That is not the impression I have received from over 50 years of engaging with hundreds of evangelical Christians. Most of them speak as if God is a person that they talk to, and sometimes literally hear back from, whether in words or “signs.” They speak of God’s personal presence in a room, that they can literally “feel” his warmth and personal love, like a caring hand on their shoulder (and sometimes not even “like” – sometimes they actually claim to feel his hand), and so on. Their language is heavily personalistic, and they apply the personal language to God just as much as to themselves. You are an outlier among the evangelicals I have known. I don’t think you are representative of the evangelical mindset overall. That doesn’t make you wrong, but it makes you puzzling. Your way of describing God and your relationship to him seems to be neither that of classical Christianity nor that of modern evangelical faith, but something else.
No Biblical author claims that God is white or red, so Augustine’s example is fatuous. And I thought you were more concerned about the Bible than the Fathers, anyway. Why don’t you want to discuss my Biblical examples?
Such expressions were understood as figurative even by the Biblical authors. But that God created, made, gave laws, parted the Red Sea, turned rods into snakes, made covenants, was angry, etc., were not regarded as figurative by them. I’m asking you to comment on those things, not on the obvious metaphors.
I find it interesting that you say you want to put the Bible above all human speculation, yet appeal to Augustine, who at least in these passages you have quoted is at his most “Greek” and least “Biblical.” Why don’t you read his account of the Biblical history in On the City of God instead? He offers a much more concrete “Lord of Nature and History” reading of the Bible there – much more in line with traditional Protestant notions of a hands-on, active God.
Then why did he write this:
“… let us believe that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, maker and ruler of the whole creation: that Father is not Son, nor Holy Spirit Father or Son; but a Trinity of mutually related Persons, and a unity of equal essence.” (De Trinitate, IX, 1.)
You see the word “Persons” in there?
But again, I’m less interested in what Augustine says than in what the Bible says. Augustine fluctuates between a Greek and a Hebraic mentality; if you want the pure Hebraic mentality, you need to go to the Bible. The portrayal of God, especially in the Old Testament, is heavily couched in personalistic language.
I’m not saying that personalistic language for God is necessarily right; I’m saying that’s what the Bible gives us. Yes, he is beyond our understanding, he is shrouded in mystery, he cannot be fully seen by any man, even Moses (who sees only his “hinder parts”), and his deepest plans are not known to us; yet he is not completely alien to us; he talks to Adam and Cain and Abraham and Jacob and Moses; he and Abraham seem to come to a common understanding of justice in the Sodom story; he promises, he covenants, he gives instructions to Israel in matters secular as well as sacred, he is angered, he loves. One can reject all of this in favor of the “philosopher’s God” who is an object of our intellectual contemplation and reverence, but who is admired like a beautiful statue more than loved like a father or a bride; at points Augustine seems to lean that way (until his devotional side gets the better of him and he returns to the personal language); but one certainly has to choose, in the end, the kind of Christian one wants to be, one who follows the God of the philosophers or one who follows the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I am not sure where you sit on this choice; you seem to be trying to split the difference. You seem to want God to be utterly remote and alien to human nature, yet yourself to have a “personal relationship” with this remote and alien being. I cannot grasp this. Possibly my mind is too rigid in its categories. Anyhow, I must do some real-world work now, and so I may not respond for a while. If you want to add something, go ahead, and I will get to it when I can.