Argument

Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, 

so that the righteous fare as the wicked!

Far be it from you!

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?

-Abraham speaking to God in Genesis 18: 25

Mythology is full of stories where mortals get the best of divine and magical beings, usually by outwitting them.  But you might imagine that the Bible would eschew that sort of nonsense, after all God is the ground of all being, the Creator, not just of living things, but of all that is, including light and darkness.  However, somehow or other, that God seems willing to argue with mortals.  Abraham is just the first in a long list of people who get away with arguing with God.  The Book of Job actually paints a picture of the relationship between God and Satan that is more like a couple of contentious old cronies than a picture of mortal enemies.  That Abraham's argument does not ultimately save Sodom and Gomorrah is beside the point, he wins the argument and does indeed save the righteous people who were living in Sodom (his kinsman Lot and his family, with the unfortunate exception of Lot's wife who just couldn't follow directions).  Moses will later win a similar argument with God over the fate of the Israelites who had recently fled from Egypt.  Prophets and even Jesus himself do some arguing with God, and the real kicker is that sometimes it works.

Among some other features, I think it is this daring, argumentative, posture that defines Judaism.  Their ancestor Jacob (Abraham's grandson) got his name changed to Israel, which means "Let God contend," after spending a long night wrestling an Angel (or the Lord himself, depending on how you read). Stubbornness, not servility, defines the chosen people of God more than anything else.  My son, in arguing with Michele and I over something, has told us, that being stubborn is not a bad thing.  I guess I have to concede that from a biblical standpoint, indeed it is not.  Most of the important characters have an attitude of stubbornness, that manifests as willingness to argue with God.

Now, the form of the argument matters.  It does not benefit one to be petulant or disrespectful to the Almighty.  The best arguments are the ones that remind God who God is, because really they remind us who God is.  Sometimes, when I look at the world, I actually do long for a God who might show up and do some good old fashioned smiting of the wicked.  There are certainly people who I feel deserve a nice long dip in the Lake of Fire, but that doesn't make for a very becoming argument with the Creator of all things.  The arguments that succeed are the ones that acknowledge and affirm God's mercy, justice and steadfast love, and call those attributes into action.  Sorry, arguing for wrath just doesn't work, like ever, see the book of Jonah for an entertaining take on that.

The real work of interpreting Genesis lies in faithfully holding a tension between history and mythology.  Some of it tells the story of God's relationship with actual humans and some of it tells the deeply mythologized understanding that those humans brought to the events that they experienced.  You can never, and should never, truly resolve that tension, or you will make the book inevitably less than it should be.

God can be argued with because God is willing to have a relationship with us, indeed to make covenants with us.  God is willing to be held to God's own standards, which is something that most fictitious theology just will not accept.  As entertaining as it might be to hold some irreverent characterization of a quirky or flawed creator at the heart of all this nonsense, it is not correct.  The Creator is not quirky or flawed, the Creator is defined by Love, mercy and justice, if we are going to construct an argument or a defense of anything it must rest on those grounds.