God, the maker of analogies

Another thing heretics often do is to try to establish a single metaphor for God and His workings in and through the world. One of the men I mentioned in the last post has attempted to make his new theology coherent by using a "God-as-author" analogy in which God's sovereignty is explained by comparing Him to a novelist and we humans to the characters in the novel.

There's nothing immediately wrong with the analogy. In some ways, in fact, it's very helpful: we often trip up on the doctrines of God's election, foreknowledge, and foreordination, and imagining Him to be writing us can be useful in explaining those things. It's when the analogy doesn't stop where it should that the whole thing goes wrong.

Christ's deity, for instance, is whittled down to fit into the overriding metaphor. Christ is no longer the eternally-existing second person of the Trinity, He's simply a human God used to put Himself into the story He was writing. Christ, then, is as created and ontologically one-sided as we are, except that Yahweh put Himself into the consciousness of Jesus so He could interact with us.

Too many things are wrong with that to address them all here. The point is, if the individual in question were willing to relinquish his analogy when biblical doctrine has clearly outgrown or transcended it, he wouldn't be in the position he is of rejecting centuries of received Christian doctrine. Of course, he doesn't care that he's done this, but we should.

We should also try to learn something about the use of analogies in the Bible itself. God never uses a single metaphor to explain Himself, His operations, or His will for mankind simply because a single metaphor isn't sufficient. God created metaphor, and He created the analagous objects and ideas which serve every metaphor; how could just one ever tell us everything we need to know about Him?

If our goal really is to get at the root of the Bible's message, it seems to me that our first task should be to understand what kind of book the Bible is. It isn't simply a collection of literary pieces, and it isn't only a series of rational/intellectual propositional statements. Why? Because God can't be reduced to a single theme, idea, or rational precept.

The problem with heresies is that they never give God His due, they never allow the God of the universe to transcend or overwhelm or baffle His creation, they never suffice. We should be afraid of worshipping a God who stays strictly within humanly comprehensible lines; we should be terrified not to worship the God of all things who routinely challenges our perceptions and our clockwork reductionism.