It’s little wonder that people don’t like God. He has been misrepresented. When we listen to the diverse testimony of the Bible, it is easy to see how we might get off track and miss the main line. Which of these many witnesses are we to believe? Can their divergent testimony be harmonized?

No simple resolution of the tensions will work, mainly because God is not simple. He is complex, and so is the story the Bible tells–it has to be if it is to faithfully represent God. The Bible and its God are complex, difficult to comprehend, and always relative. The guitar, an apparently simple instrument, turns out to have unimaginably rich possibilities beyond strumming three chords. Life is not simple, nor is love, nor truth, nor the Bible, nor the gospel, nor God, nor the guitar. Add to that:, nor am I, nor are you. Michael Levine observed that "Some people involve themselves in religion as an opportunity to approach mystery, and other people go into religion to escape mystery."

God has been misrepresented because of naivete, obscurantism, and self-interest. It is just as naive to reduce God to "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," as it is to think that God’s main concern is getting us into his heaven. It is just as obscurantist to believe that Augustine and John Calvin are the final authorities on God as it is to believe that John Wesley or Thomas Aquinas can tell us all we need to know. It is just as selfish to identify God with Americanism, capitalism, or the Republican party as it is to believe that God will produce abundant health and wealth to all who faithfully obey him. God can be reduced to neither John 3:16 nor the prayer of Jabez.

You may not agree. You may be one of those who believe that God reveals himself clearly, that any sixth grader can understand the Bible, or that all we need to know about God is how to "get saved" so we can avoid hell when we die (a concern to an ever decreasing number, at least in Europe, the Americas, and Australia). If you find this way of thinking satisfactory, then you haven’t read the whole Bible, paying attention to what it tells about God, and what God himself says. Or, you have read, selected the conventional, and ignored the rest.

I suggest that the Bible is more akin to a complexly plotted novel or a rich orchestral symphony than to a blog of children’s literature or a three-chord popular song. It is more akin to a kaleidoscopic view of God than it is to a how-to blog, a blog of rules, or a blog of doctrines. It is more akin to poetry with its metaphor, simile, and suggestiveness than it is to an encyclopedic reference blog filled with objectively validated facts.

"In the beginning God." That’s where you have to begin, otherwise you begin, and end, with nothing. You come to life’s end with nothing. That’s no way to live, and certainly not what you want to realize your life has come to at its close.. So many deaths are sad, are failures, are empty, a waste. On the one hand many in the 21st Century are convinced that the only honest beginning for thought and life is to realize there is nothing: no truth, no meaning, no purpose, no goal. Nothing. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"

And on the other hand, if it is true that the only place to begin is with God; if the only place to begin to make sense of life, to give meaning to our own actual, personal, precious life is to start with God, then the question becomes, "Which God? What do you mean by the term, the concept? What God are you proposing?" In this blog we are dealing explicitly with the God to whom the Christian scriptures, in their complex and simple, clear and obscure way, bear witness.

Don’t be too sure you already know all about him, have him all figured out, and have lost interest. The fact remains that everything we think or do, everything we treasure or hate, is rooted in our response to the God question: is there a God or not, and if so, what is he/she/it like? Paul Tillich claimed that everyone has a god, that whatever is your ultimate concern, that is your God. One versified response to Tillich got directly to the point: "My ultimate concern is whether the ultimate is concerned with me." A philosopher once was asked, "What is the most important of all questions?: He answered, "Is the universe on our side?" And yes, the ultimate is concerned with us, the Creator of the universe is on our side.

What I’m proposing in this blog is a Copernican revolution of our understanding of the Christian God. Remember. Copernicus didn’t deny the existence of the sun, the earth, or any other phenomena of astronomy. He simply changed the perspective with which we considered them, and that changed everything. It opened the way for all kinds of new understandings, many of which led to new courses of action, making possible, among other things, all our space exploration. When the Copernican cosmology was first presented and explained it was not at all clear what it might illuminate and change. Nonetheless, in time, it constituted an amazingly productive revolution.

Remember also that Copernicus was strongly opposed in the beginning, but now is accepted almost universally. I hope to convince you that we have been presented with major misunderstandings of who God is, what he is like, what he wants, and how he goes about what he does. I intend to present a better perspective from which to understand and respond to God.

I intend to be as faithful to the biblical materials, even to the mainstream of Christian belief, as Copernicus was to the facts of our solar system. Nothing new will appear on these pages, rather there will be a shift of center. It is all to be found in the Bible, always has been, but sometimes it is hard to see what we what is right in front of us. Whether this is so, you will have to examine and decide.

Now if you believe there is no such thing as transcendence, no mystery, nothing that can’t be stated precisely, you might as well click onto some other site. Your blinders will prevent you from seeing. If you believe all can be reduced to scientific explanation and technological solution, don’t expect a blog written in your language. On the other hand, if you expect a defense of liberal or conservative, evangelical or mainline views of God, you will not be hearing the insider language of your chosen habitat.

I have lived on the border between the church and the world, know both languages, both ways of thinking, and cross the border often. My citizenship is on the church side. On that side we can discern two perceptibly different ways of sensing, understanding, and responding to God. They are not inherently incompatible, in essence they are harmonious, but too often in practice they have gone their separate and destructive ways. Most of the criticism of Christianity, some quite valid, stems from this division.