Humorless God

Warning: Star Trek reference ahead!
In the original TV series Star Trek, we encountered the character of Spock, half human and half Vulcan. His people mastered reason and logic to overcome a hideous emotional nature, according to the background legends. So Spock seldom expressed the slightest bit of emotion, but seemed to understand humor well enough to use it on his human associates when the dry, literal facts weren’t necessary.
Western evangelical Christians tend to regard God as something like Spock. It’s not so much what they say, as what they imply in their literature, and what they don’t say. The Christian evangelical mythology equates our brutish Germanic background as the only alternative to a rather sterile and dry rationalism. In their minds, they conflate the entire Ancient Near Eastern cultural legacy as pretty much like the Germanic warrior tribes prior to the Fall or Rome. By the time these evangelicals become adults, the foundation has been laid such that intellectual learning is unable to correct their assumptions.
The visceral hatred for anything not Western is what keeps people from understanding that the God of the Old Testament is the Father of Jesus, and that dying on the Cross was entirely consistent with everything God did from the beginning of Creation. Our cultural mythology reads Germanic brutality (itself largely myth) back into the Old Testament, so that God’s character is rather like something out of Norse legends. Jesus did not moderate His mean and brutal Father; Jesus expressed fully once and for all the character of His Father. Evaluating the God of Ancient Hebrew literature by Postmodern Western cultural values is begging for damnation.
It’s not as if God has no sense of humor. I can get evangelicals to say those words, but I can’t get them to change the underlying unconscious assumptions they bring to the task of talking about God. They color God’s sense of humor as urbane and modern American, and can’t imagine how God created that “nasty old Hebrew culture” as the primary necessity for humans to approach reality. So they simply read their biases back into the Bible and talk all nice about how it was so wonderful, all the time working from false assumptions that are entirely contrary to their conscious thoughts. Yes, modern evangelical Christianity is schizophrenic. Evangelicals make God out as some kind of Spock figure, and He’s not permitted to use sarcasm. It’s okay for Him to use figures of speech, but they can’t be too flexible in meaning; ambiguity is not permitted. And He damned sure isn’t permitted to use legends and mythology to get His point across.
No, the Bible has to be read as baldly literal, say evangelicals. Otherwise — why, it makes God a liar! Calm down folks. God can speak in legends if He likes.
Let’s try the figure in Scripture known as the Antichrist. It’s not as if the Bible precludes having a singular being who eventually rises to fulfill the prophecies of Antichrist. However, the Bible presumes you know better than to demand there must be a single ultimate figure near the end of time who is The Antichrist. They envision images from Rosemary’s Baby or other fictional entertainment. 1 John 4:3 should serve as a hint: In John’s mind, the Book of Revelation was not meant literally. Antichrist is a characterization, not a single figure in some future history. He takes quite seriously the notion Antichrist is more like a demonic character, a non-human that can inhabit the actions and thoughts of people who make themselves available. Reducing this down to a single human manifestation would miss the point entirely. The Antichrist was already in the world at the time of John’s ministry.
By the way, the theologically liberal feebs who want to judge the Bible against their socially and politically correct mythology are also too stupid to take seriously. Don’t bother talking to them until they repent of their arrogance. They are the controlled opposition to evangelicals, and either or both are a bigger threat to genuine Christian faith than all the Muslims in the world together.
Human evil is too complex to reduce to simplistic mythology. Western Christianity bears a vast burden of false mythology, often more heathen than Christlike. Jesus was a Hebrew man, not a German. And if you try to reduce this discussion down to something so silly as hating modern Germans, of Nazis and anti-Semitism, you really are trying hard to avoid understanding.