God the house pet

I believe that it is Peter Kreeft who tells the story of the thoroughly modern rabbi at a dinner party.  (A true story - this is not one of those "a priest and a rabbi went into a bar" tales.)  The rabbi - the one at the dinner party, not the bar - was giving a naturalistic explanation of the crossing of the Red Sea.  He explained carefully that the sea (also translated the Sea of Reeds) was really very shallow and a strong wind would have been sufficient to drive the little water back enough  for the Israelites to cross on foot.  Once the heavy Egyptian chariots came they sunk into the soft surface and could not follow.  The hostess of the party looked at the rabbi and said, "Oh, so YOU were THERE."  The hostess found the rabbi's explanation dissatisfying. As I expect Charlton Heston would have.

This story reminds me of the Sunday School teacher I once overheard telling the children that the miracle of the feeding of the 5000 was that Jesus inspired all who were present to share the food they had.  While it is certainly remarkable to inspire Adam's fallen and selfish race to sharing, it is rather less like a miracle.  The rabbi and the Sunday School teacher found explanations of the biblical events that fit a materialist worldview, allowing them to preserve respect for religious tradition without espousing those embarrassing divine interventions.

The problems with this are pluriform, but time does not allow me to fully exhaust them.  I will comment however on one of them.  The naturalistic or materialist explanations of Biblical miracles make the texts more palatable to the modern West, but they make God less than God - a containable, explainable deity hardly worth attending to, much less worshiping.  Indeed perhaps this is why the modern West has largely abandoned the worship of God.  If he were so distant and insipid, I would too.

What makes God God is, among other things, his transcendent, mysterious and miraculous intervention in the lives of men and women.  The miracle-less god is like a declawed cat - an excellent house pet who will neither harm us nor damage our furniture.  Warm and comforting on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but a little shy of awe-inspiring. What leaves me in a place of awe and worship of God is that he does the miraculous - he heals, forgives, intervenes - sometimes looked-for and sometimes not.  He is full of mystery, wonder and power - terrible in the best and oldest sense of the word.  A house pet he is not.

I worship the God of miracle - who created ex nihilo, out of nothing, who actually dried up the Red Sea and who took five loaves and two small fish and did some more ex nihilo work.  God is bigger than I think.  He is uncontainable and inexplicable.  That is one of the reasons that make him worthy of our worship - as does his holiness, his uncreatedness (if that's a word), his glory, his might, and so on, literally ad infinitum.

In last summer's movie The Avengers, the Norse god Loki faces the Hulk at one point toward the end.  Loki proclaims to his vermillion opponent that he is "a god."  The Hulk then picks him up and repeatedly throws him to the floor like a rag doll, saying when he is finished, "Puny god."  Makes me think of the rabbi's and Sunday School teacher's god.  Puny god indeed.