Does God Evolve?

Facets of God (Part 1)

WHAT WE THINK ABOUT GOD MATTERS

A few years ago a friend of mine was traveling along a fairly narrow and winding hillside road. Just after a car traveling in the opposite direction passed him, something made it swerve into the oncoming traffic where it hit the vehicle immediately behind my friend. While he was unhurt, the people involved in the accident weren’t.

As he shared this experience with me, he expressed distress at how others had reacted to his story. The most common response was to thank God that my friend had been unharmed, but he couldn’t ignore the dissonance in thanking God for his safety when God had not protected those in the accident.

In today’s Christian culture, we often encounter a lot of ideas about God that are deeply troubling. What we believe about God impacts every facet of our lives and world. So, we really need to think more deeply about how we think about God. We need to speak more carefully when we speak about God. And we need to act with greater humility and gentleness when we claim to act in God’s name.

DISTURBING IDEAS

I remember shaking my head when, in late 2019, I read a number of surprising and disturbing statements about God from prominent public figures:

“I am the greatest artist God has ever created.” - Kanye West

“When I walk into the White House God walks into the White House.” - Paula White

“…only two nations in the world have ever been in covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are the Jewish people and the Afrikaans people, that is fact.” - Angus Buchan

Statements like these make claims about God. The words of Kanye, Paula, and Angus all say that God is limited by human constructs of time, space, and value, and that God treats certain people as more important than others. These are outdated, flawed, and dangerous ways to think and speak of God.

But, if we’re honest, many of our daily conversations reveal similarly disturbing beliefs about God. To claim, when we experience good fortune, that we are blessed is to say that God has shown us special favour. What does this say about God’s relationship with those who are not equally blessed? To claim that God protected a friend or family member who was infected with COVID at the height of the pandemic is to raise questions about why God didn’t save the millions who died across the world.

EVOLVING IDEAS

We generally accept that all areas of knowledge expand through ongoing exploration, experimentation, and debate. Yet when it comes to our knowledge of God we cling to ancient ideas that were developed in very different situations by people facing very different problems. The Bible was written before much of what we now take for granted was known and before many of our current technologies and struggles even existed. This does not mean the Bible is outdated. It simply means that we need to constantly update how we read the Bible.

As John Shelby Spong wrote:

The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.

For faith to be authentic, valuable, and life-giving it needs to evolve. That’s why Scripture often speaks of the goal of faith as maturity. As our children grow, we expect their understanding of the world to grow with them. For an adult to cling to childish views is to be an underdeveloped person.

Since the Epiphany season, through which we are now traveling, is about how God’s glory and nature are revealed in Christ, I thought it would be meaningful to explore our ideas about God. And one of the most important questions we can ask is whether God evolves or not.

Most Christians resist the idea of God changing in any way. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard Christians quote Hebrews 5:8 (Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever) to support the idea of an unchanging God. But, the problem with believing that God never changes is that it makes our faith rigid, stagnant, and closed to new discoveries, information, questions, and ideas. It also implies that our ideas about God are inseparable from God and so if God doesn’t change, neither can our ideas, our reading of Scripture, or our approach to the big questions of our time.