How to write a Biography of God?

God. He is omnipresent. He seems familiar to us, yet he remains mysterious. Who exactly is he? What is his ‘life story’? These are the audacious questions the American publicist Jack Miles dared to ask in his book God: A Biography.

Is it possible to approach God not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book - the Bible – and as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and ambiguities of a Hamlet?
Miles shows us God in the appearance of a great literary character, the hero of the Old Testament. In a close, careful, and inspired reading of that testament God is seen from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. This God is a warrior whose greatest battle is with himself. We see God torn by conflicting impulses. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind.
For generations our culture's approach to the Bible has been more a respectful act than a pursuit of knowledge about the Bible's protagonist; and so, through the centuries the complexity of God's being and ‘life’ has almost disappeared in our consciousness. In his biography of God, Miles addresses his great subject with imagination, insight, learning, daring, and dazzling originality, giving us at the same time an illumination of the Old Testament as a work of  art and a journey to the secret heart of God.

Jack Miles (1942) is a writer and publicist, whose work has appeared in important American journals as the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with University of California, Irivine. His book God: A Biography won the Pullitzer Price for Biography in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages (God: een biografie, 2e druk, 1998). Where his first book is based on the Old Testament, his second book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Jezus: een crisis in het leven van God 2002) is about the New Testament.

This lecture – the 3rd in a series of Vonhoff lectures - is organized by the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, in co-operation with Studium Generale Groningen