Jonah II

Is there room for mystery in our understanding of God? Yes of course we will never get round all that God is - that goes without saying.
But I want to pick up on your question:
"What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’?"
As far as I understand the question, it can only come from a person who has never heard God speak; who doesn't have an understanding of a God who does perform miracles(similar to those recorded in the 'stories' of the Bible)in people's lives and intervene in a personal way; who doesn't have a personal relationship with God and who has never received direction from God.
Or else why ask the question? God speaks all the time and to me he speaks in English to Jonah he spoke in his native language.
Dannj I am intrigued by people who want to ask questions and would love to here your perspective (answer?) to that question:
"What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’?"
Surely we can only answer that question from experience, whilst checking our experience out with the way of the Bible?

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First of all, thanks for this (Neil?). It raises a number of interesting and important questions that I hope to offer some comment on.

I must admit at the outset that some things in here may go deeply against the way you understand God and faith. I say these things not to offend or undermine, but to answer the question about how I would read things like God speaking to people. My intention is not to belittle anything you may think or believe, but simply to offer my reasons for not sharing the same understanding.

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My posing of the question is based on an understanding of God that is entirely beyond our comprehension. Many people pay lip-service to this, and then go on to adopt rather crudely projected understandings of God as a more powerful, invisible version of humanity. As someone once said: ‘God made man in his own image and likeness; and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.’

Given that this is the case (go with it), God does not have a voice, and does not speak in the way that humans speak one to another. Similarly, as I may knock a wall over, God does not, because God is not simply a super-sized version of myself, speaking to people, doing stuff and all the rest. God is beyond our understanding. But language and conceptuality can be of some help in understanding the nature of divinity – so long as this language and conceptuality is not absolutised and ‘realised’.

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In the sense of God speaking like I may speak, you are right that I have not heard God speak. But in the sense of connecting on a deep and profound level with that which we consider to be divine, beyond description and ultimately a mystery, I have experienced things that may be put into the language and conceptuality of ‘God’ ‘speaking’ – though, of course, this language is used symbolically to express the inexpressible. Through doing this, I claim an element of continuity with the scriptural traditions that use these systems of language and conceptuality as well, and through doing so my own spiritual journey is enhanced and resourced.

Similarly, I have not seen someone get out of a wheelchair as a result of prayer or whatever (as an aside, I do believe very strongly in the placebo effect). I have, however, experienced and been on the receiving end of profound, inexpressible experiences as a result of the forces of nature and fellow humans – having wonderful conversations with friends, the thrill of white-water rafting, the joy of friends getting married or moving in together, listening to beautiful music, or the glimmers of hope and humanity among intense despair as I visited a friend in hospital at the weekend. These things can be described in physical terms (like I have done), but the depth of experience that makes them so special is beyond descriptive language. Language of miracle, transcendence and divinity provides a symbolic vocabulary for the expression and making sense of that which is beyond linguistic description.

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So what does it mean to say that God spoke to Jonah?

I think it is making God into a character in the story, with ‘human’ attributes and practices as a result. Stories are an immensely powerful way of engaging with the nature of reality, and this is what I think is going on here. I have noted the strong literary devices at work in the narrative, which I think do a good job of telling the story. One might compare it to ET speaking to the children in the film – aliens don’t exist, and if they did they wouldn’t have a voice like that; but you go along with the story because it is a good story, and seek to learn from it in whatever ways one can.

A brief aside here may help. I think that the Church has an important role to play. I see the Church as the community of people who seek to dramatise and live out these ancient stories, and in so doing work out what it is that they might mean. The commitment of faith is the commitment to participate in this process through one’s everyday actions and experience, through study, through ritual, through dialogue etc; as well as being a commitment to these texts and traditions offering a meaningful and life-giving means of engaging with the world. The texts are the texts of a community, and to remove them from that context is to miss the subtlety of their scope.

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With regards the final point about checking experience against the Bible, I have deep difficulties with this as a method. In my previous post I put something about how it is that Theology is done, and how I feel that notions of authority (scriptural or whatever) are often barriers to a searching engagement with God. As a result, seeing ‘the Bible’ (as a standalone authoritative entity, independent of interpretation or the communities that have preserved its contents) as the final arbiter of theological truth can be misleading, and negates the processes of interpretation that have to happen for its contents to become useful. There is no such thing as ‘just reading what it says’ – this is merely a rhetorical claim for power, of the type that I mentioned in the previous post. Of course, the processes and journey of theological interpretation can be deployed in the service of this ‘verification’ (for wont of a better word) – but the presence and legitimacy of these processes must be acknowledged.

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Finally, I hope this has offered some answer to the questions posed. I don’t know all the answers, of course, and these are merely some reflections on the issues raised. It would be good to continue this dialogue.