The Disney God
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB
In the beginning – Recently we examined Heschel’s claim that this verse is not a proto-scientific statement of causality. It doesn’t tell us anything about how the world came into existence. Rather, it is a statement that God is alive, that He is sovereign, and that He cares for His creation. It is a why statement. But few religious believers understand the enormous impact of Heschel’s insight. Since virtually all those who use the Bible as a sacred text have been influenced by Hellenism, they read this verse as if it were a statement about the cause of the universe. In other words, they turn this Hebrew emotion into Greek science. Why? Because the West thinks inside the box.
“For the Greek philosophers the natural world was the starting point of speculation. The goal was to develop the idea of a supreme principle . . . The words ‘the divine’ as applied to the first principle, . . illustrates a procedure adopted by philosophers in subsequent ages. It is always a principle first, to which qualities of personal existence are subsequently attributed. . . It is a God whose personality is derivative; an adjective transformed into a noun.”[1]
Greek science is interested in how things happen. It really doesn’t have a lot of patience for the why question. “Why” is relegated to moral philosophy or metaphysics or religious belief. It can’t be measured. It can’t be proven. It isn’t reducible to mathematical algorithms. Therefore, it’s not really real. What’s real is how the causal chain explains everything (just watch an episode of House and you’ll see). Therefore, the God of what’s real is also part of the causal chain, even if He is the first part of the chain. If we start from any part of the chain and work backwards, we will arrive, inevitably, at the postulation of a first link in the chain, a first cause, an uncaused cause. And that God is really just a principle of causation. But since we don’t worship mathematical principles, we add personality to this first principle and, presto chango, we have the attributes of God. It’s like Disney giving human characteristics to lions and warthogs in a movie. Theology that begins with Greek categories ends up with Disney fabrications.
If you understand this, then you might want to reconsider the typical exegesis of the first chapter of John. Is John really painting backgrounds for another Disney representation? Is he just giving you another version of the causality argument with the “Word” in the place of YHVH? Or is he thinking in Hebrew categories, telling you that the Messiah has arrived, is alive, changes things. For that matter, how much of our view of the Gospels, the miracle stories, the power and suffering, are really just another version of ancient scientific reporting, subject to all the tools we would use on any other historical event? Do you think it’s possible that we have applied the wrong paradigm to the whole Bible? That we’ve read it as if it were written by Aristotle or Josephus or Calvin? And if we have, how can we fix this?
“In the beginning,” we discovered that our thinking about God was the product of centuries of Western categories, not ancient Near-eastern revelation. “And our lives were chaos and void.”
Topical Index: causality, first cause, Disney, Genesis 1:1
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 44.
