God and Stories

When we think about the God of the Bible, we are confronted with at least two major issues (see my previous blogs): the one being the perceived contradiction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. The other would be the conflict between the narrator’s portrayal of God and readers’ theology. These issues are not to be taken lightly, as the way God is perceived to be (the kind of God we believe in) not only have a huge influence on believers’ faith and practise, but believers might end up believing in an altogether different God than the one we meet in the Bible.

The reality is that the text of the Old Testament, at least, does not deal with God, or theology, in a systematic manner. The fact is that most of the Old Testament consists of narratives – stories. What we know about God and his actions (who and how he is), we derive from these stories. And, as Wenham (1987:144) says, “…theological systematization is hardly the concern of the biblical narrators”. The authors of the Old Testament narratives did not intend to write theology. They wrote down the stories about God’s journey with his people that were passed down from generation to generation.

When we read the paper, we read the front page in a different way than the cartoons or sport pages. When we read the Bible, we need to distinguish the different types of literature. We cannot read narratives in the same way we read the Psalms or Paul’s letters. Different genres have different rules by which they are written and by which they should be interpreted.

As Fokkelman (1999:19) says, “What we have to learn is to read these stories according to their own rules and conventions, in an attitude of respect, and maintaining an open mind as long as possible."