God apologizes.

Christ
A Crisis in the Life of God
Jack Miles
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 352 pp.

In this meditation on the New Testament, Jack Miles builds on the project of God: A Biography, his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the Old Testament (more specifically of the Jewish Bible or Tanakh). Because Miles's method is deliberately literary rather than theological or historical, it will help to define these three approaches.

The theological approach insists, in its way, on the unity of what Miles calls the Christian Bible, that is, Old and New Testaments. Theologically, the Bible is seen as the expression of an internally consistent account of God's relationship to humans and to the rest of creation. However, the Bible is primarily narrative while the theological account of it is doctrinal and discursive, something forged in the acrimonious debates of the great councils of the first Christian centuries. This incongruity gives rise to embarrassments. Doctrines prize stability while stories consist of change through time. In Old Testament stories, Yahweh changes his mind and repents past acts. In the New Testament, Jesus grows in wisdom and strength. In Christian doctrine, on the other hand, God is eternal and unchanging, and his every potential is always already fulfilled.

Medieval theology responded to this discrepancy by drawing upon procedures already present in the Gospels and the epistles attributed to Paul. Typology, one version of "the fulfillment of the Scriptures," mapped the time of biblical narrative into a mental space of alignments between the Old Testament and the New. The Old Testament did not develop into the New Testament in this view. Instead, it meant the New Testament. For example, the Old Testament Book of Exodus records the liberation of the children of Israel from Egypt. Without compromising its historical authenticity, the medieval exegete said that this event was also a foreshadowing (a "type" or "figure") of the Incarnation and Redemption. This was the reason it happened, to reveal in advance the defining event of the New Testament, like a mirror catching its light even before the light was kindled. In the light of the New Testament, Saint Augustine counseled, we were to read every discordant element in the Old Testament in a way that turned it into this kind of anticipatory metaphor for the charity embodied by God incarnate in Christ. So Leah and Rachel, the wives of a disturbingly bigamous Jacob, prefigure Martha and Mary, who ministered to Jesus and became in turn figures for the active and contemplative lives of Christians to this day.

The historical approach, begun in the Enlightenment and flourishing in the nineteenth century, dissolved this theological unity. Its philological sophistication revealed multiple authors and traditions beneath the eddies of inconsistency on the textual surface. Its search for the historical truth behind the rhetoric and myth of the text analyzed that text into a jumble of incoherent fragments. Yet when that search was done, the historical truth was still elusive. For a recent episode in this frustrating struggle, see Luke Timothy Johnson's review of A Marginal Jew by John Meier in the November 9 issue of Commonweal.

Miles's literary approach, here and in God: A Biography, finds in the Bible a unity (pace the historicists) that is essentially narrative (pace the theologians). This means that he views God as a central character who changes through time. The Bible becomes a Bildungsroman and "an enclosed complete text...like a garden in that doubling back to an earlier chapter is an experience rather like strolling back toward the garden gate to refresh one's memory of something already seen and to fix the plot (both gardens and novels are plotted) more satisfyingly in the mind." Miles acknowledges Hans Frei and Frank Kermode as influences, and his sense of literary form and reading aligns him more generally with the criticism that was called "New" in the forties and fifties and is now called "formalist." Such criticism finds a "pleasure and value" in literary works that "are established by inner articulation rather than outer validation." The critic of this persuasion finds the meaning of a literary work in the way its structural parts and recurrent patterns of imagery, mood, and motive work together. Our culture, Miles argues, has decided that the Bible is such a literary work, and reads the Bible as one, despite its manifold origins scattered across centuries. We do, in fact, return to it as to a plotted garden.

It is the repeated experience of looking (or "strolling") back to the gate that admitted us in Genesis that distinguishes Miles's reading from theological typology, which insists on looking forward and foreshortening time. His insistence on the continuity of God's character revealed by retrospection yields dozens of small surprises, like the description of the scene between Jesus and the Samarian woman as "the longest conversation between God and a woman." Such a judgment requires that we look as far back as Eve and bring her story into the same long plot. This approach also gives the book its arresting subtitle, A Crisis in the Life of God. Miles's long view of God's life sees God begin as an exuberant Creator whose love for his creatures, not yet that of a father, is marked by a capricious petulance that expresses itself in the eviction of Adam and Eve and the demand, withdrawn at the last minute, for the sacrifice of Isaac. God's love for his creatures then matures into that of a father for his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham. To them he makes grand political promises and, at first, delivers on them, most spectacularly when he marshals the forces of nature against the Pharaoh (actually a rival god) in Exodus. Eventually, however, to a growing chorus of complaint in Job and in the Psalms, God stops delivering. Apparently he cannot deliver. Creation has grown resistant to his power. In the Book of Esther, Israel has learned to be self-sufficient, neither receiving nor even asking for the Lord's help against the threat from Persia. It "plays collectively the same role that the Lord plays in Exodus." Under the stronger yoke of Roman rule, God faces an "impossible challenge." He must "somehow revoke the expectations aroused in his people by the Exodus from Egypt--expectations he knows he will never again meet--without altogether destroying his relationship with them."

His response to this "crisis" is his Incarnation and redemptive death on the cross. The atonement that this achieves is for an original sin that is God's rather than man's. Suffering and death are consequences of his eviction of Adam and Eve from Paradise, and he makes up for this petulant injustice by suffering and dying himself and then conquering death by rising again. The battle he wins is now spiritualized, extended beyond Israel, and waged on the plain of eternity, transcending (and leaving undisturbed) political arrangements that (he knows) will bring about the destruction of Jerusalem some forty years after his death.

This is a very rich book, filled with many more surprising insights than I have indicated or can indicate in a review. It is also deftly poised on the border between belief and unbelief. In that context, I can imagine a theologian asking Miles how God's omnipotence, eternal stability, and justice in the face of man's original sin fit into this reading? In fact, I think the book is oddly immune to that objection. Explaining God's seeming contradictions, the theologian might note that the Bible adjusts its inspired account of God to fit human comprehension. When God is said to err and repent, that is a metaphor for movements of his Spirit beyond the reach of our time-bound minds. The Bible is thus, in important ways, a nonrevelation of God. Miles, I think, does not need to dispute this point. His task is to interpret what the Bible does, in fact, reveal. The account he gives is as coherent as it is unsettling.

Daniel M. Murtaugh, a frequent reviewer, is associate professor of English and director of Writing Programs at Florida Atlantic University.