by Donivan Bessinger
When Moses tended Jethro's sheep in Midian, he had quite a surprising experience. A bush near him burst into flame, yet it was not consumed, and from that extraordinary bush he heard a voice. The voice called "Moses, Moses!", and Moses answered, "Here am I." The voice said:
Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Ex 3:1-6)
It was a time and land of many gods. Yet, there, emanating from a bush that flamed but was not consumed was a voice who claimed to be a particular god, the god of the people of Israel. Of course Moses was afraid. However, the fear suggests that Moses was not panicked, but overwhelmed with a sense of the holy. It was a "glory fear", for this was truly an awesome voice and an awesome experience whose retelling still resonates today with the power of the holy.
In the conversation which followed, God called Moses to deliver his people from Egypt. After exasperated protests (quite understandable under the circumstances!), Moses finally turned in desperation to what was no less than a challenge of this god's credentials. He was polite of course, but only slightly did he veil his skepticism:
"If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"
God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM". And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you'." (vv 13-14)
To a literal religionist who believes in the inerrant historical truth of scripture as a transcription of words personally dictated by God, such a story presents no challenge of interpretation. The story is a true story, and is not in any sense a "myth". The event simply happened as stated, and a flame quite like any other earthly flame rose from an ordinary bush without burning it, and the voice from the bush was an audible voice.
Nor to a literal scientist is there any challenge for interpretation: Scientifically, the event could not happen that way, so it did not. The story is a "myth", meaning a false story. There, put starkly, is the conflict, and the conflict is between competing literal interpretations, each with compelling questions. If this story is literally true, how could the event have happened? On the other hand, if there had been no such literal event, why was it told and retold until eventually written down, and why do we feel a powerful inner experience as we read it? Clearly, there is more here than meets the literal eye.
If we hold that God gave us this story and that God created and controls the processes of our creation, we must find some other key to its interpretation. If we fail to do so, we loose twice: We lead ourselves into the trap of saying that God is self-contradicting, and we rob the story of meaning for ourselves today. If we say that the account was of a literal historical event, a miracle, then it cannot happen again or is not likely to, and has no more contemporary meaning than if it had not happened at all.
The key to a meaningful interpretation lies in the story itself, in the very fact that it describes something different from normal experience. If we assume that the narrator credits us with knowledge of ordinary experience, we then see the un-consumed bush as the signal that the story is symbolic. That signal points us to a mythic interpretation which is invested with a deeper and eternally new meaning. Reading that message, we can learn to see God in any bush, or every bush, and perhaps even to hear a divine call. Our call will not be to lead the Jews out of Egypt<197>that has been done already<197>but perhaps we can hear a call to awareness of the divine flame which burns in all creation. But especially significant for our discussion, the truth that God has revealed in Moses' spiritual experience does not then conflict with God's created truth about combustion, revealed by science.
Who is this God of the burning bush? Of course, the skeptic first asks, not "Who is God?", but "Does God exist?" Natural (philosophical) theology, like science, begins with doubt and by reason seeks to define whether there is necessarily a First or Ultimate Cause. In his book How To Think About God: A Guide for the Twentieth Century Pagan, Mortimer Adler answers that we can prove God's existence beyond a reasonable doubt, but we cannot prove it with certainty. There is a limit to how far natural theology can take us intellectually.
By contrast, our standpoint is that of sacred theology. We have crossed natural theology's remaining intellectual gap because we have already sensed the divine Presence in some aspect, moving in our own lives. We know God intuitively. Thus, we take as a given that God Is and we seek to understand and name that Presence. It is such a one who speaks to Moses and to us from the burning bush.
We have always found it necessary to describe divine attributes according to a human scale, but even so, ancient imagery often sounds discordant to modern ears. When Moses and his people were delivered from Pharaoh's army, his hymn of exultation said, "The Lord is a man of war" (Ex 15:3), and "Thy right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, <193> shatters the enemy." (v 6) As we bring modern knowledge into our religious worldview, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept that God literally has a right hand.
In his moment of great excitement and jubilation, perhaps Moses forgot the message of the burning bush. When he had asked how God should be identified to the people of Israel, the answer was no longer as "god of the fathers", but as "I AM", as essence of being.
God's voice from the burning bush tells Moses that he must change away from understanding God as a national god competing with nations ruled by other gods. Now, with the benefit of modern knowledge, we too must heed that message. The god who seemed a great King above all gods to the psalmist (Ps 95:5) must be seen by us as even greater. The complexity of Earth's life-system and the incomprehensible expanse of the universe itself must lead us, at the very least, to avoid the error of thinking of God as some sort of big human, or as a national god, or even as "our" god whom we in some sense possess and who must be distinguished from some else's god or gods.
From the burning bush, I AM is revealed as pure existance, and that existance has far greater scale and scope than previously could have been imagined. When God is revealed as I AM, as BEING-BECOMING, as YHWH (Yahweh), God exists as no other being can. God's living, or knowing or loving must necessarily be different from the way we humans live and know and love. Ultimately, even though knowable spiritually, the great I AM is undefinable intellectually. The full nature of God will always be incomprehensible to humans, and beyond our powers of description. Attempting to define God precisely, in its attempt to subdue God into a human image, must surely be some form of idolatry which diminishes the possibility of God in our own eyes. To use Tillich's terminology, God forever remains the concept beyond our concepts.
Perhaps, however, it is permissible and even required that we try to clarify our concepts, as we seek to name the divine. Our traditional and orthodox concept of God is as Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer, who is good, loving, all powerful, all knowing, and everywhere present. But if omnipotent and good, why is there evil? If omnipresent, how is God not in everything (immanent)? If omniscient, how not transcendent? If only transcendent, how can we know God? If God is person whom we can know, is God also process? If process, how person?
Sacred theology has wrestled with such concepts for centuries, and the debate goes on. If we are willing to look more deeply into the "word spoken in creation" we may yet be able to shed some additional light, and bring ourselves closer to a reasonable synthesis. But even if we do not achieve that goal, we may be able at least to reconcile, for our own selves, our sense of knowing the divine with an increasing understanding of the works of creation.
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