained, saying something to this effect: “I distort and modify until I can present that which the eye of habit does not see.”

That idea, “that which the eye of habit cannot see,” sheds light on much of the mental darkness that obscures the way we see reality. We live mostly by habit. We see mostly by habit. We think mostly by habit. Our thinking follows the conventional wisdom and the political and social correctness of our fellows; this wisdom and correctness come directly from the habits of societies. Once Picasso focused our attention of some element we had never really paid attention to, we look at cattle in a new way, seeing clearly that which had there all along, but now we see there is more to the steer than we had realized.

In this blog I am attempting to present an unfamiliar way of seeing God, a way has always been there, that the mind of habit sees but neither notices nor acknowledges, all the while remaining unaware of what it means. What you will find in this blog is like what the writer of I John says: “I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning . . . On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you.” We will be giving careful attention to something that has been part of the Christian religion from the beginning, but that much too often has been marginalized.

God is hard to figure out. The Bible gives a good many stories of God in action, God’s declarations, assertions others make about him. The problem is that it doesn’t all fit together very well. I read somewhere in one of Giardina’s books, [I've tried repeatedly to find the reference again, and still must do it] where the fellow said to the woman who had helped him several times, “Hit was you talked me into learning to read. I wanted to do so’s I could read the Bible. I ain’t so sure now hit’s a blessing. They’s hard sayings in there.” Besides, the Bible–-which for Christians is the only objective testimony to God they will accept–is itself hard to figure out. The Bible, the blog that is supposed to tell God’s story, is complex, much like the God it tells of. But there is no shortage of simplistic ways offered to resolve its difficulties.

That is one of the two major weaknesses of the Christian world: the proverbial plenitude of simplistic answers to complex problems. The other weakness is that it is hard to find a Christian who actually follows Jesus, who, according to the Bible, is God’s personal representative.

In this blog, we are concerned with the first weakness: simplistic descriptions of a complex God, as well as very complicated explanations of God that moves his very essence toward the edge of their attention. We will not accept simplistic views of God’s complex book, nor simplistic presentations of a rich, multilayered, polydimensional gospel. We will find that the mainstream of Christians has always accepted–although unconsciously–the relativity of God and of his expectations. Christian doctrine often acknowledges, without realizing it, that God is relative, but it treats the idea (which it fails to see clearly) as only one among the many things that need to be said about God.

If we are to know God primarily through the biblical story, we have to recognize that, like a complexly plotted novel, it is made up of many smaller stories. Let’s think of the Bible as a courtroom scene, with God on trial before the human race, as in fact he is (whether the scene will be one day reversed is a different consideration). The writers of the Bible serve in the courtroom as character witnesses. They claim to know about God, some even claiming to know him. They give their testimonies, some of which are hard to follow. Some are just plain hard to understand. After a bit, the stories they testify to begin to converge, but testimony from other witnesses diverges from the emerging consensus. Some diverge widely. Some of their stories have internal contradictions. The time comes when we begin to wonder about questioning the character of the character witnesses themselves. Do we have good reason to trust them?

So as our exploration sets out we are well aware of the well-known difficulties of understanding God and his word . Some of us have resolved the problem by withdrawing from the field and abandoning religion, at least the Christian religion. At the other extreme are those who, as already suggested, offer us naive or obscurantist and oversimplified harmonizations.

Most of us find neither of these options satisfactory