Is it a true God or our own construct of "god" in the Bible?

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curious_cath

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We hold that God has revealed Himself in the Scriptures. However, we don’t know where is this belief coming from. Someone had to reveal first that God has revealed Himself in the Bible, otherwise we would not know it. But then who revealed that information to this person? You see, everything we know from the Scriptures points toward a First Revelator, who revealed it first! But who was the First Revelator?

What we know is that the Bible was written by human hands. How do we know that those human hands wrote down the revelation of God about himself and not the revelation of man about his image of God? If we assume that God himself did not grab a pen to fancy a book about himself, then we have to say that whatever we learn about God in the Sacred Scriptures is coming from human hands. Even if we are talking about the best human beings led by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, those pages were filled by human beings of fallen nature and human frailty. We may say the Bible was written by sinners.

But then again, is this the true God or our own construct? Are we seeing a Creator on the pages of the Bible or just a reflection of a divine image that we have devised for ourselves? Is the God of the Bible a true God or just an image determined by times, culture and history? If we see a humanly devised image of God in the stories of the Scriptures then what is the exact relation of that image to the one living God?

How should we read the Bible if we want to see God behind the image that was drawn about Him by the writers of the Sacred Scriptures? Can we take off the wrapping of futile words of times, culture and history in order to get the bare truth about God? How would Jesus help us to see behind the image and get a grasp of the true thing?
 
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The Incarnation is God validating the revelation of Himself to the Chosen People. Jesus, as the Word of God revealed the mind of God because that is who the Word is and so who Jesus is. Jesus was not generated by a human father. That is a cornerstone of belief in the Incarnation. To believe in the Incarnation is to believe that the true God is not a human construct but truly came from outside of time and space. That when God Incarnated, eternity entered time and human history. Reason ascends to Faith and Faith in the Incarnation and consequently the life death and resurrection of Jesus offers good reason that God is not a human construct.
 
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Benadam said:
God is not a human construct.
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I did not intend to say God could be a human construct. My whole approach is to believe in one God, who is the Holy Trinity. My question is about the Biblical view of God which must be distinct from God himself, because even if inspired, the Scriptures were written down by human hands. This human mediation is what especially interests me. I see our ability to create an image of God in Holy Scriptures that exists somehow apart from the true God.
Benadam said:
The Incarnation is God validating the revelation of Himself to the Chosen People.
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In my mind the Incarnation overrides the written Word by personal existence. Jesus revealed the true nature of God. It is on us to synchronize our image of God from the Bible with this divine revelation through Jesus.
 
curious_cath said:
Someone had to reveal first that God has revealed Himself in the Bible, otherwise we would not know it.
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To this day many Jews believe that for the Torah, that “someone” is Moses. Let’s assume they’re right. Would that solve your problem? Or would you simply ask “How do we know Moses got it all right?” I submit that the only way to answer that question is to value these writings on a spiritual rather than historical level. (Ditto for much of the Prophets and the poetic writings.)

It’s a little different with the NT.
 
How many people still follow those religions as acknowledge them as truth?
 
Beats me. But that’s not my point. Standing “the test of time” is a poor talisman for divining the truth of a “Scripture.”
 
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curious_cath said:
apart from the true God.
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All a human person can do it write the “truth” and from that comes a SMALL picture of the TRUE GOD. We won’t know God until we get to see him face to face… but we can believe in Truth.
 
curious_cath said:
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God revealed Himself to mankind and then through after years of oral tradition it was committed to writing.
Catholics, on the other hand, recognize that the Bible does not endorse this view [that the whole of Christian truth is found within the Bible’s pages] and that, in fact, it is repudiated in Scripture. The true “rule of faith”—as expressed in the Bible itself—is Scripture plus apostolic tradition, as manifested in the living teaching authority of the Catholic Church, to which were entrusted the oral teachings of Jesus and the apostles, along with the authority to interpret Scripture correctly.
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curious_cath said:
I did not intend to say God could be a human construct. My whole approach is to believe in one God, who is the Holy Trinity. My question is about the Biblical view of God which must be distinct from God himself, because even if inspired, the Scriptures were written down by human hands. This human mediation is what especially interests me. I see our ability to create an image of God in Holy Scriptures that exists somehow apart from the true God.
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I think you are asking a good question but it will require a more thoughtful unbiased reading of the entire Bible. There are different aspects of God in different places that almost look like a God of different character. Take for example Genesis 1:28 “God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.” and compare with Genesis 2:15 “The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.”

Subdue and dominion have a very different intent than cultivate and care for. Some believe that the first was from the Elohist source and the second from the Yahwist. We wont get into the Documentary Theory but you get the idea. The Bible contains all sorts of forms of literature and sources. Each with slightly different understandings of God in some ways. Does God embrace them all? Ar some closer to the truth than others? Different groups have different answers to those questions.
 
RedFan said:
To this day many Jews believe that for the Torah, that “someone” is Moses. Let’s assume they’re right. Would that solve your problem? Or would you simply ask “How do we know Moses got it all right?” I submit that the only way to answer that question is to value these writings on a spiritual rather than historical level. (Ditto for much of the Prophets and the poetic writings.)

It’s a little different with the NT.
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I think you are right. When I hear “inspired” I think more in terms of spiritual seeking and meaning, poetry, and art, rather than historical facts. Not that there is no historical fact to be found. But sorting it out takes tremendous knowledge and study. When i read the Bible I start with face value and I guess I even make a distinction between "literal’ and “historical”. When I read Genesis, for example, I enter that world “as if” it were all literally true even though I do not believe it is historically true. And in that “as if” would what does it do to me? What do I get from it? How do I relate to God? Even in and Old Testament representation of God that seems totally different from the “Father” of Jesus, there is something that can speak to me.
 
Shakuhachi said:
How do I relate to God? Even in and Old Testament representation of God that seems totally different from the “Father” of Jesus, there is something that can speak to me.
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This is exactly what amazes me, too! We see an image of God that is somehow a human approximation. Even if it is crude and misleading there is always something that points toward a loving Father whose true nature was revealed in Jesus.
 
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deMontfort said:
This sounds like the Marcion heresy…
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Please, elaborate! Marcion discarded the whole Old Testament that contains true revelation through human approximation of the image of God. Even if this image of God is misleading and distorted, it always has something to point toward Jesus who is the revelation of God’s true nature witnessed in the Gospels.
 
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Shakuhachi said:
Some believe that the first was from the Elohist source and the second from the Yahwist.
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I am somewhat familiar with the J, E, P, D theory regarding the sources of the Pentateuch. I believe it is justified to approach these writings with the well established results of source criticism in mind.
 
It has been a long time since I studied. Are they still current mainstream thinking?
 
I don’t know for sure… but I feel I should give some credentials to them, anyway.
 
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