Miles on God

In the midst of saying some very odd and wacky things, Jack Miles does have some insights to offer in his God: A Biography . Most especially, there’s his notion that the unity of the Bible (he’s dealing with the OT) lies in the fact that it has a single main character, God. God is the hero of the story, and ultimately (I say, against Miles) a comic hero, a triumphant hero (not, as Miles says, a silent, nearly dead, weary hero). Miles’s emphasis on the “multiple” identity of God, his unpredictable volatility, is also a welcome corrective to overly Apollonian portraits of God. It would be wonderful is someone of Miles’s writing gifts and learning, but with an ORTHODOX turn of mind, would work up a theology proper in the way he does, examining God’s “character” and even “character development” as it emerges in the narratives of Scripture.