WATCH GRID: Everything has always been new

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First, here’s the obvious question at this time: What is God the god of?

Sure, I’m going somewhere with this.

Gods are gods of things, right? Things like fire, birth, or War III.

But for those of us inhabiting the world that sprang from Greek and Roman imperialism (“the West”), “God” usually refers to a singular figure whose jurisdiction is hard to define.

Condense an osmosis-based understanding of what the Bible allegedly says into something like the monopolistic god of irritable omnipresence, and you have the definition of God that people are usually referring to when they ask whether you believe God exists — as if pop culture’s interpretation of Sunday school’s summary is the only imaginable definition. (See: the kind of atheist who explains to everyone that they’ve never seen a moody grandpa on a chair orbiting our planet. Well, no shit.)

Our most popular idea of God springs from a decision made 2,500-3,000 years ago, when otherwise insignificant Near Eastern hillbillies seem to have determined the local pantheon’s storms-and-stuff patriarch was worthy of an exclusive pact. (Part of that pact: Those hillbillies were required to do periodic anti-capitalism, while that god pledged to uphold those hillbillies’ society if they stuck to their periodic anti-capitalism. The pact also included other things, such as advice on cleaning mildew.)

Throughout the Bible, that exclusivity morphed from God recruiting the Israelites against nearby gods to Deuteronomy declaring God “the god of gods” to Isaiah’s vision of a solitary cosmic mastermind (“there is no god but me”). The latter is similar to what was eventually written as the beginning of Genesis (though its writers also played with Babylonian polytheism) and in the New Testament (though you can read demons as gods, if you want, or as personifications of societal systems and untreated mental illness) and onward into modern gen pop.

Ok, so: If the God of the Bible is only sometimes the god of monotheism, even though monotheism is supposedly the most definitive trait of The Western God … then which other supposedly essential and mandatory traits aren’t necessarily part of the definition either?

For example!

For centuries now, the following gotcha has stumped various theists: How can God be loving, good, omnipotent, and omniscient? If God can fix any problem, but God allows children to suffer, then God is the most evil being imaginable, right?

Various theists have concocted various mental gymnastics in response, sometimes derailing into side quests about arguing with middle schoolers that dinosaur fossils are fakes.

I really don’t know why they bother.

It might be surprising to realize the Bible itself asks that stumper over and over, in Psalms and in Job and on the cross. If you are God, then why does everything suck?

But here’s the bigger surprise: The Bible also answers that question. Over and over.

The God of the Bible is the god of commiserating, expecting, hoping, waiting, pleading, mourning, reconsidering, creating, regretting, pining, and reacting, not the god of knowing how to snap God’s fingers and delete all suffering. Though there’s a verse in Micah that says God is unchanging, there are far more that say God is the god of constant change, the stubborn striver, the creator inspired by Genesis’ chaos. (Likewise, just as there are verses in both testaments that say God is a god of cruel nationalism and bigotry, many others in both testaments say God is a god of shielding immigrants and empowering the marginalized. By including varied human visions of God from across 1,000 years and 2,000 miles, the Bible says a lot about humans.)

When God emerged as the Israelites’ choice of god, God’s unique stipulations included a ban against representing the divine with things made by human hands.

That’s because this god was already represented by those hands themselves.

“It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God,” said Alfred North Whitehead, originator of God-is-always-changing process philosophy, though not the first to discover the knowledge that God and the universe alter each other.

“God created humans in God’s image,” says the opening chapter, which also reveals God’s work as sole creator had concluded long before the story was written down. From that point on, we had become co-creators, represented by Eve commandeering those powers while God, momentarily the god of worried parents, huffed and then puffed and then followed God’s daughter out of Eden.

Biblical scholars sometimes argue God is “the god of history,” the god whose story is not confined within primordial mythology but is presented as literally inextricable from ours, plotted along our timeline that includes verifiable things like the Assyrian Empire and mildew. Over and over, God is the god of overhauling society, and not a lofty court of Greek drama queens way up in the ethereal netherwhatever, but the dirt-bound society that can only be overhauled by us. The god of adapting to the world while urging the world to adapt.

Like the God of the Bible, we cannot merely wish an ideal universe into existence, and we cannot delete the tyrannical effects of the past. But whether or not there’s anything in all the omniverse that meets anyone’s definition of God (because I don’t give a shit whether anyone “believes in God,” whatever “believing in God” might mean), we also have this in common with the God of hope: We are co-creating a new universe in every moment.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” says Ecclesiastes, and it’s right, even when we’re tempted to imagine Kids These Days as people who perceive the world in fundamentally alien ways. We’re tempted to view 2024 as college football’s first-ever season of drastic change, but its history is part of the same arms race as everything else: a willfully naive spirit that refuses to give up on kids from nowhere vs. a caste system that wants to consolidate half the galaxy for Fox Sports’ shareholders. We will always have poverty to contend against, said Jesus, and that’s because we will always have greed.

But do you know what is new, Ecclesiastes?

That sun itself, every new day the eight-minutes-outdated image of a star that hasn’t stopped changing for almost five billion years now, illuminating acts of collective worship in Youngstown, Ohio and Seattle, Washington all the same, religious services in search of brief euphoria and settling for ever-evolving community. Yes, a tailgate is communion. No, that’s not a joke. “Haha but what about LSU tailgates with so many beers, haha have you seen the meme about whether Mountain Dew can be a communion drink.” I said it’s not a joke.

All along, the only thing that has ever been constant is change itself.

(Well, and NC State going 8-5.)

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This is the weekly college football schedule thing I’ve been posting since like 2015. No, I will not ever decide to make it look any prettier than this. All of us change all the time, but my hideous spreadsheet will not.