An Elusive God

I was having a discussion the other day about the concept of God found in the Old Testament. “God is found in a burning bush,” said my friend, “and in the wind. God is experienced as a formless voice and also in the words of the prophets. It seems to me that to the writers of the Old Testament, God was elusive.” God wasn’t experienced the same way by everyone.  The prophets couldn’t even agree on what the message was. In fact the Old Testament writers refused, or perhaps couldn’t, put God into a box.

Jesus, in the New Testament, is also portrayed through the eyes of others. To Matthew,  Jesus is Jewish and so he wrote to a Jewish audience living nearby.  Mark presented Jesus as an elusive figure, while Luke paints him as an ethical figure in the Hellenistic culture . John’s is a spiritual gospel which tells the story of Jesus in a symbolic way, Paul’s mission was to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to the gentiles. So once again no over-arching portrait occurs, but rather a series of portraits that represent both the writers’ worldview and experience.

The creeds and doctrines of the church addressed just this issue of non-conformity  with the Council of Nicaea [325], which was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom From this came the Nicene Creed which is still used in our churches today. 

So whatever happened to the unknown God of the old Testament, and the stories of Jesus, told from different world views to people with different life experiences in the New Testament?  The church councils have created statements about God for us to all agree with, and these statements are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. [Hebrews 13.8] And so we are now faced with a hodgepodge of stories which we try to fit into one mold.

Where is God for you? In his book, “The  3 Colours of Your Spirituality”, Christian  A. Schwarz, the founder of NCD or Nature Church Development, talks abut the different ways people experience religion. He breaks these down into 9 specific spiritual styles, or how one most naturally connects with ‘God’. Once you have discovered your personal style, you are then challenged to grow towards a more balanced approach in your spiritual life. it is in this growth, in learning to appreciate and understand a style opposite to our own, that we approach spiritual maturity. According to Schwarz then, my path to understanding and experiencing ‘God’, is not necessarily yours, just as your path might well be different then mine. However, they are both innate and valid. Could this explain just why the various people involved in the writing of the Old Testament scripture saw God in a variety of ways…

If that is the case, where does that leave us today? How do you experience God in your day-to-day life? Are your experiences of God seen by the organized church as being valid and having merit, even when /if they contradict a teaching of that church? Are you perhaps afraid to talk about those experiences in case you are ridiculed?

'In the early 1960s, Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904-1984) stated that if Western Christianity did not rediscover its mystical foundations, we might as well close the doors of the churches because we had lost the primary reason for our existence. Now don’t let the word “mystic” scare you. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions at their mature levels agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and even available to everyone.' Richard Rohr, Jan. 24, 2017

So my question to you is, “Is this why the God of both the Old and New Testament, and also the God of today seems elusive?”