A Brief History of God
And Some Pointers to
Taking God Seriously

Preface and Introduction

"Ask yourself," said Donald Knuth, "what you would do if you were God and you wanted to deal with people on earth, how would you present yourself?" This is what this mini-site tries to discuss. Both God's dealings with people on earth, and how he has presented, and still presents, himself.

This is the preface and introduction to the four main parts:

(This 'Brief History of God' site is offered as an idea, which might stimulate you. It is still under construction, because it is part of an on-going creative process rather than being anywhere near complete. At the bottom of the various pages you can see the current update status of each page. Andrew.)

Motivations

Why this site? Several things have motivated me to write this 'Brief History of God'. They are explained in site.html, but briefly they are:

In the same file I have set out also the aims of the site.

Questions

Most people believe in God, in some kind of Supreme Being. Even in the West 70% of us do, though only a very few of us talk about it. To the Muslims, Allah, to the Jews and Christians, Yahweh, to the ancient Chinese, Shang Di, to the original Americans, the Great Spirit.

The problem we have is this: What is this Supreme One like? Most of us reckon he has power, but what does he do with it? Does he hide himself from us, or show himself? Does he play with us, doing whatever he pleases while we suffer? Is he one who is jealous of his position, wanting to maintain his status? Does he stand back from us and let us try to enjoy ourselves and get ourselves out of our own messes? Is God just the sum total of all the perfections we can ever think of? Or does he step in and sort things out for us? Is he primarily to be feared, obeyed, sought, admired, or loved? What is God like? That's our first problem; but from it come others.

Another problem we have is: How does God link to what we see and experience around us? Is he part of it (as paganism suggests)? Is it part of him (as some eastern ideas suggest)? Or is he its creator? If so, has he just wound it up like a clock and let it run down, as Liebniz thought? Or does he get intimately involved with it, as Newton believed? And, if so, how? That's Question 2.

A third question is: How does God relate to the big issues we face? Justice? Truth? Good versus evil? Suffering? Joy? Knowledge and Wisdom? Love? Unity and Diversity? How does he relate to how these work out today: Justice for the planet, Justice for the less privileged? Truth of what we hear through the media? Wisdom in our business dealings? Global ecological disaster? Economic prosperity? Love in our families and relationships? What do we make of degrees of freedom we experience?

Likewise: How does God relate to the little issues we face every day? Is he too grand to care? Or, at the other extreme, is he so jealous of being obeyed that we have to get the tiniest detail just as he wishes it to be? Is he too weak or apathetic to care? Or does he delight to work alongside us? That's Question 4.

These lead us to Question 5: Does God have any role in determining what we should do? How we should act? How we should arrange our lives? What should we become?

Related to this: Does God have any role in helping us do what we should do? Does he just leave us to do it by ourselves? Does he just give prizes at the end of the race as an encouragement to keep going? Does he punish or reward each and every thing we do immediately it's done? Does he give us any help? Does he sort out the mess we make? In what ways?

Lastly, the seventh question: How can we know? If (pagan) God is part of what we experience around us, how can we find out what part is him? If (eastern) God is all around plus more, how can we find out what more there is? If God is Totally Other, there is an infinite gulf between him and us; how can we ever hope to look across it? Does experience help us answer this question? Tradition? Science? Reason? Intuition? Feeling? Revelation?

The Bible

Philosophers have argued about many of these questions, especially the last. But even philosophy seems to weak to tell us how to know God. One thing makes sense to me: God is the one who should make the move; he should reveal himself and he should take the initiative to reveal all the answers to these questions. That is called Revelation. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic view is that God has indeed revealed himself, and this view is found in many other traditions too, such among the Karen, Lahu and Wa peoples in south-east Asia. But not just revelation: involvement too.

What Christians know as the Bible is a record of this involvement and revelation. No, I cannot prove it, just as you cannot prove otherwise. Rather, I examine it and find it does satisfy these questions in a way that few other writings, whether religious or not, do. It is down to earth, and yet spiritual. The problem is that most people have treated this Bible either as fundamentalists do, a textbook of doctrines to believe and rules to live by, or as liberals do, a text to criticise and try to undermine, or as ritualists do, as a sacred thing that the comman man dare not be exposed to. Some people are finding another way to see the Bible - in a broad sweep, as a record of God's involvement and revelation to humankind, and a unique record at that.

In this 'brief history of God' I have attempted to look at the broad sweep picture of the Bible. What is God's involvement? What does he reveal, about himself, about ourselves and about things around us? To be involved, he enters time, though he created time; so what is his 'history' and how has it developed?

But how did I go about interpreting the Bible? Is my method valid? What are its flaws and strengths? Elsewhere I have tried to elucidate the principles and methods I have tried to follow in discerning what God has been saying and how it relates to us today.

References

Knuth, Donald E (2001) Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, USA.

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Copyright (c) Andrew Basden 2000. Comments and queries are very welcome.

Page last updated: 15 February 2000. 16 February 2000. 23 July 2000 added (some) aims. 10 December 2000 new comments pointer. 7 February 2001 email; corrected a couple of wrong links. 18 March 2001 better intro and re questions and Bible. 7 April 2001 moved motivation, aims and principles of interpretation to site.html; added link to bhg.app.html. 26 June 2001 link to 'applic'. 17 February 2002 principles and methods of interpretation added; link to. 2 August 2002 new title with 'Taking God Seriously'. 22 September 2002 Knuth quote. 3 November 2002 Motivations moved to start, and expanded; new motivation added re. all God said relevant. 22 January 2003 motivation re attitude. 3 February 2007 removed u-net; added Bible; then removed.