Who Is God Bible Study Pdf
The short answer
Most of us come to the Bible with a picture of God already in place. We inherited it from culture, from childhood, from philosophy class, from a vague sense of what a supreme being ought to be like. A serious study of who God is begins by noticing that gap: the God we assume may not be the God Scripture actually presents.
One common assumption is that God is essentially a perfect mind, and that we resemble God chiefly by being rational creatures. As the theologian Shirley Guthrie points out, this idea owes more to ancient Greek thought than to the Bible. Scripture certainly treats us as thinking beings, and it never disparages the intellect, but it never says that reason is what makes us human or what makes us like God. If we quietly define God as supreme rationality, we have imported a philosophy into the text rather than reading the text itself.
What does the Bible offer instead? A God who speaks, and who speaks in order to be answered. Walter Brueggemann describes the Hebrew intuition that God can do everything with words except deliver a monologue. God's word invites reply, questioning, even protest. That is why the Bible is full of prayers, arguments, laments, and songs, and why books like Job exist at all. Knowing God, on the Bible's terms, is less like solving an equation and more like being drawn into a conversation.
So a study of who God is turns out to be a corrective exercise. We hold up our working definition of God, test it against the biblical witness, and let the text talk back. The God we discover there is not a projection of our highest human traits, but a living voice who wants dialogue, not silent admiration.
What scholars say
Guthrie asks whether our habit of defining the image of God as rationality comes from the Bible or from Greek philosophy, and finds Scripture never makes reason the key to our humanity. Brueggemann supplies the biblical alternative: a God capable of every kind of speech except monologue, whose word generates our reply, our questions, and our art.
“We will look first at some of the more popular of these "inserted" views of the image of God and then at what most contemporary theologians believe the Bible itself means by it. Rationality? Western civilization in general has followed the ancient Greek belief that it is the capacity to reason that makes human beings human and like God. It is not surprising, then, that Western Christianity assumed for centuries that "image of God" means ability to reason and act in accordance with what is reasonable and rational. (Whatever you may think theoretically about this, did it occur to you to say "I am a rational animal" when asked who you are?) But although the Bible does not deny that we are thinking beings and shows no contempt for the intellect, nowhere does it suggest that this is the key to our humanity.”
“It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech acts except that of monologue, which has generated our acts of reply, of questioning, and counter-creation. After the Book of Job and Euripides’ Bacchae , there had to be, if man was to bear his being, the means of dialogue with God, which are spelled out in our poetics, music, art.”
What it means for you
Try naming your own working definition of God in one sentence. Then ask where it came from — Scripture, or somewhere else? That simple exercise can be uncomfortable, because many of us discover we have been relating to an idea rather than to the God the Bible describes.
The practical invitation is to treat prayer and Bible reading as two halves of one conversation. God speaks; you are expected to answer — with questions, complaints, and thanks as much as with praise. If your picture of God leaves no room for honest reply, this study suggests the picture, not the honesty, is what needs to change.
In context
"Who is God?" is not answered by a single verse but by the whole sweep of Scripture. God self-identifies to Moses in Exodus 3, argues with prophets, answers Job out of the whirlwind, and receives the raw, unfiltered prayers of the Psalms. Across these texts a consistent portrait emerges: a God known through speech and response rather than abstract definition. The excerpts below come from works of Christian doctrine and biblical theology that step back to ask how this biblical portrait differs from the God of inherited philosophy.