The Givenses Contest the Teaching “My ways are not your ways”
Posted on Dec 13, 2014 by Trevor in Religion
One of the most well known verses of Isaiah goes like this:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.
This teaching is routinely used to associate God with some doctrine or policy that is found unintelligible and/or unpalatable. “God’s ways are not our ways”, the preacher says, hoping to dismiss our concerns and remind us of the foolishness of man’s wisdom.
Terryl and Fiona Givens tackle this theme in their book, The God Who Weeps. They persuasively argue:
It is a logical and reasonable inference [that] God would be as far above us morally, as he would intellectually. But it would make sense to look for a God who inhabits that true north toward which our innate moral compass points us.
For centuries, Christians were told they have no right to expect that they sense of what is just, or true, or right, is a reliable guide to what God considers just, or true, or right. Perhaps, the argument goes, they are simply incapable of understanding Justice, Truth, and the Right writ large, as seen from God’s perspective. But we are talking here of more than a simple difference in perspective. Of course our view is partial, and imperfect. The question is, have we good reason to believe we are even in the same ballpark as God when it comes to the values we hold dear? The idea that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways, has been used as a cudgel to beat into abject submission any who question a Deity’s right to save whom He will and damn whom He will, to bless or curse as He chooses, to have His own heavenly notions about what is good and right.
In actual fact, it makes little sense to recognize in our conscience a reliable guide to what is virtuous, lovely, and praiseworthy in the world where God has placed us, while suggesting He inhabits a different moral universe. It makes little sense to insist He endowed us with an intuitive grammar of right and wrong, while He himself speaks a different moral language. As the character in Elie Wiesel’s play, The Trial of God, protests, if our truth “is not His as well, then He’s worse than I thought. Then it would mean that He gave us the taste, the passion of truth without telling us that the truth is not true!”
The biblical story of the Fall indicates, on the contrary, that we are absolutely enmeshed in the same moral order as our God. Whatever momentous change the Garden of Eden story was meant to depict, the author wanted us to know it is not entirely in the direction of sin and loss. One consequence of eating the forbidden fruit, acknowledged by God himself, is a heightened human consciousness–and not just of nakedness. Adam and Eve become more, not less, like God insofar as they came to see the same moral distinctions he did. This was precisely what He confirms, saying Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” In all the centuries of Christian hand-wringing and breast-beating that have followed in the wake of the Adamic decision, this fact seems to have disappeared entirely. Humankind and God now share a common moral awareness, a common capacity to judge between right and wrong, a common capacity for love.
Though we may be in the infancy of moral development, as individuals and as a species, surely we are striving toward a perfect model that God already embodies. And while personal and collective progress may be shaky and uneven, some moral imperatives have only grown more sharply defined across time: we reject inhumanity, cruelty, caprice, and callousness. We prize kindness, we value tenderness, and we esteem compassion. … We are continuing, with tragic and devastating exceptions, on the trajectory inaugurated by Adam and Eve, becoming ever more like God, as we become ever more adept at discerning good and evil, and nourishing the wellsprings of human love.
-The God Who Weeps, pp. 18-20
