Tell me why the world is weird: Inspiration and Incarnation: Changing God's Mind

I've been reading "Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns. Right now we are in chapter 3, which is about the "diverse viewpoints" in the bible; ie, the bible sometimes says different/contradictory things.

So, here's a question: Does God change Their mind?

I think typically, Christians believe that God is outside of our reality, above it, not constrained by time and space like we are. God knows everything, They know everything that will happen, and They are not surprised by any of it. God has a plan. So no, God doesn't change Their mind. God already knows everything there is to know about our world, and is never surprised or changed by things that happen.

I've seen some Christians suggesting that God can be changed by events that happen in our world, and I'm really interested in exploring that. The Slacktivist has a post called Epiphany (One of us), which is about how God *could not* understand what it is like to be human, until They became a human Themself, and They were changed by the experience. They learned from it. I'm so into this.

But anyway, for the most part, Christians believe God already knows everything, and so They wouldn't change Their mind. (And speculations about God learning and changing have the feel of... we aren't supposed to be talking about this, this is bordering on blasphemy, to say that God wasn't already perfect.)

However, there are stories in the bible which do portray God as changing Their mind, or learning new information and responding to it. One example given in "Inspiration and Incarnation" is when God "tested" Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham is about to do it, and God finally sends an angel to stop him:

It is clear that the purpose of the test was not to prove anything to Abraham but to God. For God to say, "Now I know," makes sense in this story only if the test was a real test; if something was at stake. It was on the basis of Abraham passing the test that God said, "Now I know." In this story, God did not know until after the test was passed.

Another example in this book is the beginning of the Noah's ark story- God sends the flood because humans have become wicked.

The scene is straightforward: (1) God creates everything good; (2) wickedness and evil enter; (3) God reacts by intending to wipe out everything he made. Of course, it is possible to say that God already anticipated step 3 in step 1, that is, he knew what was going to happen, and so step 2 does not take him by surprise. That may be so, but that is only a guess that goes far beyond what we read. The story is told in such a way that steps 2 and 3 have an unexpected quality to them. Any attempt to force the God of Genesis 6 into a mold cast by certain dogmatic commitments or to reconcile this description to other biblical passages simply amounts to reading past this story. I take it as a fundamental truth, however, that God did not put this story here so we could read past it.

Oh this is fascinating. So there are 2 ways to read the story: You could just read what's right there in Genesis 6, without bringing in your own beliefs about God being all-knowing. In this reading, God made the world and everything was good, but then humans messed up that goodness by choosing to do evil. This was not what God intended or wanted, so God reacted by sending a flood to kill everyone, except Noah and his family. Or, the other way to read the story is, you already believe that God knows everything and God can perfectly predict the future, so sending the flood was part of the plan all along. The bible portrays God as reacting to humans' behavior, but that's just pretend. God wasn't actually surprised; God was just like, oh okay, time for the next step in the plan.

And Enns's point is, we are supposed to just read the story we are given. It says God reacted to human behavior, and so, in this story, we should understand it as God being surprised and reacting to human behavior. They didn't know everything from the beginning. If you come at it with the idea that you already have beliefs about what God is like, and everything in the bible has to fit into 1 consistent picture, then you will miss the point that the writer of Genesis 6 was making.

Again, what it comes back to is, this is not a true story. We're not gonna get every passage in the bible to fit together into 1 consistent picture, because they just don't. A lot of them aren't true stories, but they were written for some reason, and we are supposed to just take each story for what it is, rather than bringing in other ideas which totally change it.

Here's an analogy I've made before, about bible stories and Spiderman:

[spoilers for "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and "Spider-Man" (2002) in the next paragraph]
It's EXACTLY like this: Let's say you watch "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (where Tom Holland plays Spiderman), and you see that Mary Jane finds out Peter Parker is Spiderman while they are high school students. Then you go watch the 2002 Spiderman movie (where Tobey Maguire plays Spiderman), and both Peter and Mary Jane are older than high school. So all throughout the movie, you think to yourself "ah, so she already knows Spiderman's real identity." You feel so proud of yourself for having this bit of insider knowledge which the movie didn't say directly- BECAUSE IT'S JUST NOT TRUE. In fact, the 2002 Spiderman movie has Peter deliberately hiding his identity in order to protect Mary Jane. Ah but you don't notice that subplot. You "know" that Mary Jane already knows. And so you miss out on the actual story that the actual movie is actually telling.

You "already know" what the story wants to say, and so you miss out on what the story is actually saying. This is so real; it's astounding to me, now that I no longer believe in biblical inerrancy, realizing what the bible stories were actually saying, and how that's completely different from the way I had always read them. The apologetics mindset where you have to make sure everything fits together, where you have to defend the bible, rather than just letting it say what it says.

And there are plenty more examples of God changing Their mind/ reacting. (The book mentions Exodus 32, where the Israelites worship a golden calf, and God is so angry he decides to destroy them, but fortunately Moses talks him down.) One could say that the whole Old Testament is about the interaction between God and the Israelites. People do things, and God responds, and there is back-and-forth.

(But also, there are bible passages where God predicts the future, or makes big promises about what will happen "forever".)

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Page 93-94 says,

The Old Testament portrays God as a being who can be acted upon, a being whose actions are in a meaningful sense of the word contingent upon what his people do: if they obey, then God will bless; if they disobey, then God will curse. I am well aware that from a philosophical point of view one can answer this quite simply by saying that God may act as if his actions are contingent, but in reality they are not. My concern, however, is with the Bible and what it says, with how God acts in Scripture. I am not at all comfortable with describing God in a way that leads me to dismiss this dimension of how God himself wishes to be known.
... It is not the God behind the scenes that I want to look at, but the God of the scenes, the God of the Bible, how he is portrayed there.
I realize this raises some questions. Does not God, as he is portrayed in the Bible, correspond to the God "behind the scenes"? In other words, does not the Bible, because it is the word of God, give us an accurate presentation of what God is really like? After all, if you drive a wedge between what the Old Testament says about God and what God is really like, how can we speak meaningfully of the Bible as God's authoritative word?
This is a very good cluster of questions. I am not trying to drive a wedge between the Bible and God. Actually, and somewhat ironically, this is what I see others doing. I feel bound to talk about God in the ways (plural) the Bible does, even if I am not comfortable with it. The Bible really does have authority if we let it speak, and not when we-- intentionally or unintentionally-- suspend what the Bible says about God in some places while we work out our speculations about what God is "really" like, perhaps by accenting other portions of the Bible that are more amenable to our thinking. God gave us the Bible so we could read it, not so we can ferret our way behind it to see how things really are.

So... the point here is we can't expect any specific thing from any bible passage to really be true in an absolute sense that we can rely on. Not the facts about the events that happened, and not the larger picture of what God is like and how They interact with people. Instead, you're supposed to just read the story, just experience it without thinking about the larger implications- and you get some kind of ~vibe~ from it, and that vibe is the meaning that God intended.

My feeling on this is, I'm really trying to like it, but I don't know if I can.

Okay, sure, read the story, get some kind of vibe. I can do that. But everyone's vibe is going to be different, so how is this meaningful at all? And I'm autistic so the things I focus on often end up *not* being the things that everyone else thinks are the important parts. This idea that we're just supposed to have the experience that the writer intended us to have, that we're supposed to just intuitively understand which details matter and which ones don't- well, how can that ever work?

Okay let me give you an example, of getting the point vs getting stuck on the details. There's a "getting to know you" activity where everyone has to share an answer to this question: "If you were a kitchen appliance, which kitchen appliance would you be?" My reaction to this is, okay, what is the mechanism by which I'm turning into a kitchen appliance? Like, a wizard transforms me or something? Why would I have any say in what kind of appliance I would turn into? I can't answer this question without understanding the mechanism of transforming into a kitchen appliance.

Then my friends told me I was missing the point, and I should stop nitpicking and just answer the question.

But like, how??? I want to give a correct answer to this question! But I can't do that without the information about how the transformation into a kitchen appliance is performed.

Eventually I realized what the question was actually asking: For fun, make an analogy between yourself and some kind of kitchen appliance. There's no right answer here; the characteristics people take from themselves and map onto a kitchen appliance could be anything, it doesn't matter, the point is just to talk to each other and get to know each other.

I wasn't, like, "being difficult" and not answering the question- I legitimately did not understand that the point was "make a fun analogy" rather than "correctly predict the outcome of this fanciful scenario." You're supposed to hear the premise, "if you were a kitchen appliance," and just accept that in a vibes-based way, rather than with a well-defined understanding of what it means.

Here's an example of the opposite kind of thing: There's a logic problem that goes like this, "George and Gracie are laying on the floor, dead. There is an open window, and there is broken glass and water on the floor around them. What happened?"

The answer: Actually George and Gracie are goldfish. They were in a fish tank near an open window, and the wind blew and knocked down the fish tank and it broke.

This is how logic problems/ "lateral thinking problems" work. Every individual statement is true, or at least true in some technical sense. But the overall picture you get from reading the question might be very different from what actually happened. You need to read over it carefully, to see what was actually stated directly, and what was an assumption that you brought into it. This is the kind of thing I'm good at. Fixating on each little detail, rather than an overall vibe.

And the biblical-inerrancy/ apologetics mindset is very much this "logic problem" sort of approach to the bible. We "know" the entire bible fits together into 1 true story. So, you take each individual statement, and you can be sure it's true- or at least true in some technical sense- and you build up a picture of what the bible is telling us. And you often end up with a picture that looks very different from whatever picture you imagine when just reading a bible story by itself.

For example, how did Judas die? Matthew says that Judas felt remorse after betraying Jesus, and he tried to return the reward money, and then hanged himself. But the book of Acts says, "With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out." So, if you are a good apologetics nerd, you know that both of these are true, so you combine them into a story like this: He hanged himself, and then after he was dead, his body fell down. But the writer of Acts doesn't say that Judas hanged himself! The way the writer of Acts tells it, the vibe you get is more like, Judas took the money he got for betraying Jesus, and he bought a field and felt like everything was going well for him- but he died from an accidental fall in his new field. Matthew portrays Judas as regretful and suicidal; Acts portrays him as prideful and then finally getting the punishment that was coming to him.

This is different! They are telling 2 different stories! But you would never realize that, if you believe in biblical inerrancy and you think the bible is a logic problem that has to all fit together.

(See: The Bible and the Pixar Theory)

This is also how you get young-earth creationists reading the story of Noah's ark and then developing an entire field of "science" to very seriously answer questions like, "Were there dinosaurs on the ark? How many animals did Noah need to take in order to preserve the full diversity of the animal kingdom- it doesn't need to be every *species*, but every *kind*, like you can take 1 pair of felines and their descendants after the flood can branch off into all the cats/ lions/ saber-tooth tigers. Maybe Noah took younger animals, to take up less space than adults. Hmm, maybe all the animals were hibernating?"

That's not the point of the story at all! The writer of Genesis was just like, 'well you'd need a male and female of each animal, that oughta do it,' and put no thought into it beyond that, because that's not the point of the story- but if you believe it's a true story, you have to deal with the fact that in reality, preserving the diversity of the animal world during a year-long global flood is going to be a lot more complicated than "just take a male and female of each animal."

But you're not supposed to get caught up in those details because it's not a true story.

Similarly, some people are more bothered than others about plot holes and inaccuracies in movies. You might feel like "I can't enjoy this movie at all because they got this part so wrong" or you might feel like "stop nitpicking and just watch the movie!"

This is especially a problem if you have a lot of technical knowledge that the average person doesn't have- let's say you're a pilot, and you're watching a movie where some important plot point is about something an airplane did, and you can't think about anything besides "wow, it does NOT work like that." And your friends won't get that. They'll be like, "whatever, just watch the movie."

And I guess when it's a movie, both approaches are fine. You can "just watch the movie" or you can nitpick everything and invent elaborate fan theories to explain all the plot holes. Different people will be at different points on the "watch the movie" to "nitpicking" spectrum. That's fine, it's just a movie, do whatever you want with it. But when it's the bible, I guess there's some element of "this is why God gave us this story"- there's some notion of a "correct" way to enjoy it (and apologetics ain't it). Is there?

So yes, I agree with what Enns is saying, that we should just take each bible passage for what it is, rather than approaching it with assumptions about "it has to be true" and "it has to match our overall understanding of God/religion/etc." But it feels to me like, if we accept this approach to reading the bible, then we can't actually rely on anything in the bible being actually true. It's just vibes, apparently.

And on one level, I guess this is fine. I don't believe in inerrancy, so my approach to the bible is, you can just take whatever is meaningful for you. And we get a fuller and richer picture by looking at the ways the bible has been understood and interpreted by different groups of people throughout history- from the original audience, to the Jewish scholars in the time to Jesus, to the modern white evangelicals, to the Black leaders of the Civil Rights movement, etc. It's living and active.

But Enns is more evangelical than me... it strikes me as very weird that his argument leads to 'we can't rely on anything in the bible being true at all' but he still says the bible is the word of God, inspired by God, given to us by God, intended to be exactly the way it is.

But let's back up. I'm responding to this claim that we're supposed to just read the bible, not nerd out about the implications of specific details ("God gave us the Bible so we could read it, not so we can ferret our way behind it to see how things really are"); this seems incompatible with an autistic way of thinking. But! The next chapter of "Inspiration and Incarnation" is about Jewish and Christian writers around the time of Jesus/ the New Testament, and how they totally did take individual details from bible passages and draw conclusions from them.

So I'm kind of responding to this 'just read it and get the message the author intended, don't overthink it', but actually, I don't even think "Inspiration and Incarnation" is advocating that.

I guess the important takeaway is, don't have an apologetics mindset where you already know the overall picture you need to fit each bible passage into, before you even read it. If you are coming at the bible from that direction, you will totally miss what a lot of the passages are saying, because they really aren't true stories and they really don't fit in with your overall beliefs about the bible, but you won't be able to perceive that.

There are layers. There's the original purpose the author had in writing, there are the events described which may or may not be true, which the writer chose to spin in some certain way... but from a biblical-inerrancy perspective, there aren't layers. It's just simply True. But if you read the bible like that, you'll miss a lot of what it's saying.

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The bible portrays God as changing Their mind and reacting to human behavior. Does God actually change Their mind and react to human behavior? Well, who knows. I guess we can't rely on the bible to answer this question- the way God is portrayed in individual bible stories isn't necessarily the way God is. (God wants us to have stories about Them changing Their mind, even though They don't, apparently???)

That's fine I guess, but I don't see how one can accept that and also continue to believe the bible is special and inspired by God and given to us by God.

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Discussion question for the comment section: If you were a kitchen appliance, what kitchen appliance would you be?

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Posts about "Inspiration and Incarnation":

Inspiration and Incarnation: Introduction
Inspiration and Incarnation: Other Ancient Near East Literature
Inspiration and Incarnation: An Aside About Apologetics
Inspiration and Incarnation: Wisdom Literature
Inspiration and Incarnation: The Ten Commandments
Inspiration and Incarnation: How Many Gods
Inspiration and Incarnation: Changing God's Mind

God Made the Firmament

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible

Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories

Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)