God’s Story in a Different Key

Jack Miles. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Reviewed By James Walters
(From the autumn 2002 issue of Spectrum magazine)

Consider the beautiful stained glass window in the church down the street. Jack Miles sees the Bible as such a window. It is to be looked at as religious art and appreciated for what it is, not peered through in an attempt to decipher the historical events that lay behind it. His artistic or literary intent sets Miles’ book apart from most other contemporary scholarly writing on Jesus Christ. Even if key elements in the Bible lack historical validity, it stands as an authentic witness to God that should continue to guide the Christian Church.

However, that rational deduction belies the rich story that makes such a conclusion possible. Like Ellen White’s The Great Controversy, Miles’s Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God takes a bird’s-eye view—from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. Another similarity is that both authors take the story literally, not as a mere residue of certain historical and cultural curiosities. Also, Miles, like the Bible itself, has God as the protagonist in the grand story. However, a pivotal difference is that Miles, contra White, sees the founding epic of Judeo-Christianity as a thoroughly human witness.

In Miles’s story, God created humankind as the apex of his creation--in his own image. But because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God cursed the human race with suffering and death. Miles implies that God is ever afterward a bit guilty because of this overreaction. Regardless, God chose the Hebrew people, and instituting a sacred covenant of reward/punishment, led them into nationhood. The originally calm and sure Creator then became an angry and anxious warrior who lead his people in near-genocidal warfare in Canaan.

Several centuries later, God punished Israel for unfaithfulness by using Babylon and Assyria to punish—yes, conquer—the Hebrews. However, an enfeebled but faithful remnant returned from Babylon to Jerusalem and built a modest new temple. However, says Miles, "the divine giant never came striding forth from the mountains of the south, shaking the earth and terrifying the sky as he had said he would" (106 )

God repeatedly promised Israel that he would wreak spectacular havoc on their new enemies as he had against their original enemy, Egypt. Israel would again bask in Davidic glory, and God would be vindicated as his promise was fulfilled. But "somehow, mysteriously, when the time came, he couldn’t go through with it. His mind had changed." God saw the "deeper consequences of his own inaugural violence" (244). Further divine military victories would be an unending punishment for the world and a silent indictment of himself. Thus, God "broke his promise" to Israel.

A pervasive theme in Mile’s depiction of God’s life—a historical novel, really—is change in God. God goes from calm creator to provincial warrior to universal lover. Adam and Eve never called themselves God’s children, or he their father. That came later. God had to grow into "bridegroom of the universe and husband of the human race" (245). Most importantly, he had to learn to win by losing. The Lamb of God would win the "only victory that really matters. The Good News of the Gospel is the news of how he did it" (245).

God doesn’t baldly declare that he can’t defeat his enemies; he declares that he has no enemies, that there’s no distinction between friend and foe. However, it’s one thing for God in his heaven to change; it’s another to ask mere humans to love enemies. It’s different unless God becomes a human and suffers the consequences of his own new covenant of love. Thus, we begin to see how Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection are vital. "Israel will be slaughtered like sheep, but God has become a lamb. He has made virtue of necessity, yes, but the virtue is real virtue. It is the heroic ideal of universal love" (109).

Jesus, God Incarnate, announces that God loves all people indiscriminately—the sun shines on all. Jesus teaches a new covenant, one whose law is love and acceptance. God had became a lord of universal love; he couldn’t continue to keep the old covenant’s terms. On the verge of a new national catastrophe for Israel—the destruction of the Third Temple (A. D. 66-70) and accompanying human slaughter—he decided not to pretend otherwise.

The "crisis in the life of God" was his inability to fulfill his singular promise—to restore Israel to Solomonic splendor. Christ majestically resolved the crisis by instituting a new, grander promise that enveloped the older one by expanding it to all peoples of the world. Furthermore, it promised not a temporal kingdom for a few within the cycle of birth and death, but it claimed the defeat of death itself. In the new chapter of God’s life, "[h]uman hope and divine honor will have been redeemed together at a single transcendent stroke" (224).