The Center of God?

Louis Mauldin, sitting on a bench at a bus stop in Jackson, Tennessee got to visiting with an old man who also was waiting for a bus. In the course of the conversation, Louis asked the fellow if he had ever traveled much. The old gentleman said he had not, then Louis suggested to him some of the advantages of travel, whereupon his new friend said he didn’t need to travel; he pointed and said, “There is north, there is south, there is west, and there is east. I’ve got them all right here. I don’t need to go anyplace else. For the old man, he lived at the center of the world, Jackson, Tennessee.

Some years earlier Louis and I had been in a seminar where Joe Hester was presenting a paper on the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who never traveled more than forty miles from his home in Konigsberg, Prussia because, as Joe told us, Kant believed that Konigsberg was the intellectual and cultural center of the world.

At the seminary where Louis, Joe, and I studied, there was a large rotunda with a map of the world on the floor. A star placed the seminary at the center of the world.

Wherever you believe to be the center of the world, it provides the perspective from which you see all other places. If a seminary in Fort Worth, Texas is the center, then Jackson, Tennessee is somewhat marginal, and Konigsberg is completely out of sight and mind.

For thinking Christians, God is the center of all reality, which is good as far as it goes, but where is the center of God? What in God is central? Is there a place from which to get all else about God in proper perspective? There is no more agreement here than there is among the citizens of the world who would dismiss Jackson, Konigsberg, and Fort Worth and name their own center of the world.
It is very common for Christians to find the divine center in the sovereignty of God. God is in control of all things; he is ruler of the universe. He holds all power and knows all things. Others find the center in the divine freedom. Because he is the Lord God Almighty, he is free to do whatever he pleases, free to create and free to destroy, free to save and free to condemn. Free to love and free to hate. His freedom knows no boundaries. Some locate the essence in a holy, transcendent mystery, a God before whom we stand in awe and fear with no way to plumb the center of such majesty.

Might we consider love, holy love, as the center from which to view all other thought about God? The great creeds, including the Apostle’s and the Nicene Creeds, in their statements of belief in God, completely ignore direct reference to God’s love. The historical confessions of faith, including the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Baptist Faith and Message, give no emphasis to the divine love. In the Westminister Confession, love ranks eighteenth among the varied characteristics of God. The Baptist Faith and Message, in its statement of belief in God give no mention of love, except as owed to God.

When we turn to the great theologians of Christian history (except John Wesley), we find they do not give primacy to God’s love. The faith of ordinary Christians has found one of its most common expressions in the great hymns of the church. When we to turn to the hymnals to find what they say about God, we that they sing most often of the Lord God Almighty, they worship him as the powerful creator, lord and king. They express his holiness and majesty and only then mention his love, if at all. Often love shows up in a third stanza, where it is commonly left unsung.

Certainly there are wonderful exceptions that sing, “Love is the theme, love is supreme,” and “Love Divine, all love’s excelling,” but as exceptions, they only make clear that this is a neglected theme.

God Changed His Mind.

God changed his mind. While Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments, the Israelites collected all their gold jewelry and asked Aaron to melt it and make them a god. So he molded a golden calf and it was declared their God that had brought them out Egypt, implicitly rejecting the God who indeed had rescued them from Egyptian slavery and intended to make of them the special people whom he would use to bring healing to his broken world. He had called them out of Egypt because he had for them a world-class task to perform.
World-class deeds demand world-class discipline. It is not easy to perform tasks of this dimension. If God’s intention were to be accomplished, if ease were to be brought to the dis-eased and hurting inhabitants of the earth, then they must trust God to do right by them and thus must obey all he requires of them. By choosing to spurn the Lord God in favor of a God made of a precious metal, they have blocked the road to hope for the rest of the world.

God was angry, angry enough, he said, to destroy them, and start over with Moses and his descendants to build a special people for this special purpose. According to Exodus, chapter 32, He explicitly told Moses, “Don’t try to stop me” from destroying them. However, Moses stood up for God’s purpose and for his people and argued that God should change his mind.

God saw that in Moses he had a leader who would stand for God’s people and purpose even in the face of God’s instruction for him to keep his mouth shut, and in the face of God’s offer to make a new start: rather than the descendants of Abraham, it would be the descendants of Moses who would fulfill God’s purpose. Quite an offer for Moses. But Moses was committed to God’s original plan and pleaded for God to reconsider his threat of destruction. “So,” in Exodus 32:14, we are told that “even though the Lord had threatened to destroy the people, he changed his mind and let them live.”

Are we to understand that a human being can argue with God and win? Are we to understand that the eternal Lord God Almighty can be persuaded to change his mind? This goes contrary to the entire history of Christian orthodoxy. Historically, Christians have always believed that God was immutable, could not change. It was understood that God was perfect–else he would not be God–and that for him to change in any sense would take away from his eternal perfection. Perhaps there is some other way to understand the biblical statement that the Lord changed his mind. Or, can we at least consider that here the Bible means literally what it says? Is it possible that we also should consider changing our mind about what God can and cannot do?


God changed his mind again. Prior to the Israelite occupation of the land of Canaan, God has appointed their leaders, Moses and Joshua, then a series of judges. They had neither the prerogatives nor the authority that goes with royal status. Samuel was the last of these judges, and in his old age the people who had greatly respected him had no respect for his sons. They came to Samuel and asked that he choose “a king to be our leader, just like all the other nations.” In I Samuel 8:7 The Lord told Samuel, “Do everything they want you to do. I am really the one they have rejected as their king.”

At the foot of Mount Sinai they rejected the Lord God as their God and chose instead the golden calf, so now they have spurned God as their king. They have done this out of their desire to be like all the other nations, even though God intended for them to become a separate nation with a holy purpose, a special purpose that distinguished them from all other nations. This time, however, rather than threatening their destruction, he had Samuel warn them that with a king they would have taxes, military draft, involuntary servitude to the king and all the things that kings burden their people with.

Even with this warning, the tribes of Israel still wanted to be a nation with a king, so, God changed his mind. Even though he wanted them to see him alone as their king, he told Samuel to give them a king. Not long afterward, God told Samuel to anoint Saul, the son of Kish, to be their king. God did not want them to have a human king, but when Israel insisted, God changed his mind and gave them a king, a king of his own choosing.



We could go on along this line. Saul was God’s choice, but Saul proved a disappointment and God rejected him and named David king in his place. Later, having chosen and anointed David’s son, Solomon as king, God rejected a failed Solomon and divided his people Israel into two nations, one retaining the name Israel; the other becomes Judah.

In the story of Jonah, God’s word to the evil city of Ninevah is, “Forty days from now, Ninevah will be destroyed.” This is God’s word. But the people of Ninevah heard, believed, and changed their attitude and their ways. So God did not destroy them as he had said, unconditionally, he would. In other words, in light of their response to his prophetic word, God changed his mind and preserved them.

God continues to struggle with a recalcitrant Israelite people, sometimes they trust and obey, other times they rebel and choose what they believe will be better ways. Finally, in the days of his prophet, Jeremiah, God acknowledges that the agreement he had made with Israel has been broken beyond repair. In Jeremiah 31:31-34 God indicates that in the future, at an appropriate time, he will establish a new agreement, covenant, testament with Israel. Israel effectively and repeatedly has stymied God’s loving action on behalf of the world. So God makes a change in his plans and prepares for a fresh start. Again, God has changed his mind.


Why have I insisted on reciting these instances (there are more) where God changed his mind? Am I trying to make it look like God has less control of his world than we have thought? Am I trying to bring God down to human capacity? Am I in some sense attempting to diminish God to make him easier to deal with? No. I want to demonstrate something of what it means to say that God is love.

Rather, I am using biblical evidence to show that god is not an uncaring, removed, autocratic ruler who will always get his way, no matter what his subjects think or do. Rather, God cares and is actively involved in his world; he and his human creation have an interactive relationship in which each often influences what the other will do. God’s core relationship with humanity is not one of power and control, but of caring, responsive love. God’s words and actions are intended to affect what we do; our words and actions affect, to some degree, what God does.


Moreover, if God is affected by what we do, this not only means that God sometimes changes his mind, but also that God has affections, that God has an emotional life. This contradicts the ancient idea that one of God’s attributes is impassibility, that he has no feelings, remains untouched by anything outside of himself. Otherwise, it was believed that is anything affects the divine equilibrium, it would mean that God changes. The traditional doctrine of immutability says that God cannot change, and the traditional doctrine of impassive means that God remains unaffected by anything. He is always the same, untouched by the human situation. Not so. The biblical story of God shows repeatedly that he has an active emotional life, that his feelings change from time to time.

Certain things please God, other thing anger him. God does some things according to his own good pleasure. He is at times frustrated. There are things he hates and despises.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem and at the tomb of Lazarus. He despaired on the cross and was thirsty. On the cross, God in the flesh suffered.

[These last paragraphs only outline the idea. In the next day or two I intend to fill it out and clarify it.]

A Religion of Rules?

Something about hard-edged and inflexible rules invites rebellion. We persistently search for loopholes, and routinely plead mitigating circumstances when we have disobeyed the law. When loopholes are locked shut and nothing is allowed to mitigate the harshness of punishment, we either submit or rebel. Human frailty feels the need for a little flexibility on occasion. Most of us believe that there are times when the law should be bent a little, if not broken. Most societies understand the dangers of rigid rules that demand obedience or else. Rules are essential; they must be followed; a society cannot exist without certain disciplines, but clear-thinking societies know that sometimes the law should be administered with a degree of moderation.

A religion of rules without emphasis on relationship breed rebellion against the rules and thus, against the religion that seeks to bind its adherents to the letter of the law, or else, it breeds those who believe in the literal letter of the law, ignoring its spirit and purpose. The apostle Paul tells us that the law was intended as a tutor helping us to understand major features of how love goes about its business. Rules, Paul says, are not an end in themselves. They serve a purpose: to lead us beyond the law to the freedom of following the spirit of the rules, to accomplish that which commandments by themselves cannot ever achieve.

But on the other hand, a religion of relationship, a religion of love without rules reduces religion to fickle feelings. We cannot love by a rule book, but love without boundaries risks a disconnect from the very meaning of love. Relationship requires rules, yet we cannot establish and maintain good relationships if we live purely by a set of rules.

Rules sometimes are intended to be rigidly adhered to and strictly enforced. On the other hand are rules of thumb, rules that tell us what, in general, what most of the time, we should do. Law guides behavior and educates us in the ways that work most effectively.

The Bible Is Relative

The Ten Commandments commonly are understood by Christians and Jews as universal and absolute, binding on everyone. But they are not. They are relative to the people of Israel, as surely as the Sermon on the Mount is relative to the followers of Jesus. The Ten Commandments were given to the Israelites shortly after their escape from Egyptian bondage under the leadership of Moses. They were not given to the world. In them, God did not address all the peoples of the earth: they were not given to the Cherokees, the Finns, the Yoruba, the Saxons, nor the Aztecs. In introducing the Decalogue, “God said to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord your God, the one who brought you out of Egypt where were slaves,” and then begins telling them, “You shall, and you shall not . . ..”

“You” specifically, not everyone. He has a claim on them because he had rescued them and established a covenant relation with them, therefore he lays out the fundamental demands of that covenant. He has established no such relation to the Mongolians, the Germans, the Hittites, or the Egyptians. The Commandments are to be understood as relative to Israel and their covenant with God. They are to be understood as relative to the formative time in their history. Paul of Tarsus, in chapter 2, verses 12-15 of his letter to Roman Christians, tells that God will deal differently with those who do not have this Law; he will deal with all according to their situation.

The case is similar with the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus retired to a mountainside with his disciples and began teaching them the nature of his kingdom. Again, he did not address the Romans, the Poles, the Syrians, nor the Iroquois. The Sermon on the Mount is to be understood as teachings for those who would commit to Jesus. God does not expect the same of unbelievers.
The Bible as a whole, and in its parts is relative. It does not deal in absolutes. It does not tell of God in abstractions, but always in relation to the human situation. Our knowledge of God is not complete, we know in only in part, only as he has chosen to reveal himself to us. In the big picture, Genesis 1-11 is relative to the rest of the Bible. It lays out the background against which the need for redemption is seen and provides the setting in which the story of redemption is told. We are to understand Genesis 12 and all that follows as God’s response to the conditions laid out in Genesis 1-11.

To touch on just a few of the relativities of the Old Testament, Abraham is important as the father of God’s covenant people. He is not important in and of himself, and yet, all the rest of the Bible is about him and his descendants. (Genesis 1-11, in contrast, deals in universal terms, with universal peoples.) Moses and David are important in their role as leaders of Israel; Elijah and Isaiah, along with the rest of the prophets, deliver messages from God relative to Israel (later, Israel and Judah).
In the New Testament, the first three gospels are relative: Matthew to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Gentiles. The epistles of the New Testament are relative to the unique situation and needs of the church to which they are written; the epistles to Timothy and Titus are relative to their pastoral responsibilities.

God speaks to people in all subsequent ages through the words of the Bible, but our understanding of what he has to say is relative to the original setting and purpose. You will search in vain for anything generic or absolute in the Bible.