Reading this with my children, I found it refreshing. The book says God didn’t “learn His ABCs.”
Simple line. Sweet. True.
But it pushes back against something that’s increasingly common in modern Christian theology: the idea that God is basically a souped-up version of us.
This idea is broadly labelled “theistic personalism” but has lots of other attending “isms” underneath it. It’s more or less a way of thinking about God that starts with us. We look at our own self awareness – how we learn, choose, deliberate, respond – and then we imagine God doing the same kinds of things… just on bigger scale, but essentially like us.
It makes God more understandable, I’ll grant that. But it also makes God in our image rather than we in His.
The first problem is that Scripture does not begin with us and scale upward. It begins with revelation: “In the beginning, God…” Not a being among beings. Not an individual inside the universe. Not one more mind in the cosmic crowd. If God is the source of everything that exists, then He doesn’t sit inside the system learning and reacting through the passage of time.
God isn’t the biggest being in the universe. He’s the reason there is a universe at all. And I love that a children’s book remembers that, even if many theological text books seem to forget it today.
God didn’t “learn His ABCs.”
