Ouroboros

On my morning walk I saw a real live ouroboros. Well, it was real dead actually, lying right on my path. Stretched out straight the snake was probably less than a foot long. But it wasn’t straight: it was configured in a circle, the head just nudging the tip of the tail.

Maybe two years ago I was writing a scene in which a character stood in front of the bathroom mirror removing her gold necklace. I was trying to picture her taking it off. Would she slip it over her head? No: the chain wasn’t that long. A clasp then. What sort of clasp? How about a snake head biting the tail? Now I could picture this chain with the reptilian scaly golden skin slithering off her neck and coiling itself inside a gold mesh bag…

Three posts ago I wrote something about the Order of Melchizedek, where the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews sees Jesus foreshadowed in the legendary priest-king of Salem, mediated by a messianic verse from the Psalms. Earlier in this same epistle the writer executes the same maneuver: Jesus as fulfillment of an ancient legend, mediated by the Psalmist. This time though the sequence doesn’t just go back in time, because this time it turns out that the past is the future — a temporal ouroboros. Here’s how it works.

The writer of Hebrews is trying to show that Jesus is more powerful than the angels. Curiously, his argument isn’t predicated on Jesus being God, but on his being man. Here is Hebrews 2:5-9…

For He did not subject to angels the world to come, concerning which we are speaking. But one has testified somewhere, saying,

WHAT IS MAN, THAT YOU REMEMBER HIM?
OR THE SON OF MAN, THAT YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT HIM?
YOU HAVE MADE HIM FOR A LITTLE WHILE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS;
YOU HAVE CROWNED HIM WITH GLORY AND HONOR,
AND HAVE APPOINTED HIM OVER THE WORKS OF YOUR HANDS;
YOU HAVE PUT ALL THINGS IN SUBJECTION UNDER HIS FEET.

For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him. But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, namely, Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone. (Hebrews 2:5-9)

This looks like an apocalyptic prophecy in which Jesus the Messiah will one day come back to rule the world. The capitalized portion of the text cites Psalm 8, so we flip back from New Testament to Old to find the source document:

O Yahweh, our Lord,
          How majestic is Your name in all the earth,
          Who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens!
From the mouth of infants and nursing babes You have established strength
          Because of Your adversaries,
          To make the enemy and the revengeful cease.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
          The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
          And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God [or than the angels; literally than the gods],
          And You crown him with glory and majesty!
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
          You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen,
          And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea,
          Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
O Yahweh, our Lord,
          How majestic is Your name in all the earth!

The writer of Hebrews got the citation right, but in the original context the passage doesn’t seem to apply to some specific man but rather to man in general, to mankind. The Psalmist marvels at the magnificence of the moon and the stars, and then he turns his gaze on puny humanity. Why, he wonders, does God bother with the human race? Not only does He bother; He appoints man as ruler over the whole world, over sheep and oxen, beasts and birds and fish… And now it begins to dawn on the reader: haven’t I read this litany of creatures great and small before?

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28)

This is day six from the Creation narrative. The writer of Hebrews points back to the Psalm, and the Psalmist points back to the writer of Genesis, who points all the way back to the beginning of time. But wait a minute. Go back to the Hebrews passage and its introduction to the Psalm quotation:

For He did not subject to angels the world to come, concerning which we are speaking. But one has testified somewhere, saying…

“The world to come”? I thought that the Psalmist was testifying to the world of the deep and legendary past, when humans ruled the world, before Eve listened to the serpent and she and Adam ate the forbidden fruit and God threw them both out of the Garden. Is this the Hebraist’s story, that Jesus will restore to mankind the power and glory lost in the Fall? That’s not what he says:

But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him.

“Not yet”? “The world to come”? Isn’t this writer, the author of a canonical New Testament text, saying that the Genesis 1 narrative refers not to the past but to the future? The world wasn’t created seven thousand years ago, or seven billion years ago. It hasn’t even been created yet.

Today we read a text written two thousand years ago, which cites a poem written a thousand years before that, which cites an even more ancient legend that goes all the way back to the beginning, and the beginning is in the future. Ouroboros.

The Order of Melchizedek

Thou art a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek
- Psalm 110:4, quoted in the Epistle to the Hebrews 5:6

Just for Easter/Passover, imagine that the Biblical texts are historically accurate. The Messiah was prophesied to be king of Israel; Jesus, being of the house of David and thus the tribe of Judah, could fulfill the criteria for being messianic king. But Psalm 110 presents a priestly Messiah, and according to the Law the priests must come from the tribe of Levi, not Judah. But the Psalmist clarifies: the Messiah is to be both king and priest, like Melchizedek, and Melchizedek’s priestly order is not predicated on being a Levite.

An enigmatic figure, Melchizedek makes his brief onstage appearance in the Book of Genesis, before the formation of Israel and long before the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt when Moses brought the Tablets down from Mount Sinai and his older brother Aaron established the Levitical priesthood. In Genesis 14 the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela are arraying themselves for battle against the kings of Elam, Goiim, Shinar, and Ellasar. After the four kings defeated the five in the tar pits of Siddim, the remnant of the conquered armies fled into the hills, taking with them their spoils and captives from the sack of Sodom and Gomorrah, including Lot, Abram’s nephew, who had been living in Sodom at the time. When word reached Abram he marshaled his trained men, three hundred eighteen in number, and defeated the straggling captors, pushing them back to the north beyond Damascus.

And he brought back all the goods, and also brought back his relative Lot with his possessions, and also the women, and the people. Then after his return from the smiting of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him in the valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s valley). And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; now he was a priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” And he gave him a tenth of all. And the king of Sodom said to Abram, “Give the people to me and take the goods for yourself.” And Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I have sworn to Yahweh God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, that I will not take a thread or a sandal thong or anything that is yours, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ I will take nothing except what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who went with me, Aner, Eshol, and Mamre; let them take their share.” (Genesis 14:17-24)

Melchizedek was king of Salem, which I had always presumed was one of “the nations” later positioned in contrast and opposition to Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures. After doing a bit of investigation I discovered that in all likelihood Salem = Jerusalem (Psalm 76:2), a city that was ancient even back in Abram’s time. Melchizedek was both king of Salem and priest of “the God Most High” whom Abram also served.The land that Yahweh promised to Abram and his seed was situated in the shadow of a capital city that already honored Yahweh. A footloose Babylonian, Abram had by this time settled in Canaan for the second time, so he would have been familiar with Salem, by reputation if not by direct experience.

So here’s something I’d never considered before. After Abram became “exalted father” Abraham, after his great-grandson Joseph moved the family to Egypt, after the family had over many generations been fruitful and multiplied, after Moses led them out of Egypt into the desert, after they became a wandering nation founded on the Law and the Levitical priesthood, when at last Joshua led them across the Jordan, the people of Israel would have experienced their arrival in Canaan as the return to an ancient, nearly mythic realm that in ages past had been presided over by the legendary Melchizedek, a king and priest who had served the God of Israel before there even was an Israel. Finally, many generations later, when King David conquered (Jeru)Salem, the restoration was complete, with David and his heirs becoming the titular successors to Melchizidek, storied priest-king of the God Most High.

God Detection Neurons?

Here’s a second installment on Thomas Metzinger, following up on yesterday’s post.

If certain aspects of consciousness are ineffable, we obviously cannot correlate them with states in our brains… But pinning down the neural correlates of specific conscious contents will lay the foundation for future neurotechnology. As soon as we know the sufficient physical correlates of apricot-pink or sandalwood-amber, we will in principle be able to activate these states by stimulating the brain in an appropriate manner. We will be able to modulate our sensations of color or smell, and intensify or extinguish them, by stimulating or inhibiting the relevant groups of neurons. This may also be true for emotional states, such as empathy, gratitude, or religious ecstasy.

- Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, pp. 19-20

Neuroscientific research has already made good progress in identifying brain coordinates for color perception, and investigation of the role of mirror neurons in empathy is a hot topic in the field. But being able to stimulate the neurons directly doesn’t belie the more important empirical evidence that these neurons are usually activated by information extracted from the environment. I.e., the parts of the brain that detect the color apricot-pink are tuned in to specific frequencies of radiomagnetic waves reflected by the surfaces of objects out there in the world, detected by photoreceptor cells in the retina, and transmitted via neural pathways to the brain.

So what about religious ecstasy? Already it can be artificially stimulated by shysters and hucksters; some day brain probes might be able to do the trick. But just because the religious ecstasy neurons can be juked doesn’t imply that all religious ecstasy is an illusion. Color-detecting neurons detect features of environmental surfaces; mirror neurons detect features of other humans. Might not religious ecstasy neurons detect features of other sorts of non-human, super-powerful sapient beings that are out there in the environment somewhere?

I know this idea has been proposed before, that the gods have equipped humans with internal mechanisms for detecting the gods’ presence or for receiving their messages. Metzinger refers to our internal representation of the environment as a “tunnel” because of its narrow bandwidth. We are equipped to detect only a small fraction of the almost unimaginably rich environment in which we are immersed. Maybe the gods are out there chattering and emitting vibes all the time, but we just can’t pick up the signals.

Humans who have never previously seen a snake exhibit fear on first contact with one. Presumably this is because the instinct to fear snakes was adaptive in the environment in which humans evolved. Our ancestors who had active snake-fear neurons avoided snakes, didn’t get bit, and so survived to pass on the snake-fear gene. Surely some ancestors who didn’t fear snakes managed to survive, and so there are surely some among us today who do not instinctively fear snakes. But there’s certainly no evolutionary pressure for the snake-fearing gene to go extinct in a snake-free environment. The snake-fear neurons are still there in the brain even if the bearer of that brain never once encounters a snake in the world.

So what about the god-detector neuron? Most people in the world claim to detect the presence of the gods. In a sense it doesn’t matter whether these billions of people’s god-detector genes are activated by real gods in their environment or whether they are artificially stimulated. The point is that these hypothetical god-detector neurons can be activated. Maybe in the evolutionary environment it was adaptive for humans to be aware of the gods. Maybe the gods enhanced survival value by conveying information about where to find food or where predators were hiding or how to overcome an enemy. Still, some of our ancestors who couldn’t detect the presence of the gods might have survived anyway, passing the god-indifference genes on to subsequent generations. Just as the absence of snake-fear genes does not hinder survival in an environment in which there are no real snakes, so the absence of god-detection genes might pose no handicap in an environment where the gods have departed or where they no longer provide survival benefits to humans.

Maybe the god-detector neurons need to learn — that is, they have to be put through some input-output-feedback iterations before they become properly attuned to the signal. Neurons assigned to language processing never function properly if you happen to be raised by wolves. Exposure to language-speakers during early childhood is necessary if the child is to learn to speak and understand speech. Maybe this iterative learning circuitry is necessary also for the god-detector neurons. If during the critical developmental period a person is not exposed to the gods, that person never develops the ability to detect gods if they happen to show up later.

It’s also possible that the god-detector neurons can become hypersensitized. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have hypersensitive asshole detector neurons: they’re chronically inflamed, always alert, always receiving signals alerting my brain to the proximal presence of assholes. The problem with a hypersensitive detection mechanism of this sort (or so I’m told) is that it generates some false positives; i.e., I’m prone to detecting assholes when none are present. Maybe this same problem of false positives plagues those burdened with hypersensitive god-detector neurons: they detect divine activity everywhere and all the time, even when it’s not present. Alternatively, people with dulled, insensitive detector neurons may experience a high proportion of false negatives. They don’t detect assholes or gods even when they’re staring them in the face.

Flagellant Processions

“When the whip is raised, when leather, scourge, and cane strike against covered or naked flesh, we stand before a stage — a stage on which a ritual unfolds.”

So begins In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, Niklaus Largier’s scrupulous chronicle of the curious practice of flagellation. While flogging has always been a popular method of punishment and torture, and while during the Lupercalia festival of ancient Rome women were whipped to ensure fertility, and although medieval Christianity was notoriously enthusiastic about penitence and penance, it isn’t until the tenth century that the disciplina of self-flagellation first appears in the annals of Christian asceticism. Even when practiced in eremitic seclusion, flagellation is intrinsically theatrical, for the act of self-abnegation is always staged for an audience of at least one: God Himself. But flagellation isn’t only an act of penitence; it is also, and perhaps predominantly, imagined as  a staged participation in the final scourging of Jesus that culminated in his crucifixion. In effect the flagellant’s blood intermingles with Jesus’ blood in a bodily re-enactment of the atonement. It’s in this sense of participating in Christ’s redemption that the public act of self-flagellation bears bodily witness to the Scriptural testimony. Enthralled by the multisensory image of the flagellant’s performance, the observer is brought through the inflamed imagination into an enactment of the Passion, where the torn flesh of the penitent commingles with the Word and the Spirit.

Largier traces the historical role of the intensely transcendent sensuality of flagellation through Ascesis to Erotics and finally to Therapeutics, these being the three main divisions of the book. While eventually we reach some risque bits and a few naughty pictures, I’m going to stick with ascesis in this post, because I learned about something I’d never heard of before. Did you know that there were flagellant processions during the Middle Ages? These were widespread popular movements that erupted not once but twice, eighty years apart. The first uprising of the flagellant processions began in 1260-1 in Perugia during a time of epidemic and famine; the second wave, in 1349-50, kept one step ahead of the plague that swept the continent.  Largier quotes at length from Hugo Spechtshart of Reutlingen, who witnessed some of the processions that erupted nearly everywhere in central Europe during 1349-50 and just as suddenly vanished.

“Priest and count, knight and serf participated… as well as monks, burghers, farmers, and professors… In those day, the flagellants moved about the land in great throngs. They tortured their bodies with gruesome whips whose effect was increased by the presence of knots in the straps. Whoever goes with them places himself under the sign of the cross, for as Scripture teaches us, all those who bear the cross are worthy and acceptable to the Virgin. They wore crosses on the front and back of their coats, also on the front and back of their hats… They even wear hats when flagellating themselves in a circle, so that… the cross is constantly before their eyes…

“They would spend each night in a different place, They stayed overnight at various sites, often quite impoverished ones, and would move about for a total of 34 days, since Christ spent exactly that many years on earth. The last day is only half a day, then everyone returns home.

“Once at nice and twice during the day, they tormented themselves with blows of the whip before the astonished crowd, and together they sang hymns while moving about in a circle and throwing themselves to the ground in the form of a cross. They did this six times, remaining on the ground each time until they had prayed two Pater Nosters.”

Bearing flags emblazoned with a cross, the flagellants, barefoot and clad in rags, would walk from town to town.  Until the 33½ days of their pilgrimage were completed the flagellants would neither bathe nor wash their clothes nor trim their beards. They were not permitted to ask for lodging, but could accept if a place was offered for the night. They were forbidden to sleep in beds or to associate with women.

“While on the path engaged in communal flagellation, they walked in side-by-side rows, like siblings, and sang songs as if they were scholars. As soon as they entered a place, the bells would ring and the people would stream out to gape at them and their fascinating terrible wounds. But they also came to beg of Christ the crucified, to fend off terrible and sudden death, and to give grace to the dead, peace to the living, and heavenly joy to the close of their lives… Crowds of men formed, and after a while they disappeared and no one knew any longer what had become of them.”

The flagellant processions made a significant impact on the towns they visited. Residents confessed their sins publicly, longstanding disputes were reconciled, thieves returned what they’d stolen, jails were emptied, slaves and captives were freed, exiles were welcomed home. Through strange behaviors, mass migration, egalitarian communality, and independence from most political and ecclesiastical authority, the flagellant processions constituted a radical if short-lived “deterritorialization” of medieval European culture.

Oh, and did I mention that this book was translated from the German by one Graham Harman?

UPDATE: Inasmuch as Graham linked to this post calling it a review, I’ll supplement my obsession over the flagellant processions with at least some review-like material. Briefly, I enjoyed the book and found it informative and stimulating. Largier spends more time describing than analyzing, but the wealth of material he’s assembled and the way he’s organized it maps an intellectual trajectory that’s self-validating. He doesn’t interpret, and implicitly condemn, medieval flagellation in terms of sublimated sexuality. Instead, he traces the gradual historic compartmentalization of a libidinal energy that a thousand years ago permeated body and spirit and imagination in a “conspiratorial connection” which, Largier contends, “became unbearable.” Phallic sexuality has thus become the only legitimate locus and interpretive context for erotic pleasure, including an odd variant like flagellation, while “the only place imagination is now allowed to occupy is the arts.”

Not having German myself, I cannot remark on the quality of the translation.

The Universe as Divine Temple

Before putting John Walton’s 2009 The Lost World of Genesis One on the shelf, I’ll summarize his interpretation of the Biblical creation story, because I found it interesting, distinctive, and not ridiculous. (I previously posted on Walton’s preliminary remarks about mythic and scientific accounts.)

Walton, an evangelical Old Testament scholar, begins by contending that the Hebrew scriptures should be read as artifacts produced by people who lived inside of a distinct historical culture rather than as timeless expressions of truth that transcend time and place. It should not surprise us then, says Walton, that God couched his Genesis 1 revelation in terms of an ancient cosmology — earth as the center of the universe, a “firmament” in the sky that keeps the heavenly floodwaters from pouring down onto the earth, and so on. That’s what the people of the time understood, and God didn’t see fit to enlighten them with more up-to-date information about. One wonders whether Walton might take the same stance about other aspects of the Biblical revelation that aren’t scientific but, say, ethical or political. E.g., did God reveal himself as jealous and punitive because that’s how the culture expected gods to act back then, and the people weren’t yet ready to understand the idea of a benign and forgiving deity? Did God present himself as championing a preferred nation that perpetrated genocide on its neighbors because national gods were a popular idea back then, and the people weren’t yet ready for a god of all nations, or a god for whom the concept of nation was irrelevant?

So, if Genesis 1 wasn’t intended as an accurate representation of cosmology or cosmogony, what was its purpose? Walton contends that the ancient Near Eastern culture subscribed not to a material ontology but to a functional ontology, in which objects and forces are characterized by their uses and purposes. A material object doesn’t exist in a functional ontology until its uses have been identified. So, e.g., unless that wooden thing across the room, consisting of a horizontal surface suspended 2 feet off the ground from four legs with a raised back, is recognized as something that can be used to sit on, it doesn’t exist as a chair.

Moving forward through the six days of the creation, Walton reiterates a set of distinctions that have long been recognized: days 1 through 3 establish functions, while days 4 through 6 identify functionaries. By setting light in oscillation with darkness, Day 1 establishes the beginning of time. I think this is an excellent interpretation, and it makes the literal passing of days an important part of the story. Day 2 marks the beginning of weather, separating the waters above (source of rain) from the waters below (sea). Day 3 is the beginning of food via plant life. The lights in the sky (day 4) are the functionaries for marking the passing of time (day 1). The sea creatures and birds and land creatures are the active agents of day 5. Man is the key functionary in the system on day 6. Again, all this is fine and has been proposed as a logical scheme by which functions are organized, rather than the temporal sequence of material ontogony.

Now we reach the heart of Walton’s interpretation. If Genesis 1 isn’t about God making the material universe or giving form to it, and if Gen. 1 is about assigning functions to the stuff of the universe, then what functional system is he assembling? Walton says that in Genesis 1 God is preparing the universe as his temple, as a place where he can live. In Genesis 1 God is assigning temple-related functions to various parts of the universe.

I think this is a fascinating position. Walton cites examples from elsewhere in Scripture that fit this reading; e.g., God lives in the heavens and uses the earth as his footstool. Walton identifies parallels in other ancient Near Eastern religions, whose gods likewise regarded the universe as their house, where they rested, accepted worship, and exercised kingship over their domains. Material temples built in honor of the gods often patterned themselves after the cosmos as a whole, with fountains of waters, pillars of earth, heavenly vaults, and so on. Genesis 1 should be read not as a history of the construction this cosmic temple but as its dedication ceremony. The material universe might have been billions of years in the making, but the dedication takes six days to accomplish. On the seventh God takes occupancy of the prepared temple — he “rests” in his prepared and dedicated home. Says Walton:

“In short, by naming the functions and installing the functionaries, and finally by deity entering his resting place, the temple comes into existence — it is created in the inauguration ceremony.” (p. 89)

After going through this part of Walton’s book I woke up in the middle of the night imagining Genesis 1 as a grand celebratory recital. Start the light show! Put in the flowers and greenery! Let everything be fruitful and multiply! Bring on the human assistants! Roll out the red carpet! Wonderful! I can picture the Genesis 1 text — as can Walton — being read ceremonially every year as a spectacular rededication of the universe to God.

In short, I quite like this interpretation. A few further points are worth considering:

Walton contends that the Bible “implies” that God created the material universe even if it’s never explicitly stated and even though Gen. 1 doesn’t speak to the topic. The few Scriptural verses he offers to justify this position aren’t convincing, inasmuch as they could be interpreted as referring to the creation of function rather than matter, just as Walton interprets Genesis 1. If Christian theology is driven by Biblical exegesis, and if exegesis makes no definitive assertion about whether God created the material universe, how might Christian theology be affected by that acknowledgment? Since the Bible doesn’t make a big deal about God as material creator ex nihilo, would it make sense to downplay or even to eliminate this divine attribute from theology? Isn’t it possible that the Hebrew Bible remains entirely silent about God’s status as material creator ex nihilo? Would it be acceptable for faithful Judeo-Christians to acknowledge agnosticism regarding whether their God might have had nothing to do with material creation?

It is possible to assign functions to objects that already exist. Someone can find a stone and use it as a hammer, or as part of a wall, or as a medium from which to chisel out a sculpture. Why then couldn’t God have simply arrived on the scene billions of years after the universe had taken shape and simply decided to “move in,” adapting it as his dwelling place? The objects and processes comprising the material universe may have a set of functions relative to God’s dwelling place, but this need not exhaust their function. E.g., the sun might be useful for distinguishing day from night in God’s temple, but it might also be useful for keeping the earth from spinning out into space and for keeping it warm enough to live on. I.e., the same material object can serve more than one function. There’s no need to claim that the universe took the material shape it did specifically and exclusively in order that it might eventually serve God’s purpose as a home. Walton contends that God no longer uses the universe as his temple (though I’m not sure why). Nonetheless, the universe and its contents persist, serving all sorts of other functions.

Walton says that God’s temple serves not just as his home, not just as his place to “rest,” but as his base of operations for running the universe. Part of God’s purported operations include keeping the material universe running, all the way down to holding individual molecules together. Again, I don’t see why that necessarily follows from the exegesis. If Genesis 1 makes no reference to material creation of the universe, why assume that God’s running of the material universe is implied? It’s certainly not stated. Why not assume that the universe runs itself, just as it had been running itself before God decided to make it his temple?

The Sage Speaks!

[UPDATED: Due to popular demand (well, it's one guy actually, and it's more a question than a demand), I offer not just one but three exciting installments!]

I’ve just finished rewriting and editing my book about Genesis 1, and I’m pretty pleased with it. What nearly 4 years ago was a 95,000-word treatise has been converted into a 35,000-word work of fiction. Here’s me reading the first two pages or so with only a few minor verbal fumbles…

The second installment is a re-edit of an old Ktismatics post from 2007…

And here’s the third and final videotaped reading…

Science as Myth

“One of the principal attributes of God affirmed by Christians is that he is Creator. That conviction is foundational as we integrate our theology into our worldview. What all is entailed in viewing God as Creator? What does that affirmation imply for how we view ourselves and the world around us? These significant questions explain why discussions of science and theology so often intersect. Given the ways that both have developed in Western culture, especially in America, these questions also explain why the two often collide.”

- John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009)

Over a year ago Erdman, well aware of my persistent obsession with the Biblical creation story, alerted me to this book’s publication. I bought it awhile back, but only now am I getting around to reading it. Walton, professor of Old Testament at the evangelical Wheaton College, argues in his book that Genesis 1 describes the creation not of the material world but of its function in God’s ordained order. This interpretation fits nicely with my own non-theistic reading, so I’m intrigued. All the same, the early going reveals that I’m not going to see completely eye to eye with Walton.

Walton begins by proposing that the Hebrew scriptures should be read as texts produced by people who lived inside of a distinct historical culture, and that understanding the texts requires understanding the culture. That proposition seems fair enough, though as Walton admits it’s easier said than done. Only fragmented evidence is available to us that describes ancient cultures, and much of that evidence consists of the very texts we’re trying to understand. At the same time, we’re all part of the same species, and even ancient Hebrew is just as modern structurally as any modern language. So I’m fairly optimistic that we can understand texts produced by ancient writers. The earliest known writings were material inventories and records of local events: kinds of writing with which we’re still very familiar.

At the end of the intro Walton explains what he means by “myth”:

“The Canaanites or the Assyrians did not consider their myths to be made up works of the imagination. Mythology by its nature seeks to explain how the world works and how it came to work that way, and therefore includes a culture’s ‘theory of origins.’ We sometimes label certain literature as ‘myth’ because we do not believe the world works that way… By this definition, our modern mythology is represented by science — our own theories of origins and operations. Science provides what is generally viewed as the consensus concerning what the world is, how it works and how it came to be… For the Israelites, Genesis 1 offered explanations of their view of origins and operations, in the same way that mythologies served in the rest of the ancient world and that science serves our Western culture. It represents what the Israelites truly believed about how the world got to be how it is and how it works, though it is not presented as their own ideas, but as revelation from God.” (pp. 14-15)

I’m fine with Walton’s contention that the creation narrative probably does reflect what the writer truly believed happened. I’m not fine with his equating premodern myths with scientific explanations.

The sequence in putting forward any cosmogony, be it mythic or scientific, is roughly this: certain events happened; someone arrived at a belief regarding what happened; that person wrote it down. There is a gap to be spanned between what actually happened and what someone believes happened. Science consists of a set of systematic replicable methods for bridging this gap between event and belief. It seems to me that Walton wants not to bridge the gap between actual event and belief but to do away with it. He proposes that the shared cultural beliefs about reality are the reality for that culture. One culture says that its god created the material universe from nothing in six days; another culture, that its god gave birth to the material universe; a third, that the universe originated in a big explosion and organized itself over billions of years. Apparently Walton regards these three accounts as equally mythic and equally true for the cultures in which they arose.

This strikes me as a rather radical assertion for an evangelical to make, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. The material world is inseparable from the thoughts and words we use to talk about it; the world is what it means to us, subjectively and intersubjectively — it’s a variant on the postmodern hermeneutics of world-as-text. We discussed implications of this orientation in a recent post on Fear of Knowledge.

I’ll keep you posted on other aspects of the book I find interesting as I go along.

Flat Hamartiology

As a Catholic kid I grew up amid a hierarchy of sins. Venial sins were minor everyday violations — lesser offenses like swearing or disobeying your parents. Minor offenses incurred minor punishments: say a Hail Mary or two as penance; or, if you don’t get yourself confessed by a Priest before you die, you might have to put in a few years in Purgatory for each venial sin before you get to go to Heaven. There were distinctions made between venial sins: disobeying your parents was naughty, but lying to your parents was pretty bad. Mortal sins were the big ones: murder, … and what else? I was never clear on that. I assumed that violating the Ten Commandments was a mortal sin, but one of  the Commandments is “Honor your father and mother.” So disobeying your parents is mortal and not venial? Or maybe hitting your parents is mortal? My mother told me that her grandmother used to tell her that if you hit your mother your hand will stick up out of the grave. Maybe that’s what happened to Carrie in the movie. Oh, I remember another mortal sin: failing to do your Easter duty, which meant that you had to go to confession and communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Easter. The consequence of committing mortal sin was potentially dire: if you died with an unconfessed mortal sin on your conscience you went straight to Hell with no possibility of release. The idea of a habitual pattern of sinfulness was alien to my young Catholic understanding: you could tell a bunch of lies without being a liar. Confess each lie and you’re off the hook.

I went agnostic as a kid, but then later on I got Born Again. I learned that the distinction between mortal and venial sin was bogus: any offense against God was grievous. No Purgatory either: only Heaven and Hell. Going to Confession? Irrelevant. If you’re Born Again, then you’ve been forgiven for all your sins past, present and future. There was debate about whether there might not be an Unforgivable Sin, or whether you could lose your salvation, or whether an ongoing pattern of sinfulness might mean that you’d never been saved in the first place. In the Born-Again theory that I learned, sin wasn’t a specific behavior but a way of being: either you were for God or you were against Him. Or perhaps sin was a life direction: moving away from God rather than toward Him.

And so in my on-again off-again Christian pilgrimage I encountered two distinct theories of sin. In the Catholic version, sins are discrete “objects.” One might think of sins as excretions of the self that cling to you and that weigh you down. These sin-objects come in varying weights, but there is a category of extremely heavy sin-objects that drag you all the way to hell. The lighter-weight objects participate in a kind of economy: you can get rid of the weight either by saying some prayers or by putting in some time in Purgatory. Famously, Martin Luther didn’t much care for the way the sin-economy was being administered by the Church. Clearly our contemporary criminal justice system operates according to a Catholic principle of discrete crimes as excrescences that can be paid for by time or money, unless of course it’s a “mortal crime.”

In the Born-Again hamartiology sin was a way of being, or a direction of movement, or a relational position. Sins as discrete objects weren’t important in and of themselves. Sins were external signs of an inner corruption that produce them, just as individual coughs and sneezes signify an underlying sickly condition. It was even possible to cure the sickness without clearing up the symptoms right away: the sinner’s corruption is removed, his direction turned around, his relationship with God restored, even if he does continue excreting the odd sin-object now and again.

So now I’m wondering whether the new object-oriented ontologies might be able to generate some alternative hamartiologies. Catholic sins are objects, but they’re hierarchically arrayed. Born-Again sin isn’t an object at all but an essence or trajectory or relationship. So I’d say that the Catholic scheme gives us a better starting point. On the other hand, there’s the Born-Again view that all sins, big and small alike, are equal in that they’re all generated by a serious, indeed a fatal, underlying condition.

How about this: Each person is an object; each sin is an object. A sin may (or may not) emerge from the interaction of a specific person with another person or situation or object: call this interactional context a “temptation.” The specific sin that’s spawned in the temptational interaction is a composite object, its specific properties generated by but irreducible to the properties of the individual sinner and the other object which the sinner encounters during the temptation.

What if temptation is resisted: is no new object formed? Or does resisting temptation produce a “virtue-object”? Do sin-objects still carry varying amounts of weight, as in the Catholic economy, and can removing this weight still be paid for by penance-objects? Do virtue-objects carry weight, or perhaps buoyancy — an anti-weight that counteracts the weight of sin-objects? Clearly more research is needed.

Moderation Tuesday

So the Catholics invented Carnival and Lent, Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, the cycle of excess and fasting, of dissipation and self-abasement. The Anglicans kept half the wheel but got rid of the other half. They even turned Fat Tuesday into Shrove Tuesday, “shrove” being the past tense of “shrive,” which means to obtain absolution for one’s sins through confession and repentance. I thought that’s what Ash Wednesday was for.

Carnival celebrates the last days of eating meat (carne) before lent, so Mardi Gras is traditionally a carnivore’s delight. Shrove Tuesday replaces the pig roast with a pancake supper. Those Anglicans sure know how to party.

I think maybe Shrove Tuesday ought to be celebrated as international WASP day. But let’s not get carried away.

Bad Lieutenant by Ferrara, 1992

“Woe to him who builds his house without righteousness and his upper rooms without justice, who uses his neighbor’s services without pay and does not give him his wages, who says, ‘I will build myself a roomy house with spacious upper rooms, and cut out its windows, paneling it with cedar and painting it bright red.’

“Do you become a king because you are competing in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink, and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He pled the cause of the afflicted and needy; then it was well. Is not that what it means to know Me?” declares the Lord.

“But your eyes and your heart are intent only upon your own dishonest gain, and on shedding innocent blood and on practicing oppression and extortion.” Therefore thus says the Lord in regard to Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, “They will not lament for him: ‘Alas, my brother!’ or, ‘Alas, sister!’ They will not lament for him: ‘Alas for the master!’ or, ‘Alas for his splendor!’ He will be buried with a donkey’s burial, dragged off and thrown out behind the gates of Jerusalem.

“Go up to Lebanon and cry out, and lift up your voice in Bashan; cry out also from Abarim, for all your lovers have been crushed. I spoke to you in your prosperity; but you said, ‘I will not listen!’ This has been your practice since your youth, that you have not obeyed My voice. The wind will sweep away all your shepherds, and your lovers will go into captivity; then you will surely be ashamed and humiliated because of all your wickedness. You who dwell in Lebanon, nestled in the cedars, how you will groan when pains come upon you, pain like a woman in childbirth!”

- Jeremiah 22:13-23

Last night I watched Bad Lieutenant: not the new New Orleans re-envisioning by Werner Herzog, but the New York original starring Harvey Keitel. It’s a much harsher and bleaker film than Herzog’s, but ultimately it’s a morality play, a Catholic parable about sin and guilt and penance, about the terrible capriciousness of fate, about justice and mercy and forgiveness. That the story centers not on ordinary civilians but on cops and mobsters and nuns means that the movie is also a social commentary — a jeremiad. Even Jesus makes two personal appearances: once on the cross, once off it.

Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is as old-fashioned and impassioned, as personal and universal as the Old Testament. As fascistically sadomasochistic too. In my prior writing about the Testaments I’ve gone for intellectual and weird in fiction, for creative and conciliatory in nonfiction. But now I’m becoming persuaded that to get at the meaning of this ancient reality you have to paint it red.

The Name

[For three years I've been a lurker on a Biblical Hebrew online forum. Usually I ignore the discussion threads, but here's one that caught my fancy. Call this my Christmas post.]

It’s pretty widely known that the Biblical name of the Hebrew God, transliterated into English, is YHWH. There’s a longstanding Jewish tradition of not writing or speaking the name of God as a token of respect. In most English translations of the Old Testament the name Yahweh is usually written as LORD, which conforms to the time-honored Jewish practice of substituting adonai — Hebrew for “lord” — for YHWH when reading Scripture aloud. This euphemistic substitution was evident also in the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible completed in the second century BC. The Septuagint translators generally replaced YHWH with kurios = Greek for “lord.” The New Testament writers, who wrote mostly in Greek, never used the name YHWH when referring to God. When they quoted passages of the Hebrew Bible they followed the Septuagint precedent of substituting kurios for YHWH.

However… Most of the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint date to the 2nd C AD. In the very oldest fragments, from the first century BC, YHWH still appears in the text and has not been replaced by kurios. Is it possible that Jesus and his followers spoke the word YHWH, that the original New Testament documents likewise wrote YHWH and not kurios, that the prohibition against speaking or writing the name of God didn’t happen until later, say in the 2nd C AD? This seems unlikely, since not a single one of the early New Testament manuscripts or fragments contains the name YHWH instead of kurios. The first-generation Christians frequently engaged in heated public debates about how Jewish they should be with respect to following the laws and traditions. Never is there a mention about whether the name of God should be written or spoken. It would seem that either the issue hadn’t come up yet, or else it had already been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

So when did the tradition of not speaking God’s name begin? There’s no prohibition against it in the Bible itself. To the contrary: when God reveals his name to Moses at the burning bush, he tells Moses that “This is my name forever, and this is my memorial name to all generations” (Exodus 3:15). In telling Moses what to say to the elders of Israel, YHWH explicitly says that Moses should speak the name YHWH. The text of Exodus probably reached its final edited form in the 5th century BC. The original Septuagint continued using the name YHWH in the 2nd century BC. By Jesus’ time, the name of God had probably already been euphemized to adonai, kurios, and even the more indirect version KS (abbreviation for kurios). So that suggests a time period around the first century BC.

Between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, the Hellenes extended the Greek civilization throughout the Middle East, where most of the Jews lived. Greek became the official language throughout the region. Even after the Romans conquered the Hellenes, the Greek language maintained its dominance among the educated classes in the eastern sectors of the Roman Empire. In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened, although how in the 4th century AD he would know isn’t clear (unless there were still texts in circulation using the Hebrew name). So there’s  one pragmatic reason for making the change. But why not just transliterate the Name from Hebrew letters to Greek? For one thing, there’s no Greek letter corresponding to ה (transliterated as H in English). But if people were used to hearing the name pronounced aloud the pipi error would likely not have happened, suggesting that the prohibition on speaking The Name was already in effect.

It’s possible that the non-Jewish population among whom the Jews lived would use the name of YHWH in vain, thereby violating the Sinaitic commandment. Surely blasphemy against the Jewish God had been common during the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BC, but no evidence of the naming prohibition appears that early in Jewish history.

Here’s my guess, though I’m open to counter-persuasion. During the 150 years before Christ, Israel witnessed a significant upsurge in messianic and holiness and nationalistic movements. The successful Maccabean liberation of Israel from the Seleucids and the subsequent Roman conquest and occupation provoked an internal conflict within Israel between the conciliatory pragmatists and the separatists. Both factions might well have agreed on no longer speaking the name of the Hebrew god. Those Jews who wanted to blend in with the Greco-Roman culture wouldn’t want to call attention to their Hebraisms, whereas those who wanted to purify themselves from the outside corruption permeating Israel would want to emphasize their God’s transcendent separateness by withdrawing even his name from unworthy human voices and ears and eyes.

But now this question comes to mind. We’re presuming that the prohibition against speaking/writing/reading the name YHWH was already practiced by Jesus and his followers. The Epistle to the Philippians is widely regarded as authentically Pauline, written around 62 AD. Included in the letter is the so-called Kenosis passage, which may have already been a well-known Christian hymn that Paul incorporated into his text. It says:

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord [kurios], to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:5-11)

It sounds as if the Hebrew God, who isn’t named here but who is referred to as “the Father,” regards the name “Jesus” as the highest of all names. But it also sounds as though God the Father assigned the name “Jesus” to this guy after he had been crucified. But that’s not right: he was named Jesus at birth (Luke 2:21), and everybody called him Jesus during his life. Maybe a distinction is being made between the guy’s well-known human name, Jesus, and the name bestowed on him by God: the “name which is above every name,” which is the name. The name “Jesus” is to be proclaimed far and wide, but let it be understood: that name also points to another name, the highest name, a name which must remain unwritten and unspoken, the name he shares with God the Father.

I’ll keep my eyes open for further clarifications from the Biblical Hebrew discussion. And of course if’any readers of this post have insights or knowledge I hope you’ll divulge.

Where Sacred Interpenetrates Secular

Here’s most of an email I sent to a guy last Friday: he’s an academic postmodern theologian who teaches at a nearby university. This is one of the directions I’m trying to take my practice.

I “work on work,” helping people reconnect the circuitry between passion and calling, between subjective agency and objective/intersubjective standards, between who they are and what they do. The ego is decentered in my praxis. Work isn’t all about what makes you happy or where you score on aptitude tests and interest inventories. Work contributes to culture, and hopefully work motivated by something like Truth, Beauty, and Justice can contribute to the construction of a better culture.

As you know, many evangelicals interpret the idea of “in the world but not of the world” in a way that dichotomizes church and human culture. Evangelicals can go into “the ministry” or conduct prayer breakfasts before work and so on, but the secular job itself? It’s a place to work out their individual salvation maybe, but not an arena where God is actively engaged. Emerging types can lament the worldliness of consumerism and pollution and neoliberal globalization, but they’re often more intent on building the church as a countercultural alternative to secular culture than on taking individual and collective stands for “good works” at the secular workplace.

As I’m sure you know, the TV show The Wire has prompted a lot of discussion in theory circles. Some dismiss it as just another racist indictment of inner-city drug-and-violence culture or a crypto-fascist valorization of vigilante justice. I’m more in the camp that regard the show as inspirational. Is it possible for some subset of people to be moved, as individuals and collectively, to Fight the Powers and take an active stand for justice? Are there rhizomatic movements of Spirit that, irrupting in particular places and times and situations, set the preconditions for a just event to break through? Can individual and collective agency amplify and concentrate this movement of Spirit in an intentional act of de/reterritorialization? Even if the world eventually absorbs the event and carries on as usual, such events embody and prefigure an alternate reality in which highers standards prevail.

This is already a long email, so I’ll get to the specific agenda. I’d like to make a push into the church world, looking for people who might see the Spirit at work in the workplace but whose subjective agency is hampered both by the marketplace ethos and by the Christian ethos of ecclesial hermeticism. Can individuals hear and heed the rhizomatic movement of Spirit? Can collective Wire-like initiatives in the workplace be assembled through some kind of Spirit-led biopower? I’m not talking about self-consciously church-branded programs, but emergent efforts where the sacred interpenetrates the secular.

I sent a somewhat shorter and less abstract version of this email to a local pastor. No response from either so far.

History is Whose Story?

Yesterday on the steps of the US Capitol the evangelical leader Rick Warren stirred a bit of controversy by concluding his inaugural invocation with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — a distinctly Christian prayer of course. I was surprised more by how he began:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our god; the Lord is one.”

“Hear, oh Israel” — this is the beginning of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. Having wandered through the wilderness for forty years after fleeing Egypt, the Jewish people stand on the east bank of the Jordan, ready to cross over into the land of Canaan, also called Palestine. Moses has just delivered the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, and now he’s giving the people a set of final instructions and warnings before they surge across the river to take what God says is rightfully theirs. It’s at the beginning of the very next chapter that we read Moses’ instructions regarding what should be done with the current occupants of the land:

“when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.” (Deuteronomy 7:2)

Is it mere coincidence that Warren chose of all things the Shema as the opening theme for his invocation at this particular juncture in history? I don’t think so.

The New Creation in Paul: Summary Observations

Based on the Pauline passages describing the “new creation” and “new man” on which I’ve posted here, here, here, here, and here, I draw three general inferences. First, the new creation constitutes a radical departure from what preceded it. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the event that marks the end of the old and the beginning of the new. Second, perhaps the most important hallmark of the new creation is that the traditional distinctions between groups of people no longer hold. Jew or Gentile, circumcision or uncircumcision, male and female, freeman or slave – the “Christ event” has rendered these differences irrelevant. By implication, the Old Testament’s structural division of humanity into microcosm (Israel) and macrocosm (everyone else) is an old-creation concept that died on the cross. Third, for Paul the old and new creations overlap not just in space and time but in the lives of individuals. The historical Christ event is binary: his death brought an end to the old creation, while his resurrection ushered in the new. But the individual’s subjective participation in the Christ event is always a matter of here and now, of continually and simultaneously dying to the old man and being renewed in the new man.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the breadth of Paul’s thought isn’t fully encapsulated in these five crucial but brief passages. It’s clear elsewhere that Paul does distinguish between believers and unbelievers. While believers may experience a chronic internal split between the old man and the new man, unbelievers presumably define themselves solely in terms of the old man. So, while Paul insists that the wall separating Jew from Gentile has been demolished in the cross, he seems to lay the groundwork for building a new division between Christian and non-Christian. Though the post-crucifixion entrance requirements may have changed, the practical upshot may be the same: a chosen microcosm arises from within a failed and dying macrocosm.

The most important question concerns the nature of the barrier separating inside from outside.

1. Following the Jewish precedent, is the division between Christianity and non-Christianity a structural one, marked by distinctly Christian confessions, worship rituals, creeds, moral codes, fellowship with one another, dedicated physical spaces, and so on?
2. Is the distinctive mark of the Christian primarily a matter of an ongoing subjective experience of dying to the old man and being renewed in the new man?
3. Do Christians distinguish themselves by their working together in filial love and resurrection hope to manifest collectively the new creation throughout the world?

If I were to choose based on the Pauline new creation texts, I’d say that the second and third options more closely correspond to Paul’s expressed thoughts on the matter.

Relegating most of the human race to the status of a failed experiment, subject to termination at a moment’s notice by the Experimenter, might be okay if you happen to be one His laboratory assistants, but for us rats running through the maze the whole concept smacks of fascism. Having read, thought about, and discussed Paul’s descriptions of the new creation, I think it’s not only possible but scriptural for Christians to disavow this sort of antagonistic us-versus-them mentality as a relic of the old-creation thinking that Jesus’s death and resurrection rendered obsolete. I came not to judge the world but to save it, Jesus said (John 12:47). It would seem that, for Christ’s fellow-heirs and co-workers and participants in his death and resurrection, saving the world is the work that still needs to be done.

* * *

In reviewing these passages I wanted to determine whether Paul said that the pathway into the new creation passes through Israel, and whether he emphasized the “peculiar people” idea for separating the chosen people collectively and structurally from the macrocosm. I think it’s fair to say that he does not. That Jesus was a Jew isn’t a mere matter of happenstance, inasmuch as he did play a pivotal role in Israel’s national project. However, in the aftermath of his death and resurrection Jesus’ Jewishness is irrelevant: in the new creation there is neither Jew nor Gentile, as Paul is repeatedly at pains to emphasize.

For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the grounds of their faith and the uncircumcised through faith. (Romans 3:28-30)

So now we have to think about a different way of characterizing the in/out distinction (again, presuming there is one). For Paul the way in passes through the person of Christ, and in particular through his death and resurrection. Jesus experienced these events personally, and it’s through personal identification with these events that the individual enters into the resurrection life of the new creation. The “Christ event” isn’t universal, happening to all nations through a multicultural array of different saviors. Rather, the specific event attains its universality by opening up a personal subjective possibility for everyone, a possibility that’s actualized by faith. One can of course draw the inference that the subjective possibility is nullified by lack of faith, thereby establishing the in/out criteria of traditional evangelicalism. But Paul seems to emphasize the observation that even the people of faith often act in ways that are indistinguishable from those who have no faith. At the same time he emphasizes the idea that Christ died for all, that all might be saved. It seems that Paul wanted to exercise caution in erecting a new set of criteria for separating sheep from goats.

Like many others, I cannot reconcile myself to the “ungenerous” elements in the Old Testament story. Retaining a generally high view of Scripture seems to demand that the reader accept the editorial stance of the Biblical writers when they assert that Israel perpetrated mass genocides and enslavements on God’s explicit order. In the early days of Christianity the Marcionites, appalled by Yahweh’s vengeful bloodthirstiness, concluded that Jesus represented a different God altogether and that his mission was to save the world from Yahweh. (Marcion was condemned as a heretic and excommunicated by the elders in Rome, but his particular Christian variant enjoyed considerable popularity for a couple of centuries at least.) Many evangelicals acknowledge their own revulsion at the Canaanite genocide recorded in Deuteronomy 7 without explicitly endorsing or disavowing it. At minimum I would hope that Christians would reject the genocidal Scriptural passages as tragic misrepresentations of God’s intentions, or perhaps even as an ill-chosen strategy in God’s historic dealings with Israel. At least it should be clear that, following the “Christ event,” this sort of divisive policy has no place in the new creation.

When God encourages Noah and Abraham and Israel to be fruitful and multiply, He’s echoing the blessing He bestowed on the original creation narrative of Genesis 1. Though the words are never explicitly stated in Scripture, I can see how one might regard these blessings as repeated efforts to renew the original creation. However, Paul speaks not of yet another renewal of the old creation but of a new creation. Disjunction rather than continuity characterizes Paul’s language. In this new creation Paul says that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, and that in Christ’s crucifixion he reconciled the two into one new man. (Gal. 6, Eph. 4). Paul speaks not at all here about the work of Christ bringing about another renewal of Israel as a microcosm and another destruction of the surrounding macrocosm. Rather, addressing himself explicitly to the Gentiles, Paul says that Christ destroyed the dividing wall that had previously separated these two mutually antagonistic subdivisions of the old creation (Eph. 4). While Paul elsewhere acknowledges God’s distinct blessings on Israel, I see nothing in these passages to indicate that he regards Israel as retaining a distinctive microcosmic status in the new creation.

In Gal. 3 Paul contends that the whole era of Israel and the Law constituted not a fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, but rather a temporary measure instituted “because of transgressions.” The Abrahamic promise finds its fulfillment not in the national identity of Israel but in solidarity with the dead and resurrected Christ. It’s a blessing that extends not to just one nation but to all, as envisioned in the original promise. Paul pointedly does not say that the Gentiles have become part of Israel; rather, the two, formerly divided by a wall of enmity, have been merged together into something altogether new. Paul regards those who believe in Christ as a blessing to the whole world. But God’s particular blessing on Israel, setting them apart as “a kingom of priests and a holy nation,” is precisely what Paul sets aside. This sort of spiritual aristocracy is old-creation thinking that’s been nullified in Christ.

It’s impossible to miss the parallels between the Genesis 1 creation narrative and the blessing on Noah. These parallels highlight the continuity between the two events, both of them playing in the same register. From within the corrupted world God chose Noah and his family to embark on a renewal and a purification of the old creation. Periodic renewals and purifications are characteristic of the Old Testament narratives, most of which deal specifically with Israel as the chosen microcosm: their separation from the world as a chosen people; their periodic disobedience, punishment, and repentance as indicators of God’s continual and specific concern for their well-being; and God’s use of the unchosen macrocosm as his usually unwitting agents in dealing specifically with Israel.

This is all old-creation stuff, says Paul; it died on the cross. Paul never uses the biological be-fruitful-and-multiply formula in describing the new creation. That sort of language is inadequate to describe the radical break created in Christ’s death and resurrection. Also, repeating the old-creational tropes would likely trigger old-creation associations especially among his Judaizing readers, and Paul is relentless in insisting that the old paradigm of separation and purification of a chosen race no longer holds.

Paul explicitly addressed his Epistle to the Romans to a Gentile audience. In chapter 9 he shifts his attention to “my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,” who are Israelites. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I could imagine that the Gentile believers wondered whether, in light of the “new creation,” God had abandoned Israel. As he did also in the Galatians letter, Paul shifts the temporal context back in time, from Israel to Abraham, emphasizing that

it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants (Romans 9:8)

In other words, the Abrahamic promise isn’t fulfilled through the biological “be fruitful and multiply” apparatus of the old creation — the means by which the nation of Israel attained distinction — but through some other channel altogether. Specifically, the biopolitical collective entity called “Israel” is not that channel, and it never was. Why? Because the channel passes through Christ and is apprehended not by biological inheritance nor by moral superiority but by faith in a resurrected Christ — the same channel by which Paul’s Gentile readers have entered into the new creation.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him. (Romans 10:12)

Paul begins Romans 11 by distinguishing a chosen and faithful remnant of Israel — a microcosm within the microcosm one might say. But he says this narrowing of Israel is a temporary measure, intended to make possible the expansion of the promise far beyond the geographic and ethnic boundaries of Israel. When Paul speaks metaphorically of the olive tree (11:17ff.), he’s again referring not to Israel according to the flesh but to the descendants of Abraham according to the promise. While some of the “natural branches” — i.e., Israelites according the flesh — have been pruned from the branch, they can be grafted in again through faith.

…a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles have come in; and thus all Israel will be saved. (Rom. 11:25-26)

Is Paul saying that “all Israel” is a newly-pruned olive tree of the spirit, consisting of a faithful remnant selected from among Jews and Gentiles alike? Or is he saying that all Israel according to the flesh will eventually be reconciled and regrafted into the spiritual descendants of Abraham, along with the “fullness” of the Gentile descendants? It’s hard for me to say, but Paul wraps up his excursus on Israel, embedded within this longer letter to the Gentile believers in Rome, with this:

For just as you [i.e., Gentiles] once were disobedient to God but now have been shown mercy because of their disobedience, so these [i.e., Jews] also now have been disobedient in order that because of the mercy shown to you they also may now be shown mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience that he might show mercy to all. (Rom. 11:30-32)

As I read this extended passage, Paul contends that the pruning of the Israelite branch down to a remnant constituted a temporary measure. The pruning was implemented in order to make possible the explosive growth and flowering of the whole tree, Jew and Gentile alike, fulfilling the expansive promise made to Abraham long before Israel had even sprouted. Participating in this promised expansion — call it the “new creation” — is achieved by faith in God’s grace and mercy bestowed despite disobedience, or even because of it, through the death and resurrection of Christ.

To regard Israel as any sort of model for building the new creation in Christ seems fundamentally ill-conceived. A radical spiritual exceptionalism in which God acts with benevolence on behalf of only a small subset of humanity while dismissing the rest as degenerates worthy of enslavement and destruction: I suspect I’m not the only one who regards this sort of thing as barbaric and fascistic. It’s the ideology of separation, elitism and violent suppression of infidels that has fueled so much destruction and insular self-absorption in the name of Christ over the centuries, and that still motivates the American religious right’s “crusades” in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. As a collective force of militant separatism, Christianity presents itself as an imminent threat to outsiders, bent on eventual world domination and the concomitant destruction of its enemies. This radical anti-humanistic aggression might be an inescapable feature of Christianity in all its guises.

* * *

In looking carefully at those five passages I was tentatively exploring the possibility of discovering a more all-embracing version of Christianity in Paul’s writings, one in which grace and resurrection life replace judgment, punishment and insular separatism as the basis for new life in Christ. If those five texts are a valid indication, then Paul regards Christianity as a radical break from the old us-versus-them paradigm. He does not commend anything about Israel — its ethnic purity, its law, its separation from the other nations — as exemplary of the new creation. When he looks for a precedent he hearkens back before Israel to Abraham and the expansive promise God made through him to all nations. He speaks of grace and faith and an explosive opening outward of God’s benevolence.

The reason I react with such vehemence to distinctions between microcosm and macrocosm, between sheep and goats, between regenerate and degenerate, is that on all these divides I occupy the position of the rejected “other.” I would have been one of the Canaanites slaughtered by the Israelites in the name of their God; I am the one whom many evangelicals regard as unregenerate and under condemnation; I am the one who will presumably be swept away in the last judgment so that the regenerate microcosm can fill the whole earth.

Now my condemnation might be justifiable if this particular God really exists: His ways are beyond our ways, the clay can’t question the potter, etc. The radical barrier distinguishing membership in the regenerate microcosm consists in believing that this God does exist, that He is right, and that one should cooperate with Him — even if it means actively helping Him slaughter entire nations or affirming His right to destroy everyone who doesn’t believe in Him. From the non-believer’s standpoint this sort of radically non-humanistic theism is fascistic by definition. And the barrier is a rigid one: join us, believe what we believe, or our Leader will execute you. Of course one can choose to believe in order to save one’s skin, but isn’t there more integrity in upholding one’s beliefs even under threat of death?

So when I read attempts to come to grips with the Canaanite genocide by acknowledging God’s right to do away with whole nations man, woman and child, I regard it as a justifying an all-powerful fascistic regime whose ruler may change tactics but whose strategy (microcosm versus macrocosm) remains constant throughout history. But there are other ways of reading Paul’s new creation texts, even within a Christian exegetical framework — ways that emphasize disjunction from Old Testament fascism rather than continuity, ways that emphasize the expansiveness of the resurrection life rather than its restrictiveness, ways that destroy barriers between in and out rather than erecting them, ways that emphasize grace rather than judgment. It’s in the context of these more gracious readings that I can find at least the possibility of common cause with Christians, in which all of us retain the integrity of our beliefs in the spirit of love. Of course evangelicals aren’t obligated to make the effort; neither am I obligated to search for a version of the Christian faith that I can live with. And there’s no assurance that our efforts will bear fruit that satisfy everyone’s tastes. But I do make that effort, for reasons that aren’t always clear to me — maybe it’s masochism, as some of my non-Christian friends suggest. Sometimes I get tired of it.

* * *

It would be wise for me to stop here, but I’m interested in the practical implications. What happens when Christians explicitly to regard themselves as participants in the new creation as Paul describes it? Not being a professing Christian I’m clearly not the best man for the job, but I’ll have a tentative go at it.

New-creation Christians break down structural differences between groups of people. Wars, racial and ethnic insulation, economic mechanisms maintaining the class divide between rich and poor, legal obstacles to the free movement of workers across national and regional boundaries – these sorts of antagonistic divisions would seem to be appropriate areas for intervention.

New-creation Christians make the boundary more permeable between sacred and secular realms. That some undertaking is a church project should be less important than the nature of the project itself. Just because Israel divided the calendar between the work week and the Sabbath doesn’t mean that the new creation is irrelevant in the workplace and the schools. Instead of buffering themselves inside the microcosm, Christians can leaven the dough of the world with resurrection life.

New-creation Christians acknowledge the dividedness of the Christian self. Death an resurrection are the two moments of the Christ event; both are part of the believer’s participation in that event. The urge to self-gratify and the urge to self-justify, the desire to obey and the desire to violate, the conflict between what we think and what we find ourselves doing, the compulsion to impose barriers between ourselves and others along with obsession to imitate and to compete – the death throes of the old man are continual and perpetual. But there’s also this other self, this new man, that is continually coming alive – what is he like, I wonder? Both are part of the Christ event; both are part of the Christian’s subjective participation in that event.

Doppelgänger Theory in Colossians 3 and Romans 6

It’s been said that Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians serves as a template for the letter to the Ephesians. Whether or not that’s the case, the passage on the “new man” in Colossians 3 closely parallels that in Ephesians 4 (the subject of the prior post), with some notable augmentations:

Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory. Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old man with its evil practices, and have put on the new man who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him — a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all. So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father. (Col. 3:1-17)

The “therefore” that begins chapter 3 refers back to Paul’s reminder at the end of chapter 2 that following ascetic laws (“Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!”) and other forms of self-abasement have no value in eliminating fleshly indulgence. Stop paying attention to these worldly concerns, Paul tells his readers. Consider yourself dead to immorality and impurity. Instead, :keep seeking the things above,” “set your mind on the things above” (3:1-2).

Is Paul advocating a simplistic psychology here, along the lines of “ignore it and it will go away” combined with the power of positive thinking? Or is he envisioning a magical mystical transformation of the self, whereby the believer is able to draw directly on the power of God to overcome sin? These interpretations can’t be ruled out, but I think Paul’s main point is to emphasize that persistent immorality isn’t all that important in the long run. You are flesh: you will surely die, and when you do these fleshly shortcomings will die along with you. Paul suggests that, instead of obsessing about your continued failures — failures which will go away eventually anyway — pay attention to the things that will last. It’s the resurrection life that matters, a life characterized not by the absence of sin but by the presence of knowledge, compassion, patience, peace, and love. These are “the things above, where Christ is.”

…and have put on the new man who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him (3:10)

As in Ephesians 4, the new man isn’t a static entity but rather a source of continuing vitality. Again the believer is encouraged to “lay aside” the old man and to “put on” the new. Again there’s the idea of the new man being a new creation in which the old-creation distinctions — Greek versus Jew, slave versus freeman — no longer hold.

* * *

The only remaining Biblical passage referring to the “old man,” though without the symmetrical reference to the “new man” we’ve seen in the other instances, appears in Romans:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. (Rom. 6:1-7)

In this passage the old/new symmetry remains unstated yet implicit. Each live man has a doppelgänger who is himself divided, being both dead and resurrected. The live man occupies a dead world that is divided against itself: Jew/Gentile, law/sin. In this dead world is a graveyard. By going into his grave, the live man enters a portal. The portal transports him from the dead world into the new creation, a living world where the old distinctions are dead. By passing through the portal of death the man is freed from these old distinctions by which he defined himself while alive in the dead world. Passing through the grave he arrives on the other side, dead but resurrected, a new man. But the portal is bidirectional: it’s possible to go back through the grave, to be reanimated inside the old creation, to re-emerge as a live man in the old world. But now the reanimated old man realizes that the whole world he left behind is a tomb, and that even while he was alive he was already a dead man walking. The resurrected new man, freed from the old distinctions of Jew/Greek and law/sin, cannot live inside the old dead creation. He has to turn around, go back down into the grave, come back out on the other side…

* * *

For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory. Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry… But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old man with its evil practices, and have put on the new man who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him. (Col. 3:5,9-10

In Romans 6:2 Paul says that he died to sin; then, in 7:4, he says he also died to the law, in order that he might be joined to the resurrected Christ. Paul repeats this thought in Galatians:

I through the Law am dead to the Law, that I might live to God. (Gal. 2:19

Now, in Colossians 3, Paul tells his readers to consider themselves dead to sin, but in the prior chapter he told them that ascetic self-denial wasn’t of any value. So which is it: dead to sin or dead to law? The general message is something like this: neither obedience to the law nor disobedience, neither self-denial nor self-gratification, will bring you into the life of God. Both of these seemingly opposing attitudes are part of the same dead thing; namely, “the flesh.”

For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace. (Rom. 8:6)

Reading this translation one might think that Paul is advocating an Aristotelian tripartite division of the self into body, soul, and spirit: the soul (or mind) can focus on bodily lusts, which lead to death, or it can turn its attention to spiritual things, leading to life. But here is a more literal translation of that same verse:

For the flesh’s way of thinking is death; but the spirit’s way of thinking is life and peace.

The flesh and the spirit are alternative ways of thinking, of orienting oneself to reality. The orientation called “the flesh” is concerned with the old-creation distinctions between Jew and Greek, and it is simultaneously obsessed with achieving justification through obeying the law and with succumbing to the desire to break the law. This fleshly orientation is death, so Paul tells his readers to die to this death-dealing thought pattern: death to the distinctions between Jew and Greek, death to law, death to sin. Instead, Paul encourages his readers to adopt the alternative orientation toward the world called “the spirit.” The spirit is concerned with other matters: knowledge and wisdom, peace and compassion, kindness and forebearance, God, love, life. It’s not through setting aside the sinful life that the believer is gradually transformed into a good person. When considered from the perspective of the spirit the believer is already good.

But setting aside the unholy life doesn’t provide the means of living a holy life. If that were true, then following the law would lead to holiness. Paul insists this isn’t the case: consider yourself dead to the law and any expectations you might still entertain that through ceasing your immorality and behaving well you will become holy. Dying to unholiness isn’t the same thing as living in holiness. The one is part of the continual dying to the old man; the other results from the continual renewal of the new man. To live in the new creation is to participate in Christ’s resurrection life. Death to the old life, the flesh, the old man, the Jew-Gentile distinction, the law and sin — this death is inevitable and not to be resisted. The new creation is something else altogether: a subjective participation in the subjectively-experienced event of Christ’s resurrection. Ultimately it’s living in the new that’s Paul’s main concern throughout his letters.

* * *

What is the relationship between the new man and holiness? If we equate holiness with sinlessness, then holiness is reduced to a negative quality, an absence of sinfulness. It would seem that Paul envisioned something more, something positive about the resurrection life. Positive holiness is what Paul regards as the centerpiece of his message to the Colossians:

the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you (or among you), the hope of glory. (Col. 1:26-27)

Christ’s crucifixion brings Jews and Gentiles together collectively as the “new creation.” As Grenz and Franke say in Beyond Foundationalism,”Through the appropriated biblical text, the Spirit forms in us a communal interpretive framework that creates a new world” (p. 81). But participation in the new collective is also an individual affair, as evidenced in Ephesians 4 and in Colossians 3. The new creation is energized by resurrection life, as is each “new man” who participates in it.

A dual operation is underway here: a setting aside of the old man, as well as a taking on of the new man. The old man participates in the old dead world, in which all Gentiles were by Law excluded from even the possibility of holiness. That’s what the Law was for: to set a holy nation apart from all other unholy nations, and to divide holy from unholy within the holy nation and among its people. In the old creation the Gentiles are unholy by definition, regardless of what they do, whether they act in accord with the Law or in opposition to it.

But now Paul moves toward something universal underlying the Law, an outscoping and abstraction that seems more Greek than Jewish. Acts of sanctification are prescribed in the Jewish Law — washings, offerings, rituals, designations of particular places for performing particular actions, circumcision — that serve only to maintain a structural barrier between the holy and the unholy. But there is also an intrinsically holy sort of human life for which being Jewish or Gentile makes no difference, a holiness which can, to an extent, be encoded in law-like prohibitions: don’t be angry or wrathful toward one another, don’t slander or verbally abuse or lie to one another (Col. 3:8-9). These aren’t positive statements of holiness (do this good thing); they’re more like the negation of unholiness (don’t do this bad thing). Still, obeying the prohibitions won’t turn the unholy man holy — negating the negative doesn’t become a positive.

Paul employs a variety of metaphors to describe to the Colossians the relationship between the resurrected Christ and the believer: Christ in/among you (1:27), you in Christ (2:6-11), you with Christ (2:12-13, 3:1-4). So when Paul exhorts his readers to “put on the new man” (3:10), it’s in this all-pervasive context of death and resurrection where “Christ is all, and in all” (3:11). To put off the old man is to set aside the deadly obstacles to holiness: anger, wrath malice, etc. (3:8-9). To put on the new man is to live positively in the holiness of Christ that characterizes the new creation. These aspects of positive holiness include compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, peace, and above all love (3:12-15). Ceasing to act from anger, wrath, and malice is one thing; acting with compassion, kindness, and love is something else altogether. The former is how the old man dies; the latter is how the new man lives.

To reiterate, then: Setting aside the old man means not doing unholy things; taking on the new man means doing holy things. To stop doing unholy things doesn’t make you holy; it only makes you dead to the old man. To do holy things means living inside the resurrection life of Christ, and letting that life live inside and among you. How this resurrection life “works” — whether it should be interpreted as a mystical force for goodness or a thoroughgoing change of heart and mind — goes beyond the scope of my observations here.