Jonah and God

A thought came to me today. I find what I think about the nature of God to be rather difficult to put into simple concepts or words, largely because I don’t understand what it is that I think. In previous posts I have drawn attention to some reflections on the nature of religious language, in particular, which go part of the way there. I thought that a blog post might help clear up my thinking a little further.

I wish to make two points:

1. That which we call God is beyond human language, conceptuality
2. God in Scripture is a literary character, that imperfectly reflects aspects of the divine mystery.

Point one is something I have said before, and so point two will be my main focus.

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I take the book on Jonah as an example.

Here are some reasons to think the story is not historical (for those obsessed with history):

− No city called Nineveh has ever existed
− If it had done, it would have been larger than the biggest cities today – a nonsense if read historically
− Jonah is the worst prophet in the OT – he utters a single line prophecy, with a 40 day – rather than the more imminent (and standard) 3 day – warning time
− But he elicits the most comprehensive repentance in the whole OT
− The book is full of such irony, some of which I have mentioned before
− Folks don’t get swallowed by fish and survive in their bellies for three days…

So, given that it didn’t happen, what is my point?

Most people are happy to accept that Jonah is a character in the story; that Nineveh is a fictional city, constructed to make particular points relevant to the story’s audience; that no such fish existed, and that it played a part in the story, etc... And so on: all of the narrative’s characters and actors are seen as part of a literary genre that seeks to use language symbolically to tell stories. All of the narrative’s characters, that is, save one: God, for whom a special case is made.

One can, of course, argue for a special case – but that is not my concern. I wonder how a commitment to how the radical ‘otherness’ of God requires one to read stories in which God is an actor, in the same way as Moses, the fish, the sailors, the city of Nineveh, or the castor bean plant. What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’? Does God have a voice? Or a rational mind? Or the ability to encourage fish to choose Jonah to eat? Or make fish belch? Or plants grow, and then die? [Or fingers to write the Ten Words? And all the rest.] What if the concept of God as a big and powerful human (which all of these attributes suggest) personifies God, and makes God a character in a story? What if just as to reduce the theological truth that the story may contain to the requirement of a historical Jonah, the same might be said of the story’s concept of God?

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Where, then, does this leave God? In short, I don’t know. What is God? Who is God? What does it mean to use language to express the inexpressible, or conceptuality to express that which is beyond comprehension?

I think this is where narrative comes into its own, and embodies my dislike of rigid doctrinal statements and propositions. Narratives encourage one to participate in the drama of theology, to use stories and traditions to engage with ultimate questions of theology, To reduce narratives to a series of doctrinal statements (such as ‘a personal God, as revealed in the Bible, exists’) misses the point of narratives, and the symbolic nature of their language – to point to something greater than the sum of their parts, and provide a context in which one can engage with the nature of God, whatever God is.