Here's the deal. This is a serious post--sort of--but at least the questions at the end are serious.
In the old testament, God is a blabbermouth, you'll pardon the expression. But let's face it, you can't shut the guy up.
"Noah, go build me an ark. I'm going to flood the planet."
Noah protests. "Hey Noah, how long can you tread water?" (With a tip o' the hat to Bill Cosby.)
"Abraham, go get your son & kill him for me."
"Lot, get your family the hell out of Sodom and Gomorrah and don't look back." (Personally, I think turning his wife to mound of salt for looking back is pretty mean-spirited on God's part.)
And poor Moses. The guy couldn't turn around without God giving him advice. Job? I'm sure Job would have been just as happy never to have heard from Him.
And so it goes...and yet...as the old testament proceeds, God talks to fewer and fewer people. By the time of the new testament, the only person he'll talk to is Jesus & that's like talking to yourself, at least according to the Christians. (I may be wrong, of course. God may have talked to other people...but the trend, I believe, is right.)
So, it's natural to ask, what happened? How come God isn't talking to anyone anymore? Or is he bending Billy Graham's ear but Graham's decided not to reveal it?
Sure, there are zillions of radio preachers and born again zealots who'll claim that God speaks to them, but, I'm sorry, if I'm God & I have everyone in the world to choose from, I'm going to pick the fringe patrol? I don't think so. Whatever you think of HIM, He ain't dumb. He'd pick people like Desmond Tutu or Mother Teresa (before she died of course...now she probably has a seat at the head table) or ... hmmm, it's hard to think of who He'd want to talk to.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Steve S
worthy of a conversation with God? Anybody, even a harlot.
2 - The Theory
nobody.
3 - Bennett
Yeah, I have a partial theory about this. Since the idea that the world is only 6000 years old has pretty much tanked, Christians now suggest that the whole "everything was created in six days" concept may still be correct because to GOD "a day" could be a million years.
So, my theory is that right around 1AD, GOD was fed up with the whole Roman Empire thing, and went on a two week vacation.
GOD time that is.
He'll be back in a few million years. Feel free to leave messages at the tone...
4 - Katarn85
Me.
I could use a chat with him.
5 - Mark Schannon
Bennett, thanks for the early morning laugh. Great idea.
Steve, I don't disagree, but, assuming for a moment that Bennett's wrong, why has he stopped talking?
Katarn, keep trying. If he answers --and you've been taking all your meds like a good person :-) -- let me know!
6 - Dj Gainey
Or as one cop here in SC told me during a traffic stop, God talks to him.
7 - Victor Lana
Mark,
Your post brings up fairly serious issues even though it has a nice humorous touch. The thing is, and I'm basing it on my opinion and own knowledge of the Bible, is that people where more open to God talking back then.
Let's think about it. In days without cell phones (and all the rest of our technology), some guy standing on a beach talking to seemingly himself would appear strange. Yet, without crowded airwaves and cluttered lives, the ancients might just have been on a better frequency to hear God.
The other thing that is essential is belief and faith. I remember an old priest saying faith is believing in what is invisible. Jesus can be standing right there next to you, but you don't see him without faith.
I'm not saying I think I'm riding the L train with Jesus, but I am saying that this is what people might think in this modern crazy technological world.
As Wordsworth once said, "The world is too much with us." So, God could be speaking but no one can hear him.
8 - Mark Schannon
Victor,
You're right--I am serious, serious enough that my latest attempt at a novel has as its working title, "God Never Answers."
I accept your premise that we're less open to hearing God today, but what confuses me is that he seemed to stop talking as far back as the Bible, at least that's what I remember.
As an agnostic, I haven't picked up a Bible in many a year, but this is nagging me for some reason, and I may have to read it again.
If I'm right that God talked a blue streak in the Five Books of Moses, then less and less through the old Testament, and then only to Jesus in the New Testament, my question is "why?" What happened?
I know no one knows the answer--but I can't be the only person who's ever asked this question, so theologians must have at least considered it.
One idea that most religious people will probably hate: Over time, our picture of God has changed. Without belaboring the point, in the early Old Testament, God shows some startlingly human characteristics (much like the Greek gods), but as time went on, theologians wrote of a more ethereal (right word?), distant God. The early Christian Church interposed priests and rituals between people and God because He wasn't accessible to just anyone.
I don't know...I may have to find a priest, a rabbi, and a minister.
9 - diana hartman
God existed and exists in people's minds...it isn't that he talks less or not at all anymore, it's that evolution has weeded out a good many schizophrenics...additionally, we don't believe schizophrenic ramblings or idolize those who ramble about having seen or talked with God...we believe they really hallucinated the mother of jesus but we don't accept their hallucination as part of reality...
one might also ask why the bible isn't still being written...
10 - Mark Schannon
No...too easy. Sure, if God doesn't exist, then anyone who heard/hears him talk and acted on it was/is psychotic.
But one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, alas. That's why it's called faith.
What I'm trying to understand is why, in the Bible, God starts out talking to anyone who happens to be standing around & by the end, is mute. Is theological question disirregardless of His existence.
Oops...forgot my closing. Rats
In Jameson's Veritas.
11 - Victor Lana
Some really good points being made. In The New Testament, God speaks to Jesus in certain places (like after John the Baptist baptizes him and in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion).
Since then where do we hear of God speaking? We hear a lot about Mary appearing to people, almost as if God is more angry than ever (and the Old Testament guy is one angry dude), so he sends or lets Mary come on his behalf.
By the way, in the supermarket line tonight I saw the tabloid THE SUN and the headline read: JESUS IS HERE ON EARTH. Okay, so maybe he is riding that L train.
12 - Anthony Grande
"What I'm trying to understand is why, in the Bible, God starts out talking to anyone who happens to be standing around & by the end, is mute."
This is because at the beginning of human time humans needed guidance and direction. Nowadays we get our guidance and direction from parents or role models.
13 - Steve S
Steve, I don't disagree, but, assuming for a moment that Bennett's wrong, why has he stopped talking?
I believe in some form of higher intelligence, but am not sure if it is the 'personality' put forth in the Bible.
God talked with Job and Lot, but did not speak to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Why? I don't know. Suppose that when he spoke to Noah and when he then spoke to the next person, 5,000 years had actually passed and we don't know it. Then we have a ways to go before he'd speak again, I would imagine. I don't know how much of the bible is truth and how much is allegory or fable.
If you mean, why has He stopped speaking as a burning bush and all that, I don't know if he ever did, but He speaks to me all the time, it just isn't language it's in the things around me. Shows me, I guess is a better term.
My own thought is that organized religion is wrong as practiced today. It's corrupt, evil, oppressive and kills. It clearly does not adhere to the principles of Christ. Perhaps the answer lies in that.
14 - Baronius
A traditional answer (old-school):
God still talks to us, through prayer and rarely through visions. God doesn't reveal any new truths (such as commandments) to us because revelation was completed in Jesus.
Think about it: if the Torah is literally true, then God spoke to about a dozen of the holiest people in 1000 years. I think that a dozen of the holiest people in the last 1000 years believe that they've conversed with God. There's no dieback.
15 - Les Slater
People wrote the Bible. These were either original fictions or transcriptions of verbal fictions. What we have now are translations. Those who commissioned and/or oversaw those translations had their own axe to grind.
There has be a clear trend in man’s relationship to a superior or Supreme being. When science and culture were at their crudest men in power used the voice of gods or God to project their outlook, theological ventriloquists.
The Bible may have stopped being written but has not stopped evolving. Currently we have the Intelligent Design folk telling us that the world was indeed created as we see from geological evidence but there was and is intelligence behind it. We are no longer are to take the Bible literally.
The trend has been for science and culture to drive God from speaking and then from any resemblance to the flesh, from personality.
God has been reduced to the laws of nature. Mother nature has always been speechless.
16 - Mark Schannon
Anthony, do you really think we need less guidance and direction than Abraham et. al? Gadfry Daniels, we're a suicidal creation.
Steve, the difference between what you describe as God speaking to you and what the Bible describes is a vast chasm. It's the world around you that you seem to take as the voice of God. Moses got two heavy tablets from God & specific directions.
I agree with you about the faults of most organized religions, but that can't be God's fault. And I'd think he'd be howling to see how His name is being used.
Baronius, interesting post in a lot of ways. But I think it's too facile to say that revelation was completed in Jesus. If revelation is the end-point, an awful lot of His chattering in the old Testament seems banal. Worse, you'd have to say he wasn't very successful with the revelation to Jesus given the state of the world today.
Les, I agree with you historically. Our evolution has required a reformulation of how we think of God. But I'm struggling with a non-historical, theological issue.
If Baronius is right about there not being any dieback, then I've just got to do some more research. But I'd sure like to know some of those dozen people in the last 1000 years. And given that we "know" about the first dozen, why have the second dozen been so quiet and have had so little effect. I know Jesus is supposed to have been the messiah, but Christianity--like virtually all religions--has been a miserable failure.
So--and this is going in a slightly different direction--God splits himself off and creates Jesus to bring enlightenment. 2,000 years later, even He'd have to admit it didn't quite take. So why the silence? He rained a dozen plagues on the Egyptians, He stayed Abraham's hand when he was about to kill Isaac, He told Noah to build an ark and then flooded the earth, He turned Lots wife into a salt lick (I still think that was a lousy trick).
Today we try to find God talking to us in leaves and oceans and clouds. Or the lunatic fringe claims they talk to God all the time. Or someone prays and thinks they've been given direction.
It's a poor substitute for telling Moses to pick up a snake.
17 - Victor Lana
Steve S:
God most certainly spoke to Jesus in the Garden that night before his death. If you recall Jesus asks, if possible, for this cup to be passed from his lips. We don't have the words God says to him, but we know that he told Jesus that he must go forth with what had to be.
It's not the same thing as talking to Moses from the burning bush, but it's communication nonetheless.
18 - Les Slater
“Les, I agree with you historically. Our evolution has required a reformulation of how we think of God. But I'm struggling with a non-historical, theological issue.”
Theology is historical. What else could it be?
To the extent that an ahistorical solution is sought we have nothing to base it on but our attempt to find a comfort zone, we cannot bear to believe that the material world is all there is.
Science shows us the way. Even the Intelligent Design folk are accepting it. Intelligent Design is a retreat from personal religion. Religion will wither away when it looses the personification of the deity.
In the future people will not have the problem you are struggling through now.
19 - Baronius
Mark - Aye, there's the rub. It's easy to find people who think that God's spoken to them. Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc, Sun Nyung Moon, the smelly guy who hangs out in front of my office. Coming up with a list of 12 people that you think God has spoken to, that's tougher. And if you want a list of 12 people that everyone agrees that God has spoken to, let me know how that goes.
20 - Les Slater
Mel Brooks
21 - voltairean
Here is a corollary question:
God spoke often to the Jews in the old testament. There were no communication problems at all. So why did the Jews believe Jesus was a false prohpet? Seems fairly strange that all of the sudden God can no longer communicate with the Jews. Did God lose their number or what?
22 - Steve S
Moses got two heavy tablets from God & specific directions.
I mentioned I wasn't sure how much of the bible is truth or how much is allegory, etc. It's possible that all the direct conversation with God is allegory. My thoughts of God are of something that is ethereal, and not bound by human frailties like vanity over his name. I don't really believe that a lightning bolt ever blasted rules into stone, but that doesn't mean the story doesn't have some message.
I agree with you about the faults of most organized religions, but that can't be God's fault.
No, I don't think it's his fault. I was speculating that he quit 'talking' because of the corruption of the church. I don't really believe he talks so directly, but assuming so for the sake of argument...perhaps he won't talk until we fix organized religion. Maybe he talks to the faithful, the true, but we aren't aware of it because it's some nun cloistered away somewhere. It certainly wouldn't be a politician or a televangelist.
23 - Mark Schannon
Les, of course, Mel Brooks. After all, he is the 2000 year old man. And, while I personally agree that religion is the opiate of the masses--although that's not how you phrased it, one can distinguish theology as a philosophical discussion from history.
And, again, while I'm a hard-core agnostic, I'm assuming for this discussion that God exists somewhat like the Judeo-Christian tradition claims.
Now Voltarian has an interesting thought--God's pissed off at Jews for rejecting Jesus as the messiah. From the depth of my Jameson's besotted memory, Jews rejected Jesus because the coming of the messiah also brought the end of the world. 2000 years is a bit long to wait. Also, Jesus was only one of many prophets at the time claiming divine something or other.
But, two things--in the New Testament, he doesn't even talk to Christians. And if you ever heard my older relatives, they talked to God all the time--mostly complaining and haranging, I grant you, and they never seemed bothered by the fact that God never answered.
Steve, let's assume you're right--that He speaks to cloistered nuns and similarly uncommunicative people. What's the point? They can't do anything. His conversations in the Bible were very directive. Unless he's lonely and cloistered nuns make good conversationalists.
In Jamesons Veritas
24 - Les Slater
“…one can distinguish theology as a philosophical discussion from history.”
Of course, however that philosophical discussion has a history. I am not trying to equate theology or philosophy with history.
I have been trying to explain that theology has been conditioned by the material circumstances in which it found itself, and that theology evolves as those material conditions evolve. It is not a one-to-one relationship. It is quite complicated. Over a long period we can ascertain trends such as God losing His tongue.
25 - Les Slater
"And, again, while I'm a hard-core agnostic, I'm assuming for this discussion that God exists somewhat like the Judeo-Christian tradition claims."
Ah, reductio ad absurdum.