I’m in the middle of reading Peter Rollins‘ excellent book How (Not) to Speak of God. Pete is maddeningly good at this stuff (one can almost hear his soft, intense Belfast voice reading the text) and his thoughts on Scripture voice with eloquence so many of my instincts.

Here’s a great example:

The interesting thing …is not that [scriptural] conflicts exist but that we know they exist. In other words, the writers and editors of the text did not see any reason to try and iron out these inconsistencies – inconsistencies that make any systematic attempt to master the text both violent and irredeemably impossible. Unlike the modern ideal of systematization in definition, these people celebrated the fact that, as Meister Eckhart once claimed, the unnameable is omni-nameable. Evidently such conflicts were not judged to be problematic but were accepted. Indeed such fissures help to prevent us from forming an idolatrous image of God, ensuring that none of us can legitimately claim to understand God as God really is. Consequently the text bars any attempt at colonization by individuals or groups who claim to possess an insight into its true meaning. The biblical text resists such idolatrous readings precisely because it contains so many ideological voices, held together in creative tension, ensuring the impossibility of any final resolution. The result is not an account that is hopelessly ideological, but rather a text that shows the extent to which no one ideology or group of ideologies can lay hold of the divine. The text is not only full of fractures, tensions and contradictions, but informs us that fractures, tensions and contradictions are all we can hope for.

This is a postmodern hermeneutic at work: not denying Truth, but deeply suspicious about truth claims; not defending the harmonious authority of the text, nor ripping it apart or discarding it as a meaningless jumble of disconnected threads. The competing images of God promise, for Rollins (and many of us), both a rich depth of interplay in the ‘fissures’ of the text and a reminder that the omni-nameable God is also beyond-name, beyond-grasp. Faith is not alabaster-smooth; it has wrinkles; it smiles, it frowns, it gasps and shouts. Truth is fluid, slippery, solid and radiant. God is hidden in cloud and obvious to all.