Noah & Sons, Pty. Ltd.

Noah & Sons, Pty. Ltd.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31 KJV)

At the end of each of the first five days in the first creation story, God looked at what he had done and saw that it was good. Then at the end of the sixth day, God looked at all that he had done that week and saw that it was very good, the divine imprimatur on creation, symbolizing God’s pleasure in what He has done. 

Some generations later, as we know, God becomes disillusioned,

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them. ” (Genesis 6:5-7)

and we have the story of Noah and the Flood, God destroying everything and starting over, a partial Re-creation, with the occupants of the Ark; and our ancestry becomes not Adam but Noah and Sons. 

Without going into etiological elements of the stories, one looks around and wonders why God did not start completely over with a totally New Creation rather than with Noah, whose generation went south immediately. “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it” comes to mind.

Nearly a generation ago, 1993, Christian feminist leaders, including from Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and other churches in the United States, held a “Re-Imaging Conference” in Brazil. Father of beloved girls, my views are sympathetic, and it looked good to me until reports started coming back. The conference was a “Re-Imaging” (not Re-Imagining) of God as radically feminine; and the re-imaging including changing God’s name to Sophia. All well and good except that (a) God already named self YHWH (“Being”), and (b) Σοφíα means “wisdom” in Greek. Obviously they would choose a girl’s name for the Divinity, but to name God “Wisdom” poses at least a couple of theological and experiential issues. For one, “... God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am ... this is my name for ever” (Exodus 3:14,15), so there is no human right to change God’s name unless one is starting over with a new and different god. Principally, though, to name God “Wisdom” limits God’s characteristic to being wise, asserts wisdom as God’s nature, which is historically, experientially problematic. Aside from the fact that the Bible says God is Love, even God’s own self has recognized God’s mistakes in judgment and tried -- too lovingly -- and inadequately -- to correct them, viz., Noah and the Flood and the succeeding thousands of years of human history. Thus, Σοφíα is hardly an apt name for God. The re-imaging-ists blew it. Perhaps if God had truly re-created instead of trying to patch things up with Noah, human history would not have been at that movie theater in Colorado the other night.

In The Bible according to Mark Twain, God is sitting around with his advisors contemplating what to do with the mess of Man that he has created. One of the advisors present, Satan, says, “I’d drown the whole mess of ‘em and start over.” Satan wouldn’t have excepted Noah & Sons.

In spite of all that has come to pass in human history, we might be thankful that God is not Wisdom, but Love.

TW+