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The Dixie dialect is artificial at times, and Jordan's version is not so consistently readable a modernization as J. B. Phillips' classic Letters to Young Churches. But Jordan's goal is sound: "The Scripture should be taken out of the stained-glass sanctuary and put out under God's skies."
∙RECORDS. An even farther-out commentary is The Incredible Shrinking God, a long-playing collection of "sermons" by Manitoba-born David Steinberg, 27, a rabbi's son who studied Hebrew literature before becoming a comedian with Chicago's Second City troupe. Not religious in a formal sense, Steinberg's comic oratory is a pop version of God-is-dead theology. Steinberg explains that he picked that title for the record because "the traditional God is becoming harder to find in modern society all the time."
Steinberg knows enough about the characters of the Bible to put them down with learned insight. Joshua, he says, was "the first real pushy prophet"; Lot was "the first Biblical voyeur"; Jezebel "was immortalized by Frankie Laine." As for the Jonah story, "the Gentiles—as is their wont from time to time—threw the Jew overboard." If Steinberg debunks God as well, it is not the real God but the "pompous image of him created by the clergy." Solemnly, Steinberg intones: "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. The Lord God is an Indian giver." When suffering Job calls out for God and gets no answer, he desperately yells: " 'Mike' . . . and God answered . . . How mysterious are the ways of the Lord."
Many clergymen have applauded Steinberg's non-homilies, on the ground that his satirizing of the wrathful, capricious God of legend is good theology as well as good fun. Steinberg keeps being invited to preach in churches and synagogues. Is he irreverent? Perhaps. But, argue his fans, who can question that God, too, has a sense of humor?