Yeah, I’m still working through that myself. It’s unfinished work, but I’ll share where I am in the hope that it is helpful. Like everything else on this podcast, it is a continuing journey.

I believe that the interpretive key for understanding (knowing) both God and scripture is given to us in the person of Jesus we see in the gospels. Hebrews 1 says Jesus is the spitting image of God (TEV: Todd’s English Version). John 1 tells us that not only was Jesus with God in the beginning, but that he WAS God. Jesus puts the lie to the view that God is angry, disgusted, stand-offish, and judgmental—that his wrath is poured out on those who don’t conform to his policies or to the way he ordered things to work. In other words, that God DOES NOT work by the Retribution Principle. Jesus says this directly when, at the end of Matthew 5, he tells us that “[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

But that angry view of God did not just appear out of nowhere. We see that version of God in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the stories you brought up. Our people have dealt with this by ignoring it, or through some theological gymnastics, like:

• They ignore the implications of Hebrews 1 and John 1, and persist in seeing God and Jesus as fundamentally different from one another. In this view, God is the angry one who must be mollified, and Jesus is the merciful hero who stands between us and God, and takes the punch intended for us.
• Or, they believe the Jesus we see in the gospels represents a temporary reprieve between the first and second comings, after which we’ll see a Jesus that looks much more like the God of wrath.
• Or, they carry some poorly defined understanding that God “converted” in the time between Malachi and Matthew.

Although these are all bad solutions, they DO help us understand the nature of the problem. As people who believe in the inspiration of Scripture—and I am one of them—we struggle when those scriptures give us competing images of who our God is.

The resolution is not 1) to throw out God altogether, although that is the path many of below the age of 50 are choosing, or 2) to throw out inspiration, although that is the only way many have been able to preserve their faith at all.

But, if Jesus looks exactly like God (TRUE), and if the books of scripture are inspired by God (TRUE), the only way to reconcile those two ideas that I can see is that we have to do the uncomfortable work of reexamining our understanding of what Inspiration means. It’s uncomfortable because the tenets of our current understanding are a shibboleth—a test of belonging—for the tribe that gives us our identity. These tenets are found in words like “verbal,” “plenary,” “inerrant,” and “infallible.” Words that are not found in any passage of scripture where it talks about itself, but nonetheless show up in statements of faith and statements of confession that are tied to membership in many of our churches.

These tenets are all man-made, and are fair game for reexamination. It’s just that we know the price for that reexamination may be the loss of “father, mother, sister and brother.”

The basic meaning of inspiration from scripture seems to be “God put life in it” (again, TEV). This means at the very least that these books are special, that they have a continuing purpose and usefulness in God’s plan for his people. Any additional meanings for inspiration we might propose must pass their own shibboleth: does the witness of the scriptural texts themselves support those ideas.

And the simple answer is no. Most of the ideas associated with our tribal understanding of inspiration do not stand up against the witness of the texts of scripture themselves. The evidence—from scripture—is overwhelmingly against.

These (wrong) ideas about inspiration gave us our map for reading and understanding the Hebrew Scriptures. If scripture is the verbal revelation by God to his people of who he is, then when Psalm 137 talks about a god who dashes the heads of infants against the rocks, our image of God’s character has to include a place for that kind of wrath.

Somehow, we don’t apply the same standard to Psalm 44, where it talks about a god who falls asleep and loses track of his people’s suffering. But how is this any different a revelation of God’s character than Psalm 137, if we apply the same view of inspiration?

My own conclusion is that when it comes to inspiration, to quote Inigo Montoya from A Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Of this, I’m fairly confident.

But now we come to the part that I’m still working out for myself: if the map we were given for reading the Hebrew Scriptures is not accurate (because our understanding of Inspiration was faulty), how are we supposed to read and understand these books as inspired texts?

The “rule” I’m learning to apply as I read these texts is one I’ve already mentioned: Jesus is the interpretive key for unlocking meaning. If Jesus is the spitting image of God (TRUE), and if God “put life in” these texts for us (TRUE), then what does it mean when a text points to a God who doesn’t look like Jesus?

Back to Hebrews 1, it starts off by saying, “In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son…” (New American Bible). The “God spoke” is part of the justification for the “verbal” component of our tribe’s definition of inspiration. But God speaking to the prophets is not the same thing as God dictating word-for-word the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. The more important idea in these first verses of Hebrews is that the ancient revelation was incomplete—that it was partial, spoken at various times to different individuals—but now the revelation has been made clear in Jesus.

When you dig into the books of the Hebrew Bible—these books that give us a partial, incomplete picture—you start to notice that there are competing images of God. Sometimes those images are easy to tag as imposters, such as when the people of God confuse him with one of the Canaanite gods. But other times, the competing claims are about who God is for. Whose side he is on.

I think these competing views of God give us a clue for how we should read these texts. The books of Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament) represent a conversation. Or, maybe better, an argument. It’s an argument about who God is. About what God is like. About what God wants. About whose side God is on. About who God is for.

Or, maybe better, it’s an argument about who gets to speak for God.

It’s an argument that is still going when Jesus shows up on the scene in the gospels, and then he settles the argument once and for all.

It’s an argument that’s preserved for us (has “life” for us), because we still tend to have and make the same arguments today.

In that argument, both then and now, we tend to credit God with events that can be used to show that he is on our side. In the 1980s many church leaders said that AIDS was God’s divine judgment on gay men. The church was in a culture war (what I call the 50 Years War on this podcast), and AIDS was a “sign from heaven” that God agreed with the good church people.

This may not be that different from the story of Uzzah that you brought up. A group of religious reformers in the time of King Josiah were compiling some of the oral histories into written form. They had a strong bias that the Retribution Principle was indeed how God worked (many of the passages supporting the Retribution Principle seem to come from this time of compilation). So Uzzah’s death was clearly—to them—evidence of God’s judgment.

Similarly, the story of Lot’s wife seems to have been written down in the early years of the Southern Kingdom. One of the defining characteristics of the literature of this time and place was its focus on the need for covenant faithfulness. Their argument was that God would take care of his people, but only if they kept their side of the bargain. The story of Lot’s wife shows what happens when the people “turn back” to old ways.

The Nadab and Abihu story seems to have been written down later than both of the other two stories. The argument about God from this perspective was that the only true intermediaries between God and the people were the priests who could trace their ancestry all the way back to Aaron. The God they proposed cared a great deal about having only the “right people” speak for him. He also insisted on conformance to a set pattern of ceremonies and practices. Although Nadab and Abihu were of the correct line of priests, they did not conform to these practices and were subjected to divine judgment. The lesson clearly being that you better listen to the priests and do what they say God wants.

In the Hebrew Scriptures we see arguments between competing tribes, kings, judges, scholars, princes, and prophets. They represent competing views of God. Who is he? What is he like? What does he expect from us? How does he compare to the other gods? These views of God are often self-centered, and self-justifying. Just like our views of God.

This, I think, is one of the ways these texts were given “life” for us. We can and should see ourselves in them. Our tendency to put God on our side. To use God to justify us getting what we want, or taking what we want. To use God to explain why bad things happen to other people—that it is his judgment and wrath against them. When we read the Hebrews Scriptures, we should see our own self-justifying and self-centered tendencies.

In our own war between northern and southern “kingdoms,” both sides claimed God was on their side. Both victory and defeat were given as evidence of his judgment. We had our own “Canaanite Conquest,” where we used God’s will and authority (in the form of Manifest Destiny) to make war on the “unchristian” nations between us and the Pacific Ocean. And then there was the “Divine Imperative” that gave us our justification on God’s authority to enslave others.

I think about all of these things we’ve attributed to God, to show that he is on our side— to justify our own place as the ones who speak for him, our own actions as part of his divine will and plan. The only way to “feel good” about these chapters in our own history, is for us to say that “God told us to do it,” or that it was “his will.”

That’s how I read the Canaanite conquests now: as a people’s way of understanding and justifying an ugly chapter in their history by saying that “God told them to do it” (Manifest Destiny, Divine Imperative). An argument that God was on their side, that it was his will for them to conquer.

That may not be correct. Like I said, I’m still working through all of this. But, in the same way that Psalm 137 and Psalm 44 are not revelations of who God is, neither are the self-justifying claims of the books of the Canaanite conquest. Those claims are an argument about who God is, based on who a people needed him to be.

Recognizing these arguments in the Hebrew Scriptures, and seeing our own tendency to repeat the same arguments in a modern context, is what I think 2 Timothy is talking about when it says the purpose of inspiration is for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. In the scriptures we see God, but we also see us. Because we are no different from our ancient ancestors in our tendencies to treat God as our own possession. To justify our own atrocities, just as they did. The competing views of God are not a confusing and contradictory revelation of who God is, but rather a clear revelation of who are, and the god we try to make Him be in service to our own ends.

When we say that we speak for God, we make the same mistake they made: we create a god in our own image. With the same tragic results.

The continuing good news for us is that, when Jesus came he ratified one and only one of these competing arguments as the true picture of God, and that view was most closely aligned with the voice of the prophets. Their argument was that God cares about justice for the “least of these.” He wants his people to be a blessing to all nations. That his fundamental character trait is love for his children. That he is merciful and forgiving in the extreme.

This, I think, is the path for relearning how to read the Hebrew Scriptures. The character and teachings of Jesus are the interpretive key for separating and understanding (rightly dividing?) the various perspectives and claims we see in these books.

As such, inspiration does not mean that these books were revelations of God to his people, given a human veneer by human authors. Rather, maybe, that these are human books that have been curated for us (given life for us) by a Divine Teacher.

That may not be satisfying. And it’s certainly challenging. But I think it is the way to understand Jesus as the spitting image of God, and at the same time to hold that these books were given life for us. Anyway, that is where I am. It may change tomorrow, but for today, it’s the best I’ve got (for whatever that’s worth). I’m wide open to other ideas and suggestions….

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by Todd Austin.