Jonah and God

Submitted by dannj on Mon, 05/12/2008 - 22:09.

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.

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):

− If Nineveh existed as in the story 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?

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.

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3:3, LA and flying pigs

Submitted by dannj on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 12:25.

1. I am deeply interested in truth. I am not interested in achieving 'truth' by misreading biblical texts through the lens of modern history - thus failing to account the strongly literary nature of their construction.

2. I was, indeed, quoting Jonah 3:3. I have the advantage of knowing Hebrew - 3:3b is: 'and Nineveh was an enormous city [lit. 'a great city like/to God'], three days walk.' It is entirely unambiguous. // An interesting point in the Hebrew is the 'to/like' God, which is part of the story's sophisticated use os irony: idiomatically it uses 'God' as a superlative (gramatically quite proper in Hebrew), but the ironic implication could be that Nineveh is a godly city (which it certainly is not, hence the irony). This is a clever literary composition.

3. Regarding LA and flying crows, this is classic historicist stuff - like the two deaths of Judas being from the hanging rope snapping. I feel a more literary reading of this is rather more plausible, and question your assumption that a historical reading is 'better'.

4. If i were trying to disprove the historicity of Jonah, fair comment. I am not; instead, i am attempting to hear the writer on his own terms, rather than retrospectively assuming history to be the arbiter of truth.

5. You still haven't addressed my main question in the original post, and subsequent replies. I would be extremely pleased to be put wrong, but my inference is that you aren't interested in it, and prefer instead to argue about history.

Is there room for mystery in

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 10:12.

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?

for goodness sake!

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 08:43.

please mr "we are often told that" if you are going to comment on someones blog, please then have the courtesy to enter into the debate. from your posting all that i can deduce is that Old Testament characters of the bible must have been real because jesus talks about them as figures of authority and the crowd accepted this to be so. HOwever in a similar circumstance i could say ron burgandy is the funniest anchorman ever, and a large amount of people would agree with me, despite the fact that ron burgundy (a character in the film anchorman) has not existed in an actual sense.
Firstly i think what Dan is saying in this post is perfectly reasonable, as the God in the bible will be a character of fiction, because the men writing the narratives couldnt hope to comprehend God and even if they could, they would not have the langauge to describe God sufficiently. Thus the i see the narratives in the bible about God to be fictional yet containing and pointing to core truths about God.
Similarly, i think you will find that trying to approach the bible from a post enlightenment 21st century viewpoint will create difficulties. the crux of the problem is to do with our modern perceptions of history and myth, where we perceive history to be truth and myth to be lies. however, and there is extensive writings on this, the authors of the various books of the bible were not concerned with presenting history or myth, and certainly not in the way we understand them to be. They were interested in using the texts to point to and portray bigger, eternal truths that went beyond whether an event happened or not. Such an act was performed by an amalgamation of history and truth all of which would be apparent to the readership of the time as "transparent fictions".
such a reading of the bible does not devalue the bible or our beliefs it just requires humility and care when reading the bible as Johnson puts it "the texts in short, are still true and still authoritative, but only if understood in a proper way".

We are too often told that

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 05/14/2008 - 15:13.

We are too often told that the great people of the Bible such as Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, the Prophets etc are not people of history. This certainly wasn’t the view of Jesus. His use of language when referring to Scripture can only conclude that Jesus believed that Scripture was the authoritative Word of God and that these people were historical figures. Jesus points out that it was the Holy Spirit that spoke the word of God through the writers of the Old Testament. Quoting Psalm 110:1 in Matthew 22.43 for example, Jesus said ‘‘How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls (Jesus) ‘Lord’? ’’

Abraham:

Jesus said about Abraham:

* ‘ Before Abraham was born I am’ (John 8:56-58)

The crowd wanted to kill Jesus for saying these words – if Abraham was thought to be imaginary in those days – their reaction simply doesn't make sense.

Moses:
is repeatedly referred to by Jesus as ‘the giver of the law’:

* ‘Moses said, ‘Honour your father..’’ (Mark 7:10)
* ‘What did Moses command you?’ (Mark 10:3)
* ‘Moses permitted you to divorce …’ (Matt 19:3)

Quite clearly, a fictional character could not be the giver of the Law or utter words that would be understood by real people as a command to them to act in a certain way. A made up person equally can not permit a real person to divorce. This would be nonsense!

Jonah:
Jesus clearly was of the mind that even Jonah was an historical character. Matthew 12:41 records Jesus as saying:

‘The men of Nineveh will stand up on the day of judgement, with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and now one grater than Jonah is here’ (Matt: 12:41)

As Preowne comments: (Obadiah and Johan: Cambridge: 1894) Are we to suppose Jesus to say:

‘that imaginary persons who at the imaginary preaching of an imaginary prophet repented in imagination, shall rise up in that day and condemn the actual impenitence of those his actual hearers?’

The Law and the Prophets:
These too were seen as God’s word and actual people. Jesus continuously declared that he came to fulfil the (imaginary?) Law and the prophets

* 'Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets ...' (Matt 5:17)
* ‘this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets’ (Luke 11:50)

Jesus made similar comments about Adam and Eve and Noah ('As it was in the days of Noah') of Isaac and Jacob and many more. If those of Jesus’ day and more seriously Jesus himself respected these people as historical figures, who did as Scripture says they did, who are we as Christians some 2,000 years later to contradict Him?

Huddersfield, Nineveh and Los Angeles

Submitted by dannj on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 01:27.

Is Huddersfield more than three days' walk across? 'Bible-believing' Christians must believe that Ninevah was so - ie, larger than modern Los Angeles?

Also, is the possibility that Jonah and countless other stories did not happen even possible? What if the writers did not intend their scope to be historical - but that a non-historical understanding of them remains of profound help theologically? I wonder if reading these stories as history in the modern sense risks misreading them also...

Quite ironically for someone

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 10:33.

Quite ironically for someone who is not interested in truth, you seem to go all out disprove the truth, with the ferocity of a lawyer. But even in this your approach seems to be flawed. I take it you are quoting Jonah 3:3 for your 'evidence' that a claim has been made that it would take 3 days to walk across. The NKJ version has a note that says 'exact meaning unknown' by 'three days journey' and other versions states (NIV, AV)probably more accurately translated: 'a visit required three days'(whatever that might mean.

Never the less, three days walk depending on the terrain might not be very far at all as the crow flies. I have never visited Los Angeles but my guess is that it has a good modern road system - which would not necessarily be the case in Nineveh.

If people are trying to disprove the historicity of something they need to concentrate on more positive evidence than an apparently vague comment.

Also...

Submitted by dannj on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 09:06.

Also, given that Jonah was the example i use in this posts, the reply displays a remarkable lack of comment on the text of Jonah itself.

My difficulty with the method employed by this post is that is attempts to make sense of biblical texts with reference to abstract doctrinal positions. If Scripture had been concerned with the formulation of firm doctrinal positions, it would have done it. But it doesn't - it tells stories and invites us to participate in them.

I wonder which of my points on the ahistoricity of Jonah you would oppose? Was Nineveh bigger than modern LA, or is the story not concerned with history?

Also, the main issue of my

Submitted by dannj on Fri, 05/16/2008 - 01:29.

Also, the main issue of my post - which i noted in my first response - has not been addressed by your comments. While we clearly disagree on the precise nature of the Jonah narrative, i was using Jonah as an example of other things. It would be good to hear your comments on those.

My biggest issue with the

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 15:26.

My biggest issue with the points you made questioning the historicity of Jonah is your comment that it is not possible to be swallowed by a large fish and live for three days. You are contradicting Jesus who says 'with God all things are possible.'

Of course we could say about the resurrection of Jesus that it is impossible for a man to die and then come alive again three days later. If I was told with authority that only one of these stories are true and I had to choose one it would be the man surviving the fish ordeal.

Your comment on Jonah being a poor profit is arbitrary - and can be argued is a historical fact.

As to the size of Nineveh 120,000 people is less than my small town of Huddersfield??

Thanks for this. It sounds

Submitted by dannj on Wed, 05/14/2008 - 22:38.

Thanks for this. It sounds quite familiar...

If we disagree about whether Jonah is historical, that is interesting. What about my suggestions regarding the nature of God, which are not reliant on the historicity or ahistoricity of Jonah? The emphasis of the post was not Jonah, but Jonah served as an example for a broader point. I wonder what you make of my comments on this?

We are too often told that

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 05/14/2008 - 15:11.