One God

After all these centuries, this pope could draw me back toward a uniting catholic church. Except that the status quo, what is among Christians today, denominations including nondenominational, seems to suit the feisty, quarrelsome, combative nature of man: we can never agree, there will always be wars, it's the ancient nature of our being, our way of settling issues. Don't graze your sheep on my farmland. Have we deluded ourselves as a race, “image of God”, surely God cannot be like this, like us?

Or maybe God is: who has read Joshua, the Book of Joshua, Adonai murderously enraged with Achan and his loved ones? Deuteronomy 21:18f: the Word of the Lord? You say so. Literal and inerrant? The obtuse simpleton who says God's definition of marriage is one-man-one-woman self-servingly skipped Genesis, Deuteronomy 21:15 et al to carve her own god. One God? Which one?

Ronald Hals says God's one characteristic is grace. What about jealousy? Anger? Which of all God's biblically apparent characteristics, actions, preferences, loves and hates, are truly of God and which are our human projections, God created in our image? One God? Do I know the cruel, hating deity worshipped at Westboro Baptist Church, carved in the image of the self-loathing closeted homophobe Fred Phelps? Would I recognize your god? Perhaps. Or maybe not. Knowing me as I do, and as I fear He does, Elohim will not recognize himself while I'm shaving this morning.

But I do see the image of God in this pope.