Some reviews of Michael Gungor Band’s recent song and music video entitled God is Not a White Man:

They could just have easily named the song “Love is God.” God does not love everyone! All men are at enmity with God. I understand what the artist is trying to communicate but it is too simplistic and thus I think dangerous.
-“thenygrens”

Time for me to weigh in. Yes, God is love, but that’s not his defining characteristic. Rather, His holiness is. So, despite the fact that Gungor makes some true statements, they end up being ultimately false because of the context in which they’re presented. 3 min. or no, the song does more harm than good, specifically on the “God in a box” problem, since God has presented himself in neat lines in Scripture.
–djazzman1

Some of the worst theology I’ve ever heard.

Is God love? yup. does he love everyone? equally?

Mal 1:2-3 and Romans 9:13 says that before either child was born… God loved Jacob and HATED Esau.

God loves everyone EQUALLY? hah.
- jesusfreakrkg

“’White Man’ is lame.  God is not a man…  Well he’s not a hippie either.  One would wonder if Michael really believes that Hell is a real place after listening to this song.  Michael needs to spend a little more time in the Old Testament to get to know the heart of God better.”
-rstreet

Love the hamster part!
- LassoLai

Ok, so apparently not everyone is quite as thrilled about the song as our friend LassoLai is…

I thought it’s about time I comment.

Here are the lyrics to our song that got those reviewers all riled up…

God is not a man, God is not a white man
God is not a man sitting on a cloud
God cannot be bought, God will not be boxed in
God will not be owned by religion

God is love, God is love
And He loves everyone

God is not a man, God is not an old man
God does not belong to Republicans

God is not a flag, not even American
God does not depend on a government
God is good, God is good, and He loves everyone

Atheists and charlatans, Communists and lesbians
And even ol’ Pat Roberston, Oh God He loves us all
Catholic or protestant, Terrorist or president
Everybody, everybody
Love, love, love, love

I started writing this song after hearing a preacher talk.  He was speaking in that typical preacher-like fashion in a way that implied that he was an expert and had God figured out. He had mentioned his education credentials several times, and we were apparently supposed to be very impressed by the man who was gracious enough to hand us the truth that he had mastered long ago.

The preacher talked about God as if God was a very manageable subject. There was no mystery or wonder in his tone, just dogmatic arrogance.  It was almost as if God was simply a larger and more powerful version of this man in the sky.  A white, republican man with a beard.

I’m sure you’ve come across people like this.  This assumption of near omniscience seems to sometimes be an unfortunately common attitude among preachers.  Our band did an event a while back with a fairly popular Christian speaker.  They asked me to take part in a question and answer session alongside of him, and during it, I nearly broke into tears once or twice.

Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy, and really funny.  I enjoyed talking to him behind the scenes, but when he would talk about God, he got that same tone in his voice.  He was also one of these guys that has it all figured out.

For instance, one of the questions directed to him was “which denomination has it right?”  I was disgusted by the question.  It was such an obvious us vs them sort of a setup.  I’m not sure what I think a good answer to that question would be, maybe something like “Who has it most right?  How the heck would I know?  And why would you ask a question like that?”

His answer wasn’t quite as sarcastic as that though..  He answered that there was no denomination that was totally right.  I appreciated that he hadn’t said his own denomination, but I noticed something about his answer…. He knew the answer.

The question wasn’t even a slightly less disgusting “which denomination do you think is the most right?”, but rather “which denomination has it right?” To give any answer to that question aside from “I don’t know” is to assume that you are the center and arbiter of all truth.  His answer was in effect saying that nobody had it totally right because he disagreed with all of them about something.

Another soul crushing question… The moderator calls on a young girl a few rows back, and a quiet little voice asks “Can Catholic people be saved?” (this is one of the times I had to hold back from breaking into tears)

He answered that yes they could, but only in spite of their Catholicism not because of it.  I wanted to turn to the preacher, say “while we’re at it” and then explosively vomit into his lap.  Ok, I didn’t actually think of that until right now, but that would have been kind of awesome.

I didn’t get a chance to respond to any of these questions, and the only questions I was getting were inane musician questions..  “how long have you been playing guitar?”  Man that was frustrating.

Why does this kind of arrogance fairly ubiquitous in pulpits, classrooms, and bookshelves all around the world?  Why do we put up with it?  I think we are afraid.  I know I am sometimes.  That’s why I didn’t interrupt that guy while he was speaking.  I didn’t want to rock the boat, and he’s the kind of guy that would have probably made me look stupid because he’s way louder and funnier than I am, and he’s got more people that consider him an expert on God than I do.  I don’t want to look stupid.

I think that’s it’s comforting to think that there must be somebody out there who has all of this figured out.  It’s nice to have experts around after all.  We don’t often know what we’re doing, so we need people that have actually studied to tell us what to do.  Should I brush before I floss or floss before I brush? Well, let’s ask the experts!

The problem is we have a lot of people who think they are experts about God.  To me, this is about as rational as calling a slug an expert in string theory.  A young Christian graduates college and then goes to a seminary for a few years, and suddenly they’ve figured out infinity?

“Yes, I happen to have my master’s degree in the infinite and unfathomable. Plus, I got an A.”

I imagine the little boy of the lawyer who grabs his dad’s brief case in order to play lawyer and how funny and silly it would be for that boy to think that he fully understands all the subtleties and complexities of the law simply because he’s walking around with a real lawyer’s brief case.  How much more ridiculous for a human being that’s been alive for a handful of decades to think that they have a pretty solid understanding of infinity?

We dress up in our daddy’s preacher clothes, and put little pieces of paper up on our office walls that say we are experts, and we delude ourselves because we need experts.  To most of us God is very mysterious, and often we don’t really know how to navigate all of that.  So we need our experts.  And listen, I’m as impressed as the next guy with the accomplishments of humanity, but let’s be honest with ourselves…  We barely know what’s in our own oceans or solar system, but we expect a preacher that went to school for a few years and reads her Bible every day to have figured out the mind of God?

The thing about infinity is that it is infinite.

There is no containing infinity.  As soon as you try to grasp it, you’ve reduced it to something less than infinite.  You can’t think of infinity as a bunch of millions stacked together.  In fact, you really can’t think of actual infinity, it’s too big! Thinking of it as “big” isn’t even good enough.  It’s infinite.  You can’t figure out infinity, and neither can the God experts.  The best those of us with finite minds can do is be overwhelmed within it.

All existing things are contained within infinity, but they don’t make up infinity.

In Him we live and move and have our being.
God is not a white man.

God is not a man.  Yes,  youtube critics, God became man in Jesus, but for crying out loud, if God is infinite, then thinking of God simply as a man would not work.  God is not a bigger more powerful version of you.  You can’t think of God as a super extended version of a human being.  He’s not just billions and billions of times smarter or bigger than us. Even those words “smarter” and “bigger” fall of infinitely short of being able to define or accurately describe an infinite God.

As soon as you have any sort of image of what you think an infinite God is in your head, you are not dealing with infinity anymore, but an image that you’ve created.  In Genesis, the story says that we were created in God’s image, and it doesn’t take too long before we start trying to make Him in ours instead.

The second commandment of the big ten that God gave the Israelites was this:

‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image–any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’

Most of us don’t actually carve the images these days, we just keep them in our minds.  If a finite human being thinks that he has any sort of grasp of an infinite God, than he surely has created an idol for himself.  A manageable, understandable god carved in the likeness of something comprehendible from creation.

Man is a proud animal.   We live 16 years, and we think we have the world figured out.  We live 10, 20, 30 more, and laugh about how we thought we had the world figured out “back then”.  But we fail to recognize that our laughing is a result of us thinking that we have a more realistic grasp of the world now.

We still think that we are right.  We think we own the truth more fully than we did back then because we’ve learned a few things about the world.   But like the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, we forget who we are.  We want to be like God and ingest the knowledge of good and evil, but we forget that we are made of dust.

Psalm 144:3-4

O LORD, what is man that you care for him,

the son of man that you think of him?

4 Man is like a breath;

his days are like a fleeting shadow.

In the story of Job, God responds to this characteristic human arrogance with outright sarcasm.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?  Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,  or who laid its cornerstone-

while the morning stars sang together

and all the angels shouted for joy?

“Who shut up the sea behind doors

when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment

and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it

and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;

here is where your proud waves halt’?

At least God is poetic in His sarcasm.

The point rings loud and clear.  God is God.  We aren’t.

If a person eats his vegetables, stay active, and gets lucky, he might live to a hundred years old.   Where was he when the dinosaurs roamed the earth?  Where was he when the moon got caught into earth’s gravitational pull?  He doesn’t even know much about this tiny little rock that we live on, yet alone possess the knowledge of the universe.  Arrogance is foolishness.

Who is man that you are mindful of him?

As clever as man may be, we are rarely right.  How many times does humanity have to be drastically wrong about something before we get it?  We don’t know as much as we think we do…   The earth isn’t flat?  The earth isn’t the center of the universe?  It’s better if we wash our hands after we go to the bathroom? Radioactive rays can cause cancer?    The list goes on and on.

With all of that said, I think I should clarify at this point that I don’t think that this implies that we cannot know God in any sort of way. I do consider myself a Christian, and that means that I believe that God reveals himself to humanity.  I believe that God reveals himself to humanity through creation, through the Scriptures, through His Spirit who is present in the most unexpected places, and most of all through the person of Jesus who John called the Word that had become flesh.

I do believe that God can be known, but not in the intellectual formulaic ways that I often hear “God experts” talk about, but to know Him like an infant knows her mother.  I think that we can know God with our hearts.  I think that we can know God in a relational sort of way as opposed to some reductionist or academic sort of way.  1 John says that we know God by loving.  It doesn’t say that we know God more by studying the Scriptures and figuring Him out, even though I do think the Scriptures can help us walk into love more fully.  It doesn’t say that we know God more by going to study at seminary, even though I think theological education can be extremely valuable.  Rather, “love is of God and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God.”