FAITH AND DOUBT 01.

Very few people doubt their faith quite like a doctoral student in religion.

First of all, you're placing anthropological rubrics over sacred texts. That means asking how human beings develop ideals of God, craft imagery to represent those ideals, and tell stories to support them—almost universally. If you’ve listened to The Text and Rock Show, you’ve probably heard me say it: place any group of sapiens by a river, and eventually they’ll start naming gods—and then worshiping them.

The irony that creeps in as you study religion deeply is this: those gods often end up looking a whole lot like the people who made them. We name our gods, and then our gods name us. We cast out an ideal, and then we follow it.

That’s probably what drew me to the Jewish, and eventually Christian, conception of God—over and against other beautiful traditions of naming the divine. Sure, I was raised with the Bible and developed a childlike faith. But in grad school, something else happened. I began to notice a shift in how God was described—specifically, that the conception of God became less human the later the text was written.

Take Genesis. If we have an Iron Age priest writing that “God walked with Adam in the cool of the day,” he means it. His God is a divine human—writ large—who visits Eden and goes for a stroll. When God asks Adam, “Where are you?” after Adam hides in shame, this version of God genuinely doesn’t know. Forget any preacher who tries to explain this away. It’s a very old Priestly source text. There is no trinity. God is not Spirit, he is human only big. And he can be wrong, mislead, etc…

Fast forward to Exodus, and God is a storm deity, descending on Mount Sinai in fire and smoke, thundering commandments and shaking the earth—holy, terrifying, but still physically manifest. God travels in a tent, eats sacrifices, and gets angry—sometimes lethally so. This God is interesting to me because he is as violent as we would expect an ancient Near Eastern deity to be… but seems to care about justice, human morality, and creates a system for dealing with human wrongdoings. This is off the map— an ideal cast farther than anything before.

Then we reach the prophets. Isaiah lifts God even higher, describing the divine as seated on a throne above the heavens, surrounded by seraphim who cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.” By the time of Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55), writing during the Babylonian exile, God becomes not just Israel’s God, but the Creator of all nations—one who raises and topples empires and speaks of justice for all peoples. So this old man with a beard in the sky surrounded by fire breathing dragons (that’s what a seraphim is (see the root for serpant?), it is not an angel. But this old man claims to not just be for a particular people… bot for all people. Again, this is a new venture forward in the Jewish tradition.

Jump again to Job, and now God is almost unfathomable. The divine voice out of the whirlwind doesn’t explain suffering but overwhelms Job with a tour of the cosmos: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” This God is cosmic, transcendent, and answerable to no one. Which… sounds pretty close to the truth. haha!

In the Psalms, you get both—sometimes an intimate shepherd, other times a mighty king of glory. And in the Wisdom tradition (like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes), God becomes a kind of moral force, almost more principle than person—woven into the structure of the universe like gravity or justice. So here’s a question. Why? Why do you get such a WIDE variety of divinity in the Psalms? It is because they are composed over a thousand years. You have every step of the evolution of God in a collection of hymns without the music. Far out huh?

So… By the time we get to the New Testament, the language has changed entirely. Jesus calls God Abba—Father—bringing back intimacy, but this time tied to self-giving love and radical inclusion. At the same time, the Gospel of John declares that “God is Spirit” (John 4:24) and “God is Love” (1 John 4:8)—concepts that are profoundly abstract, nearly philosophical. Paul echoes this cosmic transcendence, saying God is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This is literally nothing like anything in the Old Testament…because it is Greek philosophy.

But here’s what’s even more interesting: in both early Christianity and several Jewish movements of the first century, God had become so transcendent, so utterly perfect and unchangeable, that he could no longer interact with human beings directly. He was too holy, too other. This is why the New Testament is full of intermediary figures—Jesus as the Logos, the Spirit as Advocate, angels as messengers. Something or someone had to bridge the gap.

Philo of Alexandria, writing just before the birth of Christianity, represents this beautifully. For Philo, God is utterly beyond comprehension—utterly without passions, untouchable by human weakness. But Philo doesn’t abandon relationship; instead, he inserts the Logos, the divine reason or word, as a kind of bridge between heaven and earth. The Logos becomes the intermediary, the face of God turned toward creation. Sound familiar?

And here is a turbo button that will either help you or make you mad. Probably not both. At least not at the same time. This happened FIRST in Greek mythology. Zeus is elevated to the high, transcendent God and every other God becomes an intermediary that can have human interaction. In some ways, the rest of the pantheon becomes angelic— a go between on the chain of being between divinity and humanity (I’m a poet by accident a lotta times. lol).

In both traditions, God has become a being you can’t look at directly. You need a mediator, a voice, a Word made flesh. This isn’t a weakening of faith—it’s a theological evolution. The divine became more abstract, more spacious, more holy… and therefore more inaccessible. But you can see that asking “what happened” or even more so, “what is God really like?” will not get you very far if you are HONEST about the primary sources of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

So what happens when a seeker of God—who once felt awe, trust, even intimacy with the divine—discovers that in his own tradition, God is a moving target? That who God is seems to depend on the era, location, and ideology of the author?

At first, it can feel like the ground is shifting beneath your feet. The God you loved as a child starts to feel like a collage of ancient voices, stitched together by centuries of redaction and reform.

Then you need to drink. Just kidding. Seriously though—and here’s the turn—it opens something profound and beautiful and sacred.

Because if God was never just one thing, then maybe our faith was never meant to be either. Maybe the truth is not in nailing down the final form of God, but in joining a long, honest lineage of wrestlers—Israelites in the truest sense—who take their faith seriously enough to question it.

Doubt, then, isn’t the enemy of faith. It’s the threshold of deeper knowing. It’s standing at the edge of Eden, not with fear, but with curiosity, asking not “Where are you, God?” but “Where are we going next?”