3. Moses’ Atheism

The charisma and wisdom of the characters of the Hebrew imagination buck violently against their forced baptism by theologians. Moses and his line of prophets are about as radically anti-theological as any religious writers in history. Moses led his people away from the highly polytheistic and afterlife-obsessed religious expression of the Egyptians, led by the conviction that all of its gods were dead objects.

Yet Christians largely miss out on the rich joys of Hebrew literature because of a reading problem. This is the fault of the institution of Christianity, which has consistently prized loyalty over honesty, rather than laypeople who seek truth in their religion. Christians disrupt the truths of the Hebrew scriptures with the assumption that they point to Jesus.

One major problem is the assumption that the Bible is the direct Word of God. This would effectively serve to objectify God in the form of a human book–and many Baptists I grew up with are guilty of this idolatry. But in biblical Christianity, Jesus is supposed to be the Word of God, not the Bible. It is only in Islam that God’s Word is statically associated with a book. Nonetheless, many Christians have strange ideas about where the Bible came from.

Genesis, for example, is actually full of stories taken from other Near Eastern religious traditions. This can be a troubling revelation for naive young Bible students. What happens to the beliefs of an evangelical when they are exposed to the fact that stories like the creation accounts in Genesis, Noah’s Flood and even Moses’ enormous set of laws are actually reinterpretations of much older myths? That the stories of Israel’s conquests in Joshua are geographically impossible? That the historians who chronicled David’s kingdom were writing nationalistic propaganda? What do we do when we realize that the images of the New Testament are sewn together with many pagan fabrics?

These concerns are not what buckled my commitment to Christianity. As I hope to show, it was the hypocrisy of the New Testament itself, wrapped up in the impossible promises of the Church.

What many Bible readers miss —because theologians and translators try to hide its embarrassing heterogeneity—is that these stories become much more meaningful as reinterpretations, as new spins on older myths. Moses told the old stories but he told them without all the gods, their requirements, and their drama. Instead Moses’ God was as non-mythical as possible and entirely without objectification, without an inner subjective life of his own. God was simply a challenge that swept over God’s people, that bid them all to become free, every individual was to go up, to transcend, to create, to defy any who would conquer or rule over the individual. No gods or demons can stand in our way, indeed they don’t even exist. This was radical and its effect on the development of civilization is inestimable.

The centrally significant theological passage in the Torah is the Exodus. It begins with a call from an unknown and unknowable beyond. The caller cannot be named but allows itself to be consistently represented in ways those it is addressing will understand—namely a voice, though it seemingly has no vocal structure—and an undying flame amidst unharmed foliage. The absurd character of this revelation clues us into the fact that the truth it offers is not like normal everyday facts.

God speaks to Moses, challenges him to liberation and even offers an answer to Moses’ request for a name. For all that however, we are left with very little we can actually say about God: which, I think, is the point. For the people leaving a land full of objectified deity, God is that of which we cannot speak, cannot picture but don’t dare ignore. Thinking of God like an object in the world became the ultimate sin to the Hebrew psyche.

Moses’ great Ten Commandments begin:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall make no idols.
   
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Moses, like many of his progeny, was excellent at destroying gods (and keeping them dead). Moses’ faith has lived through thick and ridiculously thin, dispersed throughout the whole earth. It has consistently defied all gods old and new, no matter the cost. Perhaps to Jews, then, it is no great irony that atheists are much better at keeping the Ten Commandments than Christians.

Christians have failed dismally at all three of the theological laws, whereas my atheism passes with flying colors.

Christians have made an idol of a dead Jew and used him as the definition of God. Through constant qualifications and redefinitions, theologians have hollowed rather than hallowed the name of God. They’ve hidden the sharp edges of the scriptures and tamed their Spirit. The name of God, even Godself, has been sculpted into a horror of vanity.

Unfortunately, the bible condemns the objectification of God and then just like the antsy Israelites, immediately proceeds to associate God with patriarchal and political images.  The Hebrew Bible seems to evade idolatry, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but the Christian Bible–and much less its interpreters–is not. Although the Christian scholar quickly objects that the images of the New Testament are merely metaphors and are to be treated as such, they are rarely done so in churches and local expressions of religion.

4. Moses’ God

Moses’ uniquely personal experiences of God cohere with that of his ancestors, the basis of which founds a narrative that has partially shaped the construction of billions of people’s respective realities over the course of history.

What’s more, he is the only major religious personality in the world who has entirely avoided being deified by later fanatics. Moses did this with great intention and integrity. His own book records his failure and later denial into the Promised Land, even after leading his people so faithfully for so long. The end of Deuteronomy records that he traveled away from his beloved people, going off to die alone, an action that ensured his grave would never be worshipped. He avoided the fate both Jesus and Buddha could not.

For Moses, nothing in the world is worthy of worship. Including images. Including humans. Including Jesus.

However it is not for Moses’ or Jeremiah’s sake that I am forced from Christian doctrine, but rather it is because of the God to which they point. A God beyond knowing, beyond all conditions, and beyond existence—even existing— itself.

It is the God of Jonah and Ecclesiastes and Esther I have loved,

The God who praises Job as righteous for questioning God.

Not a god of the gaps or a pathetic explanation of suffering, but the God who forgives entire wretched civilizations because they commit to treating one another with more dignity. Without baptism, without circumcision or even conversion. The God who might go unmentioned, the God we have no ability whatsoever to speak or know about—but who we cannot but speak about and long for. This speaking and longing without knowing sometimes means resorting to myths and older human images of divinity.

My conviction is that Christ has replaced, rather than revealed this God.

Ultimately then, my question is, does the Bible itself condemn Christianity? Christian theology? The Church? What of the afterlife? And, dare I ask, what of its God?

Can Jesus stand his own against Moses? 

Is the entire Christian project undermined by its own foundation?