Book Review: The Search for God

The Bible was the book most quoted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Indeed, the very ideals that exalted the Declaration of Independence were Biblical in origin: all men are created equal", and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The debates at both the Continental Congress of 1776 and the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were, at their core, about the pursuit of truth.

Marchette Chute’s book is about that very pursuit of truth, the truth about God, as the title attests: “The Search for God.” Do subjects of a king have the right to question him? Yes, was the determination of the Founding Fathers. The basis of democracy is the right of the people to question its leaders because in the eyes of God all men are created equal. But does that include the right to question God? If any man had the right it was Job, which is the subject of the first chapter of “The Search for God.” The prophets of Israel allowed no blind reverence for tradition to stand in their way, says the author. The name “Israel” does not mean “worshipper of God.” It means “striver with God,” and the men of Israel “were worthy of their name,” says Chute. The book of Job “is a vindication of this right to free inquiry, the right without which the Bible could not have been written.”

These searchers for truth, these men of Israel, believed the ultimate discovery of the true nature of God would in some way “reveal a perfection that would fill the whole world with glory.” Says the author: “This conviction finds its most beautiful and complete expression in the writings of the prophet Isaiah, although it did not originate with him. Where it did originate no one can say, but it finds its first expression in the Bible in the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis.” The Book of Job and the Book of Genesis serve as introductions to the main body of the work. Chutes’ book is divided into four parts: “The Right to Search” (Job), “The Object of the Search” (Genesis), “The Search” (the balance of the Old Testament), and “The Finding” (the four Gospels). The author’s follow up to this book, “The End of the Search,” examines the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, the rest of the letters, and the Book of Revelation.

Ms. Chute makes a sharp distinction between the two creation accounts, given in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The first account, written 600 years AFTER the second account, is about God’s spiritual creation, in which each of the seven phases of creation is pronounced by God’s wisdom as “good” and concludes with ringing conviction that “God saw that all that he had made was very good.” In this account man is made in the image of God, of Spirit, not matter.

The second creation account is not an amplification or continuation of the first, says Chute. Everything has been “finished” (Gen ii. 1) in the first creation, including man. In the second account, another creator with a different title appears and makes man and the world all over again, by a different method and with different results. This second creator (named the Lord God) is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and his creation is not spiritual but material, not infinite but temporal, not perfect but fallible. Writes the author: “Mankind is given two origins and two deities, and there is no suggestion in the text of how the two may be reconciled. They cannot, in fact, be reconciled. There is no point of contact between the two creators or between the two creations.” It’s no accident that the editor of the book of Genesis put the spiritual account first, even though it was written much later, and the material account second, says Chute. God’s creation begins with perfection, and the story of man’s search for God is a search for the God of perfection, not the arbitrary Lord God who allows sin, sickness and death to enter his kingdom in the guise of a serpent with the power to speak and to deceive man. The search is taken up in earnest with God’s call to Abram, and concludes with the ministry of the Immaculate Jesus of Nazareth, who proclaimed, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John xiv: 6)

Among the momentous steps toward truth was the Ten Commandments. “Not in all the world’s history is there another code as brief or as comprehensive as these ten laws of Moses,” writes Chute. “They were designed to meet a specific set of local conditions, and yet they cover with so comprehensive a sweep the whole of field of human behavior that they are equally living and effective after three thousand years of change.” Yet another crucial step was the introduction of democracy. With the advent of the Judges, the Israelites were, as nearly as can be discovered, the most democratic people of the ancient world. David, the shepherd boy who became king, was like the judges. He believed that all authority and honor belonged only to God, and that the king was under the same moral law as his most humble subject.

With Elijah, the view of God advanced further still, from that of a God that was arbitrary--the author of evil as well as of good, of death as well as of life--to an unchanging God of eternal life. Elijah’s view underwent a momentous change when he would not accept that a child’s death had been the will of God. In a moment of fierce disbelief “he achieved what David had not been able to achieve by all his loving and reverent prayers. The child lived.” The prophet Isaiah advanced the concept of God even further when he correctly predicted that the nation of Judah would fall if the people put their trust in chariots and allies rather than in the one true God. Isaiah’s message was clear: spiritual growth of the individual was the key to a nation’s well-being and prosperity, and not merely on the beliefs of its priests and the military power of its king. It is Isaiah’s prophecy during this period of Judah’s history that he introduces the famous sign of Immanuel, or “God is with us.”

“For a child is born to us, a son is given to us; And the government will be upon his shoulder.” (Isa. ix. 6).

Isaiah was perhaps the greatest of Old Testament prophets. Jeremiah was a close second, who underscored Isaiah’s dictum in proclaiming that the understanding of God was not a matter of ecclesiastical organization but of individual responsibility. This was an idea the American founders would have seized upon: a nation can only be as great as its people.

The God of Isaiah and Jeremiah was the one true God, the God of the first chapter of Genesis—the God that Jesus would proclaim, whose kingdom was not of this world. This was the God of Israel. The God of the temple priests, on the other hand, was the God of the second chapter of Genesis—arbitrary, familiar with good and evil, whose kingdom was of this world. This was the God of Judah.

In the concluding chapter of Part Three, the author sets the stage for the coming of the Anointed One (Christ Jesus) by examining the beliefs of the Pharisees, the powerful religious sect who play so large a part in the New Testament. The Pharisees were the first to promulgate the doctrines of immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, heaven and hell, angels, demons, eternal punishment of sinners, and a Messiah who would judge the world on the Last Day. These ideas were not Scriptural in origin, but derived from various Persian religions, and adapted by the Pharisees and codified into religious law. These adopted concepts blinded them to the true nature of God, and of his son, Jesus. “It was only men of the spiritual stature of Isaiah or Jeremiah who would have been capable of welcoming Jesus of Nazareth,” says the author. “They would have recognized him as one of themselves . . . and they would have honored him as greater than any of them, for with Jesus the search ended in victory." The Pharisees, on the other hand, were blinded by the letter of their law, and therefore could not see the divinity of the man Jesus.

In Part Four, “The Finding,” the author makes a fine distinction between the synoptic Gospels (Mathew, Mark and Luke) and the Gospel of John. “Written by men convinced of the truth of the Jewish religion, (the Gospel accounts of Mathew, Mark and Luke) attempt at every point to reconcile Jesus to Judaism and to prove that he was the Messiah of the Jewish apocalypses,” says Chute. “Yet in recording the actual facts of Jesus’ career, so that all men might be ‘reliably informed,’ (Luke i. 4) the gospels are also obliged to record that Jesus placed himself in irreconcilable opposition to Judaism and that his conflict with the Jewish authorities ended with crucifixion.”

The Fourth Gospel does not attempt to present Jesus a Jewish Messiah who will shortly re-appear in the heavens with all his angels about him. Nor is there any attempt to present him as an enlightened teacher of Jewish ethics. More of the sayings of Jesus are recorded in the Fourth Gospel than in any other except Mathew’s, yet none of them is on the subject of morality.

“Jesus does not appear in the Fourth either as a Jewish rabbi or a Jewish Messiah,” writes Chute. “He appears, to use his own words, as ‘a man who has told you the truth,’ (John viii. 40) and this was not the truth about morality, but the truth about God.” Jesus said, “I am the bread that gives life,” (John vi. 35) and proved it by feeding a multitude without apparent supply. He said, “I am the light for the world,” (John ix. 5) and healed a man who had been born blind. He said, “I myself am resurrection and life,” (John xi. 25) and raised a man who had been four days dead.

“Unlike the synoptic Gospels, John does not present these actions as the inexplicable miracles of a Jewish Messiah” says the author. “They are presented as ‘signs,’ not of a supernatural king and judge, but of ‘a man who has told you the truth.’”

In closing, Chute writes: “There existed only one testimony to Jesus in the world, the power he called the ‘spirit of truth that comes from the Father.’ (John xv. 26) It was this power that Jesus trusted, as all the great prophets of Israel before him had trusted it. . . . It was the spirit of truth, the spirit of reality that comes from the Father, that the greatest of Jesus’ disciples bore witness when he said, ‘The light is still shining in the darkness, for the darkness has never put it out (John i. 5)'. No darkness could ever put it out. The whole of the Bible is testimony to that fact, and the testimony still remains.”

Personal note: I am a lifelong Bible reader, and have read a number of Bible commentaries, but this book was a revelation. Ms. Chute is a scholar without being pedantic, a believer in the Word remarkably free of religious doctrine. She is also one heck of a writer who never strays from her premise—that the Bible is a search for truth that culminates with the ministry of Jesus. She obviously has done a great deal of research, including a thorough perusal of the Apocrypha. "The Search for God" is a remarkable book--and a revelation.

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