God the Strange Attractor

Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: “in the beginning.” But if such talk — talk of the beginning and the end — has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of beginning, then theology had better get out of its own way.

So Catherine Keller begins her extended midrash on Genesis 1:1-2. I’d read her ideas before as summarized by John Caputo in his The Weakness of God, and since I’ve written extensively on the Biblical creation narrative I find this sort of thing more interesting than I might otherwise. I don’t read much contemporary theology, but based on these two books it seems that paradox seems to rule the day. Keller and Caputo apply the strategies of Lacan, Derrida, and Zizek to religion; by exposing the irresolvable contradictions that reveal themselves texts and ideas about God, new truths — or rather new interpretations — bubble up through the gaps. Keller is better at it than Caputo, at least based on what I’ve read. As Adam Kotsko observes in his thumbs-down response to Caputo’s book, “The chapter on Genesis is admittedly somewhat interesting, but that is probably because the whole thing is cribbed from Catherine Keller.”

The general idea driving Keller’s thesis is that the first two verses of the Bible describe not the manly exercise of might to create a universe ex nihilo, but rather the evolution, emergence, and self-organization of a creatio cooperationis. The key textual moves are these:

• “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void,” is how most translators render the first verse of Genesis. Keller follows the eleventh century Jewish commentator Rashi by reading it thusly: “When, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void.” This way the formless void already exists when God the creator arrives on the scene, making the story correspond more closely to Greek and other Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies.

• The formless void, or tohu vabohu, isn’t a vacuum, but rather a hodgepodge, a farrago, a blooming buzzing confusion. It’s the immanent flux, the primal source of inchoate and protean difference from which all things form themselves.

• The word for God in Genesis 1 is elohim. It’s a plural noun that usually takes a singular verb conjugation. Commentators often construe the plural as an indicator of plenitude or intensity, as if this one god is so far above all other gods as to merit the all-inclusivity of a plural ending. Keller suggests that the plural be regarded as an indicator of an “originary multiple without individuation,” a “swarm” a “differential unity,” a “co-creative collective.” Interpreted in this way elohim is not unlike the tohu vabohu of the pre-creation universe.

• I’ve heard Christian preachers reduce the Bible’s message to its first four words: “In the beginning, God.” In Hebrew, however, the verb precedes the noun: “In the beginning created…” Keller follows the Kabbalistic Zohar in exploring this translation: “With the beginning __ created God.” The empty space between “beginning” and “created” is an unnameable creative process of creativity that is itself divine and that gives form to itself along with the rest of the universe. Per Keller: The creativity itself does not become; it makes a becoming possible… In other words, our responses become us. (p. 181)

I respect the effort that Keller puts into these related moves to immanentize the transcendence of the Biblical creation story. In my view, while each of these textual moves is clever and could possibly represent what some earlier version of the text might have said before it got “theosized,” the Hebrew text as written doesn’t really support these alternative wordings. Still, if you’re looking for a way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian texts with the way the universe really did come into existence, then Keller offers a coherent and only mildly distorted rereading. I make similar small moves to tell my own version of the Genesis 1 story, so I can relate.

If she really believes that this is what the Bible narrative is saying, then she must accept that those early anonymous writers really were inspired beyond any possible human knowledge. And to regard the process of emergence itself as divine is not without precedent in the history of ideas. But why not just go all the way and assert that the writer of Genesis 1 is describing a materialistic process of creation where the gods don’t have any role whatsoever?

I’ll conclude with a particularly evocative passage from Keller’s book:

The Jewish delinearization of the time of creation opens up space for a biblical theology of creation, in which the chaos is neither nothing nor evil; in which to create is not to master the formless but to solicit its virtual forms. Such solicitation, when expressed as divine speech, may sound less like a command than a seduction… If this divine speech no longer blasts royally into a vacuum, how would we then interpret the iterative utterances of the “let there be”? Less, perhaps, in the monotone of command than in the whisper of desire? (pp. 115-116)

Return of the Ktismatically Repressed

I originally started writing this blog with the intention of promoting a book I’d just written about the Genesis 1 creation narrative. Subsequently I’ve come to realize that, while the central exegetical premise remains strong, the book itself is kind of lame. But I can do better, and now I’m ready to get on with it. Here’s a tentative outline for the rewritten nonfiction, working title 7 Creations Redux.

* * *

The book would begin by putting forward two basic and seemingly incompatible commitments. One, evolutionary and cosmological theories are right: the gods had absolutely nothing to do with creating the material universe. Two, the Genesis 1 creation narrative is literally true. This sets the stage for the paradoxical reading of Genesis 1; namely, that it’s the story of two guys having a week-long conversation about the universe. What gets created isn’t the material stuff of the universe but the conceptual-linguistic structure by which the idea of a universe came into being. It’s the archetypal story of that first singularity when prehumanity became fully human.

By looking closely at this reading of the ancient text the reader witnesses a sevenfold creation.

1. The creation of science: the first attempt to match observation with thought.
2. The creation of hermeneutics: the first attempt to understand one another through language.
3. The creation of creation: the recognition that, even in a pre-existing universe, it’s possible consciously to create something unprecedented.
4. The creation of history: the first time something recognizably new happens in human experience.
5. The creation of culture: the beginning of a cumulative and communicable result of human invention.
6. The creation of man: the emergence of that which most distinguishes humanity from the other animals.
7. The creation of god: man’s amazement in witnessing his own seeming transcendence of nature.

This “original” version of the creation story preserves the words of the Biblical text as written. It also is surely a true story. At some point prehistory turned to history: early humans developed language; they began to arrive at an understanding of the world they live in; they started progressively reshaping the world; they arrived at self-awareness. Even if we don’t remember the details, each of us has personally lived through this true story of achieving sentience.

With the creation of god the original narrative undergoes a mystifying transformation. The basic story remains recognizable, but the meaning of the story is completely inverted:

1. Creating the idea and structural concept of a thing gets conflated with creating the thing itself. This mystification leads to the reification of the social order.
2. The mutual give-and-take of conversation gets replaced with revelation and reception, making belief more important than understanding and agreement.
3. Instead of marking the beginning of human history, the sixth day marks the beginning of the end, when man starts falling away from God’s created order.
4. God is the only creator, with man demoted to the position of maintenance engineer.
5. Instead of arising as a cumulative “second nature” built on and complementing the first, human culture is regarded as the degenerate product of human arrogance.
6. Man, rather than ratcheting himself up on these earliest experiences of invention and self-awareness, immediately descends into decadence.
7. God, instead of being indistinguishable from man, becomes wholly other and above.

Despite updated theologizing, or perhaps because of it, the contemporary Christian church maintains its commitment the creator-god of its scriptures and traditions.

• By adopting the postmodern rejection of the scientific “metanarrative,” the church is able to discount the massive empirical support for a creatorless cosmogeny.
• By adopting a postmodern reader-centered hermeneutic, the church is able to discount the factuality of the Genesis 1 narrative while upholding its “truth.”
• By upholding a postmodern skepticism regarding progress, the church is able to discount human cultural advances.

Even in limiting God’s role to that of designer, first cause, or immanent force of creativity driving the evolutionary process, the church retains its belief in God as ultimate creator of the universe, with humanity still relegated to an infinitely lower status in the cosmic hierarchy. Suppose this belief in a creator were completely excised from the Bible: what would a creatorless Judeo-Christianity look like?

• By abandoning the idea of the Creator’s ultimate power over the world, the theological justification for holy warfare is nullified.
• By abandoning the idea of a created natural order, moral rationales justifying institutionalized homophobia and misogyny are nullified.
• By abandoning the idea of humanity’s fall from an original created purity, the notion that human culture is intrinsically corrupt is set aside. In addition, there remains no justification for perpetuating the belief that Christians are magically restored to the original pure human state, which supposedly bestows on Christians an ontologically superior essence relative to non-Christians. This sense of superiority has been used to discount the significance of violence and persecution perpetrated by Christians on non-Christians.
• That God is creator is seen by New Testament writers as the reason why God can restore humans to life after death. Without a creator the notion of the immortal soul would be jeopardized.
• Similarly, abandoning the idea that the creator can decide to destroy his creation and start over would presumably reduce Christians’ belief in unlimited abundance of natural resources and their tacit zeal for bringing on the apocalypse.

The proposed book concludes with an exercise in speculative theology. Would Christianity survive if it lost the creator? Would people continue to worship the Christian God, seek his counsel, pray to him, etc. if he no longer claimed to control the universe? Is it possible to reconfigure the basic job description for the Christian God if his creatorly credentials and functions are eliminated? Would God have to be radically redesigned? Or does the whole point of God slide down the slippery slope into irrelevance? Does the Apostle Paul’s concept of a “new creation” render the old creational underpinnings of the religion obsolete?

* * *

One good thing about this proposed book is that I’ve already done the background work on almost all of it. Portions of the old book I can cut-and-paste into the new one. I’ve also written a number of blog posts that could be adapted for the book. But perhaps the main thing I like about 7 Creations Redux is that it’s more irreverent and less conciliatory to the Christian tradition than was the old book. Plus the speculative theology bits should be fun to play around with.

I’d given considerable thought to rolling this whole idea into a novel. I do think there are interesting fictional implications to be exploited. But separating out the detailed exegetical and theoretical components and gathering them inside a tightly constructed speculative nonfiction gives me greater freedom to loosen up the fiction-writing.

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.

The New Man in Ephesians 4

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old man, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. (Ephesians 4:14-24)

In Ephesians 2 Paul said that Christ had created the Jews and the Gentiles into one new man. Here Paul tells his readers that the new man is created in the likeness of God. But wasn’t the first man created in God’s image and likeness? Does this passage imply that man lost the imago Dei in the Fall, and that now it’s being restored? Or is it possible that the original imago wasn’t complete? Genesis 1 focuses exclusively on God’s creational activity, implying that man is like God specifically in being able to create. At the end of Genesis 3 God says that man, in acquiring knowledge of good and evil, has become even more godlike. Here in Ephesians 4 Paul links the likeness of God specifically to His righteousness and holiness — yet another aspect of the imago.

Paul tells his readers that they’re acting like the Gentiles: ignorant, hard-hearted, impure and greedy. This sort of behavior Paul associates with the old man. Is Paul contradicting himself from two chapters earlier by now saying that the Gentiles are the old man and that the Jews, or perhaps the Christ-following Jews, are the new man? I don’t think so. Paul addresses his readers as “Gentiles in the flesh” (2:13) who through Christ have been joined together with the Jews into the one new man (2:15). Now, however, Paul sees evidence of his readers relapsing into their old ways, as if they were still defining themselves according to the old fleshly distinctions between peoples. The old Gentile way of life is characterized by enmity, ignorance, and immorality — in short, it’s a life that doesn’t manifest God’s holiness. Presumably Paul would levy the same criticisms against those “Jews in the flesh” who slipped back into their old Jewish ways.

Apparently it’s possible for a follower of Christ to slip back and forth between the old man and the new man. Though Christ has already created the new man, the old man persists, even among those who follow Christ. Paul enjoins his readers to “lay aside” the old man and to “put on” the new man, as if the transition were as easy as changing one’s clothes. If Paul was talking here about a distinctly new human nature having been implanted in believers, one would expect him to use different imagery. For example, if the old man is a fleshly, surface-level identity whereas the new man is deeper and truer, then Paul might exhort the backslider to lay aside the old man in order that the new, true man might shine forth. Alternatively, if the old man is deeply ingrained in human nature, then Paul might suggest that his readers put the new man over the top of the old man as a means of disguising or ritually purifying the old. Instead Paul seems to regard the old man and new man as interchangeable. He also assumes that the reader possesses an autonomy independent of the old man and the new man, a constant and continuous self that can take off the one and put on the other.

The old man and the new man are not static entities: the one is “being corrupted,” whereas the other is “being renewed” (Eph. 4:22f.). More precisely, Paul encourages the reader to “be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man.” It would seem that, in Pauline psychology, the mind has a spirit that can either be corrupted or be renewed. Here in Ephesians the old man and new man are envisioned as alternative life trajectories or mindsets, and the individual self can at any given time be guided by either the one or the other. A person who sets his life course by the new man must put aside the traditional intercultural enmities (2:15f) and the ignorance and callousness (in Greek it’s “analgesia,” the numbness to pain) that lead to impurity and greed. Instead the person participates in the ongoing life of God (4:18), a way that leads in the opposite direction, toward peace, knowledge, sensitivity, purity, generosity.

walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God… (Eph 4:17-18)

The old man is aimed toward corruption and death; the new man, toward renewal and life. Paul isn’t enjoining his readers to assume a new personality or nature. He’s asking them to respond appropriately to the singular twofold event of Christ’s death and resurrection, to “walk in a manner of the calling with which you have been called” (Eph. 4:1). It’s possible not to respond appropriately, to “put on the old man” even if you’re already a participant in the “new man” that Christ created in the cross. Those believers who put on the old man act just like those who never responded to Christ’s calling in the first place.

* * *

The unbeliever and the believer who is currently “wearing the old man” — are they the same? In other words, is there anything that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian? Is it the initial statement of faith, or is it the walk, that identifies someone who has life in the Spirit? Or is neither of these subjective responses definitive? Is it instead the “Christ event” itself that creates the new man in the flesh and the new life in the spirit? Whether you acknowledge the event or not, whether you live inside the new man or not, is it the event itself that has already changed everything?

I think that for Paul the subjective response is determinative because the “Christ event” is itself the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity, a “subjectivation” that continually renews itself in spirit and in life. Paul’s injunction to lay aside the old man and to put on the new presumes the kind of free subjectivity that the resurrected life in Christ makes possible.

The “Christ event” has two parts to it: death and resurrection. The new man is one, but this unity participates in both parts of the event. There’s a continual dying of the old man and his concerns for fleshly distinctions, laws and desires; and there’s also a continual resurrection of the new man and his freedom to act in faith, hope and love. Is there something distinctive about the individual who participates in this sort of bivalent subjectivity, or does everyone engage in these same ongoing struggles to become a free subject in the world? Sometimes I see it one way, sometimes the other, but I’ll be damned if I know which is true.

I have a sense that many, perhaps most, at least occasionally consider living a life concerned less with inconsequential distinctions and more with truth, beauty, justice, love. I also think that, at best, people vacillate repeatedly and perpetually between the two. In this regard I’m not personally persuaded that those who proclaim themselves Christians are qualitatively different from those who do not. But this is idle speculation of one observer of the human condition and not a systematic treatment of Paul’s writings.

Awhile back I wrote some posts about contemporary continental philosopher Alain Badiou’s little book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which explores issues we’ve been addressing here. Badiou contends that Paul offers not a universalist expansion of the traditionally exclusivist Jewish faith but rather “the possibility of universalism.” Paul doesn’t point either to a universally true set of philosophical propositions nor to the universally commendable life that Jesus lived on earth, but rather to the distinctive event of Christ’s death and resurrection, an event that was in its very nature subjective, experienced by Christ alone. This intensely private event offers the possibility of universal truth and love not to those who abstract its truth or who testify to its miracle but rather to those who participate subjectively in the event itself. So, paradoxically, it’s a universalism that depends on subjective participation.

Drifting again, this time into sociology, it seems that Christianity — or is it Christendom? — has established itself as a kind of universal cult, with its rituals of initiation, its creeds, its liturgies, its moral codes, its communitarian festivals, and other structural apparatuses for distinguishing inside from outside, Christian from non-Christian. It’s a sort of synthesis between Jewish excusivism and Greco-Roman inclusivism. While this is the use the church leaders made of Paul, and while Paul himself may have encouraged this sort of thing in the interests of rapid expansion, I’m not sure it’s what he really had in mind.

In reading these Pauline texts one by one we discover that, instead of reinforcing the boundaries between micro and macro, Paul insists that the boundaries have been torn down — neither Jew nor Gentile. The old and new creations overlap in the world; now in Ephesians 4 we find that they overlap even in the lives of individuals who have already declared their faith in Christ. For Paul it’s less a matter of in versus out and more a matter of how one lives one’s life that’s at stake.

Maybe even Paul’s warning in 2 Corinthians 6 against being unequally yoked with unbelievers isn’t about unbelievers being sinful while believers are holy. Maybe it’s about the hazards of living inside a dark and dead reality defined by law in which everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, falls under condemnation. Maybe it’s not the unbelievers whom Paul is calling satanic, but the satanic “old creation” in which they find themselves inextricably mired. The important thing is to die to that dead reality in order to live inside the resurrection reality. Again and again the dead old life keeps coming back — the return of the repressed and the death drive in Freud’s formulation. Paul wants his readers to recognize what’s happening. When the old man returns, don’t condemn yourself for backsliding, don’t conclude that the old reality is the only valid existence possible, don’t repress that which you’ve unsuccessfully tried to repress so many times before. Paul seems to invoke a kind of cognitive-behavioral intervention: in Eph. 4 he asks his readers simply to lay aside the old man and put the new man back on. Maybe that’s the best he could do in written correspondence with a bunch of people he probably had never met.

The New Man in Ephesians 2

In trying to understand the Biblical idea of the “new creation” we’ve looked at the only two Biblical passages that explicitly use the phrase: Galatians 6 and 2 Corinthians 5. There are also three passages which refer explicitly to the “new man,” beginning with Ephesians 2:11-22.

Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “Uncircumcision” by the so-called “Circumcision,” which is performed in the flesh by human hands— remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, hope and without hope and having no God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. AND HE CAME AND PREACHED PEACE TO YOU WHO WERE FAR AWAY, AND PEACE TO THOSE WHO WERE NEAR; for through Him we both have our access in one Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a building of God in the Spirit.

Parallels between this passage and Galatians 6 suggest strongly that for Paul the “new man” and the “new creation” are closely related concepts. The differences between the circumcision and the uncircumcision, between the Jews and the Gentiles, have been abolished. Previously Israel had been granted privileged access to God. But now, through Christ, everyone has access. Paul doesn’t say that the Gentiles have now been granted entry into the commonwealth of Israel, nor that the Jews were already the “new man” even before Christ. Instead, Paul asserts that the barrier that formerly separated Israel and the Gentiles has now been broken down. What previously had been two separate and antagonistic old men — the Jew and the Gentile — God has now joined together into one “new man.” Paul says that this joining-together by Christ is an act of “creating,” the verb κτιζω referring exclusively in the New Testament to God’s acts of creation (and serving as the root of my imaginary English word “ktismatics”).

What was it that had previously kept the two old men apart? Paul doesn’t blame the Gentiles’ sinfulness or unbelief. Instead, he says that the dividing wall was the Law: the commandments and ordinances that distinguished Israel from its neighbors. As in the Galatians passage, Paul here associates the Law with the flesh: circumcision is “performed in the flesh by human hands” (v. 11); Jesus “abolished in the flesh” the enmity between Jew and Gentile, which is the Law itself (v. 15). In destroying the barrier and in creating the one new man, God reconciles Jew and Gentile to one another and establishes peace (v. 15f). Now Jews and Gentiles are fellow-citizens (v. 19), being built together into a spiritual home of God (v. 21f).

Paul doesn’t say that Christ’s resurrection unites the Jew and the Gentile into the one new man. Death in the flesh is the great leveler of fleshly distinctions like Jew and Greek. We are all one man in death. Paul says in Ephesians 2 that Christ broke down the dividing wall of the Law that brought enmity between Jews and Gentiles. This was achieved by “the blood of Christ,” “in His flesh,” through the cross” — that is, through the physical death of Christ. But oneness in death is only the starting point. There’s a change in tone beginning in v. 17:

And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father.

I think it’s here that Paul shifts from death to resurrection, from flesh to spirit. The Gentiles were far away, the Jews were near, but in the crucifixion these distances were erased. Now, in the resurrection, Christ preaches peace to everyone, grants spiritual access to everyone. Again, Paul says nothing about his readers’ response: it is the efficacy of the resurrection that’s the source of this new spiritual life. The dividing wall is leveled in Christ’s death, making everyone equal in the flesh. In His resurrection everyone is “being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.”

*  *  *

Now that the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been torn down, does all of humanity come together in the new creation as members of the collective “new man”? Or does the traditional interpretation hold: because the structural barrier is broken down, no one is barred access to the new creation, which is entered only by those who exercise faith? When Paul speaks of “God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the corner stone,” is he saying that the household includes only those who follow this trajectory of faith?

We’ve observed that Christ’s death is the great social leveler, breaking down the old distinctions between Jew and Gentile and uniting them in one new man. Paul says nothing about Christ’s death being made efficacious only by virtue of his readers’ response of repentance or faith or love. Later in Ephesians Paul begins to emphasize his readers’ active participation in Christ’s work. He entreats them to walk in a manner worthy of their calling, with patience and love, in the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. This is the new resurrection life that Paul is talking about here.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling. (Eph. 4:4)

The one body comes together in Christ’s death; the one Spirit arises from His resurrection: this is the twofold offer from God. Paul then outlines what will happen as his readers continue to walk in a manner worthy of this offer: grace, gifts, service, maturity. This leads to 4:17, the beginning of the next passage talking about the “new man,” and the subject of a separate post. The thrust of Ephesians is generally this: Christ reconciled everyone in the body of His death; Christ offered new life in the Spirit through His resurrection; Paul encourages his readers to respond appropriately to what Christ has already accomplished. Does Paul propose that a new distinction be made between Christian and non-Christian? Is he collapsing the old distinctions between Jew and Gentile, near and far, microcosm and macrocosm, only to open a pathway to a new microcosm along a different axis, leaving a newly-configured macrocosm separated from God outside a newly-erected dividing wall?

In Chapter 5 Paul does invoke certain threats about the loss of inheritance in the kingdom and about the wrath of God. And in 4:17 he encourages his Gentile readers not to live the way they once did, in a life excluded from God. But the thrust remains consistent: Christ did these things for you, therefore you should respond appropriately to what Christ has already done. If you don’t, then you’re living the life of the “old man,” where fleshly distinctions like Jew versus Gentile still hold sway. It would appear that even believers can slip back into the fleshly old man, separated from the spiritual life of God in the resurrected Christ. Does this mean that individual believers can go back and forth between saved and lost, between being Christian and being non-Christian? I don’t think that’s what Paul has in mind here.

* * *

It seems that, for Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection was an objective event that ushered in a new way of becoming a subject, of becoming a self. Paul presents this new subjectivity in contradistinction to the two main alternatives on offer in the first century: Israel and Greece/Rome.

Jewishness was based on exclusivity: the distinct geography, ethnicity, laws, and rituals were all intended to establish boundaries between inside and outside. To be Jewish would be to participate in this exclusivity, defining oneself according to collective and rigidly defined differences. The Gentile nations had their own distinctives too of course, turning the ancient Near East into a hodgepodge of separate nations whose perpetual conflicts derived from their essential similarity to one another as exclusionary microcultures.

The Empire model of Rome replaced exclusive communitarianism with universalism. Local distinctions could be maintained as long as everyone paid tribute to Rome. Military might ensured compliance. Greece provided a philosophical basis for this sort of universalism: all local differences constitute imperfect variations on the one ideal model of self, society, law, etc. To be Greco-Roman is to become generic, to define yourself in a way that disregards differences.

I think that Paul’s “new man” constitutes a different way. Local variations aren’t important, but not because they’re immersed in the universal solvent of comprehensive political, economic and legal systems that dissolve all differences. No law, says Paul; I’m dead to law, alive to love and the spirit. No Jew or Gentile, but no Roman or Greek either. One new man, but a man comprised of a wide diversity of men walking and working together toward some unprecedented truth and maturity and plenitude that can barely be glimpsed from here.

Whatever else Jesus was, he was a man. Jewish exclusivity and Roman universalism conspired together to do him in. But there arises in the resurrection some other way of being a subjective agent in the world rather than just an object defined by these two competing ways, both of which lead to the same death. I don’t think this makes the resurrected Christ a libertarian, carving his idiosyncratic course like some Nietzschean superman. Instead his is a subjectivity that’s characterized not by ego but by love: fellow heirs, free subjects freely working together. This is neither an us-versus-them exclusive cult nor a one-size-fits-all empire of universal indifference, nor even a scattered multitude of free-ranging individualists, but rather a new way of being an active collaboration of free subjects freely joining themselves together in common cause.

2 Corinthians 5 and the New Creation

For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf. Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:14-20)

The other day I posted on Paul’s idea of the  “new creation”  in Galatians 6. Here in 2 Cor. 5 Paul explicitly links the passing away of the old creation and the arrival of the new to the death and resurrection of Christ. The phrase καινη κτισις, here translated by the NASB as “new creature,” is rendered as “new creation” in Galatians 6. There is no indefinite article in Greek, and there’s no verb in the phrase, so a more literal translation might be: “if anyone is in Christ, new creation.” I like the alternative reading presented in a footnote to the NASB: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” One might say that each new creature in Christ participates in the more comprehensive new creation. Paul is saying that Christ’s death and resurrection didn’t just affect Christ Himself: these events changed the world. Therefore, those who are in Christ participate in this radically transformed world, which is the “new creation.” The death and resurrection of Christ don’t just transform individuals into new creatures; it’s an all-inclusive event.

When Paul associates the old creation with the flesh, he’s referring not to the sinful passions but rather to the materialistic worldview. Formerly he and his readers knew Christ “according to the flesh” — surely he doesn’t mean that they lusted after Jesus. Rather, they knew Christ as a flesh-and-blood human being who lived and died; now, though, they know him as a resurrected human, the firstborn of the new creation. Paul says that the reason they now know Him this way is that when Jesus died, somehow all died with him and are now resurrected in him. Jesus’s death brought to an end the old creation and ushered in the new creation for all. Just as he and his readers no longer know Christ according to the flesh as a merely mortal human, so they no longer know anyone according to the flesh. This is the case, says Paul, because in Christ God reconciled the whole world to himself.

Through Christ’s death and resurrection the old creation died and the new creation is born, a transformation that affects the whole world: what does Paul mean here? Is he saying that the whole world, all of humanity, died in Christ and is now resurrected in Christ? That the whole world is now reconciled to God? That what remains is for us to recognize the reality of this transformation, no longer seeing things according to the fleshly old-creational perspective of a material world that’s been rejected by God? That all of us participate in the resurrection life of the new creation whether we realize it or not? That now, having been accepted by God, we in turn ought to accept God?

Or is Paul saying that the new creation affects only those who through faith accept Christ’s resurrection as ushering in a new creation, who accept Christ’s work of reconciliation and reciprocate by reconciling themselves to God? Is he saying that as long as someone continues to see Christ, himself, and the world “according to the flesh,” that person remains bound to the old creation, doomed to mortality, or perhaps to eternal torment? This is the usual interpretation of the passage. I think the text is ambiguous and could be read either way. Did Christ really die for everyone and through resurrection reconcile everyone to God — which is what Paul explicitly asserts here? Or did Christ die for and reconcile only those who can see things from this perspective? In other words, is each of us living in the AD era participating in the new creation whether we realize it or not, or do we have to perceive the new creation subjectively in order for it to apply to us personally?

Either way, Paul’s emphasis is clear in 1 Cor. 5: the old creation died with Christ; the new creation began with Christ’s resurrection. The new creation is meant to embrace the whole world, reconciling everyone to God through Christ.

At the end of the passage Paul exhorts his readers to serve as Christ’s ambassadors. It’s a call for a reciprocal response to God’s proactive move. This is similar to Paul’s call for reciprocity in response to the “new creation” in Galatians 6, where he says that through the cross “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). God has already reconciled the world to Himself through Christ (2 Cor. 5:19) — whether or not this is achieved through substitutionary atonement isn’t really the focus of this particular passage. “Reconcile to Himself” means in effect that God is willing to let bygones be bygones, to disregard whatever it is that people have done against Him. What might it mean for someone to “be reconciled to God”? I think it means reconciling God to myself. In what ways do I feel that God has harmed me, opposed me, offended me? Can I let those go; in effect, can I forgive God? That seems to be what Paul’s ministry of reconciliation is here: God forgives you; it’s time for you to forgive God. I understand that it’s not polite conversation to complain about God publicly, but I think a lot of people (me included) resent the hand that’s been dealt them as well as the new cards they draw. (Of course I’m veering away from the “new creation” topic here, but that’s the case with any passage: it’s hard to stick with one theme when so many others intertwined with it call for attention.

In 2 Cor. 5 Paul places the emphasis on the objective work of Christ: He died for all, therefore all died. It’s not just that I am crucified to the world through Christ; everybody is. The reader doesn’t have to look for a universal salvation theme in this passage; it’s there in the words of the text: Christ died for all, through Christ God reconciled the world to Himself. Reading this passage in 2 Cor. 5 it’s conceivable that the subjective response of the individual to the cross doesn’t activate salvation for that individual, but that instead it’s a matter of the individual subjectively recognizing what already happened objectively to everyone. In other words, maybe everyone already came through the cross during the historical event of the crucifixion. Paul sounds a similar note in Romans 5:

For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. (Rom. 5:10)

Three times in a row Paul in 2 Cor. 5:14-15 says “all”: “…one died for all, therefore all died, and He died for all…” It seems he’s emphasizing inclusiveness here. One would be hesitant to say that what Paul really meant was “all except” or “only those who.” He also says that through Christ God reconciled the world — cosmos in Greek — to Himself. Again, Paul seems to broaden the scope as far as possible. One could argue that participation in this universal new creation is conditional: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:18). However, it’s not necessary to interpret the “if” here as distinguishing between those who are “in Christ” and those who are not. I think, given the context, the “if” is a link in a chain of logical argument that Paul has been outlining: if A, then B. For example, earlier in 2 Corinthians we read:

For if that which fades away was with glory, much more that which remains is in glory. (2 Cor. 3:11)

Paul has just gotten done arguing that the “if” clause is true — in this case he’s referring to the temporary glory of God that shone on Moses’ face when he came down from Sinai with the Law. In 2 Cor. 5 Paul has just gotten finished saying that all died in Christ, in order that those who live might live for Christ. Therefore, following the logic, if anyone lives in Christ (which Paul asserts is true), then he/there is a new creation. I’m not prepared based on this one passage to argue that, for Paul, all who die in Christ also live in Christ. Still, it’s clear that in this passage emphasizes the all-inclusiveness of the new creation.

The New Creation in Paul: Galatians 6

In thinking about rewriting my book about Genesis 1 I find myself looking at references to creation in the New Testament. Awhile back I wrote a series of posts on Alain Badiou’s book about Saint Paul, in which Badiou touches on the “new creation” as a pivotal concept in Paul’s movement away from flesh and law to spirit. It turns out that Paul uses the phrase “new creation” only twice in his epistles, with the cognate “new creature” appearing three times. No other NT writer refers to the new creation, nor does Jesus as his words are recorded in the Gospels.

Briefly, what I see Paul working out in this idea of “new creation” is a path toward the universal reconciliation of all humanity. This reconciliation is achieved neither through universalizing a social and moral code (as represented by Israel), nor by participating in a universal empire (as represented by Rome), but through some sort of universal participation in Jesus. It seems that this participation has already been accomplished through Jesus’s historical death and resurrection, even if the consequences of this cataclysmic event aren’t yet widely recognized.

In the spirit of this Epiphany season — no wait, I guess it’s Advent isn’t it? — I’m going to look at each of the 5 Pauline references to “new creation” one at a time. The first one is in Galatians, a Pauline epistle on which I’ve previously written several posts.

Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For those who are circumcised do not even keep the Law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh. But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. (Galatians 6:12-16)

Throughout his letter to the Galatians Paul mounts an argument against those who would require Gentile believers in Christ to follow the Mosaic Law. Here at the end of the letter he reiterates his position. Paul frequently uses “circumcision” as a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part stands for the whole. Thus circumcision stands for the whole Mosaic body of law, of which the specific act of circumcision constitutes only one specific law. Paul explicitly identifies the part-whole relationship in the preceding chapter:

And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. (Gal. 5:3)

So in Galatians 6:15 Paul is telling the Galatians that it doesn’t matter whether they follow the Law of Moses or not. But the specific act of circumcision isn’t lost sight of. In 5:12 and 5:13 Paul twice links the word “circumcision” to the word “flesh.” This is important too, because Paul wants to distinguish flesh from spirit. Synecdochally speaking, circumcision doesn’t just represent the whole Law; it also represents the whole flesh. Those who think the Law is important are those who judge matters according to the flesh rather than the spirit.

Now we get to the key phrase in Gal. 6:15:

For neither circumcision is anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

The distinction between those who follow the Law and those who don’t is unimportant, because this is a fleshly distinction. Instead what’s important is a new creation. By implication, then, the world that distinguishes between circumcision and uncircumcision, between Law and not-Law, together comprise the old creation characterized not by spirit but by flesh.

Those who insist on preserving this old fleshly distinction are, of course, the Jews. Is Paul saying that Jewishness itself is an old-creation construct, that from the perspective of the new creation Israel doesn’t matter any more? Gal. 6:16 suggests we think again:

And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

As far as I can tell, the phrase “Israel of God” is used nowhere else in the Bible. In contrast, “God of Israel” is a very frequent construction throughout the Old Testament. Is Paul calling attention to something by inverting the customary word order? He doesn’t elaborate here at the end of Galatians, moving directly from this verse to the closing of his letter. We might speculate from the larger theme of the letter to infer something like this: The Jews act as if God were their possession, as if they controlled the Gentiles’ access to God through the traditional means of circumcision and the Law. But Paul says it’s the other way around: Israel is God’s possession.

So does Paul mean that God gives access to Israel rather than vice versa? I don’t think so. Earlier in Galatians Paul talks about two sons of Abraham: Ishmael, born of the servant Hagar; and Isaac, born of Abraham’s wife Sarah. The nation of Israel traces its lineage through Isaac; the Gentile nations, through Ishmael. But Paul turns the story around:

This is allegorically speaking, for these women are two covenants: one proceeding from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother. (Gal. 4:24-25)

Paul distinguishes between earthly Jerusalem, capital of the nation of Israel, and “the Jerusalem above.” How is earthly Jerusalem enslaved? Israel has become a province of the Roman Empire, so in a political sense Jerusalem is enslaved to Rome. But the subject of Paul’s Galatian letter is freedom from the Law. In Chapter 5 he describes the Jews’ subjection to the Law as enslavement. But, says Paul,

It is for freedom that Christ set us free… for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love. (Gal. 5:1,6)

Earthly Jerusalem is enslaved to the Law, but “the Jerusalem above is free.” So in Gal. 4 does “the Jerusalem above” trace its lineage through the Gentile Ishmael? Paul doesn’t complete the analogy in quite this way; rather, he’s making the distinction between the physical and the spiritual descendants of Sarah. Physically, the nation of Israel sets itself apart from the other nations, and this “fleshly” Israel controls access to its God via fleshly circumcision and adherence to the Law. Spiritually, the “Israel of God” isn’t distinguished by ethnicity, national boundaries, or Law. Rather, the Israel of God, the “new creation” to which Paul extends peace and mercy at the end of his letter, is identified by the freedom from these fleshly distinctions between “in” and “out” that characterize the old creation, a freedom made possible by faith and love.

By believing God, Abraham received the promise of a new creation, a promise which was to be fulfilled in the future. This promise, says Paul, has now been fulfilled in Christ’s death, ushering in the new creation. All who believe God can receive now that which had been promised long ago to Abraham. This is the thrust of Paul’s argument in Galatians:

Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS. Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “ALL THE NATIONS WILL BE BLESSED IN YOU.” So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer. (Gal. 3:6-9)

Throughout the centuries the Jews anticipated the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, which remained in the future. They failed to recognize that participation in the Mosaic Law — i.e., membership in the nation of Israel — wasn’t the portal offering entry into the new creation yet to come. The real portal is faith, by which many nations may participate in the fulfillment of the promise.

Many nations are to be blessed by the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. In Gal. 3:16 Paul emphasizes that “the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed“: singular, not plural. Paul goes on to say that the seed of Abraham is Christ. I think Paul’s intention here is to assert that the promise wasn’t extended directly to the many nations that would eventually benefit from the promise, nor was it channeled through Israel the grandson of Abraham, nor through Moses by whom the Law was given to the nation of Israel. Instead, the promise passed through Jesus.

What I am saying is this: the Law, which came four hundred and thirty years later [i.e., after Abraham], does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise. Why the Law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made. (Gal. 3:17-19)

Paul is saying that the promise to Abraham, the “new creation” through which many nations would be blessed, remained a promise rather than a fulfillment throughout all the intervening centuries between Abraham and Christ. It wasn’t until now, through Christ’s death, that the promise is fulfilled and the new creation begins.

But before faith came, we [i.e., the Jews] were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you [i.e., the Gentile believers] are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise. (Gal. 3:23-29)

There remains an element of the promise yet to be fulfilled, an aspect of the new creation not yet made manifest.

For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. (Gal. 5:5)

Paul directs this remark to the believers who, realizing that they haven’t yet become sinless, are tempted to revert to the Law as the means of achieving sanctification. Paul is reassuring the believers that, even though the promise is now fulfilled in Christ and the new creation is begun, it’s not yet complete. And so Paul begins his discussion of walking freely in the Spirit rather than obeying the Law as the right way to live in new creation.

NEXT UP: 2 CORINTHIANS 5

Rereading the Genesis Book

For some time now I’ve had the feeling that if I could make myself reread my Genesis 1 book I wouldn’t like it any more. I was right.

It’s not that the thing sucks in its entirety. There are some vibrant passages scattered liberally throughout the generally well-crafted prose. The thinking is pretty clear and at times quite original, though I’ve lived with the ideas for so long now they seem stale. What mostly sucks is that this never was the book I really wanted to write.

I had written two novels, both of which pleased me (and practically no one else). I had sent them to an agent who said they were “too experimental” for the mainstream marketplace — an incongruous reading I’ve since interpreted as a generic rejection intended to make me, the Author, feel like a misunderstood genius. So I decided to pursue an alternative sales strategy. Having read somewhere that nonfiction is easier to get published than fiction, I decided to write a nonfiction as a door-opener with the agents. My first novel refers to the Biblical creation narrative, so it was already on my mind. I had come up with an innovative and paradoxical reading of the Biblical text which I thought might stir up some controversy. The creation-versus-evolution topic was hot in the aftermath of Richard Dawkins’ and Sam Harris’ anti-religion diatribes. The subject of creation interests me professionally as a psychologist. I have the right letters to string after my name to lend at least a modicum of certified credibility to my bold assertions. So I wrote The Seven Creations of Genesis 1, describing it to potential agents as a “high bridge” spanning the chasm between science and religion. I also launched Ktismatics ( a technical term I made up, based on the Greek word for “creation”) as a means of disseminating the ideas in the book, hoping to build some sort of viral enthusiasm among potential readers. This strategy failed: the several agents to whom I sent my proposal and outline weren’t interested; the blogged elaborations of the idea certainly didn’t build any sort of buzz.

Consequently, when last week I read the book again it was hard not to feel a sense of regret and futility. Here’s a project I didn’t even want to do, that didn’t pay me any money, and that didn’t get my novels any farther out the door than they were before. But it’s not just the bad feelings: there’s a lot that’s substantively wrong with it too. I don’t like the parts where I’m too conciliatory to traditional Judeo-Christianity and too complimentary of modern Western culture. Or the parts where I’m too respectful of conservative methods of Biblical exegesis. Or the parts where I’m trying too hard to establish myself as a professional ktismaticist who knows what it takes to be a creator just like God.

I remember times while writing the book when I was really enjoying myself. It felt like writing fiction, speculating about events that in all likelihood never even happened, stringing whole paragraphs together that didn’t have to be justified in footnotes, immersing myself in an alternate reality which in many ways isn’t so different from the sort of imaginary reality I explored in my first novel. I suspect it’s those parts of the text I wrote while in fictive mode that I like best now. The speculative parts. The ironic and paradoxical parts. The self-consciously bombastic parts. And then there are the parts I haven’t written yet. The part where I shop my clever ideas around but nobody seems able to hear them. The part where I redesign the Judeo-Christian religion around a God who had nothing to do with creating the material universe. The part where this redesigned “atheistic theism” catches on in an alternate reality that looks a lot like our own. The part where this new version of the faith becomes just as mystified and totalizing and hegemonic as the old version.

By now this book is starting to sound a lot more fictional. I could embed most of the features I like into a radically revised work of speculative nonfiction. Or I could come up with some characters and some story and turn it into a novel. This hybrid area of fictional nonfiction or nonfictional fiction, where things could easily go either way, is where I’d like to set up shop and start again — that is, if I can persuade myself it’s worth the trouble, or that it’s something I really want to do regardless of how it’s received.

Eventually I’m going to take down the blog page describing the Seven Creations book as written, but I think I’ll leave it up for public scrutiny and disdain as a personal motivation to replace it with something I like better.

Loss of Innocence

Adam at An und für sich has obliquely sketched out an alternative interpretation of the Biblical Fall in Eden, transforming it into a story about early humanity’s first experience with private ownership.

The fall occurred when someone got it into his head to rule over and own everyone else, that is, had a desire for possession that goes beyond the simple needs of survival and acted on it.

By this reading I infer that Adam — appropriately named for perpetrating this mythic inversion — would make Yahweh the original sinner for having staked proprietary rights to to the Garden and especially to the forbidden Tree. This treatment of the Fall reminded me of my very earliest childhood memory.

I was in my backyard playing with my best friend Jeff Heydecker — the officials at Ellis Island probably changed the family surname from Heidegger to make it sound more American. Jeff and I were fighting over a toy metal firetruck. I was convinced the truck was mine; Jeff insisted it belonged to him. And then Jeff conked me over the head with it.

Original Sin Reinterpreted

Here’s a brief interruption in the Empire series… Awhile back I mentioned that I was launching a series of posts at Open Source Theology exploring what would happen to the rest of the Bible if the creation narratives from Genesis 1-3 were simply deleted. I’m getting close to the end of this project, which will be sort of a relief: other than my friend Sam, hardly anyone has engaged in discussion other than to tell me that my whole project is ill-conceived. Today I wrote a piece about original sin, which might be of interest both to the Christians and to the Lacanians who happen to show up here.

Nothing in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve suggests that Adam’s sin somehow infected all of his descendants. They were banned from the Garden and its Tree of Life, which would have granted them immortality, but in the Genesis creation narratives mortality is the natural human condition. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul goes so far as to say that the natural, mortal human body has a kind of “glory” to it.

Nothing in God’s curses on Adam and Eve suggest that he’ll cause them or their progeny to be more prone to sin than would naturally be the case. In the very next chapter Yahweh poses this question to Cain: “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?” or perhaps “will you not be accepted?” (Gen 4:7) By this question isn’t Yahweh saying that it’s possible for Cain, son of Adam, to do well? To the best of my knowledge, nowhere else in the Old Testament is there any suggestion that Adam’s sin was passed on to his descendants. Jewish theology has no concept of original sin. I’m not sure to what extent the early Christians believed in original sin. Augustine formulated the doctrine of original sin that came to dominate Christian thought from the Middle Ages on. The Protestant reformers also subscribed to Augustine’s formulation. What about in the New Testament? Again as far as I can tell, Romans 5 is the only NT text to suggest the idea that Adam’s original sin caused the sinfulness of his descendants. Here’s the one verse that’s hard to account for:

For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many were made righteous (Romans 5:19).

That sure sounds like original sin to me. Is there a straight reading of this verse that doesn’t turn into the historic Christian doctrine of original sin, whereby everyone inherits a sinful nature from Adam? Here’s a stab at it…

In Romans as elsewhere Paul addresses what is arguably his main theme: justification by faith. It is in this context that Paul talks about the law. Not only are people incapable of following the law — the law itself has no power to bring justification. Even worse and paradoxically so, the law makes one aware of one’s sinfulness rather than removing that awareness.

Paul summarizes his justification-by-faith argument in the first eleven verses of Romans 5, at which point he moves into an extended comparison between Adam and Christ. Therefore, Paul begins verse 12, signaling that the analogy is going to be relevant to his larger justification-by-faith argument — Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin… This “one man” isn’t named here, but he is two verses later: it’s Adam. But how can Paul say that Adam sinned if it’s through law that we become aware of our sinfulness? Paul highlights this dilemma in verse 13: for until the Law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law.

Clearly, though, sin was imputed to “the one man,” to Adam. For his sin Adam was condemned to death, and death reigned from Adam to Moses (v. 14) — in other words, death reigned during the entire pre-Law era. It would seem, then, that Adam must have acted in the context of some sort of law, even if it wasn’t THE Mosaic Law.

Later in Romans Paul outlines the intrinsic link between law and sin. The law doesn’t just create an awareness of having already broken the law; it actually stimulates the desire to break the law:

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “YOU SHALL NOT COVET.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. (Romans 7:7-8)

So, Adam is in the Garden and God tells him not to eat from one particular tree. This is God’s only rule as far as we’re told, but it’s enough to produce the very desire it prohibits. The fruit looks tasty, it will make me wise — I’m having a bite! Man was created good and the law was good; it was the interaction of human nature with the law that went badly. Paul says that it always goes badly.

Let’s say that Adam and Eve really did acquire the knowledge they sought in the Garden. In fact, Yahweh says they did in Genesis 2:22: Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. It’s possible that the desire to be like the lawgiver is the motivation behind lots of sins, maybe even all sin. When God says “Don’t eat from that tree” He also means “Only I am allowed to eat from that tree.” The person who’s told not to eat admires the lawgiver, wants to become like the lawgiver, wants therefore to do precisely what the lawgiver told him or her NOT to do. It’s a sad story really.

This knowledge of good and evil can be expressed in the form of laws: you should do this, you shouldn’t do that. No other animal besides man is possessed of such knowledge. Babies aren’t born with this knowledge, but they begin learning it in infancy, and once they learn it they can never unlearn it. This knowledge, says Paul, is a mixed blessing: knowing the good produces both an awareness of having already done wrong and a desire to continue doing wrong. Human nature is good, and the law is good, but human knowledge of law establishes the preconditions from which sin invariably emerges.

Adam and Eve learned good and evil, and they could never forget it, never again escape both the self-awareness of sin and the desire to sin that’s stimulated by knowing the law. The first parents almost surely conveyed this knowledge to their children. Do this; don’t do that — it’s hard to imagine being a parent without laying down the law. Still, there must have been a particular time when humans moved beyond the instinctive stimulus-response, action-reaction style of non-sentient animals. In so doing, in teaching law to their children, parents transmit the preconditions that, says Paul, invariably generate sin in their children.

Okay, back to the problem verse: For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners… This interpretation could work, couldn’t it? Adam and Eve learned good and evil, which can be expressed as law. Knowing law creates awareness of having broken law and stimulates desire to break law some more. Once this knowledge enters human awareness it never goes away. And it’s exactly the kind of knowledge that parents almost immediately impart to their children. Paradoxically, by laying down the law to their children, parents become the conduits of sinfulness to their children. There’s no biological inheritance of a sinful nature; it’s just the way things invariably go when humans acquire the knowledge of good and evil.

Here’s how Romans 5 wraps up:

For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:19-21)

Paul finishes the parallel between Adam and Jesus by giving his readers a foretaste of the Law-sin connection he elaborates in chapter 7. Adam and his descendants experienced this fateful connection on a small scale; the Jews under THE Law got a full dose. Christ breaks the Law-sin connection that began with Adam and intensified via Moses.

Biblical Thought Experiments

For those of you who are interested in such things, I just wrote a post at Open Source Theology called The Biblical Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments. In it I ask the emerging post-evangelicals to consider the implications of regarding the stories about the seven days, the Garden, Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, etc. as mistaken speculations of ancient thinkers, having no privileged claim to transcendent truth. There’s a growing tendency in the post-evangelical world to acknowledge that these stories might not be literally and historically true. However, this acknowledgment gets disguised by invoking the concept of “true myth”: encoded in the details of the story are spiritual meanings that were inspired by God and endorsed by Him as true. So now I’m asking what happens if the “true myth” proposition is set aside. Feel free to comment either here or on the OST post.

Dead Man Walking

Hey, I did say I might post a fleeting thought from time to time… Here’s something I realized today when writing a comment about the Fall on another blog:

In Genesis 2 God tells Adam that on the day he eats the forbidden fruit he will die. The Serpent says it ain’t so, that Adam and Eve won’t die on that day. Genesis 5 informs us that Adam didn’t die until hundreds of years later. It would seem that the Serpent was right, and God either lied or made a mistake. Let’s presume, though, that Yahweh was a God of his word. Man died on that day, but he didn’t literally die — he became mortal, he realized he was mortal, he forfeited his claim to eternal life, he suffered a deathlike separation from God, he died spiritually, etc. The text demands that the reader take God’s word figuratively.

Excerpts from My Books

As I was putting Ktismatics to bed, I decided to put up summaries and first chapters of the three books I’ve written so far: The Stations, Prop O’Gandhi and The Seven Creations of Genesis 1. See the top line of the blog to click to the appropriate page.

A Fictional Manifesto?

Walking across America, you could discover vast quantities of things that look and feel exactly like dollars and cents, but they aren’t dollars and cents until the US government creates their monetary reality. You could walk across fields and through forests and over mountains, but they aren’t fields and forests and mountains until someone creates these abstract categories and the words to identify them, distinguishing them from what they are not and separating them conceptually from their opposites. You could be walking across the surface of the third planet orbiting a particular star in a particular galaxy, but… The raw stuff is different from its meaning; to assign meaning to raw stuff is to perform an act of creation.

Once you have the idea of a universe in mind, a lot of revolutionary possibilities present themselves. The universe could be made up of things other than what happens to be the case in our universe – there could be two moons, say, or the world could be enshrouded in a perpetually gray and translucent ganzfeld, or there could be a world with no sea or no solid ground. New things could be created to populate this universe by fashioning them from raw materials. New properties could be defined for making sense of things that already exist: heavy and light, near and far, structure and function, atomic weight. Different realities could be created, based on principles other than sheer material existence: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, happy and sad, just and unjust, sincere and disingenuous.

Which is the more powerful act: to create all the things that populate the heavens and the earth, or to create systems of meaning by which the heavens and the earth become reality? An individual insect can die at the same instant that another one hatches; a whole species of insect can come into existence, thrive, and fall into extinction; mountain ranges can be lifted up from the sea, slowly crumble to rock, and sink back into the deep; a star can form, generate enough gravity to support a solar system and enough energy to support life, and then collapse and disintegrate. These are physical events involving the creation, transformation and destruction of matter. However, until they find their place in a system of meaning, these events and things have no reality.

Cups are cups because intelligent beings created a category called “cup” and stuck all the cups inside it. Men are men because God created a category called “man” and stuck all the men inside it. Matter wedded to idea is reality. If God pulled all the men back out of the category, the category “man” would persist in the mind of God, and the creature formerly called “man” would persist in nature. But the category would be empty, and the creature would be nameless…

…While writing my book about Genesis 1 I kept having the weird feeling that I was writing fiction. These four preceding paragraphs are part of that book, a book that in a world just slightly different from this one is becoming hugely influential in certain circles. Here in this reality, a couple days ago, I wrote a first installment in a “Ktismatics Manifesto.” Then the next day I wrote about a particular kid to illustrate alternative psychotherapeutic realities, and I find it a lot more fun to spin out interpretations of this one particular kid’s story and what might happen to her in those stories than to establish the abstract principles of reality theory. Perhaps the Ktismatics Manifesto would be more interesting as pamphlet that exists as part of a fictional reality, rather than as a work of nonfiction in this reality. It’s like in Donnie Darko, we find out that Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, author of The Philosophy of Time Travel. We know the book exists, we get brief glimpses of its cover and pages, we know that it’s changing the world Donnie Darko inhabits, but the book itself exists only in that reality. In our everyday reality that book, even if it had been written, would likely never get published or be read by anybody.

I’m starting to get the feeling that it’s time to create a fictional reality where some eccentric cat has written the Ktismatics Manifesto, and it changes that world.

The Sun Must Bear No Name

Begin, ephebe,* by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .

The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus** lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

- from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” by Wallace Stevens; Stanza 1 of Part One: It Must Be Abstract

* ephebe — Anglicized form of the Greek ephebos, an adolescent male.

** Phoebus — “Shining One” in Greek, a name for the sun god and, metaphorically in Latin poetry, for the sun itself.

A Ghost in the Machine?

On the other hand, the membrane isn’t just a bag of skin.

A couple posts ago I reduced Self and Reality to opposite faces of a membrane between inside and outside. The membrane is flexible, porous, emergent. The job of the practitioner is to unclog the membrane, facilitating the transfer of information between inside and out, seeking ways for desires to achieve fulfillment. Thinking about the membrane this morning, I realize that I may have underestimated its significance. In fact, I think this membrane might be the most important thing.

I agree that Self has gotten entirely too big, as if it contained all of Reality inside itself. At the same time, I’m concernted that Reality also has gotten too big, with its Totalizing Discourses and its Metanarratives, its Globalization and its Merged Hermeneutical Horizons squeezing all the Voids and Differences out of existence.

But now I’m thinking back to the beginning of this blog, when I was still working on Genesis 1. In my reading of that primal narrative, Self and Reality were the twin stars of that show. In embedding the universe in a framework of meaning elohim created a reality. In watching, learning and participating in elohim’s work of creation, the selfhood of man emerged as part of that creation. Selves create the meaning of realities; realities create the meaning of selves.

A self has no substance of its own; neither does a reality. At the same time, we humans have no direct access to the world or even to our own instincts and drives and desires. All our experiences are mediated by selves interacting with realities. Without the insubstantial two-sided membrane we wouldn’t disappear; we would recede into insignificance, and so would the world we live in.

The membrane isn’t just the least intrusive break in the continuum between inside and outside. The membrane is a break to be sure, a gap that keeps the world from overwhelming us and ourselves from absorbing the world into our own representations of it. But the membrane is also a radically different entity from the substances on the inside and the outside. It might not even be substantial at all, although I’m wary of inserting some sort of transcendence into the gap, a ghost into the machine. The membrane is different from inside and outside. The two-sided membrane is the source and the process of differentiation.

The work of the practice isn’t merely to make the membrane as porous as possible, so that raw desires and raw phenomena pass through it untransformed. It’s the transformative power of the membrane that’s the most important thing. What’s wanted is a limber and dexterous and powerful membrane, a membrane that is itself a portal, continually transforming the raw into reality, pulling meaning out of the chaos and the void.

A Theodicy of Shit

I posted on The Unbearable Lightness of Being before. This time, following yesterday’s post on Nabokov and poshlost, we have Kundera on kitsch. Kundera is Czech: his fictional meditation on kitsch must be so well-known in Eastern Europe that Zizek, a Slovenian, can refer to it prominently in The Parallax View without even citing the source: Part II is entitled “The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One;” Chapter 3, “The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit.” But back to Kundera’s book, which is a strange amalgam of fiction and nonfiction.

Early in WWII Stalin’s son Yakov found himself in a German prison camp, bivouacked with a group of British soldiers who resented his unsanitary latrine habits. Eventually the complaint was brought to the commandant. Unable to stand the humiliation of discussing his own shit with the arrogant German, Yakov, cursing loudly in Russian, threw himself onto the electrified barbed-wire fence and was killed.

Stalin’s son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered by God) and His cast-off. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin’s son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off son’s friends in order to punish him)… Was he, who bore on his shoulders the drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? …If the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light…

Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west — yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.

The narrator of Kundera’s novel, who presumably is Kundera himself, remembers looking at pictures of God in a children’s Old Testament:

He was a bearded old man with eyes, nose, a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image — and God has intestines — or God lacks intestines and man is not like him.

The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate and drank, but did not defecate.” Shit is a more onerous problem than evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

Kundera the narrator goes on to wonder whether Adam and Eve had sexual intercourse in Paradise. Saint Jerome said “no” in the fourth century. In the ninth century Erigena said “yes,” but with the proviso that Adam’s erections were entirely voluntary, like raising an arm.

What the great theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual intercourse and the attendant pleasure; what he found incompatible with Paradise was excitement. Bear in mind: There was pleasure in Paradise, but no excitement.

Erigenea’s argument holds the key to a theological justification (in other words, a theodicy) of shit. As long as man was allowed to remain in Paradise, either (like Valentinus’ Jesus) he did not defecate at all, or (as would seem more likely) he did not look upon shit as something repellant. Not until after God expelled man from Paradise did He make him feel disgust. Man began to hide what shamed him, and by the time he removed the veil, he was blinded by a great light. Thus, immediately after his introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word) there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses…

Behind all European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being. The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unaccptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch… Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable to human existence.

Yet again I find myself drawn back to Genesis 1. Perhaps more from Kundera on kitsch in the next post.

The 2007 Tohu Vavohu Tour

22 March ———— Geneva

24 March ———— Bologna

25 March ———— Venice

28 March ———— Innsbruck

30 March ———— Vienna

1 April —————- Prague

3 April ————— Leipzig

4 April ————— Berlin

6 April ————— Bremen

7 April ————— The Hague

8 April ————— Brussels

10 April ————– London

12 April ————– Manchester

13 April ————– Dublin

15 April ————– Paris

17 April ————– Bordeaux

19 April ————– Bilbao

21 April ————– Madrid

23 April ————– Barcelona

Order your t-shirt today!

Reading the Book of Nature

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:17-20)

The gist is this: if you pay attention to the Creation you will learn about God, because the Creation reveals what God is like. Presumably you don’t even have to become a scientist to learn, because this God-knowledge is clearly seen. Neither do you have to become a Christian to learn, because the knowledge is already evident even to the ungodly.

So the question is this: Does everything in the Creation reveal God’s divine nature? Everyone can see what the natural world is like: there is beauty and bounty and birth, but there is also violence and indifference and death. There are also plenty of features in nature that just seem sort of neutral and impersonal and random. Is God like all these things? Or does God instill in everyone the ability to distinguish those features of nature that are like Him from those that aren’t?

Participating the Creator

Near the beginning of the Summa Theologica, Aquinas affirms the absolute transcendence of God. Man’s finite and imperfect thought cannot grasp God; his language cannot describe God.

Now we cannot know what God is, but only what he is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which he does. (S.T. 1.3)

God is not like anything in creation; the creation, however, is like God.

Any creature in so far as it possesses any perfection represents God and is like him, for he, being simply and universally perfect, has pre-existing in him the perfections of all his creatures . . . what we call goodness in creatures pre-exists in God in a higher way. Thus God is not good because he causes goodness, but rather goodness flows from him because he is good. (S.T. 1.13.2).

We cannot infer God’s goodness by contemplating good things and extrapolating from them. Rather, things are good to the extent that they “participate” God’s nature, which is perfect goodness. God isn’t just the cause of goodness in things; he is its continual source. It’s not even adequate to say that goodness in the world is an imperfect version of God’s goodness. To say something is “good” is to use an analogy. For Aquinas, language describes not things as they objectively are but as they exist in human knowledge, which is only analogical to God’s truth. God’s goodness doesn’t just exceed finite goodness: it is qualitatively different, totally other. Things are good by analogy to God’s goodness; or, to use Aquinas’s language, good things “participate” God’s goodness.

Aquinas is trying to find a middle ground here. If only God is good, then nothing in the world can be good unless it is an emanation from God himself — this is Greek and pagan thinking. On the other hand, if things in the world really can be good in and of themselves, then there may be no need to invoke a transendent cause of their goodness outside of the world, which potentially renders God unnecessary. So Aquinas says this:

Things are good inasmuch as they exist. Now things are said to exist, not by divine existence, but by their own. So things are good, not by God’s goodness, but by their own. (1.6.4).

But then he also says this:

One may therefore call things good and existent by reference to this first thing, existent and good by nature, inasmuch as they somehow participate and resemble it, even if distantly and deficiently . . . And in this sense all things are said to be good by divine goodness, which is the pattern, source and goal of all goodness. Nevertheless the resemblance to divine goodness which leads us to call the thing good is inherent in the thing itself, belonging to it as a form and therefore naming it. And so there is one goodness in all things, and yet many. (1.6.4).

So God can be spoken of, but only by analogy, He can be known, but only by participation:

God is known from the perfections that flow from him and are to be found in creatures, yet which exist in him in a transcendent way. (1.1.3)

Perhaps Aquinas’s is as good an interpretation as any of Paul’s remark:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made… (Romans 1:20)

Aquinas and Paul walk the line between creation as an emanation of its creator and creation as wholly other than its creator.