How People Understand God Has Changed Again and Again

Deconstructing Christianity: Concepts of God have changed many times. It is time for another leap in the way people understand 'God'.

Whatever kind of God might exist on the one hand, and one’s own, or one’s group’s concept of God on the other, are two different things. We might all have the same scriptures, but we do not all have the same material, social, cultural, and personal circumstances shaping our understanding of those scriptures or the God described in them. Neither do we all have the same personal experiences of God. No one can have a perfect understanding of God. The idea here is God per se on the one hand and one’s concept of God on the other. Reflect on that for a moment.

If God on the one hand, and one’s concept (or one’s group’s concept) of God on the other is an unsettling dichotomy, face it with courage anyway. It is an important distinction to make. Conflating the two will preclude a more mature understanding of oneself concerning God. Each of us might have a personal experience of God, but personal experience is distinct from transcendent God, who nonetheless becomes immanent in our experience. Each of us may be informed by our own or our group’s interpretation of scripture concerning God, but that interpretation is not God, either.

This post is not about God—who does not change, but about people’s concepts of God—which do change.

Critical analysis of language in biblical texts has given us the ability to see with some clarity how the work of different sources was knit together over time, and how historical circumstances framed the compilation of those sources. As a result of our own imperfection and fallibility, and due to continual changes in material, social, cultural, and developmental circumstances over time and in different places, it is also clear from scripture that we have had to update how we understand God time and again. The Bible, as well as church history after the Christian scriptural canon was settled, are records of how God’s people have changed in their understanding of who, what, and where God is. The Bible and Christian history do not provide what would define God for all time; rather, they provide a rich developmental record of the struggles through which our understanding of God has evolved over millennia.

Shifting Concepts

Ancient inhabitants of the Levant in nomadic, Late Bronze Age tribal settlements did not originally understand the Elohim they worshiped as the one and only God. The idea rather developed over time that one elohim should be considered foremost within the vast, hierarchical pantheon of Canaanite gods—given precedence above the others. This is not monotheism, but is properly understood as monolatry, or henotheism. There are many passages in the Hebrew Bible that reflect this understanding of God, and draw on various Canaanite terms and imagery.

Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.

YHVH, the sometime national God of the kingdom of Judah, represents a conflation of the gods El and YHVH that took place in context of the Israelite and Judahn monarchies, along with the gradual absorption of principal Canaanite gods Asherah and Ba‛al into YHVHistic religion. In many ways, the torah reflects this religious and ideological struggle, integrates the other deities, and promotes the supremacy of YHVH. This develops in conjunction with the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Iron Age YHVHistic kingdom of Judah, a theological development of which included the understanding of God as one, and as dwelling in a specific location, inside a holy structure, on a certain holy mountain.

When that specific dwelling in its specific location ceased to exist, people’s concept of God had to change again. The idea developed of a God that is everywhere, and can be invoked wherever and whenever people are gathered for that purpose. When Jesus spoke the phrase, “Wherever two or three are gathered,” he was articulating a notion about divine presence that not only shows up in the Christian Bible, but also in the Talmud, developed as part of the Rabbinic Judaism that emerged based on subsequent understandings of Hebrew scriptures.

Jesus’ attributed words that “God is Spirit,” and his use of wind as a metaphor, that “blows where it will,” (John 3) have roots in Hebrew Bible references to the spirit of God. However, Jesus’ conception of God as immaterial spirit also represents something of an innovation with respect to the way God’s spirit is depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Though the early development of monotheism can be traced back in part to the Iron Age kingdoms, its implicit assumption only becomes consistent in the Hellenistic Judaism of Jesus and the apostles, and in the Rabbinic Judaism that slowly developed after the destruction of the second temple.

Though inaccurate and unfair in some ways, much has been made of the distinction between an “Old Testament” God who appears jealous, vengeful and wrathful, and a “New Testament” God who is Love itself. God shows compassion in the Hebrew Bible, and a God of vengeance and wrath certainly shows up within Christian traditions. By the fourth century CE, the idea of God as Trinity became codified in the Christian tradition. In Christian thinking, Trinity is implicit in Hebrew Bible references to God, and explicit in the attributed words and teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

Awareness in thinking about God has also developed over time. By the thirteenth century, the work of Medieval Scholastics exemplified by Thomas Aquinas reflected that God could be approached through human reason. At the same time, Late Medieval mystics rejected a connection between reason and God, relying instead on personal experience mediated through mind-clearing meditative practices. Protestant reformers emphasized scriptural revelation, as well as the sovereignty of God and human corruption, and so expressed mistrust in reason as a way of knowing God.

Modern thinking in European cultures can be understood as having developed in several places over the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Early on, it was assumed that rational processes would eventually discover and validate what was presupposed by faith; however, faith eventually ceased to be grounded in reason, and reason eventually ceased to be supervised by faith. Christians now affirm from the biblical teaching of Paul that the spiritual practice of faith presupposition does not take place in the rational realm of empirical evidence—it is not ‘belief’ in the modern sense—neither need faith be considered in conflict with empirical evidence. Any supposed conflict between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ results when a proponent of one is threatened by the other, and resorts to the inherent potential in modern thought for rigidity and intolerance.

Fundamentalist thinking within any religion or ideology has a number of identifiable hallmarks. One of these is the reductive collapsing of selected knowledge gained through long-term, dynamic processes (like changing concepts of God over time) into a single, static, all-time proposition, held up as a holistic viewpoint while denying its inherent contradictions or the changing circumstances out of which they arose. Another characteristic is the presupposition of a past or future golden age in which such a static view of reality holds dominion over all others.

Different concepts of God do exist simultaneously in the biblical record, and in the record of church history. And, there is another way in which these different concepts of God are all combined in the shorter term. This has to do with the way an individual’s understanding of God changes as they grow and develop as a human being through their life cycle.

The point is, though God may be regarded as changeless, our individual and collective experience and understanding of God, as people of God, are by no means fixed and unchanging. Our finite understanding of God, whether by revelation, reason, or personal experience is, and always has been filtered through the changing material, social, cultural, and developmental circumstances that have shaped that understanding.

And, just as collectively held concepts of God have changed over time, as human societies and cultures have changed, so individual concepts of God change over the life cycle of an individual, as they follow their own path of human development. These paths of collective and individual development are related. The bottom line is this: God doesn’t change, people do.

We all change, both individually over a lifetime, and collectively throughout history. One of my cardinal arguments in publishing this blog is that the time has come for our concept of ‘God’ to make another leap for Christianity to remain relevant in the postmodern world. Because people’s concepts of God have changed again and again—as clearly seen in the records of scripture and history—Christians need not fear change; rather, they would do well to embrace it, given that in the final analysis, it is inevitable.