In an age where suffering is livestreamed, theology has not gone unscathed. For many, the God of classical theism—all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good—is no longer plausible.
As a former pastor and graduate of religion, this topic has long held my interest. That interest surged after a personal crisis a few years ago, when my faith was profoundly shaken. Since then, I’ve allowed my theology to float, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. To the end I’d now describe myself as completely open to truth, whatever it may be, however hard it might be to swallow. Which, turns out, makes me a heretic. Fine by me. The word has aged well.
While on this path of inquiry, I’ve studied ancient traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, mystics like Santa Teresa, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich, explored emerging perspectives from process philosophy, Perennial philosophy, and followed thinkers like Alex O’Connor and scholars such as Dan McClellan. The latter two offer a fresh approach in challenging traditional interpretations of Scripture, without callousness. They ask: If God is good, why is the world strewn with suffering? If Jesus is love incarnate, how do we reconcile his gentle eyes with the fire and flood of the Old Testament? And if the Bible is God’s word, why does it require doctrinal scaffolding to interpret it ‘correctly’?
These questions are old. They have not gotten easier.
An inherited tension: a tale of two testaments
To the thoughtful reader, the God of the Hebrew Bible can seem jealous and tribal, a deity who commands wars and punishes generations, who at times reads more like a regional warlord than the all-loving Father that Jesus proclaims. Whereas Jesus is radically different. He turns the other cheek and dines with outcasts and teaches that God is like a forgiving parent who runs to embrace the prodigal.
Dan McClellan addresses this tension through historical-critical scholarship and argues that Scripture reflects an evolving human understanding of the divine, shaped by cultural and political rhetorical goals. The texts themselves never announce the Trinity or the Messiahship of Jesus. Later readers laid those doctrines over the page like lenses. It was a surprise for me to learn that Genesis, for example, has been translated to read as a cohesive narrative, but the scholarly consensus suggests sections were written at different times (Genesis 1 was added much later than Genesis 2 and 3), which is more obvious in the original Hebrew texts. For McClellan, though, this makes Scripture more human and honest, and potentially increases its value1.
Alex O’Connor, meanwhile, challenges the morality of a God who would allow such a world to exist2. The coherence of Scripture is one thing. The character of its God is another. Why would an all-powerful, loving deity design a world where children suffer and entire species go extinct in agony? Couldn’t God have made a better system?
One possibility he’s proposed is that the God of the Old Testament is a Demiurge, a malevolent being responsible for making the material world but inferior to the supreme, unknowable God. This is a Gnostic view—the Demiurge as the source of suffering and evil.
The earlier texts don’t even deny other gods exist. They just insist you worship this one over that one. Scholars call it monolatry. Full monotheism came later3. In Exodus 15:11, we read, “Who is like you among the gods, O Lord?” In Psalm 82, YHWH is shown judging a divine council of gods. But in later, especially post-exilic texts, the tone shifts. Isaiah 45:5 declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.”
There is also archaeological support for YHWH’s early origins as a regional storm deity, possibly adopted from worshipping communities in southern Canaan or Midianite regions4. In the Ten Commandments, we see language that implies divine competition: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Before YHWH, there was El5. The supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon, El was worshipped across the ancient Levant and is best documented through clay tablets discovered in 1929 at the city of Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria. El was the father figure, wise, benevolent, called “creator of creatures” and “father of humankind.” You have already seen him if you’ve ever stepped foot in the Sistine Chapel and craned your neck to behold Michelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” painted on the ceiling. YHWH, a storm-warrior deity from the south, was a different god entirely. Over time, the Israelites absorbed El’s attributes, his supremacy, his fatherhood, his creative authority, into YHWH. The name Israel itself (Yisra-El) means “one who wrestles with El,” preserving the older deity in the identity of the people. When the Hebrew Bible reads “the LORD your God,” the Hebrew is YHWH Elohekha (יהוה אלהיך), Elohekha deriving from Elohim, itself rooted in El. The phrase is effectively saying: YHWH, your El. Two gods, collapsed into one name.
It seems the Old Testament sometimes reflects our nature more than God’s. The Israelites, like many people throughout history, sought to secure divine favor to justify human desires for vengeance and power, cloaking violence in a language of holiness. They were coming to know God, but only in part, sometimes conflating him with rival storm gods like Baal, whose attributes mirrored those of YHWH’s early portrayal. Later, in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ birth, we see a gradual and innovative shift. The tribal, tempestuous image of God gave way to something more vast: a God who was all-powerful and all-good.
Jesus, in this light, becomes a correcting lens. He reframes what came before, unveiling who God truly is. The image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), in whom the fullness of God dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). Before Jesus, we saw God in glimpses, distortions, and tribal masks. Through him, God is revealed. A foot-washer where we expected a king. A healer where we expected a warlord. The one who calms the storm, having come down from Sinai.
The problem with power
Process theology comes largely from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, carried forward by John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, and others. Its central claim is startling: God is not all-controlling. And God is changed through relationship with us. He is the most moved being in the universe, intimately entangled in every moment, touched by all pain.
Whereas classical theology insists God has total control but chooses not to remove human suffering, process theology suggests God cannot remove it all at once. God does not coerce outcomes. Rather, woos creation toward greater beauty and waits to see what creation does with the invitation. And girding this worldview is the notion that God’s power is primarily sourced by an astounding relational knowledge. What if God knows us and all things so intimately that he can anticipate what is likely to unfold? How one person will speak to their mother, their father, their friend, their enemy, how each will likely respond, how they will go on to interact with others, how everyone’s dispositions, biological and emotional and chosen, ripple outward across time and generations.
So, the key to God discerning future contours is attunement. Remarkable, intimate attunement.
God knows all possibilities and all actualities. Yet the future remains open and dependent on creaturely participation. It is not fully knowable, even by God. Humans, in this view, are co-creators also wooing the world unto love, which would seem to align remarkably well with the mission of Jesus. And God cannot override free will or natural laws. Love influences, it does not force. God suffers with creation. The divine feels all that happens and responds in real time.
Process theology might partly answer O’Connor’s critique on why God ‘allows’ suffering. It redefines his power entirely. What if true power is unwavering love that refuses to manipulate? What if it surrenders?
Critics argue that a God who cannot prevent evil seems impotent, not worthy of worship. But proponents reply that power redefined as radical vulnerability and relational presence offers a different kind of majesty. And if in response to the notion of God’s power being limited, we find ourselves longing for an all-controlling God… well, what might that say about us?
This view also resonates with recent developments in science. Federico Faggin, physicist and inventor of the microprocessor, argues in his book Irreducible that quantum mechanics undermines materialism and supports the idea that consciousness is fundamental, the source from which matter arises. “Experience is the ontological foundation of reality,” he writes6. Which begins to suggest something the mystics have said for centuries: the cosmos is alive with nearness and is still unfolding. We might be one with the Universe as it continues to learn about itself.
Which brings us to nonduality. In Advaita-inspired thought, God is Being Itself, the Source of all awareness and all things arise in God. The finite exists within the Infinite, meaning you are not a ‘finite’ self and it is only an illusion that you appear to exist apart from God, because God doesn’t speak to you so much as God speaks as you, through you, when you stop blocking the signal. To be clear, nondualists do not suggest you are God but that you are part of God’s shared being, and the deafening silence you sometimes encounter in prayer or meditation or lying awake at three in the morning with your chest tight and your and your questions unanswered—that silence may be the presence of God in the absence of everything our world says is necessary.
In this view, Jesus is one who has realized his identity as the Infinite, and invites others to do the same. Critics ask whether this risks detachment from the world’s suffering. Others suggest it does the opposite. Suffering is real, yet not as real as the Oneness through all things. The illusion of separation causes suffering. Awareness dissolves it. By awakening us to our unity with all creation, it calls forth a deeper form of justice, one rooted in shared being.
The dissonance between the God of wrath and the God of love, then, may be a slow unveiling of truth. As Richard Rohr puts it, “God was always like Jesus. We just didn’t know it yet7.”
This vision partly resonates with Ellen G. White’s Great Controversy framework, which portrays human history as the unfolding of a cosmic trial8. God’s character is on display before the universe, placed on trial by the accusations of a fallen angel named Lucifer. God upholds freedom of choice though he does not control the outcome. Love must be freely chosen by nature. Lucifer, seemingly in the throes of time, rejected love, and sin—or disillusionment—began.
Some interpreters, including early Adventist thinkers and proponents of the “ruin-reconstruction” theory, have suggested that Genesis 1:2 describes a world already marred by chaos, potentially the result of Lucifer’s disillusionment. Genesis 1:1, in contrast, reflects a perfect design, created well beforehand. In this reading, God is the one who brings form and beauty from a pre-existing wreckage. Though speculative and not universally held, this theory supports the idea that Earth’s brokenness was the consequence of a cosmic conflict already underway. This overlaps with the Gnostic view of a Demiurge, a lesser god, having created the earth.
Jesus’ life, death, and purported resurrection would then serve as testimony in that cosmic case: that God is just, patient, and loving beyond measure, even when misunderstood. While White’s theology fits within the broader tradition of classical theism, I believe it offers a narrative that complements process thought. Perhaps we are part of a tremendous crisis, in a world that has been overtaken by a powerful lesser being.
White herself did not affirm the Gnostic tradition. But her vision of a cosmic conflict echoes ancient intuitions found in multiple traditions. In this expanded view, a figure such as Lucifer or a Demiurge looks like something larger than a scriptural adversary. Powerful enough to warp creation, yet too weak to stop love from unfolding.
There is another wrinkle worth sitting with. The figure we call Satan may not be who we think he is9. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is ha-satan (הַשָּׂטָן), and it is a title, not a name. It means “the accuser” or “the adversary.” In Job, ha-satan appears among the bene ha-elohim, the sons of God, in YHWH’s divine council. He is a prosecutor and brings accusations against Job, tests his loyalty, and operates entirely under YHWH’s authority. There is no rebellion. No fall. No war in heaven. He does his job and follows orders. Then, again in Zechariah, he appears in the same role, standing at the right hand of the high priest Joshua to accuse him before the court. This is a courtroom, and ha-satan is the attorney for the prosecution. Most scholars conclude the serpent in Eden is simply a serpent, and the story a creation myth drawing from a shared pool of ancient Near Eastern traditions. The “Lucifer” of Isaiah 14 is a Babylonian king, called Heylel in Hebrew, “morning star,” a title borrowed from Attar, the Canaanite god of the planet Venus. It was not until the intertestamental period, influenced partly by Zoroastrian dualism, that Jewish writers began stitching these figures together into a single cosmic adversary. And it was not until the second century, with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr, that anyone formally identified Satan with the serpent from Eden. The Devil, as Western Christianity knows him, is less a biblical character than a composite, assembled across centuries from fragments the original authors never intended to connect.
Whether seen as trial, unveiling, persuasion, or illusion, each of these frameworks returns us to the same essential question.
What kind of God are we dealing with?
The lens and its limits
Each theological framework, like a lens, sharpens some features and blurs others. None are neutral.
McClellan observes that Christian dogma overlays the Bible like a filter, requiring you to embrace concepts like the Trinity, the Resurrection, or a historical Adam and Eve before Scripture can be univocally understood. But the historical-critical method he champions also has its own inherited assumptions. Born of the Enlightenment, it tends to view supernatural claims as suspect and defaults to naturalistic explanations. Thus, what appears objective may be shaped by modern cultural bias.
Even moral skepticism, like O’Connor’s, carries an underlying creed. It assumes scientific rationalism, with its focus on testability and coherence, as the best lens for evaluating divine claims. But is a framework built on falsifiability enough to measure something like love? Can it prove or disprove presence? The color red? The taste of chocolate on your tongue? If early followers of Jesus claimed to experience his presence after the crucifixion, how could that ever be proven, when all we have is testimony and communal memory passed through second- and thirdhand accounts?
There is no unfiltered reading. Everyone reads through a lens. The question is which constellation of them we are using to filter what we call truth. And beneath these lenses, what unstated premises—biases, longings, wounds—shape the way we see?
Subjectivity is more prevalent than we’d like to admit. But naming our premises brings them into the light, moving them from implicit to explicit, allowing us to more clearly see what is shaping our tendency to believe one thing over another.
Even the way our brains are wired shapes the lens. Iain McGilchrist has shown how Western culture has increasingly privileged the left hemisphere’s mode of seeing: analytical, reductive, eager to flatten complexity until it fits10. The right hemisphere holds the whole without needing to solve it. Which mode do we bring to Scripture? To suffering? To God?
Rethinking the scriptures
What does this mean for the Bible?
Christians often read Scripture as univocal, as though it speaks with one voice across centuries, a single story with a single author behind it, and if you read it correctly, applying the right lenses, the coherence becomes self-evident: YHWH is the same as the God of Jesus, the Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the whole thing was orchestrated from the start. But the Bible is an anthology. It is a collection of libraries compiled by hundreds, likely even thousands, of anonymous authors, scribes, and editors (redactors) working from different cultures, different political realities, different understandings of the divine, each with their own rhetorical goals. The Priestly writer of Genesis 1 had a different cosmology than the Yahwist of Genesis 2. The author of Ecclesiastes would have baffled the author of Proverbs. The writer of Job may well have been arguing against the theology of Deuteronomy.
There’s a distinction worth making. There may not be inherent meaning in a text, meaning that simply lives inside the words independent of who wrote them or who reads them. There is intended meaning, which is what the authors and editors meant to say in their time and place. And there is interpretive meaning: what we bring to the text when we read it through our own lenses, longings, and wounds. Much of what we call “biblical truth” may be interpretive meaning mistaken for inherent meaning, read back into texts that were never asking the questions we bring to them. That is not wrong in itself, so long as we call it what it is. Meaning-making. We are crafting mythologies about the scriptures themselves.
My evolving perspective is that Scripture is a living library of humanity’s wrestling with the divine. Some pages reflect our highest visions of love and justice. Others mirror our darkest projections of fear and vengeance. Inexplicably, God’s Being is gradually unveiling through it all. Without force.
For those who want a way to sit with a passage and not merely dissect it, here is a prayer I’ve found useful:
Let me ask: does this passage lead to love?
Does it reflect mercy?
Does it bind the broken, lift the lowly, welcome the stranger, bless the enemy?
If not, may I honor what the writers were ultimately seeking, without assuming it true.
May I wait in the mystery, may I behold the Unknown.
Toward a God we can trust
Beneath all of this is a question that has nothing to do with texts or frameworks:
Can God be trusted?
O’Connor might say no. Many have felt the same. I have felt the same.
Behind much skepticism is a formative wound still being felt. The intellect arrives later11. God did not protect me. God was not a good father or mother. A wound might take the shape of an absent parent, or the failure of people who wrongly embodied spiritual or institutional power. These wounds form our propensity to believe, and what kind of God we want to believe in, if any at all.
So, I wonder: if God is really there (rather, here), could these visions begin to pair sound reasoning with lived experience?
Could there be a God who declines to control us, who declines to sort us into saint and sinner, who stays in the thick of our messy lives?
A God who has nothing to reunite, the Infinite having never been apart from anything, and so only unveils?
A God on trial, revealed through Jesus, who suffers where we expected smiting?
And if there is a God who would rather be crucified than coerce the world into belief, might that God be trusting that love will win in the end?
For a God whose character has been questioned before the universe, Jesus’ simple, non-coercive lifestyle becomes the ultimate risk and perhaps the clearest reflection of God’s heart. Much is made of the cross. Maybe he did not plan to die, which many scholars believe. I don’t know. But I do read that Jesus had a faith in love even when hanging on the cross. And certain writers in the New Testament say we are to have the faith of Jesus, not just faith in Jesus (Gal 2:16; Rom 3:22). If Jesus is alive, he may not give a damn about our faith in him, and be much more interested in our radical belief in good, and in doing good, on the ordinary days, when no one is watching12.
None of these visions sound like a God of empire and might reflect the kind of God our hearts have secretly longed for. Hidden in plain sight. Neither too important to exalt himself as God nor too ordinary to remain obscure for too long. Tender and spineful enough to model our lives after. A Godman who risks rejection, obscurity, even crucifixion. Who loses. A spiritual underdog.
What if love is the universe’s oldest experiment?
Reflecting a God misnamed, misheard, but never absent.
Until the next cast,
Jordan
In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.
thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.
innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.
offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.
Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.
All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.
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Dan McClellan is a biblical scholar and scripture translation supervisor whose podcast and social media presence, “Data Over Dogma,” has introduced historical-critical methods to a wide audience. He advocates for reading scripture through its historical and cultural development rather than through later doctrinal frameworks.
Alex O’Connor, known online as “Cosmic Skeptic,” is a philosopher and interviewer whose work explores the moral and logical coherence of theism. He’d likely resist being called an atheist these days. Agnostic is closer to the mark, which may be the more honest position for all of us.
Archaeological evidence, from the Amarna letters to the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions (which famously reference “YHWH and his Asherah”), shows Yahweh’s worship alongside other deities, supporting the gradual shift from monolatry to exclusive monotheism.
The concept that YHWH originated as a regional storm deity is widely supported in biblical scholarship. The Song of Deborah (Judges 5:4–5), one of the oldest passages in the Hebrew Bible, speaks of YHWH marching from Seir and Edom with storm imagery.
For the Canaanite god El and the YHWH-El merger, see Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Eerdmans, 2002), and Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard University Press, 1973). The Ugaritic tablets, discovered at Ras Shamra in 1929, remain the richest source for understanding El’s role in the Canaanite pantheon. The name “Israel” (Yisra-El) preserving El’s name is discussed extensively in both works.
Federico Faggin, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (2024). Faggin’s transition from inventing the microprocessor to arguing that consciousness precedes matter gives his philosophical work an unusual weight. He has, quite literally, built the architecture of the digital age and then questioned whether it touches anything real.
Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2019).
Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (1888). White framed human history as a cosmic trial in which God’s character is on display before the universe. Love must be freely chosen. Her vision centers on self-giving love rather than domination, which aligns, perhaps surprisingly, with themes in process theology.
For the scholarly consensus on ha-satan as a title rather than a name, and the development of Satan as a composite figure, see Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (Vintage, 1996). The identification of Satan with the serpent in Eden is first attested in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160 AD), chapters 45 and 79. The influence of Zoroastrian dualism on the intertestamental development of a cosmic adversary is discussed in Pagels and in the Biblical Archaeology Society’s accessible overview, “Who Is Satan?”
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009; expanded edition 2019). McGilchrist argues that Western culture has increasingly privileged the left hemisphere’s analytical, reductive mode at the expense of the right hemisphere’s capacity to apprehend the whole. He is careful to note this is a cultural tendency, not a biological inevitability.
The premise that formative wounds shape our image of God is central to the recovery tradition. Alcoholics Anonymous Step Two reads: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” As part of working the steps, individuals take an inventory of the authority figures—parents, elders, teachers, coaches, pastors—who shaped their view of a higher power, naming both the helpful and harmful attributes those figures imparted. This process surfaces the often subconscious link between lived human relationships and one’s ability to trust in God.
Including the moment of death, because dying may be the most unwatched thing any of us will ever do.