The practice of negative definitions has been my little spiritual friend for a while now.
God is not bound by time and space; God is not corporeal; God is neither male nor female; God is not like us. I take great solace in these "beliefs."
As a result, I recoil from declarations that begin with "God likes ____," "God's very nature is to ____," or "God will most certainly ____," especially when these become downright laughable.
Like on Monday, when a friend of a friend said, and not jokingly, "God has a twisted sense of humor." This was, mind you, in response to yet another chapter in an unemployed friend's fruitless job search. A search that has now lasted months and is taking its expected toll on all parties.
In essence, this person's super-duper helpful point was "God is cruel." Or "God likes to mess with your psyche. For fun. Come on, get in on the funny, funny joke already."
Yeah, instances like that are why it's easy to see why for so many centuries, the Catholic Church discouraged regular folk from reading the actual text of the Bible.
Got time for a casual glance at Job? You'll conclude, like our buddy from earlier, that God is indeed a sadist. A little reading of Hosea at bedtime? Well, what do you know, God's a masochist. Skim through a few Pauline epistles and God's a sexist; swim a shallow lap around Leviticus and God's a bloodthirsty legalist. (Saunter on over to Revelation and God's a drug trip. Far out.)
I don't know about you, but this God is starting to sound, like, not all there, you know?
Who wants a God like that -- or even a friend like that? Not me. I start with the belief that God possesses none of those attributes listed two paragraphs earlier. The effect is that the Bible gains a freedom it otherwise wouldn't have -- the freedom to be a collection of mankind's evolving view of a deity. Rather than revelation, it becomes insight, wisdom, poetry, guidance, philosophy, allegory.
Liberated from the need to synthesize 66 books into a Great Unifying Theory Of God's Celestial Nature, I'm able to read Job and Ecclesiastes and Deuteronomy and Philippians and take them for what their author meant them to be -- musings on how God is and is not. (With special personal gravitation toward the "is not" portion.)
And as such, the Bible continues to retain power in my life. Because I'm not looking to it for all the right answers, but instead, for the right questions to ask, it shines a light for me. Not a light of "God is exactly like this." A light of "Look at this wisdom. Read these stories. Learn. Be illuminated."
Plus, then I don't have to explain away a friend's suffering as God's twisted joke.
