my friend Eric began to argue with the God he was presented with in church, he was merely emulating Jesus. Pastor Ken Silva has written about a verse in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” Jesus’s entire ministry was an argument with the status quo, with what he perceived as a calcified, insensitive, despotic religious pecking order that confused insulation with inspiration. Silva isn’t too happy either with the modern state of affairs in the Christian hierarchy and he summarizes his distress succinctly: “It’s only because the visible church, fearful of conflict, has decided to follow the whimsical ways of our effete culture that Christ’s confrontational style has been hidden.”
Christ’s confrontational style. I’m not a Christian, but I like that. Religion works best when it’s not telling you what to think but when it’s exhorting you to think. In my lifetime, I heard our nation’s first Catholic president, the young John F. Kennedy, close his Inaugural Address on a bitter cold day in Washington, January 20, 1961, by exclaiming: “God’s work on Earth must truly be our own.” Yes, we are God’s partners, not God’s slaves. You can find the proof of this right in the Bible.
Sarah, the mother of monotheism, argued with God. Noah failed at this. Abraham sometimes did and sometimes didn’t—the Jewish tradition is critical and concerned about his inconsistencies. The very greatness of Moses and his high rank among all the Western religions is exactly because he was an independent, cantankerous spiritual legislator who argued with God when he thought God was wrong.
Let’s see how these individuals, all sanctified in religious tradition, did when it came to arguing with God and how their stories can help us know what to believe.
Sarah, like many women, sought to bear a child. She wanted to be a mom. (The Bible spends much more time exploring the pains, joys, yearnings, and anguishes of the people in the narrative than it does portraying the big miracles.) Her husband, Abraham, had children via handmaids and concubines, a routine practice in that time and place. The Bible doesn’t sidestep Sarah’s heavy heart as she becomes postmenopausal. It doesn’t whitewash her resentment—even cruelty—toward a favorite sexual partner of Abraham’s named Hagar. Banished to the desert, thirsty and scorched by sun and sand, Hagar clutched her newborn son Ishmael—the primal beacon figure of Islam.
Whatever is happening in the Muslim world today, the Hebrew Bible unequivocally anoints Abraham’s son Ishmael with special status: “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly.” In other words, Ishmael’s descendants will become a great nation. Here is a rebuttal of blanket Islamophobia.
Meanwhile, in a classic tale of sexism, three mysterious men (“divine messengers”) appear at Abraham’s tent flap and tell the old man that he and Sarah will bear a son together after all. Sarah happens to overhear “the boys” discussing her body and her sexual promise from within the tent. Mystified, defiant, joyous, and indignant, Sarah laughed out loud. To paraphrase her infamous muttering found in the Book of Genesis about this locker room moment, Sarah said to herself: “Right. I’m going to have a kid at my age. And with my old husband.”
According to the legend, God heard Sarah’s little blasphemy and became quite vexed. The God of the early Bible had a number of anger management issues, as we shall see. In keeping with the shameless paternalism of this story, God went straight to Abraham and asked, “Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
I feel this segment of scripture was written by men who didn’t want anyone, especially a woman, to question God. Even when what God proposes is a biological impossibility. It’s not that different from the longstanding antagonism of organized religious groups toward women’s rights and access to prayer, study, and even careers in the clergy. What if Sarah hadn’t argued with heaven, hadn’t stood up to male insecurity, hadn’t been bold, and had simply submitted to “God’s will”? Would the countless, valiant campaigns and movements for women’s freedoms, for suffrage, for equal pay have retained an original biblical role model? Would the teenage Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, shot in the face by a Taliban gunman, have a scriptural mentor and go on to win the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize?
All Sarah wanted was to bear a child with her husband and to have the attention and respect of that husband. What she wound up doing was teaching us that before you can believe in God, you have to believe in yourself.
And what of Abraham? Was he a leader with God or a lackey for God? It depends upon where you look in the Bible. Like almost anybody, including you and me, Abraham was filled with contradictions that he reacted to and felt varying levels of motivation about things at several points in his life. It’s just like you and me: On Monday, we don’t believe in God. On Tuesday, we do. When we were teenagers, we were immortal and unassailable and didn’t really stress about God and prayers and fate. Older and frailer, we need to care. But we also need to think and sort out what works for us, what comforts us, as our friends and family die off and we are looking down the tunnel of mortality.
There is the well-known story of Abraham trying to convince God not to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a double village of depravity and debauchery and our hero is actually bargaining with God not to destroy it. Abraham pleads, “What if there are fifty good people in the city? Will you spare it for fifty good souls?” Okay, God agrees; for fifty good and pure folks, it will be saved. Abraham pushes the envelope: What if there are forty good ones? All right, God agrees; forty. Abraham keeps up the bartering. It goes down to thirty and then to twenty. He and God finally settle at ten. If there were ten virtuous people to be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, the entire place remains standing. (A Jewish tradition asserts that this final numeral in the negotiation, ten, became the minimum number of people required to form a minyan—a group large enough to have a religious service.)
Unfortunately, there weren’t even ten upstanding individuals in that miserable community and it was wiped out. But the story, found right in the heart of the Bible, effectively indicates that if you see a possible injustice or you don’t understand what God (or God’s theologians) is disseminating, then you are supposed to speak out. God did not create us to simply fall in line. We were created to be God’s partners. Heaven is not tyranny; heaven is hope.
Yet later, Abraham strangely goes mute when God commands him to do something unthinkable: “Take your son Isaac (the only child Abraham produced with Sarah), your son that you love, go up to Mount Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon the mountain.”
Really? Abraham is supposed to kill and sacrifice his teenage boy to God? Well, after the commotion Abraham put up to save a city of criminals, the man will surely argue with this crazy notion! Look in Genesis, chapter 22, and see Abraham’s response. Not a word. Not a single protest. Here’s the verse that follows immediately after God’s outlandish request:
And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and collected wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him.
Centuries of anguished scholarship, rationalization, and dispute have failed to mitigate or explain away how a preeminent seer of Western theology did not utter a syllable of protest when God instructs him to slaughter his own child.
Of course we know Abraham did not ultimately do that terrible thing. But not because he didn’t intend do. He had the fire blazing and the blade up in the air to slay the boy and was only stayed by the intervention of an “angel of God.” It was a test, a loyalty check to evaluate just how faithful Abraham really was to this deity: “Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him. For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou has not withheld thy son.” A ram was substituted; God was going to get something out of this strange little trial of allegiance.
Anybody
