Maybe a Different Take on Prayer Would be a Dialogue

I occasionally hear people talking about how God is the last defender of absolutes. It is as though the Greek way of thinking about philosophy, where we move in a series of geometrical statements from absolute first terms to specifics through a syllogism or pattern of deduction, really is an inroad into the mind of God. It is almost as though we have all come from a reading of the SUMMA of St. Thomas Aquinas. 

A slightly more than casual reading of two passages in the Hebrew scriptures, however, has lately provided me with more than clear evidence to the contrary, suggesting very strongly that God is not to be approached as a syllogism.

I’m referring to two conversations here, one between Abraham and God, and the other between Moses and God. Both show the idea that God, rather than an impersonal force of absolute first principles, is personal and deeply willing to discuss “decisions” to crush a city and, later, the Jewish people. In both passages, God is talked out of sad anger by mere mortals. Even more to the point, though, is that rather than supporting the Greek idea of absolutism, these episodes show a deity very much in genuine personal relationship with human beings who are allowed to sway and influence divine thinking.

I know that some scholars of the early parts of the Old Testament, or First Testament, have remarked on how some sections of the Book of Genesis depict God in a more whimsical role than seems to appear later. They suggest that one of the authors of the early books attributed to Moses may have been a woman. This section, where Abraham dialogues with God and makes a successful case for saving people, is perhaps evidence of this.

I’m not a biblical scholar, so I don’t know about other evidence given for this thesis. Yet I would suggest that God frequently invites believers to reason, to consider circumstances. The reason we might not accept this could go back to the sense we have that the God we serve is the God of philosophers. That is, we arrive at this deity through philosophical reasoning and premises, where we discover absolutes. The heaven of this God might be in the neighborhood of Plato’s heaven, or realm of true forms.

Early in my work as a teacher, I benefited from an experienced teacher who helped me to think through some of my confusion between process and product in my responses to student writing. In the course of our discussions, this colleague let me know that she only held to the five books of Moses. She was Jewish in the deepest sense. “The rest of the Bible,” she said, “shows too much affiliation with Greek thought, with Plato.”

I have long reflected on what she meant here, and I think that there is something to her thinking that we would be wise to consider. Certainly, if we believe in God, we believe in one who is God of the philosophers. But God is also God of the scientists, the artists, the midwife, the minimum wage worker, and the orphan and widow.

In our rush to defend our most cherished absolutes (which previous epochs may not have held to), we need to be careful that we don’t lose sight of the first and one true absolute–to love our neighbor as we love ourselves–in whatever form and however far from absolutes that may take.