The God Paradigm

When God began to create heaven and earth—  Genesis 1:1  JPS

God – Now don’t get too upset about the JPS translation.  It only tries to capture the fact that the opening word, bere’shiyt, does not have a definite article attached (“the” beginning) and therefore must be understood in some other way than an announcement about the beginning of everything.[1]  Today we want to look at something else.  Today we want to notice that the Scriptures begin with the axiom of Elohim.  Nowhere does Scripture attempt to justify, explain, account for or give grounds for God.  There are no proofs for His existence, no arguments for His character, no rationalizations for His sovereignty.  In the biblical world, all of this is assumed.  The fundamental axiom of the Hebraic worldview is God revealed in Scripture.  To doubt what Scripture says about God is the equivalent of doubting the axiom that two parallel lines never meet in Euclidian geometry.  Give up the axiom and nothing else follows.  The entire edifice built upon the axiom comes apart.  Take out this brick and the wall collapses.

Every systematic theology text that I know of has a section on proofs for the existence of God.  The Christian world has been preoccupied with this problem since the early third century.  But nothing like this occurs anywhere in the Bible, even in the New Testament.  You should find this quite remarkable.  If there were ever evidence that the Christian epistemology is radically different than the Hebrew epistemology, this is it.  For some reason (which we will not elaborate now), Christianity feels it necessary to demonstrate that their God can be rationally justified while Hebrew thought unquestionably begins with the unchallenged assumption of God’s existence.

It seems to me that the reason for this striking difference can be found in the origins of the two faiths (yes, I am separating Hebraic-based faith and Christianity).  In Hebraic thought, belief and obedience (they are the same) begins in the 16^th century BCE in the ancient Near East.  In that world absolutely no one could have imagined the non-existence of divine beings.  Every culture in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt was filled with gods.  Gods ran everything.  Mankind’s greatest problem was not deciding whether or not the gods existed.  It was determining what the gods wanted.  In fact, even ancient Greece assumed the existence of the gods.  Greek philosophy did not begin to question the existence of the gods until the 4^th century BCE.  But by far the majority of all the people in the Roman Empire continued to believe unquestionably in the existence of the gods.  If this were not the case, Christianity would have had a much more difficult time converting pagans.

Enough history.  Let’s look at the radical difference between these two origins.  Hebraic thought comes from a world where divinity is found everywhere.  With this basic axiom, the only issue is which god to follow and therefore the Bible asserts that YHWH is the only God.  The intellectual bridge to cross is not whether or not God exists.  The bridge to cross is whether or not YHWH is the only God.  The plagues of Egypt are necessary demonstrations that there is no other god but YHWH.  Once that question is settled, everything else proceeds on the basis that this only God has revealed His will for men, and since He is the only God, we had better pay attention.  This is paradigmatic thinking.  It does not lend itself to outside critical evaluation.  It does not pretend to answer all the objections; objections, it must be added, that arise from outside the paradigm.  This is “Try it, you’ll like it” thinking.  You have to get into the paradigm before you can see the world from that point of view.  This is why men like Kierkegaard advocated a “leap of faith.”  They failed to see that their “leap” was predicated upon a different paradigm.  They had to leap because the paradigm they embraced could not justify the biblical religion but they wanted that kind of faith anyway.  So, they thought they had to give up their “rationality” in order to embrace something that was illogical.  They didn’t see that it was illogical because they were standing outside the paradigm.

Does this mean those of us who embrace Hebraic thought today are merely throwbacks to the ancient (and therefore irrational) world?  If you even entertain that question, you are already outside.  Paradigms may be resistant to outside criticism, but that does not mean they are insular.  The entire project of paradigmatic thinking is to make sense of the world.  Insofar as a paradigm fails to do this, it is less elegant, less appealing and potentially more vulnerable to collapse.  How do we evaluate paradigms if we have to stand inside to see what the world looks like?  There are essentially three general tests.

First, logical consistency.  Wherever a paradigm asserts something that defies the laws of logic, it must be challenged.  It is not possible for A to be equal to not-A.  Self-contradiction is (usually) a fatal flaw.  You can appreciate how powerful such a critique is when you find theologians like Erickson saying, “It appears that Tertullian was right in affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity must be divinely revealed, not humanly constructed.  It is so absurd from a human standpoint that no one would have invented it.  We do not hold the doctrine of the Trinity because it is self-evident or logically cogent.” [2]  This is quite an admission.  What Erickson recognizes is that this essential doctrine defies logic.  But notice that he stills explains why we should believe something completely absurd.  The paradigm is very strong indeed.

Second, coherence.  Ideas inside the paradigm must be related to each other in some coherent way.  Paradigms fail when they assert beliefs that are disconnected from each other.  As an example, recent dialogue about the relationship between sin, illness and Satan points out that some explanations of these relationships make sense based on the evidence from the text and some do not make sense.  When paradigms stop making sense they are likely to collapse (but not always, see Erickson above).

Finally, comprehensiveness.  A paradigm is supposed to make sense of the world.  That means it must be powerful enough to explain all of the experience of the world.  Wherever a paradigm justifies itself by ignoring or discounting human experience, it is weak.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s worldview may not include the occurrence of the holocaust, but that only points out the insufficiency of his paradigm.  His worldview is a failure.  It does not account for the facts. 

All of this leads to self-examination.  You have a paradigm, a worldview.  Is it logically consistent, internally coherent, experience comprehensive?  Wherever your paradigm fails to make sense of the whole world, it weakens.  But standing outside looking in and criticizing one worldview from the perspective of another worldview is fairly useless if we are trying to help people move to another paradigm.  Put on the shoes, then take a serious look around.

“In the beginning God” starts a way of seeing the world.  If you don’t put on Hebrew shoes, it probably won’t make sense.  But if you do put them on, lots of other things will have to change.  You decide.  Ask yourself, “What shoes will I wear today?”

Topical Index:  paradigms, Genesis 1:1, bere’shiyt.