The Evolution of the Idea of God in the Bible—The Evolution of a Relationship With an Imaginary Friend, or an Actually-Existing God? by Charles Bledsoe. Posted at BSA on Oct 17, 2025.
[Below is his post for which he is the author and it is posted here for my personal reference only.]
From my theological perspective I see the concept of God in the Bible evolving, and I’d like to delve deeper into that perception of a dynamic and developing biblical deity. However, I wish to be very mindful to not give any impression that I’m endorsing what I’ll term a supersessionist evolutionary view, in which the culmination of the Bible’s evolution is reached in the higher agapeic theology of Jesus, in which the idea of God in the Hebrew Bible is less advanced than the New Testament and Christian vision of the divine. I wish to make it clear up front that I don’t subscribe to any such theological supersessionism.
I don’t suppose it would be too controversial for me to start off by saying that at an early stage Israelite religion was more monolatrous than monotheistic, the divine was conceived to be plural, to comprise a Canaanite pantheon (not too surprising given that the Israelites were for the most part indigenous Canaanites, not refugees from Egypt) in which the Israelite God, Yahweh by name, was ranked #1 and enjoyed favored status as the Israelite’s national deity, but wasn’t conceived to be the one and only actually-existing god.
Israelite religion of course evolved toward exclusive Yahwism, and eventually, gradually toward a more universal monotheism. This was one hugely significant path of progression that its evolution followed. But for quite some time on the surface Yahweh was certainly not anything that a modern liberal theist would find terribly appealing or see the potential of without the benefit of hindsight. First of all, he was quite anthropomorphic (and a part of His anthropomorphic character was that he was depicted as male, so the pronoun He is legitimate here). In fact, He was quite literally anthropomorphic. The earliest biblical authors imagined that God had an anthropomorphic form, a human-like body. More disturbingly, some quite unattractive (to modern minds) personality traits were also attributed to Him: anger, wrath, jealousy, violence, destructiveness. And he was of course quite tribal, he played favorites with the Israelites and commanded them to make war, conquer and exterminate other peoples, and colonize their land.
But I would contend that this offensive to our sensibilities character of Yahweh doesn’t necessarily convict the biblical authors of a disconnect from the divine. The idea that it does is down to our own theological preconceptions; and anachronism, our judging Israelite theology by those preconceptions. That is, we assume that if there’s a God “He” [sic] (the scare quotes and [sic] will function to indicate that for familiarity’s sake I’m using conventional gendered pronouns that I don’t agree with) would not have presented to the biblical authors as anything like Yahweh. Therefore J, E, D, and P must have been completely out of touch with a veridical, and writing entirely about an imaginary deity.
Again, this judgment stems from the theological lens we’re wearing, even if one is a skeptic or atheist. Yes, even those who don’t believe in God conceive God in a certain way that’s been shaped by the theology they intellectually dissent from. I would argue here for instead viewing the Israelite God through the lens of a theology that differs fundamentally from a mainstream contemporary theism that makes it inconceivable that God would have ever presented as Yawheh.
I would first suggest that a finitist theology in which God lacks the determinative power to impose an understanding of “Himself” [sic] would go a good part of the way to explaining how Israelite anthropomorphism and its sometimes unsavory portrayal of Yahweh doesn’t necessarily demonstrate a disconnect, a lack of contact with God.
Bear with me as I dive deeper into the particular kind of finitist theology I’m envisioning here. The term “finitist” doesn’t do it justice. It’s a theology of noncoercive divine love and power in which God is unable to exercise controlling sovereignty to bestow welfare, prosperity, and security upon us; a perspective in which God’s benevolence is instead conceived to be limited to an MO of offering us gentle and persuasive guidance, calls toward well-being. Such a finitist understanding of God’s power makes it conceivable that God might have been forced to yield to the Israelite’s and biblical authors’ misapprehension of “His” [sic] calls to them to become a people, and make a life in, pursue their welfare in the land as the commands of a tribal warrior deity to conquer and colonize (a conquest and colonization that thankfully didn’t actually happen historically).
Which is to say that the ancient Israelites, and authors of the Hebrew scriptures may then have been more aligned with God’s vision for them than one might think. Their following of God’s calls to nationhood, and collective well-being may simply have taken some unfortunate forms and directions that were unavoidable for a God of limited power. An uncontrollingly loving God who’s without the ability to hegemonize the world can only work with, and make the best of the possibilities we provide “Him” [sic] with. On this understanding of divine power neither God nor the authors of the Bible can be faulted for not doing better.
In any case, the understanding of God of the biblical authors, even at this early stage, was relational. This was expressed in their sense of a covenant with Yahweh. Their theology wasn’t entirely benighted Bronze-Age stuff (but then the Hebrew Bible of course wasn’t written in the Bronze Age).
But from our modern vantage there was room for ethical improvement, so to speak. And it arguably came with the prophets. Continuing with the above theological perspective, with the concept of a God whose power is the power of influence not control, I would assert that with the prophets we see Israelite religion developing a heightened receptiveness to divine influence toward values such as social justice, and an ethically good society, not just the establishment of an identity, and a polity with control over the land.
I’ll take a moment to emphasize the real theological kicker here, an idea that will kick against conventional theism. The theology of the full-orbed relationality of God being proposed here sees the growing human receptiveness to divine input and influence, the evolution of our relationship with and understanding of deity, affecting God’s experiential and interpersonal self. That is, the development of the idea of God is consequential not only for us but also for God. It’s a two-way relational-evolutionary process in which how God intersubjectively relates with us, and God’s inner life is changed, realizes new possibilities and potentialities, new characters, enrichment with new dimensions to God’s ever-ongoing self-actualization. In short, God evolves with our evolving idea of God. And I would maintain that we see this two-way process, and the gradual emergence of new dimensions of the God-human relationship, taking place throughout the Bible. The Bible’s wisdom literature, in particular, arguably supports this view.
In books such as Job and Ecclesiastes we see more theological progress with the rejection of a Deuteronomistic theology, theodicy, and morality that views suffering as God’s punishment for unfaithfulness. God is no longer held responsible for all of our trials and tribulations. There’s a (divinely inspired, I would posit) movement away from the simplistic idea that God is a totalitarian who controls everything.
Most importantly, running throughout the Hebrew Bible we find the evolving theme of God being characterized as lovingly relational, as exhibiting love—love defined as willing and promoting the well-being of human beings—in the form of a precept to love our neighbor (understood in a restricted sense by Israelites, as a command to love fellow Israelites), forgiveness and mercy, compassion and grace, and khesed. And in the New Testament we have an account of a Jewish teacher who added a universalizing tweak to the love command, and made quite a lot of God’s love, who seemed to resonate deeply with the divine love nature.
But it should be understood that Jesus’ theological vision and teachings were embedded in the Jewish religion and scriptures, and not something that took flight from them, and rendered them defunct. It’s the Judaism of Jesus that makes him receptive to God’s call to conceive “Him” [sic] as fundamentally love, and to help stimulate an advancement in the evolution of God-consciousness.
What’s more, the New Testament is not just one long message of God’s universal love that outdoes the Hebrew scriptures in portraying God as love and supersedes Judaism. There’s quite a bit of content in it that isn’t exactly highly evolved love-oriented stuff. This needs to be emphasized. We must fastidiously guard against Christian supersessionism and asserting an evolutionary leap beyond Judaism in our thinking about God. But that said, I think it can be argued that we do see the evolution of theism in the New Testament, and beyond, in all three of the Abrahamic faiths, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our, or at least my takeaway from a close theological reading of how God is portrayed in the Bible, a reading through the particular theological lens I’ve used here, is that theism is by no means a static outdated belief, that it’s very much an evolutionary process and rather than fading away God-belief will more likely see future transformations for the better.
