I have been mulling over this particular post for a while now, always hesitant to write something that is bound to cause confusion and perhaps even a bit of anger. Talking about God is never easy, and always fraught with the hazards that come with challenging people's most cherished beliefs (or non-beliefs). When I was in seminary (where I received my Master's Degree), the arguments were heated, and occasionally perched on the edge of violence, because an assault on one'e belief in God, one's image of God, is so personal, so bound up with that person's identity, that it was often perceived as a personal affront. Even those who profess atheism are uncomfortable with challenges to God-imagery, challenges which very often make their arguments irrelevant.
I remember the moment I began to think the whole "omni-" God thing - God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent - was wrong. As an undergraduate, long before I even thought of studying theology or philosophy, I overheard a discussion of these supposed attributes of the divine, and how they involved God in contradiction, which was said to be impossible (by whom, I'm not quite sure). For example, if God is all powerful, one person said, could God create a rock that God was unable to lift? Could God create another God? In another context (a discussion I read concerning creationism vs evolution), I read that, using certain creationist logic, one could make the argument that God only created the universe moments ago, placing in our heads all the memories of our previous lives, as well as te vast tomes of history, which would be, of course, false.
It took years for these initial, tiny cracks in the facade of traditional theism to crumble the edifice that was my own belief in this strange creature so many people called God. Reading N. T. Wright recently has only confirmed for me what I have held tacitly and unspoken for so long. First, we all use the word God, thinking that we are all using the word to refer to the same thing - some old white guy with a long flowing beard, wearing a robe, by turns smiling benevolently or frowning malevolnetly upon the world that is his handiwork. This general, unquestioning univocity (to use a fancy term that means the same as the previous sentence) creates a situation wherein discussions about "religion", too, no longer need to refer to anything specific because, of course, we all know what religion is all about, don't we? I have written at length and ad nauseum about my objections to this whole idea, so I will not tire anyone with a repeat performance, except to say that much the same argument applies to the word "God" that I have used in my discussions over the meaningless word "religion". Without a reference to anything specific - who this God is that we are all talking about - the word means nothing, and all the ideas in our heads have no reference to anything except, as Freud and Feuerbach noted, our own wishes or concepts of what is best (or worst) in humanity writ large.
What offends so many people when they read the Bible is that the God of the Old and New Testaments is not this God who is omni-. This God does not conform to what we think a God should be. This God does not act the way we want a god to act. I also think that, because of the emphasis on the omni's, too often we think of God as some kind of invisible magician, pulling rabbits out of hats, or our chestnuts out of the fire - and when that doesn't happen, it is obvious that God does not exist, at least to these people. Rather than struggle with the God professed and witnessed to in Scripture - much as Joshua did (and remember, Joshua lost) - we would ask God to be something God is not, and when God doesn't meet our qualifications, we reject him.
I wish to offer an alternative. Read the Bible with the omnis out of your head. Don't think of God as some wizened, and wise, old king, a combinatino of Plato, George Washington, and Santa Claus. These are foolish notions, childish notions, best left in the nursery where they belong. Read the Bible and discover who the God of Christianity is. Read who this God whom Jesus called "Father" is. Read about what this God did, both the wonderful and the horrific. Read about the love this God has, not just for Israel, but for the whole created order - a creation he loved so much, he actually sought to destroy it when it became so tainted by human sin (yet relented enough to allow Noah to salvage a bit from the wreckage). I have often heard people, well-educated, smart people, say that they don't understand why God this instead of that - again, the whole magical thinking thing. All I can say is asking "why" of God doesn't mean much, except, in the end, to discover that, as the first epistle of John says, "God is love". This love doesn't always manifest itself in the Bible in ways we might like (an Old Testament scholar wrote a book in the early 1980's called Texts of Terror; so much for Christians not facing the horrors of the Bible square-on) but it is always there, sitting behhind what happens, and (more importantly) how people perceive the role of God in these acts.
So, to discover God, we should not look into our heads, or the concepts of philosophy. We should read the Bible. Again. And again. And again. God isn't a concept, except insofar as the word "God" is only conceptual until that concept is filled by the specifics of Scripture.
